Slowing the speed of life

Quick preface: I'm overwhelmed by election coverage on this fine evening. As fascinating and important as this process is, the months of wall-to-wall coverage punctuated by the inevitable acceleration in coverage leading up to tonight have combined to take the joy out of what should otherwise be a quiet evening at home with my wife. Besides, I'm Canadian. So I'm declaring a moratorium on watching U.S. news on the telly - at least until the ultimate non-journalist superstar, Jon Stewart, comes on at 10 - and wish to instead share this somewhat more serene post with you. Enjoy.

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I've always felt that life moves too quickly, and that we’d manage to squeeze more out of our time on this planet if we learned to slow down and enjoy the view.

As a child, I remember watching a television commercial about a headache pain reliever. It showed a stressed-out woman chasing a bus, then grabbing her head in pain after she missed it. Ominous music played in the background, and my first real impression of a hectic, adult world was formed.

I remember asking my Mom if the real world was like that. I think I was four or five years-old, and I thought life was as relaxing as my Lego-filled world. Typical for a child, I had no idea how fast people need to run just to stay in the same place once they hit adulthood.

My mother spoke soothingly about how it was just a commercial, and how advertisers always exaggerated to prove their point. She confirmed that, yes, the typical day for the typical person wasn’t composed of end-to-end bus chases and escalator leaps. That there was still plenty of opportunity for regular folks to chill out and, like me, play with Legos if they so wished.

Satisfied with her answer, I returned to playing on a floor strewn with toys, still mostly oblivious to the realities of the broader world around me.

Regardless, the image from that television commercial stayed in my head. As I grew older, I sensed things speeding up on me, and I felt I needed to run faster just to keep pace. From taking a bus cross-town to get to class on time to dragging mountains of books from one class to another and juggling school, work, and writing assignments, my life started looking more and more like that still-remembered commercial from my childhood.

Not that I’m a lazy person – quite the opposite, I never seem to know when to turn the darn machine in my head off – but I’ve always lamented the fact that I never seem to have enough time to just sit and think. Or, even better, to sit and do absolutely nothing. Vacations are a perfect example: I like to sit in a comfy chair on a beach or under a tree and do nothing more challenging than read a book or stare at the waves while my brain cooks up funny story ideas. And the idea-generation part is optional: usually while sitting in a vegetative state in a relaxing place on the planet, the old noggin will simply decide what I want to eat during my next meal. Not exactly a processor-intensive activity.

When I watch those cruise commercials where everyone’s busy running from rock climbing to sailboarding to jet skiing before returning to the ship for another night of overeating, I’ve got to conclude that they will all need vacations from their vacations after they get back home. Anything requiring a calendar, datebook, watch or any sort of time/date-based registration is emphatically not a vacation. Simply watching those spots on TV only convinces me still further that people don’t get it, and need to learn how to ease back and actually live.

ABC News is running a fascinating piece entitled Slow Down! You Move Too Fast. It discusses a number of perspectives related to this issue, notably how one can actually accomplish a slower, more meaningful lifestyle while still achieving the things that we rush so aggressively to acquire and keep.

I'm still exceeding the speed limit in the passing lane and lamenting the fact that I haven't taken the time to enjoy the two-lane roads that wind by the rolling farmland that dominates the countryside in our part of the world. But I'll do whatever it takes to get there. Maybe reading this article will help me get my start.

The Season Ends

Here's another glimpse of my bike tour of the country roads near our home. I was struck by the forlorn sight of one leaf on the side of the road. The transience of this moment and moments like it - a dying leaf, a setting sun, an impossibly long shadow, a breeze just waiting to repaint the environment - stays with me as I look at this photo. While the surface beauty of a scene may be fleeting, its underlying beauty resonates in our heads for a significantly longer period of time.

More cheese, please

On the assumption that you have as much leftover junk food in your house as we have in ours, I present this brief photographic survey of the sea of cheesies (or cheese doodles, if you will) that lurked in a bowl on the counter. This was, of course, before I put them out of their finger-staining misery by feeding them to the squirrels.

The dying holiday?

I couldn't help but notice the decided lack of trick-or-treating children at Halloween this year. I believe a number of possible reasons could be behind the falloff: the kids in our neighborhood are growing up; election coverage is so scintillatingly compelling that everyone - children included - simply stayed home and dial-zapped between the talking heads on CNN, Fox News, and CNBC; the apple growers lobby has finally gotten its act together and kicked Wonka Corp's flabby behind off the supermarket shelves; or the holiday has simply become a tired, meaningless exercise in gluttony.

Whatever's driving it, we ended up with a bit of a logistical challenge: way too many little chocolate bars. I deliberately overbought because I had been having recurring dreams that we had run out.

