Large Fierce Mammal

Addressing the Press Club in Washington, D. C., on 25 March 1969, and in reference to the relationship between Canada and the United States, then Prime Minister of Canada Pierre Elliott Trudeau said, “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”

As a student of world politics observing the differences between the Bush and Obama administrations, it has become obvious to me that only one man on the planet has succeeded in capturing the true essence of each. This man is none other than Hugh Laurie; fellow member of the British Commonwealth and star of the celebrated TV show House, MD.

Confident as I am in the intelligence of my readers, I shall explain no further and leave you to agree with me as you watch the following offerings.

In this first performance, assisted by Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie captures the essence of the Bush administration; whether he, in his genius, knows it or not.

Next, Hugh Laurie gets to the heart of what I personally also understand to be the crux of the Obama plan, both for the US and the world. This song really speaks to the workin’ man in me.

Obviously Hugh Laurie is the personification of enlightenment.

If this was my shirt it would say, “YIPPEE!!!!” on the back and everything after “WIFE” would be covered in exclamation points.

I took the title of this post from among the many wise and witty utterances of the immortal Groucho Marx. He also said, “I intend to live forever, or die trying.”

Of no surprise to my readers will be the disclosure that my brand of humour veers sharply toward the dark side. My dance card of funeral attendance over the years includes both my parents, four uncles and one aunt, an assortment of friends and the parents of others, and that’s just the humans. If memory serves, I have also officiated at or otherwise participated in the last goodbye to five dogs, one horse, one cat, three hamsters, at least six birds of various species, a similar number of reptiles, and one monkey. Species be damned. Grief is grief.

As I’ve gone through the grieving process myself, and watched others do the same, it has become clear to me that, in the end, the power and joy of a life well lived is not diminished by the final footnote that it came to an end. That grief is a path leading to a place where, without trivializing our loss or assuming a pretense that the one departed isn’t missed, we can once again think and speak of them fondly and often, without spontaneously melting into a weeping puddle of goo. That their lives will have meaning as long as those of us who remember still draw breath.

I often tell stories of my father, Lawrence Whynacht (above left with Joey), and employ his common expressions such as, “Like picking fly shit out of pepper with boxing gloves on,” when speaking of a task that was very difficult to do. His influence in my life is felt daily, with joy instead of sadness, and yet since his burial the only time I have returned to his grave was the day we placed my mother beside him. That’s not him there. Those are his remains, and I need no monument to remind me of what his life meant to everyone who knew him. In fact as his son I am, in the most powerful and fundamental of ways, a living monument to him.

I am motivated to reflect on these things because, five years ago today, another fine man, a fine friend, and most importantly a fine parent, whose life touched mine in a way that has forever filled me with gratitude beyond the bounds of mere language to express, died in Halifax after a mighty battle with cancer. Ryszard Stanislaw Kleszczynski was the father of my beloved Diana.

Izabella, little Diana, and Ryszard in 1982

Born in Klodzko, Poland on 2 June 1950, Ryszard was a professional engineer, tennis player, musician, and avid camper. A man of great intelligence and humour with a razor sharp wit, Ryszard possessed an effortless and classic style in his manners that only the term “old world” can adequately describe.

First and foremost though, Ryszard was a family man. A devoted husband and lover to his wife Izabella;

a proud and loving father to his two daughters, Diana and Dorothy, the latter of whom will give birth to a daughter of her own in a few weeks from the date of this post.

Diana, Dorothy, and Ryszard

Ryszard loved the outdoors and regularly took the family camping in Kejimkujik National Park for weeks at a time. Having been raised on a farm, he took a practical, no-nonsense approach to life, but never forgot how to relax …

… have fun …

… nor the importance of keeping romance alive.

As an engineer he valued motivation, clear thinking, and a drive to succeed. He cultivated these values and delighted in how they took root in Diana. Look at his face in the following picture, taken at Diana’s Grade 11 honours ceremony. If that’s not a father busting a gut with pride I don’t know what is.

