Power kiting in Hamburg fun til the cops show up

On a sunny and warm summer afternoon the other day I discovered that power kiting is LOTS of fun. With nothing more than a few square yards of lightweight fabric, ultra-thin yet strong cord and a bit of wind, you can have a blast.

A friend of mine has been taking a set of kites of different sizes to Hamburg’s Stadtpark for the last three years. When the wind is strong and steady enough, he’ll strap on a harness and fly a six-square-metre kite that gathers enough wind to pull him along the grass on what looks like a fat-wheeled skateboard.

I was hoping we’d get to see him ride it when I showed up for the first time to watch how it’s done, but the wind wasn’t blowing hard enough, and was never very steady.

But we had a great time anyway. It’s easy to learn and a lot of fun.

That is, it was fun until the cops showed up.

“I think they’re not here to offer us tips on how it’s done,” I said as they got out of their van and strolled toward us.

They were friendly enough about it, but firm.

“You can’t fly a steerable kite in the Stadtpark,” they told us. “You’re only allowed to fly kites that have only one string, not two.”

Hmmm… if we can steer them, isn’t that better than if we can’t?

I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that we were right under a runway approach to the Hamburg airport, and they’re afraid one of us might trip, fall and drop not one but both handles while the winds suddenly gust up at that precise moment to rocket the kite about 1000 metres skyward to be violently sucked into a passing jet’s engine, resulting in the agonizing deaths of hundreds of people as they’re consumed in a flaming ball of fire in the ensuing crash over a populated area?

I bet it does.

So we stood around for a while, threw the frisbee back and forth for a bit, packed up the kites, and headed off to grab a pizza and beer.

My friend in the meantime has done a bit of research. Apparently, if your kite weighs less than one kilo and has no metal parts, you can fly it in the Stadtpark.

So there, cops. See you next time it’s sunny and windy.

10 more facts and opinions about Canada

Today, July 1, 2009 is the 142nd birthday of the world’s second-largest nation. As a follow-up to last year’s wildly successful Canada Day post in which 10 facts and opinions about Canada were displayed for your elucidation, delectation, dissection and desecration, we bring you:

10 more facts and opinions about Canada.

1. Lyin’ Brian Mulroney, much-detested former Prime Minister who took six years to declare to tax authorities that he took nearly a quarter-million dollars in cash in secret hotel meetings from a businessman now awaiting extradition from Canada to Germany to face charges of fraud, bribery and tax evasion, comes by his nickname honestly.
2. Canola, another name for rapeseed, is a Canadian invention. I always thought it meant “because in the late 70s we became too politically correct to refer to something by its real name, so had to invent something stupid to replace it” but now I hear it actually means CANadian Oil, Low Acid.
3. Two Canadians are whalin’ the tar out of each over over a bottle of beer. That’s MY brewski, eh? says the first Canuck. No way, eh? That’s MY brewski, says the second, but now ya got yer backwash on it, ya can have it. The first one takes and hauls off and pounds tha livin’ be-jeesus out of the second, the second grabs a chair and wings it half-ways ta breakfast across the bar but hits a moose mounted on the far wall instead. Moose wakes up and says: hey you guys, knock it off, eh? The hockey game’s on in five minutes. They turn to each other and say, gee, sorry. You OK? Yeah, I’m all right.
4. That also passes for humour in Edmonton, Alberta.
5. The Canadian Flag depicts the Maple Leaf in the centre flanked by two red rectangles. The rectangles are the exact size and shape of a case of 12 Molson’s stubby bottles when observed from the side.
6. Manitoba, a province many are happy to say they no longer inhabit, used to have the following road sign every 10 miles: Keep heading west until you hit BC. Nothing to see here.
7. In the other direction it said: Turn around! BC’s the other way!
8. I’ve been to Winnipeg.
9. Way too often.
10. Last year’s list was better.

This post was not sponsored by VIA Rail, Canada’s national passenger rail service. Choose VILE. You’ll wish you’d flown.

Michael Jackson dead at 50. Fans in mourning. Jackson Five reunion tour to go ahead as planned.

A Definitely Not the Daily News semi-exclusive

Los Angeles (DNDN) Enigmatic, eccentric entertainment eminence Michael Jackson exited earth earlier today, sending distraught fans of the pop singer, moonwalking inventor and Plastic Surgery Fail icon into a frenzy of mourning.

“I’m down here to show….just how much I loved him,” blubbered Christie Anderson, 42, of Mountain View, California outside the singer’s Neverland ranch.  “He’s now out of my life, but not my heart.”

Sales of flowers, teddy bears, frilly hearts and other nauseating knick-knacks in a 50-mile radius of the singer’s California hideaway have skyrocketed as fans fight to bring whatever they can to lay at the front gates.

