TORONTO (November 27, 2006) -- It's Christmas and if you have family coming over, you may be looking for a movie to rent to keep the small fry from whining and hitting each other while they wait for someone else to amuse them.  I earnestly encourage you to avoid "Beauty and the Beast" unless you plan to sit down and discuss it with the kids while it's on.

Yeah, I know, it's a Disney movie and what could be bad about that?

Here's what.

Strip away the dancing and singing cutlery, and disregard the typical Disney assumption that no matter how intelligent or ambitious or talented the girl is, the only legitimate place for her is at the altar with a man -- any man.  Think of the story of Beauty and the Beast.

A mentally unstable, violent man catches a girl's father picking a flower in his yard and threatens the father with death unless he hands over his daughter.  The father actually tells the daughter about this, and then allows the daughter to go off and live with this O.J. clone.  The daughter is convinced that if SHE can be perfect enough, the unstable, violent man will become a Prince -- because it is not his fault that he's unstable and violent -- it is the fault of an older woman who MADE him that way, and only a perfect younger woman can cure him.  The girl is imprisoned in the house of this dangerous guy and through her Perfect Behaviour he begins to act, on the surface, like a human being.  But when her behaviour becomes Not Perfect -- when she asks to go home and visit her family -- this radical behaviour he tells her will lead to his death unless she comes right back to her imprisonment within a definite time period.  She overstays her holiday and rushes back to find the beast dying, professes her sin and professes her undying love -- and presto, the beast becomes a prince.

Is this really the right message to convey to a young girl?  First of all, what kind of father would sacrifice his daughter instead of himself?  Second of all, what is the reason the Battered Womens' Shelters (and the cemeteries) are filled with women and children hiding from homicidal, mentally unstable Beasts?  Because they were told that if they were perfect, if they could only be The Perfect Wife and Mother, the beast would turn into a man.  As Nicole Brown-Simpson could tell you if she wasn't decapitated by the Beast, that trick never works.

And by the way, the 'beast' in the Disney version of this cautionary tale was abusive from the time he was a child.  That's not the fault of any woman; that was born in.

Add to this the fact that the girl (like all the Disney girl characters) is intelligent and ambitious and longs to leave her small town life for something better -- and instead of encouraging her ambition, her father hands her over to a beast.

I have plenty of problems with The LIttle Mermaid (girl will endure torture if it will lead to marriage -- think of the parents who give their sixteen year olds breast implants for the love of God!) and the little girl in the Japanese movie that I can't remember the name of (after a fling at adventure that proves she is the equal to any man in the kingdom, any dutiful daughter will come home and allow herself to be tarted up and married off to the man her father chose -- realizing that this is after all the only proper place for a daughter.)  But in my opinion Beauty and the Beast could be hazardous to her health.  You'd be a lot better off renting one of those slasher movies -- at least they teach girls that if they spend the night in a deserted building and they hear funny noises outside, they should pull down the shades and lock the doors, and if they have to go outside to see what it is, at least they should put on something besides panties and a bra.

 

And if you can't be thankful...

for what you have, be thankful for what you have escaped. I'm blind in one eye and deaf in one ear.  I'm thankful that I yet have sight in one eye, and hearing in one ear. The beauties of the Earth and the Heavens become far more precious to a person who is in danger of losing both. (Take care of your hearing. Mine was damaged by being up close and personal to racing cars in the days when nobody knew about ear defenders, especially for children.) Be thankful if you can still walk up the stairs carrying your groceries or dragging the buggy with your groceries in it, even if you're cursing the person who designed a building you can't get into without climbing a steep flight of stairs. If you can only walk with assistance, be thankful you can walk at all. (And if you are on the sidewalk behind a person who is walking with assistance, take a few deep breaths and tell yourself that you will not, in fact drop dead if you have to wait a minute for a safe place to pass this person, and learn to smile at her as you pass. She's not walking with that walker just to thwart your desire to break the land speed record to the next corner.) Be thankful that your Mama or Daddy or both are still alive to sit at the table with you. I am the last person in my cohort who has active living parents; I came near to losing my Daddy this summer and I'm thankful that he's still alive to sit in front of the TV and dispute the calls of referees for NCAA football this Thanksgiving. My college roommate had to place both her parents in a nursing home only last month, as her father's got Alzeimer's and her mother is bedridden. She herself has diabetes and is starting to suffer side effects from it, and her husband just had back surgery and is incapacitated for some time to come. Another friend of mine has a Mama who's going through chemo for colon cancer but who is still able to sit at the table this year even if she's not able to share the meal. Be thankful you have a family who still recognize you. I have an uncle who has to be reminded every 30 minutes or so who I am and where I came from. I am thankful he is alive to grace our table, and I hope they're all thankful that although I may not remember their names, I recognize them and remember who they are. (If your Auntie can't remember your name, remind her in a kind and loving voice. She's not doing it to make you angry or show she doesn't think you're important.) Be thankful the cat comes to meet you at the door, even if she's making it hard for you to hang up your coat, put your stuff away and get to the TV to turn it on. She is showing her love to you in her welcoming. One day she'll be dead or -- like my beloved Rosie -- get out through a screen that the landlord has refused to fix for four years and run away, and you will be sorry you were not kind to her. Above all else, be thankful that you have what you need to keep body and soul together, and keep your body and your soul together. Life is not only a matter of envy and jealousy of those who have more than you have; it is also a matter of thankfulness that you have more than you'll ever need, and you still have 'eyes the better to see and ears the better to hear'. Because as 9/11 taught us most recently, any or all of it could be snuffed out in a heartbeat, leaving you mourning for what you never knew you had until it was taken away...and all those really stinging ripostes you have been planning to heap on your nearest and dearest when he got home rise up to haunt you when he'll never come home again. Maybe your life is filled with sorrow. There is still more sorrow that you do not have. Take time this Thanksgiving to think of what could have happened to you this year and didn't. Trust me, it'll cheer you up no end