Make no mistake, these were true nightmares: I'd be standing at the door, beating off the starving kids with one hand while trying to shove the door closed against the struggling mob with the other. In these dreams, the cat was out of his furry little mind, and the kids cowered behind the sofa. My wife ran for the vacuum cleaner handle, hoping to give me additional leverage against the sugar-crazed mob. It was a scene straight out of Dante's Inferno, I tell ya.

So I figured another huge box (or two, I lost count in the frenzy of hands at the supermarket) of $10 mini-chocolate bars - the ones we really, REALLY like, of course - would represent cheap homeowner's insurance.

Of course, now we've got enough sugar to keep Up With People on tour until next summer. Which means I've got to find a place to hide all of this stuff from the little people before they end up on the tour bus with the dreaded Up With People cast (or, as the Simpsons so aptly skewered them, Hooray For Everything.)

Getting serious for a moment, I do have to admit how nice it was to see neighbors who are usually blurry apparitions in your window as they zip off to work in the morning, then home again at night. For most of the year, we interact with them from a distance - namely waves and smiles when they pass by, and the occasional 15-second conversation when we're close enough. This time, we actually got to chat and catch up on much of the past year - until the plantive whines of my threesome rose to a crescendo. They apparently think I talk too much.

Must have been all that sugar.

Percolating...

I am, apparently, still brewing some sharp words through my poor, poor keyboard. My run-in with swastika-boy last week seemed to throw my writer's sense of balance in a very defiant direction. Almost from the moment I saw the offensive symbol, my brain went into underdog mode and started shaping some very hard-edged thoughts on how the intolerance of this world has impacted my thinking as a journalist who happens to be Jewish, and who happens to write within a broadly non-Jewish world.

As my head tumbles through this process, I find myself crafting this week's column - for Wednesday publication - using a very powerful and personal voice. Anyone who reads this piece will know, point blank, who I am, why I do what I do, and why my thoughts on hatred and intolerance really do matter. I just have to stay out of too-hot-for-the-breakfast-table territory, so it may need a bit of a sleep-on-it approach before I do my final edits before submission tomorrow.

Incidentally, the title of this message refers to the process by which I initiate ideas and gradually evolve them through the various stages of creation, writing, and polishing before I have a final, submission-ready opinion piece. This process often takes months while I toss various treatments and focii around my head. Interestingly, it almost never gets written down. While the idea itself may exist on a storyboard list that I maintain on my PalmPilot, the actual evolution of the idea is not documented. It simply grows in my head until one day I wake up and feel that it's time to turn it into a concrete piece of writing.

In many respects, I don't control it. Rather, it tends to control me. If I try to force an idea before my head has had a chance to thoroughly churn it into something worthwhile, it almost inevitably comes out substandard. I cringe when I read some of my improperly-churned work, as it jumps out at me like a taunting child in an elementary school playground.

Please note that this process applies only to opinion pieces and other more personal forms of writing. The usual newsy or tech stuff doesn't tend to come from the same place. It's much more factual, direct, and impersonal. I don't feel like I give birth to those as I do my opinion pieces. I don't leave traces of myself embedded in those phrases and paragraphs. As a result, blasting out reams of copy is fairly straightforward once I've got a good handle on the voice of the publication in question.

But something changes when I use my opinions as the basis for my writing. Things slow down and each word becomes immensely more powerful. People are moved. Hopefully, to do good.

Tonight, the anger and fear of being a member of a minority group that is being repeatedly singled out by hate-mongers on a national scale is weighing heavily on my writer's voice. I feel accountable to deliver a message from deep inside that reflects that fear, and uses it as a catalyst to move us all beyond the here and now and into a somewhat more enlightened future. Who knows, maybe the power of the pen will prevail after all.

I'll head back to the process now, but not before I thank everyone who took the time to comment on my swastika post. I wish I could articulate how your words have helped me shape my thoughts and my writer's response in the days since this first occurred. You have once again reinforced and validated the wickedly subversive power of this rapidly-evolving medium of ours. I can't wait to see what happens as this audience of greats continues to expand.

Onward, with my thanks...

Colors from a lunchtime stroll...

Sad news from the beach

Dear readers: It seems I've been dwelling in the land of mirth for the past few days. I don't quite think there's one all-encompassing reason for this. I think the world's been piling lots of things up at the front door, and I've just got to work through it before the sine wave swings back to its more familiar perch at the top of the chart.

To help matters, I thought I'd jazz things up with a lighter-toned observation from the world of entertainment. This should keep things in balance - at least until I dig into writing my next column. On that front, I feel some nastiness brewing yet again. Away we go...

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It seems that David Hasselhoff, who this week pleaded no contest to a charge of drunk driving, will be spending the next six months in an alcohol treatment program. Reuters is running this piece announcing the sentence.

