The Captain's Table

Don't feel sad USA we have them too!

As promised when we started the Great Canadian series we will, on occasion, put forth a Canadian who is great for being a complete and utter idiot - and today's Canadian is all that and more!!

It seems like only about 4 years ago (because it was) that Calgary West MP Rob Anders tried to put his best foot forward and, in so doing, planted it firmly in his mouth - so today, a recap of the magnificent boobery of one (in)famous canuck.

Lest we forget...

In 2001, the Federal Government decided to give Nelson Mandela honorary Canadian citizenship, making him only the second foreigner to receive such an honour.

This award - largely predicated on Mandela's work CHANGING THE WORLD AND PROMOTING PEACE - didn't, however, sit well with one fiery, idiotic, toady of the religious right from Calgary - and so enter our hero - Conservative MP Rob Anders.

Calling Mandela, "a communist and a terrorist," and decrying him as "the politically correct Left-lib
poster boy of today", the not-so-prescient Anders declared that Mandela would be forgotten in 5 years.
Fortunately time has and will prove Anders wrong - guaranteeing that Mandela's legacy will be remembered and that, in fact, it will be Anders who fades, all the while babbling nonsense, into the mists of time; fated to be remembered only in backhanded salutes like this one.

To be fair - Anders may not have been completely briefed and focused on the Mandela issue as he was, at the time, very busy with his personal political agenda of banning abortion and promoting western seperatism... and we all know how tiring THAT can be.

In an equally twitty addendum to the tale Mandela, noted for his willingness to reconcile with those who
disagree with him, attempted to phone Anders to smooth things out, but Anders refused to take the call.

So take a satisfied breath all you Yankees - because now you can feel safe in the knowledge that blinkered, Philistine, pig-ignorance is a world-wide phenomenon; you are not alone.

Evry Monday - Another Great Canadian

A new feature here at The Captain's Table in which we will feature an educational (sort of) profile of a great, not so great or really nasty Canadian each and every Monday until we run out.

So let's start with a favorite to canadians everywhere - Kim Mitchell

If words like Sarnia, Max Webster and Gowan seem like Greek to you - then you've never really met a
little person called the Canadian-you-within.

Sarnia 1967!!: A young, ambitious Kim Mitchell joins "ZOOOM". Soon, after debating with his bandmates which songs they should COVER (yeesh), Mitchell leaves "ZOOOM" and pursues a career doing studio sessions, beer commercials, and the airport lounge circuit.

Early 70's: Mitchell sets off to the Greek island of Rhodes backing up a "Greek Tom Jones". Six months
later Mitchell invites childhood buddy Pye Dubois to Greece to co-write some songs; they decided to make it a band project with some Sarnia friends and set off to launch MAX WEBSTER (a name they picked from a phonebook).

1975-1978: Max Webster signs with SRO Productions and record their first two albums, 'Max Webster' and 'High Class In Borrowed Shoes'., then during the recording of their third album - 'Mutiny Up My Sleeve' - (1978) their producer quits over the album's musical direction.

Damn - this is like Spinal Tap only real AND Canadian! What could happen next? Success? Pathos? Bathos? Well read on...

1979: Max Webster (7 years after forming) finally crack the charts with the single "Let Go The Line" in
1979. Then, almost right after, THE BAND SPLITS UP (!?!) - with some members forming an unfortunately-named offshoot called "Antlers" and, Kim Mitchell - our hero, of sorts, I guess - decides to
pursue a solo career.

Early 80's: It wasn't all beer and skittles for Kim though! Kim's first work mostly involved doing session
work and producing Scottish-Canadian-pop-superstar-and-uber-oddity Larry "Your a Strange Animal (that's what you are)" Gowan's self-titled debut "Goman".

Kim - now donning his trademark half-mullety-haircut, shades and ball cap - then went on to record his own albums; "Akimbo Alogo", and "Shaking Like a Human Being"; they were both very successful, and included hit songs "Patio Lanterns", and "Go for a Soda" - which became the unofficial anthem for Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). "Shaking" went triple platinum, and earned Kim two Juno awards. His latest album "Kimosabe", was released in 1999, and featured vocals from Lisa Dalbello.

Kim Mitchell - a true canadian success story!

Back To The Ureftu

It's that time of year here at the Captain's Table when I find myself receiving floods of email from young minds seeking my counsel on what path to take with their educational futures. Really - if you could see the stacks of inquisitive emails, postcards and ham-fisted 2nd year philosophy theses that are stacked across my desk you'd be amazed! Most of these are easy to dispense with as I immediately trash the ones that start with "Deer Captun", are rife with split infinitives, over usage of the word "like" or that employ a hand-writing so spidery and discursive that they can only have been penned by a florid psychotic or drug addict - and we all know that THEY belong in community college.

That usually winnows the pile down to a half-dozen or so and, this year at least, one perfect and sparely-written gem rose to the surface and I felt compelled to respond:

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In a message dated 4/8/05 12:16:38 AM, _______@hotmail.com writes:

Easy question: Yale or Princeton?

In a message dated 4/8/05 9:37:38 AM you replied to _______@hotmail.com:

Dear V,

Easy for some, maybe - but remember V that I am a high-school dropout and autodidact. So higher education - particularly the Ivy-garlanded kind - is a mystery to me. Are you thinking of Grad school?

I guess if I had to choose I'd say Yale - but that's only based on its value on a scrabble board - which is the same as Princeton's but uses much fewer letters (thank god for "y"). That sort of terse efficiency suggests a rigorous program with no post-modern nonsense - probably very Paper Chase with professors making speeches along the lines of a Houseman-esque: "You come in he-ah with a skull full of MUSH! But you will leave thinking like a (insert future networked job here)."

If you do choose Yale read "The Secret History" again - in whose shamelessly page-turning, guilty-pleasure narrative you'll find a cautionary tale about what can happen when all that terseness goes off the rails.

Princeton on the other hand is a more lissome creature; discursive and prone to flouncing into the room like a circus horse and making impassioned pronouncements on the nature of Love or Art. This fact evidenced again by the Scrabble rule of university which notes that Princeton - creative, albeit misguided, creature that she is - yields such words as cointer, entopic, intoner, nepotic, noticer, pointer, pontine, porcine, protein, ternion, tropine and entropic. But never a full use of all the tiles on her rack.

Thus, she is broken, probably myopic and, in the end, only partly realized... entropic indeed.

So that's my two cents worth - Yale for the rigour (that's canadian rigour, with a "U", by the way - 4 extra points), or Princeton for the more earthy, artistic experience - though one wonders if you didn't get enough of that 'crumpets-and-poetry-in-a-punt' stuff when you went to Vassar.

Let me know what you decide. Til then I'll be counting the tiles.

The Captain

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Editorially I would only add that Yale's motto of "Lux et Veritas" (Light and Truth) doesn't do nearly so well on the Scrabble board as Princeton's pithy "Dei Sub Numine Viget" (Under God's Power She Flourishes). Although, I believe, Latin is still not in common usage in official Scrabble competition, the cautious student may want to consider this fact when declaring a Major.