November 17, 2006 -- What are you going to be when you grow up?  When I was at college, the answer to that question would be "define 'grow up' please."  The traditional meaning of the words were 'when you take on adult responsibilities that require you to have a steady, reliable source of income to support a family'.  Today people put that experience off a lot longer than they used to, and people live a lot longer than they used to, so that decision can be put off as well.

Some of us were discussing a trend in the Province of Alberta, where there's a lot more work than there are people to do it, for kids to leave high school and go into the oilfields or other fields and work 12 hour days making money hand over fist instead of going on to university and learning to do something they can do without getting dirty.  My contention is, if you can get that kind of work when you're young, you should go for it.  When you're 18 years old you can sleep in a hostel, a box car, a tent or a dorm and eat everything and anything put before you, work 12 hours and sleep 6 hours and live to tell the tale.  Along the way you can amass a tidy amount of money because you have no time to spend it and the stuff you want doesn't cost that much, proportionate to what you're earning.  Not only that, you can learn to work on a team, you'll develop a great set of muscles, you'll meet people who can tell you stuff about life you'll never learn in a classroom, and you won't have any time to get into trouble.  And when the work runs out or you're tired of it, you can quit and go do something else.  Who said that what you start doing at 18 is what you have to do til you're 88?

I currently have a friend from Australia working in England, a friend from Mississippi picking fruit on an organic farm in New Zealand, two friends teaching English in Prague, and a family of cousins doing mission work in Senegal.  None of them plan to do these things for life.  This is what they are doing now.  Some have been to university, some have been through university, most have not.  The guy from Australia is going to join the Army when he's ready to go home again; the friend from Mississippi is going to teach music in a private seminary.  The couple in Prague are actors and writers gathering material.  The mission famliy will come home and join the Salvation Army.  That's what they are thinking now.

My oldest boy dropped out of high school to go to work, and one of my sisters urged me to talk to him about 'wasting his life'.  I pointed out to her that at his age I was living in a yurt in Nepal, studying the Ghurka.  I meandered through several careers and many jobs and finally ended up in a career where I've been for the past 21 years.  But I also have a side job that I love, that allows me to travel and meet people and revel in beautiful fast cars and a wide variety of people from every country in the world.  And I have done charity work from the office side and what I have learned in motorsports has helped me deal with the people there; I can direct traffic and take notes and stop a rebellion in its tracks without looking up from my book -- because of the wide variety of experiences I have had.  Everything you do is a part of who you will be when you grow up.

So when somebody asks you what you'll be when you grow up, the proper answer probably is "I guess we'll have to wait and see."

Meanwhile, don't be in a hurry to climb into a box and say that this is 'who I am'.  You may be surprised one day to find out that you quit too soon -- and that all the time you thought you'd grown up, you could have been somebody else.  Try it when you're young instead of waiting for midlife crisis when it will be much harder to change horses without looking as if you've lost your mind.

As Yogi Berra would have said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."  You've got fifty years to work.  Don't be in a hurry to settle down..

November 8, 2006:  Do you remember customer service?  I mean, the kind of customer service where a human being listened to your request, understood it, and then took steps to do something to help you?  And thanked you for calling -- sincerely?

