Talking with an 11-year-old about insurance fraud

We finally broke down and bought the little red-haired girl a new bicycle last week. Summer’s already here and besides, pretty soon I’m going to have to drop the little.

We’d been holding off because it’s just so difficult to find a decent bike for a growing kid in Germany. You either find junk at the bottom end of the scale - expensive junk to boot - or top-flight bikes that will get ripped off the moment you leave it outside, which she is forced to do because there is no other place to lock them up where we live.

Then at one shop where we’d finally found one that was right for her, I told the guy that we wanted a really good lock, mentioning also that I’d had parts ripped off from my own bike after leaving it outside for only one night.

No problem, he said. If you’re worrried about security, you can get a complete insurance package for only eight euros a month. It includes replacement for theft and new parts if they’re stolen or the bike vandalised. Even if she has a fall, they’ll fix it for her.

So I signed up for the deal, thinking that it’s cheap at twice the price if I don’t have to worry about replacing a stolen bike a week after buying it.

After explaining to her that the insurance only works if she locks the bike around a bike stand or pole so that it can’t be carried away, she asked me:

How does the insurance work? What if you had two kids who needed bikes, but only enough money for one? Couldn’t you just hide the bike and tell the insurance company that the bike was stolen? Then you’d get another one for the other kid for free.

Sure, you could do that. I’m sure there are people who have done that. Would you like to be one of them?

No.

Well, I’m glad to hear that. Did you know there are people who try to get out of working by pretending they’re sick, saying things like their back hurts all the time, or that they can’t get out of bed?

No…

They get to go on disability pension, which means they get money every month without having to work anymore, even though they’re not sick. But there’s a catch. The insurance companies have people who check up on them. If they see them carrying around a pair of skis, riding their bikes, whatever, they get cut off their money, they don’t get to go back to their old jobs… they end up with nothing.

Oh…

Trying my best not to sound preachy, but probably failing because I’m doing all the talking, I add:

It just makes more sense to be honest and tell people the truth. That way, you don’t have to remember what you said to anybody, because it will always be the same thing.  You won’t always have to be looking over your shoulder, either.

Learning English the Calvin and Hobbes way

I never get any peace and quiet anymore between the time the little red-haired girl goes to bed and her falling asleep, but I don’t mind at all.

“Daaa-deee,” she’ll call from her bedroom five minutes after bedding down. “What does philanthropic mean?”

So I get up out of my chair and go in to tell her.

“Well, philanthropic is being nice to other people, but in a way that benefits everybody. Like you donate a lot of money to support a hospital for sick children, or for buying space for young artists to work in. That’s being philanthropic. It has two root words in one - philo- meaning love of, and anthropos- meaning human being.

Forfeiture

Epiphany

Sophisticated

Pandemonium

Euphoric

Voyeurism

Subjugate

Co-dependent dysfunctionality

I’ve always spoken English with her, but she’s only 11, been taking English in her German high school for all of eight months, and I’ve never used such vocabulary in my conversations with her, so where does it come from?

Calvin and Hobbes. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, 1400 pages spread over three volumes in a boxed set covering 10 years’ worth of colour and black-and-white comics.

She’d already dog-eared the two Calvin compilations I’d given her, books from my younger days when I too was a fan of the little guy with the big ideas and his imaginary tiger. She bought another one herself a few months ago, but after also reading through that one several times  over, went on a hunt for more. After discovering the three-volume set up for auction on eBay, she snapped it up, using her own allowance and birthday money.

I know she’ll probably not retain half of the new words she comes across this way, but that’s not important right now.   Expat parents are always trying to make sure their native language gets passed on to their kids in the face of the constant bombardment of the majority language and culture they swim in.

If she’s found something in English she not only loves to read but can’t seem to get enough of, my job is that much easier.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

The brother who speaks my language

It doesn’t matter how many months - or, lately, years - it’s been since I’ve seen my older brother Gordon, we always greet each other the same way.

One of us will say, “Hi, how the fuck are ya?”

The other will say, “fucking great, man” and we’ll give each other a bear hug.

Then we’ll step back and the next thing one of us will say is Well. That was never five minutes just now.

Anyone witnessing this or any other exchange between the two of us could be excused for thinking we’re more than just a little bit daft, because if each of us has his own particular set of quirks and foibles, stir Gordon and me together for a while and a whole lifetime of slang, sayings, even our own rhythm and cadence kicks in, and nobody else really gets it.

One of the main things we get into is adding the suffix -age onto everything. Length, for example, becomes footage. So to ask, “how far is it to…” we would ask, what’s the footage to get to….