Like Patrick Swayze before him, Mr. Hasselhoff, who is apparently very popular in Germany, becomes only the latest celebrity to go down the road we should never travel.

What I fail to understand is why he simply didn't let the freako talking car do the driving for him. Similarly, I wonder if this will affect his eligibility to protect the swimmers at California's beaches next summer. I don't think Pamela Anderson can handle the rolling surf on her own.

Oops, looks like reality is colliding with the world of entertainment again. What can I say except they've both always been such convincing actors.

Like William Katt!

And Connie Sellecca!

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BTW, for those of you who may have missed my earlier missive - Some thoughts on links - about the links within my messages, this simple rule continues to apply: you never know what weird and wonderful place I will send you with a simple hyperlink. Happy mouse-travels.

Stupidity personified. Again.

I'll warn y'all now before I get into this message: I am going to rant.

There, now that I've gotten that out of the way, let's proceed:

Without identifying the guilty party or where this actually happened, suffice to say I encountered someone today whose Halloween costume incorporated a swastika. He was dressed as a German Shepherd (an actual shepherd, not the dog.) As if to underscore that fact, he had draped a large sign saying - you guessed it - "German Shepherd" around his neck. Gee, I'm sure he was mighty proud of his questionably creative contribution to a ridiculously mindless holiday.

Um, how to put this delicately: there's nothing funny about a symbol that stood for what is certainly the most monstrous crime in the history of humankind. The passage of a couple of generations does nothing to dampen the visceral, nausea-inducing impact it has on me every time I see it. That someone felt it was a comical addition to a costume does nothing to mitigate how wrong the decision turned out to be.

Pacifist that I am, I said nothing. It's not as if I'm surrounded by legions of skullcap-wearing Jews whose presence would make me feel any more comfortable in opening up my mouth. Growing up in Canada, I long ago got used to being the token Jew in whatever group I happened to be in, and I learned to hold my tongue lest I become identified as - you guessed it again - "That Token Jew Who Always Whines."

Since moving to London, beautiful whitebread-where-visible-minorities-really-stand-out London, that feeling has only become more pronounced.

So instead of saying anything, I quietly observed the rest of the crowd casually ignoring the burning symbol on this guy's hat. As I did so, my vision turned red with anger. Still, I bit my tongue, because I knew I'd toss the dictionary at the guy if I started with even one word. Am I ashamed that I didn't confront him? You betcha. I owe my family, my community, and our history a little more than mere silence.

When I next saw our protagonist, the hat was gone. Maybe he picked up on the look of consternation on my face. Maybe he simply got warm and decided to doff his headgear. Either way, the fact that it was no longer visible did little to drop my blood pressure.

In this day and age, you simply never know what someone out in the real world will do when you open up and argue a point that is so obviously emotional - to you, anyway. There's little opportunity to educate morons who don't think before they act, and you run the very real risk of making yourself look worse in the eyes of everyone else because, frankly, they simply don't care.

So I sat back, seethed through the day, and decided to write about it here. I'm left with the gnawing feeling that perhaps a more direct confrontation might have reinforced my message more effectively.

Sometimes, being on the outside of a secular society can be more challenging than we'd like. Regardless, I'd rather be in my shoes working through the receiving end of issues like this than in a glorified bedsheet without a clue about why this stuff matters as much as it does.

Fun with the electoral process

In the runup to the U.S. presidential election (you are going to vote, right?) our collective inboxes are overflowing with various multimedia bits designed to toss a few laughs into the deadly-serious electoral proceedings.

The beauty of this is that we are, in the first place, allowed to poke fun at the process and the people who make it happen. If you want to slap a candidate’s face, you can. If you’d rather watch the 10 funniest campaign ads, click here and have a good time. This is precisely the kind of behavior that in some parts of the world would still get you shot. Yet here, it’s all considered part of the socio-political landscape.

With that in mind, an outfit called Boom Chicago has produced this really funny video about electronic voting machines in Florida. Its amusement is, in large part, derived from the fact that a part of your head believes, however remotely, that it could actually happen.

Laughs aside, if you are eligible to vote, I hope you’ll actually do so. No, it may not always be convenient. You may have better things to do on a Tuesday night, and you certainly don’t do it for money. But having a say in how you are governed is one of those intangible, priceless rights. It is not a given, however, for there are some – too many – people on the planet who would dearly love to take that right away from us. Over the generations, too many people have died to ensure that right stays precisely where it is: in our hands. For anyone to casually dismiss his/her participation in the process is, to me, thoroughly impossible to understand and, frankly, inexcusable.

Will I be voting on Tuesday? No.

