Posted on December 10, 2014 under Storytelling with no comments yet

Some research is for the birds

 

 

A day rarely goes by when we don’t hear something in the media about ground-breaking research.   An announcer breathlessly declares that some obscure university has followed thousands of participants and has reached some startling conclusions.  The study is usually funded by government, or worse; by private industry which has a lot to gain by results that point to a particular product or service.

Useless research ranks right up there with suspect polling.  In this millennium, election results in Canada and beyond have left us all scratching our heads as candidates, who were doomed to the scrap heap in the media, miraculously won after being far behind in the polls.

I was mulling these things over the other day after hearing the results of a study about infants.  I know a little bit about this subject, having played a role (supporting cast) in raising four of them.  I am also a grandparent three times over so I am witness to child rearing a second time around, albeit from a more comfortable vantage point.

So here are some of the results of recent research projects that have left me shaking my head in awe.  Babies who are rocked by their parents and grandparents are more content and grow up better adjusted.  Now that’s a shocker.  And how about this stunner: kids who are well nourished learn better and faster.  This was a $500,000 study.  Seriously.  And, wait for this, children who are read to as infants and toddlers do better when they arrive at school.  I am flabbergasted.  I am so relieved that this study took many years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to reach this amazing conclusion.  Somehow I have to believe that the dedicated volunteers who devised and implemented the Read to Me! program in Nova Scotia knew instinctively that kids and books belong together.

The only thing more preposterous than government funded studies is those done by private companies, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry.  All of their research eventually concludes that more drugs are the answer.  Don’t you just love the ads on US stations that tell you the merits of a new wonder drug, only to find out that the side effects include the possibility of dizziness, nausea, heart palpitations, sweating, shortness of breath, rash, amnesia, stoke, heart attack and , in rare, cases, death.  Yup.  I’m ready to step up and try some of that, especially when the research has been conducted by a reputable company funded by big pharma.

I have a much better suggestion that would save years and millions of dollars. I have done my own research.  All it took was thirty-two years sitting at the kitchen table.  After reading hundreds of stories and realizing how much research is either self-serving or redundant, I have concluded that investigators could have saved themselves and the tax paying public a lot of grief.

They could have simply picked up the phone and asked my wife, or any of her peers.

Posted on December 8, 2014 under Monday Morning Musings with no comments yet

A festive tree

 

 

Seems like the new craze in outdoor decorations these days is giant balls hanging in trees.  ( I tried to word this sentence differently but it just didn’t work! ). I set a new world record by doing our outdoor decorations in 25 minutes. We walked down to Brendan’s afterwards and picked out a tree. It took longer to write the cheque than it did to pick the tree. ( 14 seconds ) Stay tuned for my story “Deck Orations” coming next weekend which attempts to explain out pathetic attempts at decorating.

My book is officially launched and early sales are brisk. If you’re looking for a copy ( or 10 ! ), you can buy them locally at the 5 to $1.00, Brendan’s, Brosha’s Short Stoppe, and Elm Gardens. You can also get them from me and if you happen to live in Taiwan or Toronto, you can purchase them on line. Thank you for your support.

I’m on a roll. I have four brand new stories in the works and none of them are related to Christmas. I might recycle my Christmas turkey story sometime during the festive season ( A Tale of Two Turkeys ).

“Just Ask a Woman”, which will be published on Wednesday ( Casket day ),  is about useless research. I am not talking about serious research that is done by outstanding professors and specialists in their fields. I’m talking about studies whose conclusions are painfully obvious to anyone with a grade 4 education. For example, a recent study showed that children who are read to at an early age, do better in school than those who grow up without books. Duh. Really? I would have never guessed. As you might deduce, this piece is just a tad on the sarcastic side. I try to avoid sarcasm but sometimes it’s just not possible.

And speaking of head scratchers , how about this one. This did not happen in Antigonish. I was elsewhere in the province when my cell phone started acting up. I went into a shop that sells and services cell phones. Good so far. There were two young clerks. One was waiting on a senior citizen buying his very first cell phone. The other was, well, chatting with her boyfriend on the phone… and chewing gum. After waiting about a minute to be acknowledged, I explained my phone problems. She kept her cell phone to her ear while coaching her co-worker on the features of a particular package. She finally had to put her phone down to check the settings on my phone. “ I think the problem is with your phone.” I am not lying. And you wonder where I get story ideas?!

Have you ever had a confrontation with a toll booth? Friends of mine were recently travelling in Europe and had an interesting encounter in Italy at an unmanned toll booth. “Taking Its Toll” deals with some common frustrations that occasionally arise at toll booths especially where there is a language barrier to go along with the physical barrier which won’t go up until your toll is paid.

Have a great week.

P.S. Because of recent changes to Facebook, the only way that you can be sure to receive my posts is to go to my website and become a subscriber through e-mail. ( at the bottom of my home page ). It’s old fashioned… but it works.

Posted on December 6, 2014 under Storytelling with no comments yet

( Originally published Dec.7, 2013 )

 

 

I received a text from my daughter earlier today.  She and her partner are expecting their first child next spring and will spend their first Christmas together in their new house, later this month.  My daughter is a very sensible and practical woman.  She and her partner waited until she finished university before they bought a modest home in a brand new subdivision.  When she shops she is methodical – not many impulse purchases in her world.  Which is why I was not a bit surprised to read in her text that they had just bought an artificial Christmas tree.  Besides being very smart, she has a good memory and somewhere deep in her psyche, she remembers one memorable Christmas when our family procured a real Christmas tree, the old fashioned way.