It can sometimes get to ridiculous extremes. Damn, I’m hungry. I need some foodage, and maybe some drinkage too, at which point we silently call a truceage and cut out the crappage before we drive each other around the bendage.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of it stems from late-1960s to mid-70s pop culture and television, which coincides from the time Dad bought our first TV ’til Gordon left home to go to university.

If someone’s having trouble opening something, we’ll say really fast just jiggle it a little, it’ll open. Try it. Justjiggleitalittleit’llopen. It’s from an episode of I Love Lucy.

Greetings can also be Hey Goob or Hey Goobah, which comes from Gomer Pyle, USMC. From goober we get goobernatorial, a play on the real word gubernatorial, which as Canadians we always found should refer to something stupid anyway. How goobernatorial is that?

If we’re playing a game and it’s the other’s move, we’ll say itchy goom, something our Dad mis-heard when we were telling him we were watching the TV game show It’s Your Move.

Have some crispy french fries, cousin Cesspool is a set phrase we throw in when offering any type of food to the other. It comes from a misunderstood TV commercial for Crisco Oil.

If we see or hear something stupid, idiotic or just a little weird, one of us will say eww, ginchy. Ginch is a derivation of that classic Canadian slang term for underwear gaunch.

To ask the time we’ll say time diddehhh? - drawing out the second syllable for some reason. We can also ask the time in French, but instead of the simple Quelle heure est-il? we’ll say Quelle heure est-il maintenant ou pas? adding the nonsensical now or not? at the end.

We also invert many things so that they sound French, but aren’t. A CD player will be a player de CD, a paper bag a bag de paper, a hockey stick a stick de hockey and so on.

To say excuse me we say Scoozay-mwah, see-voo-play, that is all my French to-day.

To offer milk to the other we say Would you like some Millek with your Fillem? I was the one who introduced that, because I had a teacher in Grades 6 and 7 who used to prononce film as the two-syllable affectation fill-em.

A helicopter is not a helicopter, it’s a hobbidy-cobbidy, a knife is not a knife, it’s a kaniffy, McDonald’s isn’t McDonalds it’s Flap-doodles but the latter is more Gord’s and I just adopted it.

If you noticed the Monty Python reference in That was never five minutes just now, that’s just scratching the surface. We both know the entire repertoire inside-out, dragging up snippets of skits and sometimes whole monologues to fit various situations. If death comes up on the panel the high point of the Dead Parrot sketch will be played out, if one of us says Could be the other will say, Could be, could be taken on a holiday, and any reference to Christian religious ritual one of us will start reciting the monologue of how the Lord sent an Angel to comfort Victor for the weekend, and entered they together, the jacuzzi.

Here endeth the lesson.

Well, not quite. Because if all this stuff and nonsense has you thinking we do it because we have nothing at all to talk about and it’s just filling dead air, that’s not it. We know how much is too much, had tons to discuss and argue over and contemplate and laugh about, and had been doing for an entire week despite my being ill for half of it, before he left yesterday for London and then home.

Dammit Gord, great funnage. Sorry I was such a wreckage when you got here. See you this fallage.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

99 + 1 too many things about me

One of the things that used to hold me back from starting a blog was the thought of having colleagues read it, slide on over to me and say, hey, you are one bizarre individual… Then one day I said what the hell, I’ll start a blog, and they can read it all they like. I just won’t reveal too much about me.

Now after a year or so of posting, I figure they know as much as you do, so here goes:

1. See that photo at the top of this blog? Add a bunch of overhead cables and telephone wires, and that was our family’s view out of the front window when I was growing up.
2. When I was born, I was driven home from hospital in a banana box placed on the floorboards of an old Austin.
3. My elder brother wanted me to be a girl. I know because he wrote that in a letter to my mother right after I was born. I don’t hold it against him.
4. Had I been born a girl, my name would be Fiona.
5. I’m glad I’m not a girl.
6. My earliest memory is of me standing up looking through the bars of the crib, that same brother coming in and saying, “there he is.”
7. I don’t know if that was a dream or not, but I can see it clearly.
8. I was only three years and eight months old when JFK was shot, but I remember where I was and what was going on around me.
9. I’m the youngest of four children.
10. My sister, the family’s first born, was killed in a level crossing accident when I was seven. She was 18. Damn that Canadian Pacific Railway anyway.
11. They say she was like my second mother, constantly taking care of me as a baby.
12. I have always missed her. 
13. Not for what might have been, because my memories of her are vague, but for what never could be.
14. For the past six generations, my family has been afflicted with a hereditary skin condition called epidermolysis bullosa.
15. I consider myself to be very lucky, because I don’t have it, nor can I pass it on.
16. We didn’t have a television until I was nearly eight. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for holding out that long.
17. I grew up during the Vietnam war.
18. I’ve been fascinated with that country my whole life.
19. I started delivering newspapers when I was eight. I’d often read ours before starting the route.
20. The Canadian town I grew up in was a one-company mining town. Anaconda -  an American company - owned it.
21. I was skipped a grade. I did the first half of Grade 3, then was moved over to the other side of the room to do the second half of the year in Grade 4.
22. School mates were angry at me because they thought I’d deserted the gang.
23. I also had a terrible time adjusting, because all of a sudden I had to write with a pen, and didn’t know how.
24. I was an overweight kid from the age of eight ’til 12, when I made a conscious effort to lose weight. It worked.
25. Perhaps too well, because when I hit Grade 8, skinny and a year younger than the other boys, I was picked on.
26. Don’t worry, I’m over it.
27. I first went skiing when I was 10 years old, and hated it. I went another couple of times that year, and hated it even more.
    Then the next year, I went skiing again, and was hooked.
28. I am still absolutely nuts about skiing.
29. Photo break:
30. 
31. I wish we lived closer to the Alps.
32. I have a deep scar on my chin from a skiing accident when I was 12. Back in the day, they used to have so-called safety straps attaching your ski to your ankle, so that when you fell and the skis released, the ski wouldn’t flit down the hill and impale someone. I fell badly and my ski whipped around, smashing an edge into my chin.
33. That happened on the Harmony Bowl at Whistler, back when a lift ticket cost a kid like me all of four Canadian dollars.
34. Blood everywhere, six stitches.
35. I spent a year ski instructing at Cypress Bowl, one of the three areas close to Vancouver.  The job’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
36. We used to spend hours either playing street hockey, Canadian football, soccer or baseball until it was so dark, it was dangerous to play.
37. My first real girlfriend had an identical twin. They were beautiful girls, always leaving me at a loss for words not only for that, but because I couldn’t tell them apart when they greeted me.
38. Then on January 27, 1977 at precisely 4:20 pm Pacific time, I kissed one of them.  After that, the difference was unmistakable.
39. I learned to drive in a 1972 MGB, but I have fonder memories of a 4-door 1970 Plymouth Satellite.
40. The first three years I had my driver’s license, I was in five accidents. I haven’t been in once since.
41. If you don’t know what I mean by real girlfriend, then don’t ask.
42. I used to run around in the BC coastal rainforest behind our house from the time I was old enough to be let loose out the back door.
43. It was like a forest village, with a stream to catch frogs and make dams, great hiding places under old stumps and logs, a clearing to play little games of baseball, a hill for a lookout, and patches of huckleberry, salmonberry and blackberry to plunder as Spring slowly ripened to Summer.
44. When I arrived back from my first long trip away from home - a year-long jaunt with a backpack through most of western Europe, Egypt, Israel and Turkey when I was 20 - I discovered they’d clear-cut my forest playground to put in a fucking trailer park.
45. First day back from that trip, one of the first songs I heard was, “The Rodeo Song.” Its first line, “Well, it’s 40 below and I don’t give a fuck, got a heater in my truck and I’m off to the rodeo” didn’t make sense to me.
46. It made me wonder if I was coming back to the right place.
47. I miss Canada a lot, but I think it’s mostly nostalgia not for the place, but for the careless days of youth.
48. I can speak French and German fluently. I prefer to play Scrabble in French, though I haven’t for a while.
49. I sometimes dream in German.
50. The first five words I learned in Cantonese were five, four, three, two and one in that order.
51. I have an extremely good memory for places and dates.  That skiing photo was taken in February, 1992 at Owl’s Head, Quebec.
52. I can be very self-deprecating. That’s a good thing, because it puts me in some good company.
53. I love learning new things, even if some of them are unpleasant.
54. For example, I had to learn the hard way the meaning of narcissistic personality disorder.
55. I don’t have narcissistic personality disorder.
56. I dislike crowds intensely.
57. I have no superstitions save one: I never write anything in red ink.
58. I have climbed to the top of two of the three pyramids at Giza, Egypt. They say you’re not allowed to do that anymore.
59. In the winter of 1980 - 81 worked as a ski patroller at Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights, Israel.
60. I paid my way through university and for that backpacking trip by working for the Canadian National Railway at a job that doesn’t exist anymore thanks to the fax machine, a device now overtaken by email.
61. Thanks to that job, I know what it’s like to live in pretty well every town between Prince Rupert, BC and North Battleford, Saskatchewan.
62. I used to work for Overwaitea Foods packing bags and stocking shelves.  One day, the manager came up and asked me to start stocking the frozen food section.  As I was doing the job he came up to me again and said, ”the reason I’ve asked you to do this is we’re serious about training you for management, and this is the job we give everyone who’s starting out in that direction.”
63. Feeling horrified, I looked up at him with a bag of frozen peas in my hand and said, “Well, I’ve registered for university in the fall.”  He looked disappointed, and two hours later, I was packing bags again. 
64. I was robbed in Nice, France in 1980. Two years later, I was robbed in Cannes.  Watch your stuff when you’re on the Côte d’Azur.
65. When I started scribbling things down for this, my goal was to have 100 entries in the list.
66. I believe the secret to boring the crap out of everyone is to tell them them everything, so I’m going to stop here.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