Unless I am magically granted U.S. citizenship over the weekend, I’ll continue to watch this fascinating story from the sidelines, north of the border. Still, when it comes time for me to vote in my staid and stodgy country of Canada, rest assured you’d have to fight me off with a pool noodle to keep me from my appointment at the ballot box.

Whatever happens on Tuesday night, I hope all players on all sides of the political spectrum realize they are both individually and collectively part of this gloriously flawed process. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a hell of a ride, isn’t it?

If you're reading this, Mom...

...you may resume reading my blog. I'm finished discussing the peculiarities of fetishist corporate leaders.

For now.

Sox win!

It was a touching moment in history last night as the Boston Red Sox beat the St. Louis Cardinals to win their first World Series championship since 1918. In doing so, they lifted the mythical Curse of the Bambino and gave Boston sports fans something to cheer about after generations of endless disappointment.

Three links from the horse’s mouth, the Boston Globe, summarize the ecstatic tone of the hometown coverage:

YES!!! Red Sox complete sweep, win first Series since 1918

For multitudes, years of torment end in bliss

Victory transforms a region’s identity

How the Sox won was representative of a storybook in itself. Coming from three games down to take the American League Championship Series from the New York Yankees was about as classic as America’s game can ever be.

Which explains why, after the decisive four-game sweep of the Cards, I feel a tinge of sadness that it ended the way it did.

First, a bit of context: I’ve always been a major fan of the underdog. If someone is different, disadvantaged, or discriminated against, I’ll be right there in the corner, rooting for said person to prevail. There’s always been something immensely satisfying about overcoming an obstacle to win. The overwhelming favorites in anything just don’t do it for my psyche. When you’re already sitting on top of the mountain, you simply don’t deserve it as much as someone who has to claw up the slopes and knock you off.

One of my favorite cartoons when I was a child was the 1964-66 cartoon series Underdog (surprised ya, didn’t I?) Poor old Underdog could never get it together. Saving the world was never a linear process for him. Something always happened to him that kept him from using his superpowers to beat the nefarious dudes who were threatening to do irreparable harm to his city, to him, or to his girlfriend.

Despite the never-ending challenges and cliffhangers that defined his life, he always scratched out a solution. By the end of each episode, the good guy won. The conceptual hares who thought they would easily scamper over the conceptual tortoises to reach the finish line first were, ultimately, sadly mistaken in their smug assumptions.

The now-forgotten live-action series, The Greatest American Hero, starring the also-forgotten William Katt, followed a similar arc. But hobbled by a completely lame theme song and writing that made Falcon Crest look worthy of a Pulitzer, it sank fairly quickly. At least it starred Connie Sellecca in her pre-John Tesh days.

Enough cartoons, though. What does it have to do with baseball? Apparently, much. While the ALCS series represented the ultimate Boston gumption in my mind, the World Series was as outright rout. At no point in the series did the Sox ever trail the Cards. It seemed somewhat out of character for the perennial underdog team, and didn’t fit the storybook storyline that the team began crafting earlier this season, and whose climax seemed to have been reached during the series with the Yankees.

After the ALCS victory, the underdogs were nowhere to be seen. It was much harder to root for an all-powerful entity. No one ever cheers the Borg as they assimilate yet another species into their collective. Not that Boston has become a monolithic, robotic race that cruises interstellar space in huge cubic ships in search of more planets to munch, but they did become slightly less lovable when they were crushing the dickens out of the birdie-team.

In a similar vein, now that the Curse of the Bambino – so-named because while the team failed to win a series after trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees, the aforementioned New York team went on to dominate professional sport for generations – has been broken, what lore will Boston fans cling to? What do you do once the eternal fog lifts and you’re forced to live your life in somewhat more regular sunshine?

I’m not sure there’s a pat answer to this somewhat rhetorical question. But what is clear is that the world – the seemingly trivial one occupied by grown men who chase balls around an irregularly-shaped field for a living – has changed. Where it goes from here remains to be seen.

A delicate workplace issue

[OK, Mom, please stop reading now.]

Truth really can be stranger than fiction when it comes to this wacky new world known as the Internet. Thanks to an industrious colleague who shall remain nameless (what was said colleague doing scanning tech message boards for the word "porn" anyway?) a relatively new discussion currently making the rounds of the TechRepublic site somehow ended up marching across my screen. It's called CEO surfs porn and it should prove to be a more entertaining read than your usual dry-as-a-stuffed-shirt geek exchange.

With this funny still fresh in my mind, I have built the following Top 10 list of excuses a CEO could give after being caught surfing for smut on an office computer:

1. I was conducting a critical bandwidth-overload test.
2. I accidentally mistook whitehouse.com for whitehouse.gov.
3. I was calibrating the color on my new LCD flat-panel display.
   
