Up in Ontario

Church Bulletin Bloopers

What follows is perhaps the original and most-pervasive use of email: passing around jokes. I don't know the origin of the list below and I don't know who transcribed or collected the list, but it is a funny bit of language slippage. Such a small mistake can make such a large difference.

Thank God for the church ladies with typewriters. These sentences actually appeared in church bulletins or were announced in church services:

#1. Bertha Belch, a missionary from Africa, will be speaking tonight at Calvary Methodist. Come hear Bertha Belch all the way from Africa.

#2. Announcement in a church bulletin for a national PRAYER & FASTING Conference: "The cost for attending the Fasting & Prayer Conference includes meals."

#3. The sermon this morning: "Jesus Walks on the Water." The sermon tonight: Searching for Jesus."

#4. Our youth basketball team is back in action Wednesday at 8 PM in the recreation hall. Come out and watch us kill Christ the King.

#5. Ladies, don't forget the rummage sale. It's a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Don't forget your husbands.

#6. The peacemaking meeting scheduled for today has been canceled due to a conflict.

#7. Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our community. Smile at someone who is hard to love. Say "Hell" to someone who doesn't care much about you.

#8. Don't let worry kill you off - let the Church help.

#9. Miss Charlene Mason sang "I will not pass this way again," giving obvious pleasure to the congregation.

#10. For those of you who have children and don't know it, we have a nursery
downstairs.

#11. Next Thursday there will be tryouts for the choir. They need all the help they can get.

#12. Barbara remains in the hospital and needs blood donors for more transfusions. She is also having trouble sleeping and requests tapes of Pastor Jack's sermons.

#13. The Rector will preach his farewell message after which the choir will sing: "Break Forth Into Joy."

#14. Irving Benson and Jessie Carter were married on October 24 in the church. So ends a friendship that began in their school days.

#15. A bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the church hall. Music will follow.

#16. At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be "What Is Hell?" Come early and listen to our choir practice.

#17. Eight new choir robes are currently needed due to the addition of several
new members and to the deterioration of some older ones.

#18. Scouts are saving aluminum cans, bottles and other items to be recycled. Proceeds will be used to cripple children.

#19. Please place your donation in the envelope along with the deceased person you want remembered.

#20. Attend and you will hear an excellent speaker and heave a healthy lunch.

#21. The church will host an evening of fine dining, super entertainment and
gracious hostility.

#22. Potluck supper Sunday at 5:00 PM - prayer and medication to follow.

#23. The ladies of the Church have cast off clothing of every kind. They may
be seen in the basement on Friday afternoon.

#24. This evening at 7 PM there will be a hymn sing in the park across from the Church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.

#25. Ladies Bible Study will be held Thursday morning at 10 AM. All ladies are invited to lunch in the Fellowship Hall after the B.S. is done.

#26. The pastor would appreciate it if the ladies of the congregation would lend him their electric girdles for the pancake breakfast next Sunday.

#27. Low Self Esteem Support Group will meet Thursday at 7 PM. Please use
the back door.

#28. The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare's Hamlet in the church
basement Friday at 7 PM. The congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.

#29. Weight Watchers will meet at 7 PM at the First Presbyterian Church. Please use large double door at the side entrance.

#30. The Associate Minister unveiled the church' s new tithing campaign slogan last Sunday: "I Upped My Pledge - Up Yours."

With files from Alyson Munroe.

Plans for the Weekend

So here’s the skinny. The rugby game is on Saturday at the Kitsilano Community Centre, located in a big square bordered by W. 10th and W. 12th and Larch and Balsam. A map is below. The game is the Kitsilano Meralomas vs. the James Bay Bears. My brother plays for James Bay. There will be 2 games back to back. My brother will likely play in both games, starting the first division game at 1 pm and subbing in the premier division game at 3 pm. Beers and barbecue will be served from the clubhouse. I anticipate that it could be, as they say in the cheap seats, “fun,” or “a fucking good time.”

After the game I’ll be running a few errands in preparation for the big wild game dinner at my place. Folks are coming in from as far away as New Westminster and Victoria for it. I know for sure that I’ll be serving venison, coho salmon and lamb. The remainder of the menu is in flux, but promised to deliver some wow. Now do I have to spell it out? You’re of course invited to any and all the events. It’s action-packed.

Let me know if you'd like to come and I'll send you the details.

Mamamusings Top 24 Tips for a Lifetime

Via the always-excellent and destined to be frequently referenced LifeHacker website, mamamusings presents her favourite 24 useful household tips. I'm always a sucker for lists like this since it accomplishes two things - (1) the practical application of the tip and (2) making me feel smart, as if these tactics were some secret and I had been admitted late one night by a woman in a tilted hat and trench coat.

Some favourites I may employ one day:

• 3) To keep potatoes from budding, place an apple in the bag with the potatoes.
  
• 8) Spray your Tupperware with nonstick cooking spray before pouring in tomato-based sauces - no more stains.
  
• 18) If you have a problem opening jars: Try using latex dishwashing gloves. They give a non-slip grip that makes opening jars easy.