Here again we see the effect in evidence as Ryszard dances with Diana at her prom, something that in my day we called a grad dance.

Once more for good measure, here is a photo of Izabella, Dorothy, Diana, Michelin representative Nancy Bell, and Ryszard taken at Diana’s high school graduation. Diana had graduated with honours, top of her class, with a $20,000.00 scholarship to Dalhousie University, and had won the $8,000.00 Michelin bursary for scholastic excellence which was presented to her by Ms. Bell. No wonder Ryszard often looked at Diana and called her Magnavox, the company motto of which was, “Smart. Very smart”.

Here’s some local news coverage from the Bridgewater Bulletin (click on the image to enlarge it):

In his last days, Diana and I spent a lot of time travelling back and forth from our residence near Lunenburg to the QEII hospital in Halifax. We had moved to Corkum’s Island in September 2003 and due to his illness he had never been able to visit us there.

During one of those last visits he asked to speak with me alone and said, “I have heard you have a big house”

I agreed that we did and he nodded his head. Raising a finger and gesturing toward the door where Diana had just passed out of sight, with a slight smile on his lips he said, “If you ever hurt her, I will haunt that house.”

Well, I never have, but still think he haunts our house anyway, just for fun. In fact, this was one of the reasons we married on All Hallows Eve 2008. To the many who have asked, “Why Hallowe’en?” I have always replied, “Because some of the most important guests are dead, and that’s the only night they could come.”

The eagle is a bird that features prominently in Polish heraldry. On the day of Ryszard’s death, as Diana and I drove home across the Corkum’s Island causeway, a breath taking bald eagle flew low across the road in front of us. It, or one just as big, has often been seen in our vicinity on many occasions thereafter and I can honestly say that in all the time I’ve spent outdoors in my life, eagles were never so much in evidence as they have been since.

I’ve enjoyed telling these stories about Ryszard, and I’d be lying if I claimed not to have shed more than a few private tears of joy in celebration of the life of an exceptional man as I wrote them. In closing, dear and loyal readers, here’s an appropriate animated gif Diana created some months ago that I believe will speak for itself. Click here to view it.

A kitchen knife wielded by a master is magical to behold. One seeking to succeed in an endeavour should aspire to start nowhere but at the beginning, and only through the development of sound technique can speed and style be built. In my recent travels I encountered some training videos on the subject of kitchen bladesmanship that I thought I’d share in hopes that my readers will all still have the same number of digits a year from now.

So, without further delay, here is Chad Ward, author of An Edge in the Kitchen.

First, The Pinch and the Claw in which he explains and demonstrates the proper way to hold the knife for most common kitchen tasks.

Next, Dicing Onions: Classic and Cheat Techniques from which even I learned something I didn’t know; i.e., the secret of the root.

Enjoy.

On my father’s side of the family, all ancestry leads back to German settlers arriving in Lunenburg by way of Halifax in 1753. On my mother’s side, the paternal line goes straight back to the same source, but her mother was born and raised in Surrey, England. That makes me a mutt, and I’m proud to claim the title right alongside some of the finest mammals of the canine persuasion it has been my privilege to meet.

Diana though, now she’s a thoroughbred. Born in Poland to Polish parents, she was raised predominantly in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, facts that contributed hugely to the similarity of our mutual upbringings in spite of the 25 year difference in our ages. As it turns out, as of 1982 eastern European parents were exactly a generation behind Canada, and by that I mean better, in the arts of raisin’ up a kid or two, than most 1982 vintage Canadian parents. To reach that level of quality here you have to go back to 1957.