4. I'm saving it for someone else.
5. I resent your use of the term "porn". I think of it as "adult entertainment".
   
6. It's part of my final project for film school.
   
7. I'm taking one for the team.
8. Pornography? I thought it was Cornography!
   
9. I sure wish the shareholders could see this.
   
10. Have you seen my wife's latest film?

Something smells

I know this story, Ontario funds power from manure project, practically begs for a childishly snide comment. But I can't get myself to do it for two reasons: first, I'm not feeling particularly childish or snide at this particular moment; second, it's frankly just the right kind of fresh (maybe not the best word choice, but it'll do) thinking that we need to start applying to our current and future uses of energy.

Similarly, Lucan is literally just up the road from London. So if I get on my bike and manage to avoid the speeders and the drunks on Adelaide Road, I'll eventually arrive in the lovely little village of Lucan where another step in our energy future is about to be taken.

Google Mail - from famine to feast

Like most tech geeks over the past few months, I've been an active participant in the Google Mail feeding frenzy. You know the drill: Google released its take on a next-generation web-based e-mail service into beta and managed to goose the buzz level beyond the apogee of SpaceShipOne by strictly limiting who could participate in the program.

By tightly controlling the supply side of the equation, this new-generation savvy firm guaranteed an insatiable demand for what is essentially Hotmail on steroids (I'll duck now to avoid the epithets which will inevitably be hurled by the Google Zealots who will proclaim the new service to be the second coming of some long-dead guy who, contrary to popular belief, never drove and wouldn't know what car to drive in any case.)

My sentences are apparently running on. Must be something in the air today. Either that or it is simply a Monday. Yes, that's it. I don't write well on Mondays. Which is a bit unfortunate given some of my most important deadlines seem to fall on Mondays. But I'm drifting off-topic. Another byproduct of Mondays, I guess.

In the beginning

How I came to get my first Google Mail (or Gmail) account was through the googleswap.com web site back in June. I remember the thrill I felt when I got an e-mail from a complete stranger letting me know he was sending me a coveted and rare invitation to set up a Gmail account. I imagine this is what Christmas would have felt like – assuming that I even celebrated Christmas. Which I don't, incidentally. (Geez, I hope my rabbi isn't reading this!)

The day a "You may invite up to five friends to join" link popped up on my account was another good day in the evolution of Carmi – yes, I know, I lead a pathetic, technologically-bound life, but I'm happy. I picked my favorite friends and colleagues – family members are still too disenfranchised from the whole wave of technology to make any use of such a resource, so I didn't

For some reason, my wife didn't share my elation upon gaining entry to the browser-based messaging revolution. I remember the nonplussed look on her face when I told her. She gave me a quick whatever comment and left me to my own playtime on the computer. When the extra invitations showed up, I told the cat instead. He rubbed up against my ankle.

Things have changed

Fast forward a few months and the whole Gmail situation has evolved significantly. The company has on at least two occasions significantly loosened the restrictions on who could invite others into the family and how many invitations would be given out in the process. The GoogleSwap site now engages in a completely different online activity (no, not that!).

Now, the "invite a bunch of friends" message is granted to pretty much anyone with a pulse. Most leading-edge mail users already have at least one account. Blog postings offering free accounts to whoever asks generally go ignored. Despite the fact that Google's stock price has been rising faster than the price of oil in recent weeks, its mail property has become decidedly ho-hum.

The bottom line

This entire situation depresses me because I'm sitting on ten (!) invitations and for the life of me I cannot think of even one person who would like one. So please consider this post my last desperate attempt to distribute them to the only ten members of the entire planet's population who have not yet heard of Gmail. They must have been camping out on an ice floe in the Antarctic over the past few months and are eagerly looking forward to reconnecting with the online world. Whatever their excuse, I hope they – or you, on their behalf, or even you on your behalf – will kindly step forward and help get these now-commonplace invitations off of my hands.

What do I expect in exchange? Unlike the denizens of Ebay, I do not wish to receive money in return for these intangible collections of electrons. I similarly don't want to be granted any favors. Please do not send me your semi-completed summer camp macramé project. You may save that batch of oatmeal-raisin cookies for your shut-in neighbor

The real payoff

In exchange for a Google Mail invitation, all I ask is that you consider paying it forward by doing something nice for someone else. It can be anything you wish. Large or small. But it must be altruistic and reflective of the kind soul that you so clearly are (I absolutely believe that only kind souls read my blog.) Please post your good-deed intentions as a comment to this posting, and I'll gladly send you said invitation (make sure you include a working e-mail address.)

We'll use the time-tested honor system; I trust that everyone who steps forward will gladly follow through on each commitment to engage in the greater good.

I'll keep giving 'em away until they're all gone. I'm sure the benefit to the world around us will extend way beyond access to a ridiculously overhyped piece of server-based software.

