Letters To An
Overseas Friend.

Things I heard on the radio today.

In the aftermath of a fatal non-recall debacle, the CEO of General Motors robotically reading to us about her passionate life-long commitment to communication. CEO’s in the know know: do not speak from the heart to a hostile audience.

Stephen Harper couldn’t say Vladimir Putin’s* name with any kind of smoothness. He innocuously starts with poo-TEEN (which sounded correct to me) then catches himself and fake-corrects himself by saying poo-TEEN again. After fumbling about for a second or two, he quickly settles down and finally goes with poo-TIN with the inflection going up at the end to turn the name into a question.** He then carries on with the rest of his spiel, cool as a cucumber. A little jarring to listen to a world leader not be able to smoothly say the name of a another world leader but certainly mis-pronunciations are no big deal. To my ear, he basically, at least initially, said the name of the ruler of Russia with the Anglophone pronunciation of a Quebecois dish. Nothing wrong with that. Happens all the time.

I think it might have just been a faulty switch on the PM-bot. Someone left him in Show Quebec Love Mode. Luckily, he was only set to poutine, and he never got around to “GO HABS!” while discussing the Crimea. Not that making a positive reference to the Hockeys is ever a bad idea in these parts, but the Canadiens are now out of the playoffs. A lack of hockey tournament enumeration, I am sure, would have been picked out by some as irrefutable evidence for the alien evil that is Stephen Harper. But as far as poutine goes, right reference, Mr. PM, just the wrong place. Not that any of this matters to his governing abilities or even to his reputation. Either you believe he is the guy who single handedly saved us from the Great Recession, or he had a hand in its creation. There’s no middle.

All the while, I am a person who often forgets where he is and strings together the words, “selection bias” without prejudice. It’s hard to tell if the subsequent look I get is, “that’s not even English” or “You think you’re better than me?”


* I understand when speaking of name pronunciations, I might be exposing my ignorance but… I believe Putin is pronounced POO-teen. If so, I’d say to pronounce it poo-TEEN is closer to the actual than is poo-TIN.

** Since Vladimir Putin is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, it seems perfectly logical to me to pronounce his name as a question since riddles are questions.

Just saw an ad that has a boy and a girl enjoying each other’s company in various roadside locations. The ad ends with the boy dropping the girl off in his car. She tells him to not to get out, she’ll get her item from the trunk herself. That item is a gas can and you can now see her abandoned truck in the scene. Turns out they were strangers and he was just helping her out. Boy looks disappointed and drives away. He gets home and see’s that she had written her number in the dirty film on the trunk of his car. Close ad with tagline about how anything can happen when you drive a Ford, or Honda, or whatever. Or maybe it wasn’t even a car ad. I can’t remember.

Clever, exciting, and touching, I guess, but all I could think was: What if it rained?! What if he doesn’t look back there?! Because spontaneity is hot, that’s what. Well I find reliable means of communication and not leaving important objectives up to the vagary of weather, hot.