As most of you know, Diana and I were married on Hallowe’en of 2008 at which time I became officially Polish by marriage, and that dear readers is a burden I am proud to bear. To illustrate why I feel this way, I will list here some items Diana recently received in an e-mail from her mother Izabella titled, “You Know You’re Polish When …“

Obviously Polish people can just check their birth records whenever they’re in doubt, but please try to stay focused and just enjoy this post. Diana added annotations to assist the unschooled; i.e., non-Poles; in understanding the unbridled wit of this, and I’ll include those as I write, so here we go:

1. You have relatives who aren’t really your relatives.
2. You sing the same song, “100 lat”, on every joyful occasion: weddings, birthdays, baby showers ….
3. You know very well that Pope John Paul II was Polish, and his name was Karol, not Carol. As a side note, Diana and her parents met him.
4. You drink your wodka straight. No, there are no misspelled words in the previous sentence.
5. You open your presents on Christmas eve.
6. You don’t feel the need to add “s” to “pierogi” because you already know the word is plural (You can’t eat just one!), and it annoys you when others do. However, you still add “y” to already plural English words; i.e., “chipsy”.
7. You are convinced your pets only understand Polish. In the case of Izabella’s cats, this is one of the Great Truths of the Universe
8. You can spot Polish people like Asians can spot each other. Strangely, and without any actual practice I’m aware of ever having participated in, I have developed this talent.
9. Your name always gets slaughtered on the first day or school. OK, tutorial time. Diana’s maiden name was Kleszczynski. To get this right, you need to understand a simple set of rules: “sz” in Polish is pronounced like “sh” in English. Similarly, “cz” is pronounced as “ch”. Pronounce the “y” like an “i” and you get “Klesh-CHIN-skee”. Work on it until you can say it three times fast with a snoot full of straight wodka.
10. The thought of eating cow stomach (flaki) doesn’t gross you out. Why should it? I’ve always known cow tongue as “the snack that tastes you back”!
11. When you are at a stranger’s house, you expect their garbage can to be under the sink.
12. Every window in your house must have “firanki” (curtains), even in the bathroom. For a couple of years I lived in Sweetland, Lunenburg County, and found it the local custom to eschew curtains in favour of ensuring that the primal horror of having anything happen outside that you couldn’t observe was avoided at all costs. Sweetlanders would make very poor Poles.
13. You celebrate your birthday and your name day, “imieniny”. This is a clever way of getting more presents out of a year of life and highly recommended. Kind of like looking for excuses to have a party. Yippee! Skeezix of the funnies landed a job! Let’s party!
14. You were extremely surprised to learn that North American weddings last hours, not days. Diana and I created our own version of this tradition. The actual ceremonial part occupied an evening while what is usually referred to as “the wedding night” lasted days.
15. Your grandmother insists you wear kapcie in the summer. Diana says that since she had no grandmother here in Canada, her father Ryszard did the insisting. I had a college room mate who told me his mother would tell him to put on a sweater because she was cold, but he was from Moncton.
16. You know Chopin was born in Poland, not France.
17. You were speaking Polish before English. Diana came from Poland to Canada by way of Italy, and entered the Nova Scotian school system speaking only Polish and Italian.
18. At every party you attend, people tell dowcipy (jokes) and there is a discussion about politics.
19. You watched Bolek i Lolek before bed time. Diana did, and YouTube has them in spades. Here’s a sample:
    