Let's talk about my paper

As many of you may already know, I'm not much of a morning person. I so enjoy my sleep that when night begins to turn to day and the world slowly stirs, I need to work through a whole set of predictable steps before I'm ready to face the world.

Part of that ritual includes a trip to the mailbox beside our front door to collect the paper. I know newspaper subscriptions aren't on my generation's priority list, but in an age when information comes at us faster and in greater volume than ever, the morning paper represents a trusted, repeatable means of putting that torrent into its proper perspective

Newspapers are no longer the first or sole deliverers of major breaking news. That's now become the domain of the cable news channels. But beyond a 15-minute news delivery cycle that tells you what's going on Right Now, accelerated delivery does little to build any sort of context for what you're seeing. If I want to understand what that news means, and how it all fits together, nothing approaches the power of a newspaper. The fact that I can pull it out of my mailbox before the sun rises and spend some quiet time absorbing it over breakfast is the icing on the media cake

London, like most fairly large cities in this day and age, is home to one daily paper. The days of two or more dailies are history in most centres. Ours is called the London Free Press, and it's owned by Quebecor's Sun Media.

The thing that irks me about it is the snideness with which it is viewed by visitors to our city. Typical comments include "It's so small-town," "It reminds me of a local paper," "I read it in six minutes flat," "Any thinner and I'd be able to see through it."

Never mind that I write for this paper. Most folks who insult the paper do so to my face, or they forget to whisper quietly enough when they're across the room. Rest assured, I hear you, and it bugs the fecal matter out of me.

My initial response is always a hot flush of frustration beneath my cheeks. I can feel my skin get red as my brain races to assemble some witty phrases to spit back at the media mavens in my midst. I never say anything, of course, because I'd only come across as rude and partisan in the process.

To put my thoughts in perspective, I'm not writing this as an unabashed cheerleader for the paper for which I am a columnist (though, to be fair, I love reading the paper for which I write…anyone who publishes will likely understand the curious mixture of pride and accomplishment associated with being a part of a major media vehicle.) Rather, it is the complete lack of understanding of how newspapers work, and the willingness with which the entire product is dismissed, that eats away at my journalistic soul. Someone who has likely never written so much as a letter to the editor feels eminently qualified to pass final judgment on a paper in a city which he/she does not call home. Everyone make way for our next journalism school professor, shall we?

My perspective is this: London is a city of some 350,000 people. The hinterland likely drives that figure above a half-million. It is an incredibly diverse population whose occupations span a wider range than you'd likely ever find in the corridors of a downtown megalopolis. We don't have countless millions of people here, and we may not be the je ne sais quoi of urban chic and leading edge. But a centre's relative size has little to do with the relevance of its media to the people who live there – something that's often lost on people who don't live here.

This particular paper is staffed – and freelanced – by some of the most gifted writers with whom I've ever worked. From a personal perspective, what I write here I likely wouldn't be able to write anywhere else. I draw from a deep well of human-focused topic areas that don't exist in the same manner outside of this region. It's a special place for a writer like me, and I'll never run out of great things to write because I'm surrounded by similarly great people and communities.

People here still care passionately about their neighborhoods. They're far more willing and able to step forward when they're not happy with the way things are. The degree of citizen participation in civic politics, media, and community organizations exceeds anything I ever witnessed in the big city where I was born. And it drives my writing in ways I could have never imagined before coming here.

So the next time someone feels compelled to comment on how my paper – "my" referring to the fact that I am a subscriber, I am a Londoner, I am a writer, and I am passionately involved in making both my medium and my community better through my writing – falls short of the lofty standards set by those in larger cities, I hope they consider the true depth of their error before they dig their feet any deeper down their esophageal tract.

I've always tried to follow the mantra of choosing to be part of the solution. If said cosmo-media-commentators are so compelled to dismiss our paper as small-town, they're always welcome to pick up a pen and try their hand at contributing.

In doing so, they may learn something profound about how lucky we are to be part of a medium that so richly contributes to the life of its community. They may never look at this paper – or indeed, any paper – the same way again.

Raiding the Archives 9 - A sidewalk lesson

I've fallen behind in my efforts to gradually post my columns that were published before they became available on the newspaper's web site. I'll do my best to cherrypick the ones that stick in my mind, and will try to keep the flow of older work heading your way on a somewhat more consistent basis. As I drop each one into the blog, I'll also share a thought or two on why I like that piece, and why I think it still matters even though it's been months and/or years since I first built the article in my head.

I've always liked this one because if represented one of my earlier attempts to paint pictures of life's small moments. It was spawned by my meeting a particularly friendly garbage collector as I rushed to get our green bags to the curb one morning. He so started me with his cheeriness that it stuck with me a days afterward. I realized that goodness - and good people - are everywhere. And we often find them in the darndest places. The garbageman piece, as I have come to know it, represents an early example of my unconventional journal of the neat people I've met in situations you wouldn't always expect.