So close, so far apart

My daughter and her Oma spend a lot of quiet time together. I love it that they get along so well and always seem to have something to talk about, even during those times when there’s not much to say or left to do but play checkers for awhile.

But as much as I love to stop and look at the two of them in their calm togetherness, I can’t help thinking that by the very nature of our family, one part of her childhood will always be hopelessly one-sided.

Her German Oma lives only a couple of hours down the Autobahn and comes to visit us regularly, but her Canadian grandmother lives nine time zones and a long, expensive flight away. My mother is turning 85, still fit and active, still drives a car, goes out with friends and takes short trips, but understandably no longer feels up to the exhausting flight to Europe from the west coast of Canada all by herself. She’s made the trek three times in the 10 years we’ve been living in Hamburg, and we’ve flown there four, but now it’s all up to us.

I’d like to be able to offer my daughter what I feel is the best for her, and that includes regular contact with her grandmother. But by the very nature of having a family where grandparents live on opposite sides of the world, on this I fear we are always going to come up short. In contrast to the close, comfortable relationship she has with her Oma, her contact with her Grandma will always be like getting to know one another all over again. She’ll still be the red-haired girl, but each time she’ll have grown and changed into a new version of herself. Depending on mood, the effects of jet lag and any other combination of factors, there’s no guarantee the two of them will ever be able to settle into each other’s company, and after our time’s up and it’s time to go, that’ll be it until the next time.

We’re headed to Canada this year, not just because we want to, but because it really has been too long since she last saw her grandmother. It’s going to be a great trip: a week in Canada, then a wander down the coast of Oregon and California to Los Angeles. There we will stay with a friend of ours, before flying home from LA.

I really don’t know when the next time will be. And in the back of my mind, I’m always wondering: is this time going to be the last?

© 2008 lettershometoyou

What if you’re white, and don’t like stuff white people like?

I’m a white guy. A real white guy. I am so damn white, I need factor 35 sun cream to go skiing or sunbathing. I am so damn white, there is a genetic skin disease in my family going back an untold number of generations called Epidermolysis Bullosa, a rare affliction which renders the skin as fragile as a butterfly’s. Though the disease doesn’t discriminate for race or sex, it first showed up in my family in the area of the northern British Isles where my ancestors lived, and where asses don’t get whiter.

My two white brothers have it, my white father did, so did his white father, and his white father, his white mother… and that’s about as far back as we’ve been able to trace.

Born in Canada, so already a member of the lucky sperm club, I can count myself one of the luckiest damn white guys on the planet, because I don’t have it.

Still, I’m stuck with being white, and can’t do anything about that. I was born this way. This is who I am.

Apparently, some Americans have been carefully observing me and my fellow white people, and decided it’s time to let everybody know in a blog what white people like. Called Stuff White People Like, it has shot like a rocket to the second-most popular blog on wordpress.com in only its first five weeks of life, pulling in a total of more than six million hits as well as hundreds of comments for each post. The “About” page alone has nearly 2,200 comments last time I looked.

I read through it and shrug.

Musical comedy? I prefer stand-up.

Kitchen gadgets? Please.

Multilingual children? There are hundreds of millions of white people here in Europe, where the best jobs are hard to find without foreign language skills.

Threatening to move to Canada? I had a howl at that one, because at the end it says - possibly after someone pointed out that there are white people in Canada who read the blog - that white Canadians threaten to move to Europe.

Naw, we just look south and shake our heads at the latest example of how little regard or even awareness many Americans have for what goes on beyond their own borders. Having successfully thrown their cultural weight around the planet for more than a century, they automatically assume that what goes for white Americans goes for white people everywhere.

There are dozens more examples of Stuff White People are Supposed to Like. White Americans, maybe. Yuppie Americans for sure. Yuppie American dinks (dual income, no kids) absolutely. It stops there, though.

National Lampoon in its 1970s glory days once ran a Race Issue which, depending on how you took it, either tried its best to insult every race on the planet with equal measure, or satirise racism as a useless exercise because we all have traits which define us as individuals and, like it or not, as a group.