And some that just make me wonder how people discover things:

• 17) Don’t throw out all that leftover wine: Freeze into ice cubes for future use in casseroles and sauces. (Leftover wine?)
  
• 16) Cure for headaches: Take a lime, cut it in half and rub it on your forehead. The throbbing will go away. (And your forehead will be sticky.)

The rest of the Mamamusings blog makes for excellent reading as well, or at least it does if you're interested in the intersection of social behaviour and how computers / softwate / the internet enable and change those social behaviours. The author, Elizabeth Lane Lawley (yet another proud member of the reality-based community), eshews capitals and is slated to spend a year on sabbatical from her job at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology, I assume though I can find no explanation of the acronym on their website) to join the Microsoft Social Computing Group.

I also noticed today that LifeHacker recommends the Griffin iTalk, an iPod add on microphone that allows you to record directly into your iPod, which is exactly what the Duck and I have been doing, interviewing for a book project we're working on together. It's the second external microphone we've bought for our iPod and it works much better than the first one we bought, which tended to pick up too much ambient noise in the room including the sound of the iPod hard drive whirring. The iTalk also comes with a line-in insert so a better microphone is an option if we were interested in getting sound files closer to broadcast quality.

To complete my geek cred claim here, I bought our Griffin iTalk at the Apple Store in San Francisco when I was there attending the Web 2.0 conference back in October 5 to 7, 2004. The conference itself may be the most profoundly geek moment of my life, living for a few days in the epicentre of information technology and its leaders. More about that another time. Now I will only tell you that I had dinner one night of the conference with Ryszard Kott and Andrzej Turski, two researchers / developers / dreamers from Microsoft's Social Computing Group, the same group where the Mamamusings blogger, Elizabeth Lane Lawley, will be spending her sabbatical. Ryszard and Andrzej, both of whose names are much harder to spell than pronounce, provided excellent company that one night and their enthusiasm for social computing, in particular Wallop, bodes very well for the future relevance of Microsoft to geek culture.

Scoring the Good Stuff in Vancouver

This post is a continuation of My Education in Cooking. Now, the locals establishment to furnish the foodstuff of the affair.

Produce: Fruit and Veg
Vancouver is blessed with some excellent growing conditions and original, inspired farmers. From May to October on Saturdays from 9 am to 2 pm a farmer's market springs up in the parking lot of the Trout Lake Community Centre. Discovering it opened up a whole new world of food and freshness to me, such as the ritual indulgence in sink peaches and attempts to create basil pesto.

In the winter and spring a produce shop on West Broadway called Young Brothers (right beside the Hollywood Theatre, if you're looking) fills our fridge on a weekly basis. I don't know where they find all their produce but there are mountains of everything in that store and it's incredibly cheap and the service is rushed and rude unless you expect it to be rude, in which case its hospitable.

Meats
I source meats at the excellent Market Meats on West 4th, though I avoid their prepared, marinated meats simply because I like to do it myself. The sausages they sell are made on the premises and I can recommend from first-hand experience.

The other thing I really like about them is that they're willing to work with customers. They'll talk to you about what you want to achieve and then recommend how to get there. If you have an idea of what you'd like to do they'll order in hard-to-find items or set them aside when they pass by. Just go in when they're not so busy to make sure you get good service and not the high school kids working for the weekend.

Fish
Not a lot of fish comes into our house since the Duck is allegic to the stuff and neither of us is interested in killing her. But, I must confess, every now and then, if she's out of town especially, a fillet or steak might sneak in for some special, very sanitary treatment. So all of that to say that I'm not a great source for fish information. I love the stuff but don't have much experience buying it. Catching it, yes; buying it, no.

What I do have to recommend though are the many locations throughout Vancouver where you can walk out on a dock and buy the fish straight off the boats where it was caught. Granville Island features Fisherman's Wharf, a name that promises more than the location delivers, but where Joe Public can find excellent local seafood (salmon, halibut, prawns, ling cod, etc.) fresh, when in season, or frozen in the shoulder seasons.

Lastly, Vancouver is also blessed with many other food enthusiasts. In particular, Barb and Roland Tanglao's VanEats website provides exhaustive information on the Vancouver food scene.

Debunking the Threat of Internet Pharmacies

Michael Geist has a great story in today's Toronto Star called No good reason to bow to U.S. pharma's lobbying. Geist used to regularly have interesting articles in the Technology section of the Globe and Mail on Thursdays, back in the frothy boom days when enough tech advertisers bought enough pages to warrant a standalone section, and I'm glad to rediscover his intelligent, disinterested writing.

What I particularly like about the article is its plain talk about lobbying and the pharmaceutical industry's attempts to control public perception of Internet phramacies, particularly those operating out of Canada. Reading through the article the machinations of big business, big lobbyists and their affects on government policy are revealed. Geist picks apart the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) arguments one by one in what I would characterize as a gentle way, considering how patently (!) wrong and simply wrought the arguments are.

