If your hair isn't on end, find a new route to work

In the city of Saskatoon, which as you may know lies in the midst of Canada's prairies, the left turns we make are typically about 90 degrees - if even that much. Our intersections are usually designed to simply facilitate an alteration to the way our car is facing, no more no less. They're about as interesting as a Catholic mass (note: this specifically does not include Catholic masses which reference the parts of the old testament with all the smiting). Once, during a winter road trip from Saskatoon to Calgary, AB, I had the pleasure of driving through the hills surrounding Drumheller. The twists, the turns, the gas-brake action, rapid shifting upwards and downwards. More hairpins than a beauty salon. It was like a grand commercial for a performance automobile, and I was strikingly out of my element.

I came back to Saskatoon, and it's yawn inspiring turns, feeling like a man whose tongue had experienced what good wine is supposed to taste like, and been subsequently banished to a land of grape juice with vodka. 90 degrees, and that's all I could get. 90 puny degrees.

It could be that I've somehow never seen the hard, winding bends of Saskatoon. Or it could be that without a developed palate for hair-raising turns, I'd simply never noticed them before. Nevertheless my whistle had been whet, and I spent my time poring over maps - both street and elevation - trying desperately to spend some time at the wheel with my mind ablaze, my calloused hands at their quickest, and my feet dancing among the pedals. As a process it was exhausting, but I was able to find a few left turns in Saskatoon that offer more than a simple change of direction - they offer an experience that reminds the driver of the importance of topping up his power steering fluid, and never going anywhere without his motoring gloves. If you think driving through Saskatoon is as ho-hum as it gets, try adding these special turns into your route plans. You'll think twice before you tell your friends that Saskatoon has no turns over 90 degrees again!

1. College Drive westbound, turning left onto Clarence Avenue southbound. Having just passed by the remarkably beautiful University of Saskatchewan campus, you'll find yourself heading toward a bridge. Just as you think you might need to fade right and soar high above the swift waters of the South Saskatchewan River, you'll dodge it for quick uphill left onto Clarence that is simply divine. Then again, if you have a heart condition or are pregnant, it might be best to avoid this thriller.

2. Spadina Crescent heading north, turning left onto Queen Street heading west. In the absence of oncoming traffic, try shifting down and accelerating through the apex - I bet you'll shit a brick!

A few years later I was in Las Vegas around Christmas visiting with my girlfriend's family, her parents having taken up residence there for parts of the year. Similarly, my father and his special lady spend part of the year at their home in Palm Springs; specifically, they spend the part of the year that is frighteningly wintry in Saskatchewan. I had been informed by my father that Palm Springs was a stone's throw from Las Vegas, and it would be a tragedy to be so close and not spin down to see each other over the holidays. We talked about it on the phone, and discussed how nice it would be for the four of us to get together; a civilized stroll through downtown Palm Springs, a leisurely dinner following a polite cocktail hour on the patio, and conversation centered on only the highest of high brow topics. We went through the paces together on a long distance call, the image becoming solidified when he told me there was a sort of street fair taking place while we planned to be in town. We talked about it like we meant it, but we both know what I was really saying, "I'll drive down there and we can get really drunk in the hot tub and talk about bull shit all night."

The one part of the whole, grandiose idea that wasn't a cover was the drive itself. For all I know about southern California, the region is designed carefully and skillfully with the sole intention of finding more ways to drive somewhere. In the boardroom of the urban planning department of every city in every county, there's a banner that says Sure, But How Does It Let Us Drive More?. Thus there are several different routes that one can choose from to get between Las Vegas and Palm Spring and my father, as has always been his talent, seemed to have an unreasonable understanding of all of them. For a certain period of my childhood he would occasionally wait for a time when I literally couldn't leave - whilst in a moving car was a common choice - and he would run me through each of  the possible routes between Saskatoon and the Glacier National Park in Montana. He'd list each of the highways, the turns required, the distance differences,  and we'd speculate on the potential for getting good mileage depending on which way the wind was blowing. It happened so often that I've spent a lot of time in my life trying to decode this aspect of his personality; did he actually think it was fun? Was it a torture technique he'd read about in an issue of National Geographic during the 1970s? Maybe he was working on his memoirs and was bouncing some material off me? I've come to many conclusions over the years, but most commonly I decide that it's simply a cathartic exercise. Some people do a crossword, others go bird watching, my father's method for relaxing was doing math in his head and converting between imperial and metric units. "You can shave 90 miles or so if you head  through Havre instead of going though Medicine Hat, but there's a lot of single lane in there, and if you end up with a wind out of the west it can be an absolute bear!"

