The phones are listening.

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My wife and I were driving in our car. I was an IT contractor, and working with a client migrating from Windows 7 to Windows 10.

My team would hire someone, and this would involve getting a variety of network permissions, and equipment for them. The new hires would always have to sit around doing nothing, because their permissions hadn’t come through yet, and we didn’t have the equipment to give them if they had.

“You know what these guys need? They need to use Gantt charts, figure out how long the different paths take, and then tell new hires to show up on the day everything’s ready for them… Instead of having them lurk about. Fun as that can be, depending on the person.”

Ulrika looked at me. She then echoed Joan Kroc’s reported answer to Ray Kroc when he told her he’d bought the Padres (“Honey, what’s a Padre?”) — “Honey, what’s a Gantt chart?”

“You know. A Gantt chart. Stacked horizontal lines? Used to manage a project? You use Office… They’re in Excel, I’m pretty sure.”

“Well, you’re driving, so don’t try to show me just now.”

Now, normally, this would just be a very minor anecdote… except for one thing:

I started seeing ads for Gantt charts in both GMail and Facebook. Ulrika started seeing ads for Gantt charts in both GMail and Facebook.

It’s been four years since I was on that contract, and Facebook still shows me this:


We both have Android phones. We weren’t using them at the time.

It’s really unlikely Ulrika would have been a target audience, given that she didn’t know what they were until that conversation. And it’s a very specialized product.

Don’t tell me the phones don’t listen.

“Foreshadowing”

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Lexicon.

About a week before Bloom County went on a substantial sub-plot about Bill the Cat being a Russian spy, there was this glorious 3-day sequence. It has even been quoted in academic papers.

“Foreshadowing” — Your clue to quality literature.

Here, have a link to the very first Bloom County strip, December 8, 1980. Then, you can read through the whole thing. If you want.

The Man In the Shack

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Lexicon.

This comes from “Fit the Twelfth,” the final episode of the radio version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The lads have found the ruler of the universe, who is a solitary man in a shack, and who has a cat. While feeding the cat he says,

“I think fish is nice, but then l think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?”

I’m going to include some screen captures below, because I’m too lazy to type out the whole thing. But it’s Douglas Adams at his most humorously philosophical, and also empirical.

The Frantics

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All of them lexicon.

Boot to the head:

Ti Kwan Leep:

And, Make Up Dirty Words:

These are all, spectacularly, from the same album. But so many phrases come from them:
”Boot to the head.”
”Yeah, yeah, patience… how long will that take?”
” I have urges in my areas.”
”…and one for Jenny and the wimp.”
”Beat people up?”

What’s interesting is “Ti Kwan Leep” has generated second generation performances in… martial arts schools, of all places. Here’s an example (a little shaky, but others stick in Vangelis’ Chariots of Fire):

The Frantics were a recurring act on a radio show for novelty records, hosted by Dr Demento. The good Doctor’s most famous acolyte was “Weird Al” Yankovic, who got his start on the radio program.

“As Canadian as possible…”

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I’m going to quote this in full. Mostly so I can have it in a safe place, and not disappear due to link rot, or the Brownian swirl of the internet.

“As Canadian as possible under the circumstances” is arguably one of the most famous Canadian aphorisms. But not many know its author, or how it came to be.

In 1972, Peter Gzowski, then summer host of This Country in the Morning, held a contest to complete (in the manner of “As American as apple pie”) the saying “As Canadian as …”. Heather Scott, a seventeen-year-old summer music school student at the time, heard of the contest, and immediately came up with the phrase that has since become so famous. The subsequent telephone call from Peter to Heather at her school began what was to become an on-and-off relationship with “Mr. Canada”.

Heather was a passionate Canadian, who cared deeply about her country and her fellow man. She bravely completed her University of Toronto Honours B.A. while recovering from Hodgkin’s Disease, and went on to a career as a production editor with Prentice Hall, married and miraculously (after all her radiation treatments) bore a daughter, Sarah. Her other popular claim to fame is as editor of Don Cherry’s autobiography, for which she earned a flowery dedication from Don.

Sadly, her cancer returned in 1990, and she died at home (in White Rock, B.C.) on 30 October 1994. Ironically, Peter Gzowski visited White Rock on a book tour just a few days later. They never met, until perhaps Peter’s own passing a scant eight years later.

R. W. Scott (Heather’s father) 
Long Point, Ontario 
18 May 2004

This can be lexicon, as I joke about five (maybe six) of my eight great-grandparents being Canadian makes me ethnically so. Sometimes rephrased as, “As well as possible…” in response to the American opening question, “How are you doing?”

(Note that Ms. Scott was a music student, and there were rules about a minimum of Canadian content on radio and television.)