One woman stopped beating her chest and tearing her hair out long enough to complain of how area stores were price-gouging.

“They wanted 50 bucks for a key chain at the 7-11 just down the road,” said one middle-aged woman who declined to give her name.  “I bought it anyway, cuz y’know, just imagine being caught on YouRube showing up here with nothing to give.  It’d be unthinkable.”

One nearby 7-11 employee said stocks had already been depleted in the wake of the death of Farrah Fawcett only a day before.

“It’s supply and demand.  Everyone’s doing it,” said 7-11 stockboy Pim P. Lee from behind the counter. ” See that rack of scandal sheets over there?  You think they’re not going to make a killing in sales over this as well?”

Millions of fans who purchased tickets for Jackson’s sold-out This is It comeback tour in London are now being asked to return them for refund.

“We thought of presenting a hologram, doubling the price, and calling it Michael Jackson That was That,” said Jackson publicist James J. Goff, “but that would be about as tasteless and insensitive as posting a fake Jackson news piece within hours of his death.  We’re asking everyone to at least give it a 24-hour grace period.”

Organisers of a planned Jackson Five reunion tour scheduled to get under way in March, 2010 say they’re still going to go ahead with the show, despite the death of the former quintet’s most famous member.

“Michael would have liked it that way,” said brother Jermaine Jackson from his home in Los Angeles.  “Sales were strong, but we’re sure to get a sellout now that prices have been slashed by 20%.”

If you screw up, you could kill someone

By the time I was 19 and started training in McBride, BC, for my summer with the Canadian National Railway, I’d already racked up a long list of jobs from house-builder to ferry deckhand to supermarket stockboy, but none so far boiled down to this: If you screw up, you could kill someone.

That point was hammered home my first day of training with a jovial, red-faced, pot-bellied, silver-haired gent named Jim, who told me the story of why being precise in everything you do on this job was a matter of life and death.

In 1950 the Canadian army was sending troops over to fight in the Korean war.  The troops were often sent west to Vancouver by train, but one of those trains never made it.  It slammed head-on into a passenger train, killing 17 soldiers and four train crew.

Here’s how it happened, or rather, here’s how I heard it, because there are different versions out there.

The train order operator’s job was to pass messages from the train dispatcher to the trains, either at the station before the train left, or as they were rolling past stations down the line, so the train crews knew where they’d be meeting trains coming the opposite direction.   Much of Canada’s mainline train traffic is now double-track, but back then most areas were single-track, with sidings every few miles to pull off and let opposing trains pass.

We’d bang out messages – called train orders -  onto a form as the dispatcher dictated them over the wire, and repeat the order back to him.   The dispatcher would then give the OK that what we’d typed out was correct.  After the dispatcher was sure that all trains had their meeting points planned out, he issued a clearance to attach to the orders and we’d hand it over to the crew.  Back in 1950, even the high-traffic mainline trains between major Canadian cities were still being run this way.

One day an operator, after repeating back a train order, noticed he’d made a mistake, so he threw the order away and typed out a new one.

Unfortunately, he made two critical errors.  He not only wrote the wrong meeting point on the new order he typed out, he failed to repeat the order back to the dispatcher.  Had he repeated the order with the mistake back to the dispatcher, he and the other operators listening in to the repetition would have immediately spotted the wrong meeting point, and he’d have had to go back and type it yet again until he got it right.

As it was, he passed a message along to the passenger train to meet the troop train one station beyond the point the dispatcher thought they would meet.

So the troop train and the passenger train met in the middle – head on, around a curve, in the middle of the Rockies.

The train order operator, a young man only three years older than I was when I started my training, was charged with manslaughter.  In the trial, his lawyer argued that the man was actually being used as a scapegoat, and that the real culprit was the shoddy way the railways were being run.  Standing up in the courtroom, he held the railway rule book high over his head and ripped it to shreds, saying the rules by which the railway was then running trains were unsafe and must be amended.

That’s why on the rule book I was issued it said: Uniform Code of Operating Rules, Revision of 1962 on the cover.  They completely re-wrote the rule book based on that one disaster, resulting in a daily routine for train order operators from then on:

All train orders had to be letter perfect.  All times and all place names had to be spelled out letter-by-letter in the operator’s repetition back to the dispatcher.  And if a mistake were made, you could be charged with a criminal offense if it were found that you’d passed the order to the train without having first repeated it back.

The operator’s lawyer, by the way, was none other than John Diefenbaker, a man who later became Canada’s Prime Minister.

Caveat: I’ve re-told this story as I remember it being told to me.  When looking up for information on what’s known as the Canoe River disaster, you come up with several variations.

Disclaimer: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a trainspotter.