20. You know how to “kombinowac”, meaning to combine, plan, scheme, or add.
21. You or someone you know wears bursztyn (amber). Green amber is our family stone.
22. Your family considers mushroom picking as “having a good time”. So good in fact, that we’re pretty certain the Polish technique of harvesting mushrooms resulted in Diana’s conception.
23. You have paper towels in the house but they’re just for show, because everyone knows you’re supposed to use a szmatka, which means rag. In Poland, the term is also used as it is here when referring to a crappy magazine or newspaper. Interestingly, the letter “k” is often added to a word to soften its punch, so if you encounter a publication that shouldn’t be cast aside lightly but deserves instead to be thrown with great force, the proper expletive to yell as you hurl it should actually be “SZMATA!“
24. When something breaks easily, is of crappy quality or is an ugly looking bike… you call it Ukranian. Diana’s mother has been known to do this on occasion.
25. All your friends wished they were Polish because of smigus dingus. This is an odd Polish tradition that consisted in Diana’s family of being the first person to get up on Easter Monday and douse everyone else with water, or at least spray them with a water pistol. In Poland though, a deluge would be delivered to everyone in sight, and the practice was aimed by men at women. Diana thinks that isn’t much fun so everybody is fair game. As far as I can tell, this is not where the concept of the wet T shirt contest originated, but I can assure you that if Diana is wearing one when hit with water by me, mushroom picking would certainly result.
26. You fail a blood/drug test because you’ve eaten so much poppyseed cake before it. Holy shit, is that stuff addictive!
27. At some time in your life, when you were sick, you had one of these two remedies: hot milk with butter and garlic (mleko z czostkem) or syrop z czebulie (onions with sugar). Diana’s mother had her own formula for the first one; hot milk with butter and honey. She also reports that onions with sugar was actually something she looked forward to but she is an unrepentant perve which is one of the many reasons I love her.
28. When you or your family and/or Polish friends talk to each other in English, you occasionally slip in Polish words, and it’s OK because you all know what is being said. It can get even more convoluted though. When Diana’s father Ryszard was in hospital not long before his death, Izabella, Diana, and I were visiting. Ryszard had been alternately speaking to Izabella and Diana in a mixture of Polish and English when he looked at me and without breaking stride delivered a lengthy statement in Polish. When he was finished and still looking to me for my reply Izabella reminded him (in Polish) that I don’t speak Polish to which he replied to her, still in Polish, “Well, he needs to learn.” Some might consider this rude but that wasn’t his intent. The statement brought humor to a tragic situation and it’s one of the memories I’ll always carry with me about him.
29. If you were born in Canada to Polish parents, you are regarded as the inferior genetic counterpart to the purebred Pole. In this picture from our 31 October 2008 wedding we see, from left to right, Izabella (Diana’s mother), my incomparable Diana, and Diana’s sister Dorothy (AKA Dorota, not to be confused with the maid on “Gossip Girl”). Sorry Dorothy, but you were born in Bridgewater so this item is talking about you. My sympathies. I just don’t know what else to say.
30. Your parents don’t realize phone connections to foreign countries have improved in the last two decades, and still scream at the top of their lungs when making foreign calls. “MAMO!? HALO?!? KTO TAM?” Diana says this was not uncommon in her family, and only in the last seven years has it stopped.
31. Your dad has butchered a pig or lamb. Ryszard grew up on a farm so Diana has a bingo on this one too.
32. You have kielbasa hanging somewhere in your kitchen. I find this one slightly troubling because the only way this would happen in our house would be if the sausage was terrible. In fact, it’s so delicious that any form of Polish sausage is in constant danger of being attacked and is gone in no time. What can I say? Polish sausage is a health food.
33. Your family had at least three working Fiat Maluchy sitting in their front yard, one of which, at any given, time usually had 5 or more people stuffed into it. This was the first car Diana’s father had as a young man in Poland. It was yellow and he always pined over the necessity of selling it.

Australians have long been known to warn gullible tourists about the perils of drop bears. As everybody who reads Wikipedia knows, “Drop bears are … unusually large, vicious, carnivorous koalas that inhabit treetops and attack their prey by dropping onto their heads from above.” To make things worse, they warn that there is no way to tell the difference between a common koala and an immature drop bear, and besides simply staying away from them, as well as out from under trees of course, strapping upward pointing forks to your head or putting toothpaste or vegemite behind your ears can be an effective countermeasure.

I bring this up for no particular reason other than that I just uncovered some entertaining lore on another fictional creature; specifically the Foo Bird.