We have four children of varying temperaments.  Daughter #2 was crazy about 4H.  For a period of time we lived in the country to accommodate a flock of chickens that we had been keeping in our yard in town.    Our neighbors were, by and large, a pretty good natured and patient lot.  But when the chickens had reached maturity, they were able to extricate themselves from their pen and find their way to adjacent vegetable gardens.  Most normal people move because of a change of employment, they want to downsize or upsize, or want a lifestyle change.  Precious few move to accommodate their chickens but that is precisely why we moved to Cloverville Road.  As part of the move, we relocated the kids’ playhouse.  This rugged wooden structure that once housed small children was reincarnated as a henhouse.  I digress.

Our neighbor in Cloverville owned a Christmas tree lot next to our property.  And being the good neighbor he was, he generously offered us a free Christmas tree.  All we had to do was walk about 1000 yards to his lot, choose a tree, chop it down and drag it home – a simple enough task on the surface, if you are a childless Paul Bunyan type.

Just getting everybody ready and out the door  was a Herculean effort as it had snowed heavily on the days leading up to the fun-filled event.  With feelings of peace, joy and goodwill, mixed with dread, we headed up the logging road.  And no Husqvarna chain saw for this crew.  No, just an old, dull handsaw.  If you saw what we owned that passed for tools, you would readily understand that we are not “do it yourselfers”.  The most basic carpentry is to be avoided.  Wielding a chainsaw would be akin to handling dynamite.

My memory is somewhat clouded (repression may be at work) but I believe Christmas carols were sung on the outward half of the journey.  You could almost touch and taste the Christmas spirit.  Large, fluffy snowflakes leant an air of magic to this Currier and Ives scene.  That was until the walking became more difficult and the first hint of sibling rivalry reared its ugly head.  And then, as if in a dream, the tree lot appeared before us.  Hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands of beautifully shaped balsam firs.  Let’s do the math.  Let’s just say that were 1000 trees and six of us trying to make a unanimous decision on the perfect tree.  I thought of my grade nine teacher and pondered the possible permutations and combinations that could lead us to the Promised Land.  Something in the pit of my stomach was telling me that trouble was just around the corner.

The snow was knee deep and the trees were covered.  The first decision was about the height of the tree. Our modest home did not have high ceilings and would require an equally modest size tree.  Try telling that to four kids salivating in front of a forest of trees.  Consensus in any endeavour is never a foregone conclusion.  Choosing the perfect Christmas tree with six people adjudicating is, well, impossible.  After a long, painstaking and at times tearful period of time, our tree, our bundle of Christmas joy, was selected.  Our ancestors were hewers of wood and drawers of water.  If my forefathers could clear the land with strength of will and abject determination, then I would certainly do them proud and quickly dispatch the lovely nine-footer staring me down.

Have you ever tried cutting down a tree, a large tree, with cold sap running through its veins, with a saw so dull that it couldn’t slice a watermelon?  Within minutes, although it felt like hours, I could feel the sweat underneath my stocking cap and was finding it hard to see with the fog accumulating on my glasses … and the snow falling from the branches down my neck … and the children becoming more and more exasperated.  I wasn’t feeling the Christmas spirit as much as I was hoping to soon drink some Christmas spirits.

I waged war with the tree and eventually won but as you historians know, sometimes a conquest is only a Pyrrhic victory.  Someone who achieves this essentially wins the battle but loses the war.  Mercifully the tree gave up just before I did and fell quietly to the ground.  Did you ever notice that a tree, cut down in the forest, somehow undergoes a metamorphosis by the time it reaches a house?  What was once a stunning beauty, a perfect 10, the best tree ever, turns into something very different.  Gaps in the branches appeared where there were none only minutes earlier.  The shape wasn’t quite right and, wonder of wonders, it was too tall.  I assured the kids that once we cut it down to its proper size and had decorations on it, it would be awesome.

Who was I kidding?  Knowing I had to contend with the stump, I thought about trading in the saw for a bread and butter knife.  I wondered if simply chanting a yoga mantra would somehow remove the bottom two feet of the tree.  We dragged the tree into the living room and after a reasonable tussle with the tree stand (we all understand tree stands) the Christmas tree, the centerpiece of the Christmas season, stood proudly in the corner.

There was only one small problem.  The kids absolutely hated it.  No, that’s not strong enough.  They abhorred it, they detested it.  It was too short, had a poor shape and flat out sucked.  The only thing that could have made the situation worse was to throw in the towel and admit that there was no Santa Claus.  There were moments when I thought about it.

One of the most effective ads on television in the ‘60’s was for hair shampoo.  To increase sales, a clever ad man came up with the slogan “rinse and repeat”.  Well, when at first you don’t succeed … with dry mittens and a fresh outlook we returned to the scene of the crime and secured the perfect tree.

As a footnote, we eventually moved back to town when all the chickens ended up at Kentucky Fried.  There is a Christmas tree lot just around the corner from where we live, in the parking lot of a convenience store.  We would walk to the lot, pick out a tree and walk it home.  The children all grew up and moved away from home.  Last year we were running a bit behind and we secured our tree on December 24^th.  There were only three trees left on the lot and the seller had gone home.  The odds of picking the perfect tree were very good.  Two people – three trees.  It was all over in 5 minutes.