Moreover, the story of the pharmaceutical industry's successful lobbying efforts is instructional and indicative of how business is conducted in our country. Lobbyist present a story representative of an interest group. Our elected governments consider that story in framing legislation. The net effect being that big corporations become enfranchised, and citizens' interests are comprimised. The story remains the same in many other similar oligopoly industries: agribusiness, automotive manufacturing, oil and energy, financial services, etc.

In the last few month the pharmaceutical industry has suffered from bad story after bad story: shabby approval processes slickened with the distribution of research dollars and the infestation of regulatory bodies with industry shills, drugs pulled from the marketplace long after being ostesibly approved. I put forward that the industry should more accurately be called what it is, a cartel, and we would have an easier time dealing with it as citizens.

My Education in Cooking

Gradually over the last many years I have worked on my cooking abilities. I discovered soon after moving out on my own that in order to eat well - something I liked to do - I had to either pay someone else to cook for me or I had to learn to cook for myself. So learning to cook for myself it was.

The first source I turned to for information was my mother, a wonderful cook of hearty comfort foods. Stews, soups, chilis, sauces and pastas and roasts all turned out of our kitchen rich and savoury with flavour. I can largely trace my current tastes to this elemental knowledge. And since mom was a nurse our dishes were largely prepared with an eye for health. The Canada Food Guide hung on our fridge door. For my first birthday after I moved out Mom sent me a recipe book filled with some of her best creations. She'll be the first to mention that many of them are cribbed from other sources, but to me they're all hers.

Over the intervening few years I have worked out that original recipe book to the point that its spiral binding has loosened and come apart at the end and care must be taken in its handling. Many of the pages show drip and spatter stains and one section of pages has a fine powdery feel to them, as if covered in a dusting of flour. Various yellowed clippings from newspapers, scraps of paper and leaflets are stuffed in at different sections. Because the Duck is alergic to all fish we have remarked the Fish section Wines to keep track of any good vintage that comes across our palate, although I never remember to write anything in there and I just have seven or eight labels I recognize in the liquor store for assurance, paired with an appetite for experimentation, a stunned browser's look in the store and an openness for new things.

More recently I have turned to new sources for inspiration: local people growing and selling the basic foodstuffs and books. In the coming days I'll cover the locals and the books. In the meantime, check out the website of Peter Hertzmann and in particular his sections on how to select, use and care for knives and how to cut vegetables. All the above links brought to, and hence brought to you, from the brand new and very cool website/blog LifeHacks.com.

New Designer Steriod Discovered

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reports that WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, has discovered a new designer steriod that they are calling DMT (Desoxy-Methyl Testosterone). The discovery follows on the heels of the discovery and widespread use of THG (tetrahydrogestrinone) in 2003 and points to an unknown number of steriods designed to avoid detection.

Christiane Ayotte, director of the WADA-accredited doping laboratory in Montreal, said that The Canada Border Services Agency, formerly Canada Customs, seized a bottle of the drug at the Canada-U.S. border at Coutts, Alta., in December, 2003.

An anonymous e-mailer alerted WADA to the seizure.

Working with federal government scientists they discovered it was a new performance-enhancing drug, dubbed Desoxy-Methyl Testosterone or DMT.

It has the ability to increase strength, muscle bulk and stamina.

"In this case, whoever made this drug had access to serious organic chemists," Ayotte said. "It is at a level of sophistication what we have not seen before."

Dope-testing centres around the world have been alerted to the drug.

Ayotte said re-tests of stored urine samples taken from athletes in recent months showed no trace of the drug and she believes it was caught before it went into general circulation.

The discovery of DMT reinforces the opinions I posted about in my Drugs in Sports Report back in June, 2004. What I said then and what I still say now is that drug use is endemic in big-money sports for one simple reason: it works.

More designer steriods will appear in the future. Some will already be in use by various levels of athletes and testing for them will trigger wide-scale disqualifications. Some will appear before they reach wide circulation. If I were in the business of developing designer steriods I would even put out dummy or decoy drugs to keep the labs busy working away from the patterns employed by the real drugs. Perhaps this tactic is already employed.

I always wonder how many illusions I'm shattering by speaking frankly about drug use in professional sports. I guess that 85 to 95 percent of professional football players use steriods or muscle-building drugs. It's simply impossible for so many people to be so large and to recover so fast without the drugs. Sure the NFL has a drug policy but it can't disqualify the whole league. And the drug use extends far beyond the professional ranks, down through the college programs to the high schools. The whole feeder system of high-performance football players conforms. I've seen it with my own eyes. I've been told stories many times.

Honestly I'm surprised that professional sports leagues, in particular the NFL, can keep the public so mystified. I suppose the willing suspension of disbelief extends far beyond the movie theatre or stage. Or maybe I'm not so surprised. Maybe this is the condition our culture finds itself in, where elections are fought on placebo issues, spokespeople are organized to present the ruling message, and information innundation has rendered us all numb to the meanings of messages. We trust the mediated story more than we trust our own first-hand experience. Maybe I'm already working on a book about this.