It's one of the things I love about being a writer. Despite the loneliness of being at one with a computer when the world is dark and you're the only one awake, you also get to meet incredible people by day. Often, they're name-brand people who you meet through sanctioned interviews (the perks of being a journalist, I guess.) Just as often, they're ordinary folks who would otherwise never have any media spotlight shone on them.

I've found their stories can be every bit as compelling, if not more so, than the famous folks. And it's a privilege to be able to write about these snippets of lives not too different from yours and mine. I hope you enjoy this one, and I hope it helps you recall a similar story in your own life. If it does, don't be too shy to share it here.

Enjoy.

---
Originally published January 14, 2003, in the London Free Press.

Spare a nod for little people in our lives

Our world is filled with people who cross our paths every day, yet we never seem to take the time to look them in the eyes and wish them a good morning.

They clean our offices, deliver our mail, and landscape our parks. We know they're there, yet in our rush to get out of the office, pick up dinner and make it to the kids' skating lessons on time, we briskly pass them without a second thought.

I didn't mean to get this philosophical this past Friday morning. The clock said it was 5:45. Thanks to London's always-entertaining garbage pickup schedule, I had - for the umpteenth time in memory - forgotten to leave the trash and recycling by the curb the previous night.

Waking up in a panic because missing a Friday pickup would mean 10 days of hoarding garbage, I ran downstairs hoping against hope that I would beat the truck.

This time, I got lucky: my neighbours' garbage bags were still there. So I grabbed ours and headed outside.

In my haste, I forgot to put a label on a garbage can with a broken glass lamp inside.

So as my head danced with nightmarish images of the garbage dude slashing his arms on an unseen fixture, I sat on the front porch and waited for the truck's arrival.

Before long, the familiar diesel rumble echoed through the neighborhood, growing louder as the headlights lit up my street. I strode over to the curb and probably scared the heck out of him in the process.

Me: "I'm sorry for forgetting to label this can. It has glass in it, so you may want to be careful."
Him: [Smiling broadly] "Good morning! Hey, no sweat about the glass. I am, after all, a professional."
Me: [Pausing at how customer-focused this guy seemed to be before 6 a.m.] "Thanks, sir. Have a great day and see you next week."
Him: "Sure thing, bud. Have an awesome weekend."

With that, he grabbed the cans, expertly emptied them into the back of the truck, waved at me and continued to the next house.

It was only a 15-second exchange with someone who's probably been by my house hundreds of times. Yet in those 15 seconds, a complete stranger transcended the stereotypical image of the garbageman - politically incorrect reference and all - and became, simply, a real person.

We seem to pigeonhole people based on what they do for a living. Some of us dump on restaurant servers every time a meal is too slow in coming or slightly overdone. We berate them and then leave them no tip at“ all for something over which they have no control. But because they're entry level employees, we seem content that our behaviour is justified.

Perhaps we really are in a rush and we simply don't have the time to talk to them. It's equally possible that we don't think they're worthy of our time. Perhaps they didn't go to the right school. Or they didn't go to school at all. Maybe it's bad for our corporate image to be seen chatting with "the help."

Think about it the next time you're in the office late one evening. Would you know the name of the person who empties your recycling bin? Similarly, would you recognize the lady who waters the plants if you passed her on the street?

I didn't make any new year's resolutions this year. We should be trying to improve ourselves every day of the year and not just in the few days following a drunken all-night party.

But if I focus on one thing in the coming months, it will be to personalize my encounters with those who are traditionally invisible in our status-driven society. I'll start by addressing them by name.

Corporate expediency aside, everyone has a story. If we took that extra time to find out what it is, we might learn more about our own. See you next Monday, garbage man.

-30-

Carmi again: The paper ran a letter to the editor a few days after this first appeared. The reader was somewhat upset with the use of the word "little" in the headline. The letter said this word choice highlighted my condescending tone to others. Interestingly, the headline is the one part of the package that I do not write. But readers don't know that, so I had to endure my first public whipping by a reader.

Interestingly, I was just as tickled with this response as I would have been with a kudo. Any response is a good one, and I'm perfectly comfortable if someone chooses disagree with me. Either way, I reached the reader. That's all I can really ask for.

Rosie DiManno revisited

I've written previously about how much I admire and respect Rosie DiManno for her unabashedly honest and in-your-face style of writing. Few columnists have the ability to punch you in the psyche with their words. Rosie is clearly one of them, and I know I'm better at what I do because I regularly read her work.