This morning I had to call the Bell Operator for assistance in dialing; we had a number in a new area code (2 years old) that would not go through our phone system for reasons that had a lot to do with the antiquity of our phone system.  In the Olden Days one could dial Operator and request "assistance in dialing please" and the Operator would assist us to connect with the party to whom we wished to speak.  This morning I dialed O and was disconnected with that European Ambulance Wail that says 'not on your tintype, sweetie' in the modern patois.  So I dialed O on my cell phone and got instructions on how to get operator assistance and dialed that on my office phone.  I got an operator who was extremely rude when she found out all I wanted was assistance in dialing.  Since I was born and reared in New York, I saw her rude and trumped it with a Supernanny, and she dialed the number, reached it, and then snapped "Have a nice day" in a tone of voice that implied the precise opposite.  I believe she may have been the first person in Kanukistan I've spoken to who was too rude even for Air Canada, which apparently holds special classes in dissing customers.

Speaking of Air Canada, the last time I was tricked into flying with them (I signed up for a United flight that turned out to be a code share with AC), I discovered that they have automated all their check-in services at the Terminal.  This is patently ridiculous in a city where the vast majority of the citizenry are of foreign extraction and their grasp of the English language is tenuous at best, and their grasp of modern machinery even more so.  Two 'attendants' were trying to help at least forty people check in with these machines.  There was a desk with a sign reading "Passenger assistance"; however, the smirking creep behind the counter refused to assist anyone, directing us back to the machines.  I procured the assistance of an "attendant" by the New York method of hollering really loudly "Is there an attendant in the house?"  The attendant, when she came, was Jamaican, and she could not find the Access Code demanded by the machine, on my computer printout ticket.  SHE went to the "passenger assistance" desk where the smirking creep looked up the number for her, then she came back and completed the transaction on the machine for me.  And THEN I had to go stand in another line and check my baggage in!  For airlines that are NOT Air Canada, both these transactions are done together, in about 1/3 the time it took me to simply check myself in on this consumer-hostile automated system.

And we all know what fun it is to call any Customer Assistance hotline that has to do with our computers these days. What are the odds of reaching anyone in North America on one of these lines?  Zero.  In fact, that's actually better odds than you will get regarding reaching someone who can speak and understand the same brand of English you yourself tend to use.  Here in Kanukistan we also have the possibility of reaching someone whose primary language is French, and whose grasp of English is roughly equal to our grasp of French. One example will suffice:  in trying to call the outfit that handles my dial-up connection (a backup system that works only in Canada), seeking the access number for Oshawa (the next bedroom town up from Toronto), I got someone who could not locate my name on her customer list although I had given her every possible code and my telephone number too.  Turned out she thought "Elizabeth" began with an "I", and my four-letter last name contained a consonant that they don't have in French so apparently she could not spell that either.  Having waited for 45 minutes on hold and memorized the French for "Thank you for your patience while on hold.  Our agents are serving other customers and we will answer your call shortly," I again used the New York Diplomacy method and shouted at her.  She gave me the number to make me go away.

It's the same in virtually every manner of business anymore.  Gone are the days when someone would say, "I don't know the answer to that, but give me a minute and I will find the right person to help you" and then NOT disconnect you and go to lunch.  Dell Canada's telephone hotline only operates between 9 and 5, Monday thru Friday, and they have no computer hotline.  When you call Rogers Cable to find out why your internet access isn't working, you stay on hold listening to someone exhort you to go to their website instead of wasting your time on hold...along with a long list of all the other products that, since you have been on hold through an entire episode of "Mythbusters", you have decided you will never buy as long as you live.  Then when the person comes on the line, he tells you to input your phone number, which you did to get to the point where you could be on hold, and asks you to tell him all the information he has on the screen in front of him -- and then he tells you that the internet is down, which is what you called to tell HIM.

And of course there are the little knots of sales people in department stores, who view the approach of a customer with a question with the same enthusiasm they view a screaming toddler with a double-dip ice cream cone; and the girl at the check-out counter who is on the phone arranging a baby shower for a colleague while the line grows in front of her; and the guy at Radio Shack who wants your zip code and can't understand that you live in Canada and we don't HAVE zip codes...

Well, you get my drift. What this world needs, as it grows increasingly complex and as the mean age of the population grows ever closer to 40, is a customer service robot who speaks clear and understandable English, who knows her subject, who is in electronic communication with her fellow robots at all times, and who has been programmed to thank us for our business.  As the younger generation grow fewer, more sullen, and frankly stupider (which is the militant form of ignorance), it's probably the best we can do. 

And we'd better do it soon, or there's going to be a meltdown.  Trust me.  I know that. I will lead it.