One look through the comments and you’ll see that readers of this new blog don’t know what to make of it, either.

Me? I prefer Weird Al. At least he’s funny.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Every ecosystem has its predators and bottom-feeders

The comments on my last post about photos and copyright show that there is a lot of confusion about what images you can put in your blog and still sleep soundly at night.

After all, as I pointed out, there are predators and bottom-feeders out there with jaws poised like a spring-loaded trap, ready to sue your butt at the first sighting of your using any of their photos.  The link to the whole show - it’s the first item - is now in the right-hand sidebar of the show’s site.  It’s near the top under Video, which from my advanced language course I learned is German for video.

But even if you don’t speak German, take a look at the TV segment.  You’ll at least get a close-up view of who I’m talking about.  Have a barf bowl ready, just in case.

The show - and I - recommend using only your own stuff if you want to be 100% protected from these, errr… people.  But safe to some is boring.  What if you want to use somebody else’s work, and still be safe from a lawsuit?

Some hide behind the fair use fig leaf.  As pointed out by timethief - a tireless worker in the thankless and never-ending job of helping out wordpress.com users lost in their chaotic forums - as long as you’re not using it to make money you should be OK.

But where does occasionally using a photo or drawing for illustrative, critical or satirical purposes end, and systematically mining someone’s work for publication on your own blog begin?  Take a look at Comics I don’t Understand.  Actually, a lot of the comics on that site I do understand.  What I don’t get is how they can claim fair use.  His entire concept is based on the work of other people.  I asked him in the comments under a post with a full-colour Garfield cartoon what he does about copyright, but got no answer from the blog author.   Someone else in the comments said that since the site is for comment and criticism of copyrighted work, it’s OK to use it.

Buddy, I hope you have good insurance, because if I were the author of any one of those cartoons, I’d tell you to butt out after three posts of my stuff.  Sure, you might not be out to make a profit, but it’s like having a site entitled Photos I think are, like, bitchin’ and posting the collected works of Annie Leibovitz a little at a time. 

Headbang8 of Deutschland über Elvis says that if you’re a serious amateur blogger, get an el-cheapo subscription to clipart.com, where you can choose from more than nine million illustrations and model-released photos.    The catch with that site is, sure you can download as many gigs worth of images you like in one week for only 15 bucks, but if you don’t use them for the first time within the period of your subscription, you can’t use them unless you take out a new subscription.  To do so would be stockpiling, which is against their rules. 

Simon, a caricaturist based in London, is coming at it from the author’s side.  What to do about his stuff being grabbed and used on other sites?  Simon, if you want to make sure your art doesn’t get stolen, don’t post it on the Internet.  Like others pointed out in the comments, whatever you post is going to be scraped and used elsewhere whether you like it or not.  I’ve bitched and whined about this myself, and all I am is some duff blogger.  I’m slowly getting over myself though.

======================================

Speaking of photos, and since recent events have put me in a giddy mood, I will now break two rules.  One: I am going to go completely off-topic within the same post, and two: post what we had for dinner last night.  Ta-da…..!

Sweetie, just take the picture.  My fingers are burning.

Photos and pizza guaranteed 100% home-made.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Snowdrops and crocuses, heralds of spring

Sometimes you have to get out of town to see what lies ahead.

Snowdrops and crocuses,

Heralds of Spring

Snowdrops and crocuses,

The birds will sing

When all the world is bare,

Springing up here and there,

Blossoms of beauty rare,

Heralds of Spring.

It’ll still take about two or three weeks for them to appear in Hamburg, but in London they’re already out. These were spotted this past Saturday in the park alongside The Mall near Buckingham Palace, their quiet voices of light and colour reminding us that greenery will soon return to carpet the land. I was so thrilled to see them, I stood up, turned around and sang those lines out to my wife, my daughter, and my friend Douglas, whom we were visiting.

They always come back to me every Spring.

If the words sound a bit sing-songy and child-like, they should. In what I now recognise to be merely an early training exercise for that 1970s Village People hit YMCA, Mrs. Fairburn had her Grade One class (spot me if you can) stand by our desks and act out the words as we sang, drooping our arms and hunching forward for the snowdrops, standing on tip-toes and reaching up to the ceiling for the crocuses.

So unexpected to come across them midst the hurried, sometimes frantic bustle of London. But that’s what I like about visiting cities. Not so much the layers of history at the Tower of London, the grandeur of the Tower Bridge or the hulking immensity of the Tate Modern, but the little details you come across and only take notice of because you’re visiting.

© 2008 lettershometoyou