My father assured me though that the way to go was to roll through the Mojave National Preserve or, through the desert, as everyone in the area seems to say. I kept referring to it as the Mojave, and I would sometimes get as a sideways look. I liked to imagine that using the actual name of the desert fell out of fashion when certain people kept pronouncing it wrong and it created that eternally awkward situation where one must decide if they should correct the pronunciation and risk feeling like a jerk. My girlfriend's parents had purchased a car from friends to keep as as second vehicle in Vegas, and were very gracious about lending it to us for the drive. It was a 1990 Mitsubishi Eclipse, with a 5-speed manual transmission, and a 2.0 liter turbo engine. No question about it, this was a hot car... at least, at some point in history, it was designed and marketed as a hot car. I am someone that has exclusively owned cars that were in the final, golden years of their lives, so worn from many years of abuse, but still not quite dead. As such, I've spent a lot of time imagining - rather, trying to get inside the head - of someone who bought my car when it was new, off the lot. I would own the car at a point when spilling an entire cup of coffee in it wasn't really that big of a deal, but at some point in the 1980s, someone was touring a car lot with their chequebook in hand, and the heavens split when their eyes met with the savvy lines of this fine automobile. They looked at the features, they test drove it, their eyes met with those of their passenger and they mouthed the words, "I want this car. This car is me." My expectations for a car's performance are, as a result, relatively low. "All five gears work?" I would say, "I can actually adjust the seat?" I felt as though I was in the midst of a wonderfully unrealistic dream. So while my girlfriend's parents wanted to downplay the Eclipse's hotness, I carried on about it for days before and after the trip. They may have thought that I was making fun of them, but I was sincerely impressed that I didn't get an electrical shock when I adjusted the air conditioning.

We set out on a beautifully clear day, and found a radio station that really seemed to have our number. Despite being sort of chilly out, I insisted on driving with the windows down on the freeway leaving Las Vegas. The dusty desert air poured into the car blowing our hair around, and I pushed the gas pedal to the floor as the car sputtered up the on-ramp to the interstate. My father's recommendation to drive through the desert was something I still thank him for now and again; it was an incredible drive full of twists and turns and hills and bumps. It had been a few years since my drive through Drumheller, but I felt an old fire inside me begin to flare up, stoked up with coal every time I had to hold onto the wheel with two hands because I whipped around curves at twice the recommended speed. Several times, my girlfriend's coffee spilled out and onto her clothes, but I think she knew that I was having a moment with the car and the desert and decided not to shout at me about it.  It was the kind of thrill-a-minute, heel-toe driving that my heart had longed for in Saskatoon. My sweating hands toggled constantly between the steering wheel and the gearshift, and I jammed on the pedals to make the whole thing more dramatic. In 1990 the folks at Mitsubishi unleashed this model of the Eclipse on the world, and I don't doubt that when people wandered into the showroom the salesmen would paint a picture in their heads that was, turn-for-turn, exactly my drive through the Mojave National Preserve. It was that blissful combination of exciting and frightening that underlies most good things that happen to us in our lives. It was a memory that I still think of often, and that I take the chance to tell people about whether I think they're listening to me or not. I think sometimes about regaling my nephew with the tale when he's old enough for me to tell the version where I curse a lot. Perhaps I'll wait for a time when he literally can't go anywhere, like when we're in a moving car or something.

Update on Background Noise

Here I thought that as a fresh business school grad (made the Dean's honour list on two separate years), I would be ahead of the curve. I thought that all of my knowledge, handed down from on high, would aid me in becoming a business leader of tomorrow; I thought I could become the next entrepreneurial wonder, a man that wasn't just another smarmy young schlep in a cheap suit.
I am supposed to be a good business man.

