If you've seen it before, please indulge me, because it's important that you have it fresh in your head as you read what follows.
If you've never seen it, well, there are worse ways to spend five minutes (make sure you watch the credits).
http://www.nfb.ca/film/william_shatner_sings_o_canada/
OK. Now that you're back, let's talk about the line in Mr. Shatner's version of our national anthem that mentions free health care.
Healthcare is always a little humiliating, even when you pay for it. The long waits plus the expectations of strangers that you will open up, bend over and strip naked just because they tell you to, all make otherwise high-functioning, self-actualizing grown ups feel a little less of each.
In Canada, of course, we have many of these humiliations covered by our tax dollars (which isn't the same thing as "free" but most people think this way anyway) and, as the population both burgeons and ages, the burden on the tax base has encouraged health-care providers to look for efficiencies.
So, Cancer Care Ontario (you can tell just from the name that we care about cancer in Ontario) has devised an ingenious means by which to routinely check for tell-tale signs of colon cancer without the fuss and expense of hospitals or waiting rooms or paper gowns.
Once every other annual check up, I bring home a little kit with a ever-lengthening set of instructions for how to gather samples of my poo and put it all in another taxpayer-subsidized service (that would be the mail) and send it to a lab in Mississauga.
I have, over the past three times that I have done this since I turned fifty, found that securing the samples without regret is a bit of a trick. The process is not quite how they make it look in the easy-to-follow instructions, where little ping-pong-ball shaped brown blobs sit feather-light on two thin sheets of toilet paper floating in exactly the right spot in the toilet water, and where the little balsa wood sticks they give you to harvest the samples always get just the right amount.
I can't imagine what the lab technicians sometimes find when they slice open those postage-paid envelopes, though the instructions shed some light. My favourite: the instruction (in bright red letters) asking please DO NOT MAIL THE STICKS.
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Mr. Shatner in his rendition of our national anthem suggests that Canada should stay free of smog.
While not exactly on topic, I would like to note in passing that I think most people should, if given the opportunity, attend a funeral (though preferably not their own) on their birthday.
On September 23rd, I attended a service celebrating the life of Walter Chan who passed away suddenly on September 18 at the age of 64.
When I joined the Ministry of the Environment in 2006, Walter was my boss. In fact, Walter was the person who made the decision to hire me. So, all the work I have had the enormous privilege to do over the past five years, I can thank Walter for.
The one thing every reader should be grateful for is the work Walter did twenty years ago as the head of the Ministry's acid rain program. Walter was a scientist and he led Ontario's contribution to an acid rain pact between Canada and the US. Walter also pioneered new policies to reduce other kinds of smog-causing pollution. The quality of the air people breathe outdoors in Ontario is better now than it has been for the past thirty years (even with enormous growth in both the economy and the population) and Walter deserves a lot of the credit for this.
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Finally, Molly.
It has been not quite a year since we said goodbye to our little stinker. Yesterday, finally, we gave away her blankies, beds and crate to the Humane Society.
Here's a rerun of an old bit about the dog:
Everyone has heard the faux factoid that “Eskimos have 200 words for snow.”
Of course this is not true, and, while the Wikipedia entry on the topic proposes a mention in the New York Times in 1984 as the first official sighting of the factoid (except it was 100 words, not 200), I know that my father, who travelled north to the land of the Eskimos many times in his career, told us that very thing when we were kids in Edmonton. So, easily a decade or more before the New York Times mention, families were gathered around the kitchen table wisely noting the remarkable fact that Eskimos have 200 words for snow.
Why would people light on such a fanciful notion? I can’t speak for any others, but I know why it appealed to me. It allowed me to imagine that there were people in the world so connected to their surroundings that they could see such distinct differences in a thing – frozen water that has fallen from the sky in this case – that they came up with myriad words for it. The factoid connoted a human appreciation for the world that I thought I would like to emulate.
Thinking on this recently, I noticed that, in English, we have a lot of words for money (cash, lucre, coin) and even more for being drunk (smashed, looped, pissed, pie-eyed, shit faced, hammered…). And, in the most localized argot I know, we have in this household approximately 200 (give or take) words for the dog. In no particular order, here are the ones used in the last forty-eight hours:
Molly – Molly-the-Dog – Molly Dog – Bug – Bed Bug – Bed Hog – Wart Hog (she has a lot of warts) – Little Bug – Sweetie Bug – Silly – Silly Dog – Silly Old Dog – Sweetie – Stinky – Tripod (she goes up the stairs on three legs) – Eye Booger Factory – My Girl – My Little Girl – My Old Girl – My Little Old Girl – Trip Hazard – Pup – Pup Dog – Twinkle Toes.
Please find attached a picture of Ms. Twinkle Toes and her dad taken on July 4 2009. And have a great week!
Karen
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