There is an old joke that comes in several varieties about the Foo Bird, but my favourite version has it that the Foo Bird lives in the deepest parts of the Amazon rain forest and is to be avoided at all costs because its droppings contain an unusually vile and deadly poison.

The particularly evil thing about getting some of this on you is that the toxic effects result from a chemical reaction that only occurs when skin that was covered with the feces is subsequently cleaned and exposed to the air. Because of this, the best advice that can be given to the victim of such an attack is if the Foo shits, wear it.

As I said, there are other versions of this, mostly dealing with bad luck if the Foo Bird’s gift is removed, but my version is more dark and disgusting and hence I like it better.

Anyway, on the same subject, I happened today on a blog written by a man going by the name of “Oldcock“. Right away I felt a bond because, as it happens, I have one of those myself, albeit well maintained and kept honed by constant use.

A man of eclectic tastes, Oldcock describes himself as having, ” … more than a passing interest in witchcraft, sorcery and other occult subjects, wine, women and song, bawdy verse, entertaining unusual and eccentric people, searching for leprechauns and fishing.”

I mean, what’s not to love?

On the subject of the Foo Bird, Oldcock posted this gem which I have slightly edited and will leave you to ponder:

The Ol’ Foo Bird is quite absurd
For round and round it flies.
It flaps its wings and flies in rings
And circles through the skies.
But when its speed doth much exceed
Such speeds as Foo Birds may,
Then twiddle-dee-dum
It flies up its own bum
And vanishes away!

Oldcock attributes this to someone he calls Bullshetty, and claims that he or she (Of course it could be a woman! I’ve met some who could bullshet with the best of them!) composed it in a “moment of drunken inspration” in 1987.

There's always a fresh pile of steaming bullshit around the next corner.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, most of modern culture is built on a foundation of 100% pure bullshit. Entire industries make obscene amounts of money convincing people that they aren’t thin enough, young enough, pretty enough, investing wisely enough, would get more sex if they were driving a different car, don’t smell good enough, are too bald or too grey … you know what I’m saying. This is made possible because most people prefer not to think for themselves.

A commercial that should insult everyone who sees it is the one that Scotia Bank put up in the wake of the current economic downturn. It’s the one with the rattled boob telling a smug woman that his investments just tanked. She tells him he should be investing with her group because their portfolios “grow with the market”. Excuse me you cloth-eared bint, but the point here is that the market is SHRINKING. If your portfolio is “growing” with the market then it’s “growing” in reverse. What’s another word for “non-winner”? Starts with an “L”.

Back in 1973 we hit a speed bump we called “the OPEC oil crisis”. In case you weren’t there, or have since killed the brain cell you formerly used to store the memory, the predominantly Arab petroleum exporting countries tried starving us oil slugging western wastrels of crude to teach us a lesson. Ecology activists preached this as a perfect opportunity to position society for the inevitable day when non-renewable energy sources would be used up. People began driving 55 miles an hour claiming that they were consuming less fuel while continuing to drive their lazy asses everywhere and taking longer to do it. Honda introduced the Civic as the first car capable of going more than 40 miles on a gallon of gas. California passed more environmental laws and succeeded in becoming still more Californian.

So what happened? There was some military sabre rattling but, in the end, formerly dirt poor people who succeeded in becoming wealthy based on nothing more than the fact that they happen to live on a sand dune covering a shitload of the most desirable commodity in the world really can’t ignore how much money they aren’t making forever. Greed both started and ended this tempest in a teapot. Honda still builds the Civic but it’s a sporty car now and 40+ miles to the gallon is just a twinkle on its exhaust pipe. SUV’s and full size pick-up trucks abound, driven by people who were briefly upset by more recent fuel cost increases but forgot about that when prices dropped again, however temporarily. A few drive hybrid vehicles and feel morally superior. Some also buy carbon credits which I find to be pretty much the same as Catholics going to confession. A little penance and all the sin under your fingernails is like it was never there in the first place. Even better, it’s like having someone else wipe your ass for you. In the end, it’s not you left holding the shit.