So you can imagine how I felt when I realized how embarrassingly antiquated, how unbearably last year, my most recent post was. Several real business men/women heard the market's call and responded before I even got my paddle in the water. I've found websites that offer streaming white noise, though most seem to fall short of my idea to go beyond simply providing "relaxing" noises. My brother found an application from Apple offering a cornucopia of terrific atmospheric noises that help the listener to feel lifted out of their status quo.
I am crestfallen.

The only way I can finish this idea is to make a suggestion of a noise that I thought of recently. You're in a hotel, either in the pool area or walking down an adjacent hallway and you can hear it, just a little. It definitely has a water slide, and what I want to hear is that screeching of children flying down the slide in arrangements that are against the rules.

Hear it market? That's a call for something, now answer it.

8000 a year to learn how to write Case Studies

We like to believe that our world is increasingly chaotic, fast-paced, and stressful. I'm not convinced that it is or is not true, but I recently got thinking about the retail world of relaxation.

One of the most (in my opinion) fantastic stress relief agents were the CD's with things like ocean noises, or the sound of a stream running calmly. These don't seem to be as popular anymore, and I think that's a terrible, terrible shame. How do we explain it? One argument is the most obvious, change in technology. People simply aren't buying as many CD's anymore, thus people aren't buy CD's that have the sounds of nature on them. As well, the proliferation of noise machines that produce everything from thunder storms to plain old white noise (I own one), has rendered the former form a little bit, well, useless. This argument has an implicit counter though, the pairing up of what I believe to be the original market for these CD's and what will be the last market to continue purchasing CD's long after you can easily purchase a CD player: middle-aged women.

The second argument, the one which I believe is more plausible and will further expound upon presently is simple, they lost their edge. Any business student worth his weight would tell you that producing the same product, without adapting, forever will end a lot like that business student's very first time in the sack: shortly, awkwardly, and perhaps with some crying.
Background CD's have to wedge their way back into the home relaxation market, and position themselves by exploiting an important part of relaxation: helping us forget about how much the rest of our life sucks.

You see it doesn't necessarily need to make us feel like we're in the jungle, or at the base of a waterfall, or sitting under an umbrella during a storm. We just need to be taken to a place where we didn't just get a massive Visa bill, where we don't hate our job, and where self-actualization isn't a bullshit concept atop a pyramid, but actually sort of fun. So why stop at only calm, consistent, relaxing noises? Why not move into the complete background noise market? No longer sell simply an easier experience, but a different experience than our actual lives.

List of Great Background CD's

"Restaurant noise" The clanging of the kitchen, the buzz of the eating and beverage-ing public, the whisk of the automatic front door opening and closing, the polite voice of an underage (though you'd never guess) hostess, and the smarmy red-wine attitude of the floor manager, all in this compact disk for you to bring home.

"Crowded bar just before a band goes on" - The murmur of a crowd, the sound of drinks being made ice-liquor-mix-enjoy, ice-liquor-mix-enjoy, the light background music that should be slightly shittier than the band we're going to see (like when a batter practices with extra weight before going up to bat), and perhaps even a sound man Test-test-heyo-creo-jambo-jambo-test-test into the mic. Why leave it at the bar when you could listen to it as you drive, sleep, eat, or work?

"The sound of basketball (or other court shoes) squeaking on hardwood floors" Maybe you're an old jock, or maybe you just think it's a neat sound. At first its very annoying, but after a while it takes on a strangely relaxing rhythm, as the feet move up and down the court. Feel yourself be pulled from your shitty reality, to court side seats, one quarter at a time.

"Someone working at a laptop computer beside you at an airport bar" Delayed flight, layover, 8 minutes to kill before boarding: these are all reasons I have stopped into an airport bar for a pint. The faint sound of a game playing on tv, flight calls broadcast over the airport P.A. system, and of course, the undeniable clickety-clacketing of today's business travelers on a laptop computer beside you, trying to work for 20 minutes while shoving down a Smoked Meat Sandwich. You don't need a boarding pass to get passed security for this gem.