Her most recent piece, Do not push gently into that good night, will literally shove you back into your seat and remain in your brain for days afterward. Yes, she's that good. I'd give up a major organ to be similarly gifted.

But enough about me. Follow the link above to this article, and feel free to share similarly powerful writers with the readers of this space known as my blog. Funny how, as time goes on, this humble site is attracting a gradually growing legion of its own. Cool!

Ms. DiManno's online archive is located here. If you've got a bit of free time, I highly recommend you spend some time exploring it. Her coverage of the Athens Olympics was particularly human-focused and poignant. She's one of the few sports writers who avoids the cliché, and successfully manages to make the compelling stories of an athlete interesting and relevant to the sports anti-fan.

At some point, I'll integrate a link to her page into my sidebar. But not tonight. I finally felt well enough to finish installing the floor, so I got busy after supper. It's been an ordeal, again, because I'm just not as flexible as I was when I was 16. (Please hold your jokes until after the children have gone to bed.) But at least this time I didn't end up with pinched nerves in both my legs! So, on balance, it's been a decent outcome.

Onward…

I'm a bad e-mailer

I was updating some addresses on my PalmPilot the other day when I realized how bloated my own entry had become. I have more e-mail addresses than any one person ought to have.

Let's run them down, shall we: a work one, a home one for family messaging, a Hotmail one that I attach to everything I publish, an address at the college where I teach, a Google Mail one that I use for everyday messaging, another Gmail one that I use specifically for blogging, yet another Gmail one that I set up for one particular, high-volume contract that I'm working on, and a few other free web-based accounts that I had set up over the years, then abandoned as they filled up with the inevitable tidal waves of spam.

That's seven addresses that I use more or less regularly, plus a bunch of long-forgotten mail folders sitting out in the internetworked ether. And that's just the ones I remember.

It's completely ridiculous, yet as long as an exposed e-mail address – meaning one that you freely give out to people, and use to sign up for stuff online – can be harvested by the scum who spread spam around the world, a surreptitious approach to e-mail account management will continue to be the order of the day.

Which leads me to the spark of an idea that originally inspired this message: the fact that I'm a bad e-mailer.

I think you've experienced it on your end as well: an acquaintance e-mails you. You're pretty busy when you first see the message in your inbox, so you make a mental note to answer said person when you have a free moment. Of course, you never end up actually having that free moment. So days, weeks, and months pass before you come across the now-stale message still sitting patiently in your inbox.

Do you answer the message and apologize profusely in the process? Do you reply and pretend as if no time at all has passed? Do you ignore the message and pretend you never got it? Is there a right thing to do when you're an E-mail Answer Slacker?

I'm not sure there is. But I know my various inboxes are littered with stale-dated messages from people I really like, but just haven't had the time to get back to. If you're one of those folks and you're reading this, don't hate me and the six generations of Levys who follow. Instead, hate the insidious rules of our planet that limit the day to 24 hours, and the year to 365 days. Yes, I know leap years don't count. But even then, the extra day does little to ease my e-mail backlog.

If the Earth flew just a little more slowly in its orbital track, maybe we'd be able to slow down a little. The late Christopher Reeve's Superman, with his much-maligned fly-around-the-world-so-fast-that-the-planet's-spin-is-reversed-and- time-goes-backward trick may not have been so off the mark after all.

At some point, I'm sure a Treo 650 smart phone would help my case. But that would only render me able to tap away while engaged in otherwise non-e-mail-conducive activities. Besides, I've already written about nasty CrackBerry addicts, so I'd be violating my integrity as a ranting-lunatic journalist if I simply joined the cult. It is, at the end of it all, a technology whose solution may be worse than the initial affliction.

With that in mind, my predicament will likely remain relatively unchanged for the foreseeable future. I'll continue to juggle too may inboxes and inadvertently ignore too many messages from people who matter.

It doesn't mean I don't care. I'm simply too busy keeping all these balls in the air to take the time to actually appreciate the subtle nuances of any one of them.

Still with the funnies

While I'm on the topic of interesting reads, I think at least one of you might find the Regret the Error blog an amusing timeout from the usual unending current of media sludge.

The site reports and links to some of the more interesting newspaper corrections out there. Beyond the actual corrections, some of the blog commentaries themselves are worth reading just for the wall-to-wall sardonic wit contained therein.

Remember our lesson from an earlier message on this very blog: swallow your milk or similarly-phased beverage, then proceed to read the site. Your keyboard, mouse, and related computing equipment within esophageal range will thank you.

Lego chief quits...

It's been a long, depressing week. Time for some levity:

This article, Kristiansen: Lego Chief Quits As Poor Sales Block Recovery, weaseled its way into my browser earlier today.

I guess they finally succeeded in knocking his block off.

(Sorry, couldn't resist. Feel free to insert your own cheeky comment below.)