Go to a school and ask a bunch of kids to draw a picture or write a description of what they imagine when they hear the word “environment”. Ask a group of adults where “the environment” is. Everybody pictures clear running streams, forests, and wildlife. Few picture “the environment” as being where they’re sitting. Commercials funded by governments and companies that make their living from wholesale exploitation of Nature use variations of the tag line that they are making sure wild places are there “to be enjoyed” by future generations. That’s future generations of humans of course. Other species don’t vote or buy deodorant.

“To be enjoyed” you say. Is that what this is about? Humans are so far out on top of the food chain that short of a few parasites, viruses, and the animals we’ve domesticated who can’t survive without human support, pretty much nothing else on the planet would miss us if we all disappeared tomorrow. All of this should make a thinking person more than a little unaccepting of any claims that each and every part of Nature exists purely “to be enjoyed” by humans, and I encourage you all to teach the Great Unwashed the true meaning of “environment” by getting into their personal space and emitting the most lethal fart you can muster.

Every morning it seems that I’m hearing the results of the latest “study”. The sad thing is that the results have less to do with science and more with the agenda of whoever paid for the study to be done in the first place.

In the March 2009 edition of Outdoor Canada I found a short piece by Aaron Kylie titled “Unnatural Selections” that I’ll reproduce here, particularly since it’s what got me riled in the first place:

So much for going green. The latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary – aimed at children aged seven or older – has excised more than 100 flora and fauna related words, replacing them with terms such as blog, chatroom, and celebrity. Here’s a selection of the omissions ….

• Acorn
• Ash
• Beaver
• Beech
• Blackberry
• Boar
• Brook
• Chestnut
• Clover
• Doe
• Drake
• Fern
• Hazelnut
• Heron
• Herring
• Ivy
• Kingfisher
• Minnow
• Otter
• Porcupine
• Raven
• Thrush
• Walnut
• Wren

What the hell? As a Canadian, I find the omission of “beaver” to be more than a little offensive, and I really can’t understand how they dropped the ball on “blackberry” seeing as this age of self-indulgence and instant gratification has turned that word into a verb.

Bloody hell. Rant out.

As usual, turn up your sound.

For the benefit of those of you unfamiliar with the history of Canadian military aviation, the CF-104 Starfighter, built by Canadair under license from Lockheed, was Canada’s front line fighter deployed to European bases as part of our NATO commitment during the latter part of the cold war. Officially adopted in March 1962, it replaced the Canadair Sabre Mk.6 in 1968 and served until itself being replaced by the CF-18 Hornet in 1987 after which most surviving CF-104’s were sold to Turkey.

A Challenging aircraft to fly, 46% of Canadian Starfighters were lost in accidents. This was a very fast airplane being operated at low altitudes in European weather conditions where, if you don’t fly in crap, you don’t fly. Even so, those who flew and maintained the Starfighter thought highly of it and, by the time it was replaced with the CF-18 Hornet, the average CF-104 airframe had 6000 hours on it as compared with the 2000 hours of the next highest time air force, the German Luftwaffe.


I am presently in the pre-production and screen testing phase of a documentary film called “The F Word”, commemorating the 2009 centennial of powered flight in Canada. Flight sequences are being shot using flight simulation software, specifically Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 and X-Plane by Laminar Research. As screen tests proceed, I will be posting the results here, as well as on YouTube and SimTube, just for fun.

So, if you enjoy history, airplanes, things that go fast, and loud noises, not to mention kick-ass travelling music, try on The F Word – Screen Test 1 featuring the exceptional and accurately modelled Captain Sim “Legendary F-104” wearing my personally applied RCAF colours based on the black and white photo below courtesy of the Canadian Starfighter Association. Click on the photo to view it full size, and turn up your sound before watching the movie.