Ride the Wavy Train

The terrible pants salesman leaves the village.

What is it about novelty transportation that inspires waving to perfect strangers? Tour boats, amusement park rides, and tiny tot trains all make for hands high occasions. Even classic cars or school buses tickle the waving bone for no good reason. Whether you're on or off them, waving to each other across opposite sides of these unusual transports is widely accepted as normal behavior. If I were to view the world during only these moments of enthusiastic greeting exchange, I would assume everyone knew everyone.

So why are these times the only appropriate times to be so joyful about saying hello to strangers? If I waved at strangers I passed on the sidewalk, I would be a wacko. If I said salutations to everyone in my row at the movies, parents would whisper to their children, "stay away from that man, and share those nachos with your sister."

In close quarters, friendly attempts at making an acquaintance is considered suspicious. People want to be friendly though. If someone you don't know says "Hi," a short mental struggle happens within. You don't want to interact with them in case they are crazy or just selling something, but you were taught not saying "Hi" back is rude. So, you say "Hi" back and listen to their sales pitch.

The best test of this knee jerk fear of incivility is to drive past someone waving and smiling, you in the car and they on the sidewalk. People don't have time to figure out who you are before they start waving too. Immediately afterward they wonder if they knew you at all, but it no longer matters. Inadvertently, two strangers were just friendly to each other for no good reason, and they didn't even need an ice cream truck to prompt them.

This blog brought to you by the Wave at a Stranger campaign.

Just a Little Something - Smelliness

This shirt is camouflage for our kind, more affective if upwind.

I'm not sure if this is possible but I think I ate so much asparagus last night that I am now secreting it through my pores. Maybe Vanessa just shoved a couple of stalks up my nose while I was sleeping to keep me from snoring. It's all I can smell right now. Changing the odor of my urine I accept, but this is too much. It's like it has reconfigured my DNA, blasting asparagus scented pheromones out of me like wind swept bait to other foul smelling creatures.  Will I be an outcast from society, forced to live with other smelly people like odiferous lepers? Perhaps I can take a lover who reeks of olive oil or cheese so our children will at least be flavorful to the jungle cats surrounding our isolated camp. Maybe we can all establish a new community overlooking The Bog of Eternal Stench where our offensive fragrances can go unnoticed.

Texans in Canada, Part 6

I'm the one in the big hat.

Every major city provides radio stations as diverse as the citizens who take residence in that slice of Radioland. Often, leaving large cities means leaving large towers, and consequently leaving static or silence on the car stereo. There is no area of Texas, however, where you can't clearly hear Mexican (woh-oh) radio. For some of my time in Texas I found this to be rather annoying, especially since the Mexican musica would often drown out a station that was struggling to satisfy my ethnic ears. After listening to Canadian radio though, I long for the soothing rhythms of the accordion, sweet blasting trumpets, and mysterious lyrics that were often best left untranslated.

There is a lot of Canadian pride and they support anyone who represents them in sports, entertainment, etc. With a population this small it makes sense to get behind anyone that stands out. It's kind of like if a friend of one of your cousins knows Julia Roberts. You would tell everyone about it, probably leaving out the extra degree of the friend, because knowing Julia Roberts (through your cousin) somehow makes you much cooler to know. Where pride was lacking, however, Canada started to enforce it.

In 1971 the CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission) introduced the MAPL system which mandated radio and TV to have a certain percentage of their programs to be Canadian content. This was brought to you by the style of parenting where, if you force your kids to participate in something they dislike for long enough, they will learn to like it and thank you in the end. Many neglected family pianos will silently disagree with these methods.

The largest Canadian recording studio.

Canadian content under the MAPL system means anything where the Music, Artist, Production or Lyrics are entirely Canadian. I think the "E" they left off MAPLE originally stood for Entertainment value to an entirely Canadian audience but there were too few cases to sustain the category. There are VERY few entertaining Canadian bands and deep down even Canadians know this. When the CRTC first demanded 25% of radio play to be dedicated to Canadian content music, stations complied by playing the songs overnight or early Sunday mornings. The "beaver hour" was what they referred to as the off peak block of time dedicated to Canadian music. Despite changes in regulations leading to peak hour play, the music is still a joke and sours any possibility of a great string of songs being played back to back on the radio. My finger hurts from changing the stations so often. I never really cared for Neil Young before but I didn't know how much I loathed him until I moved here. They play bad music that doesn't even qualify for the content regulations. I assumed George Thorogood was Canadian after hearing him get so much air time here, but he's from Delaware! Why would you play George Thorogood so much unless you had to?

The real cherry on all this is they have the annual Juno Awards to honor Canadian musicians. With so few qualified applicants, is there even a voting process? In the classroom of music worldwide, receiving a Juno award is like getting a participation grade. Are you Canadian? Yes. Did you sing something this year? Yes. Okay, here's your Juno.

Television production here is an amateur hour clown show. They create their own commercials for U.S. nationally televised shows, i think as a way to satisfy content requirements. Their idea of advertising a show is putting random clips together and laying a song over the whole thing. At the end of the ad I know the title of the show and that people are in it. Thanks. Switching from the U.S to Canadian feed is anything but seamless. We miss parts of shows because a local commercial runs over time. The first three minutes of Seinfeld is actually the intro to the Simpsons. I saw color bars on screen the other day. I haven't seen a color bar on TV since 1993 when stations stopped signing off for the night.