Old CD's of nature sounds = old hat.
New CD's that transplant you to another place and time = fucking awesome.

More to come.

I got this joke on sale.

Question:
Why did the corrupt accountant have a heat lamp installed above his desk?

Answer:
So he could cook the books.

Whatever, it's funny.

I always wear that ring on my right hand, why do you ask?

Upon receiving this month's credit card statement, I noticed a delicious little surprise in the top right corner. My credit limit has been not just extended, but doubled. Why, thank you MasterCard, you shouldn't have.... oh MasterCard, (insert delighted shriek of laughter here) you know just how I like it. But it's not all good news, for alas, I have a moral dilemma.
When my credit is extended, I get this feeling like I'm at some woman's house, I don't know who, just a woman who's house I'm not supposed to be at. Some sort of indescribably sexy temptress that my mother, or my wife, or both, have warned me to stay away from. Nevertheless, I am there, in the doorway, about to try and leave.
What's that sexy temptress? oh...yeah, I suppose I could stay for a drink, what's the harm in that? What's that? Oh no, I'm comfortable in what I'm wearing thank you.
I put on a cool front, but I'm terribly nervous, because I know that it is not possible for any good to come of this.
What's that you say MasterCard? I can leave even further beyond my means? I suppose I can buy one more pair of shoes, what's the harm in that?

Spring time, when winter's silence is ruined by the sounds of love

What do dorm rooms, bathrooms, furnace rooms, and broom closets have in common? All of them are a better place than a coffee shop for a couple to make out.
Today, as is typical of any Tuesday between 11:30 am, and 12:50 pm, I was enjoying a coffee and catching up on some reading in one of the coffee shops on the Concordia campus. Just 12 minutes into my blissful midday routine, in walked a young couple. A thin young man and what I presumed to be his "best girl", sat down at a table near mine, and readied a laptop computer for what I had, in vein, assumed would be some sort of work session.
What actually took place requires no exaggeration on my part. A very, very serious make out session quickly got underway.
I am sort of a libertarian at heart, believing that whatever you must do to get your kicks is none of my business, should it not impugn the ability of myself, or anyone else, to get our kicks. Moreover, I am a reasonable man. I can understand a tender moment between two kids in love, so overwhelmed by emotions and so bereft of consideration for anyone else that a tender, loving embrace may seem reasonable in a public place. But this was beyond an intimate moment. There was heavy breathing. There were sucking noises. They had a rhythm. This was foreplay, as in, that which could occur before sexual relations, you know... coitus.
And my trouble begins here. First, because their foreplay is none of my business, but second, because every reasonable man knows that foreplay is for bastards, suckers, and politicians. The only thing more disgusting than the sound of this suckface session, was how long I stayed there, stubbornly refusing to be ousted by a couple of kids with no self-control.

He who walks among us.

In one of my classes, specifically which one shall remain a secret, there sits a young man behind me that has helped to set the benchmark for the dumbest things I've ever heard. So dumb, in fact, that I wonder 2 or 3 times per lecture if I'm on some variety of "candid camera" show, or perhaps, as I live in Montreal, "Just for Laughs: Gags". The nature of this class requires the use of elementary calculus, the particular application being quite simplified. Now I am not particularly adept in mathematics, and the list of who I had to sleep with to pass university calculus may induce vomiting for some, but even I can comprehend taking a partial derivative. So of the array of hurdles that might prove difficult in an intermediate economics class, I would certainly not have guessed that the most trying of these is dividing by fractions or, what resulted in a frustrated 5-minute long explanation, square roots. How does such a man get to this point? How is it possible that the university administration allowed this specimen to slip through the cracks for so long? How does he manage to find his own ass in the morning so that it can fill the seat behind me? Moreover how is he not so frustrated, and so bewildered that he hasn't burned all of his books in a massive ritual surrounded by a hundred drumming men, with torches and guns and people in masks screaming profanities...and stopped attending?
Such questions don't have answers and so I beg of you, the facilitators of this cruel joke, come out from your places of hiding. Explain that this has all been an elaborate scheme, a hilarious yarn, because frankly the entire study of economics depends on it.