Empty Shelves in Britain
It’s like a replay of postwar rationing. There aren’t enough big trucks to get food to the stores, so the result is what you see below. The blame falls along political fault lines. The left says it’s Brexit, the right says it’s Covid and state handouts. From a distance, it seems they are both right. A very Canadian conclusion.
“A crisis made in government,” writes the left-leaning Guardian. It says Brexit means goods from Europe are tied up in red tape since the border is no longer wide open. It also means workers, especially from poorer EU countries, aren’t free to come to Britain to work in agriculture and drive trucks.
“Don’t blame Brexit for empty shelves,” says a headline in the right of centre Daily Telegraph. It says photos of empty supermarket shelves are “carefully curated”. It blames the crisis on the lack of drivers. Many of them retired during Covid; the paper called for more training for HGV (Heavy Goods Vehicle) drivers. The Daily Telegraph adds the EU is facing the same shortage of drivers.
Maybe many drivers decided to find easier ways to earn a living? Markets work. Raise the salary for drivers and watch them come back.
Lumber, lumber everywhere…
… and all the boards did shrink, at least the prices for the boards. The price of `framing lumber’ is down for the 13th straight week. It is the stuff used to build houses.
Lumber hit a high of $1,515 for a thousand board feet in May. It closed at $389 on Friday, according to an article in Fortune.com. Again, markets worked. When the price hit what builders and home fixit types thought was ridiculous, they stopped buying.
Housing prices still up around the rich world
The politicians who can’t really do anything — the ones who run national governments— keep promising to fix housing. Top issue in Canada. But it is the municipal and state/provincial politicians who block the construction of new houses.
Spreading cities, like Los Angeles and Toronto, have zoning rules that favour one lot-one house. Now the California State Legislature wants to allow as many as four houses on one lot. It will make a lot of suburban homeowners angry but it should lower the cost of housing in the long run.
There is a federal election in Canada
The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, was asked about monetary policy. His response:
“When I think about the biggest, most important economic policy this government, if re-elected, would move forward, you’ll forgive me if I don’t think about monetary policy. You’ll understand that I think about families.”
Where the wild prices are
Putting money into American stocks produced the best returns over the past 10 years.
A cult following for Knowlton, Quebec, writer
A woman stood up at a packed book launch for Louise Penny’s latest murder mystery , The Madding Crowd. She had flown from Florida to New York then driven across the border. Turns out there were others who didn't pass the Covid border rules.
The new book deals with the pandemic, starting on page one. This is Louise Penny’s 17th novel in the series, and she told the audience on Saturday that she didn't publish the first one until she was 45. The novels are based in the fictional village of Three Pines, patterned on Knowlton, Quebec.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
Or at least the creature from its home in the muck at the side of my pond.
This is a common snapping turtle soaking in the rays on one of the hottest days of the year. Get too close that mouth and you could lose a finger. She is faster than she looks. These creatures had been on Earth for 100-million years when the dinosaurs said goodbye 65-million years ago. They live for 30 years. This one is young as I have seen much bigger ones. Snapping turtles have no natural predators, except cars and trucks.
Three words that annoy me: gaslighting, trope and meme
I find them annoying because it is not clear to me what they mean. They are show-off words. Don Lemon on CNN loves using them, in particular gaslighting. Gaslighting once meant lighting gas lamps in cities. Its current meaning springs from a 1944 movie called Gaslight where a husband tries to drive his wife mad. There was a re-make that popularized it. Knowing that, I still don’t like it.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives two definitions for gaslight. The first a noun for light from gas. The second a verb:
transitive. To manipulate (a person) by psychological means into questioning his or her own sanity.J. E. Lighter Hist. Dict. Amer. Slang (1994) I. 868/1 records an oral use from 1956.
Next, here is the popularity of the word. Its use really took off a couple of years ago.
Trope is next. I don’t have a clue what it means, and I love words.
There are three definitions of trope, one of them is chemical so we can dismiss that. The other two are the same, one a noun, the other a verb.
Here is the OED definition of the noun trope:
I. A particular manner or mode.
a.Rhetoric. A figure of speech which consists in the use of a word or phrase in a sense other than that which is proper to it. Hence (more generally): a figure of speech; (an instance of) figurative or metaphorical language.
The use of trope took off around 1978. It would be easier, it seems to me, to explain what you are trying to say rather than throwing off the word trope.
Meme is another fashionable word is growing in popularity. I had to look up what it means. The full Oxford Dictionary, the one in 24 volumes, lists the times meme was first used in its current social media sense. It is perhaps the clearest of the three but it is still confusing, at least to me.
2. An image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations. Also with modifying word, as internet meme, etc.
1998 Sci. & Technol. Week (transcript of CNN TV programme) (Nexis) 24 Jan. The next thing you know, his friends have forwarded it [sc. an animation of a dancing baby] on and it's become a net meme.
2000 Guardian 10 Aug. (Online section) 11/3 The best internet memes replicate quickly, gaining authenticity and achieving mythical status as their familiarity grows.
2002 Vancouver Sun (Nexis) 26 Jan. d5 Often you attach the meme you intend to spread, and frequently it is no more ‘important’ than a separated-at-birth gag involving George Bush and a monkey.
2013 T. Chatfield Netymology xv. 49 Read the 3,000-word Wikipedia article on ‘Rickrolling’ for an example of how a meme can eat itself several times over within the space of five years.
Honourable mention to dogwhistle.
Woke is confusing but its meaning seems obvious after a while.
Essay of the Week
As far back as 1954, a newspaper called Alfie Scopp "one of Canada's top character actors." That continued for decades. The versatile actor, who died last month at the age of 101, wasn't a superstar, but he never stopped working.
"He used to say he didn't make much money, but he always had a lot of work," said his nephew Kevin Saks.
Alfie Scopp was the seltzer-spraying Clarabell on the Howdy Doody Show, Avram in Norman Jewison's Fiddler on the Roof and the voice of Charlie in the Box in Rudolf The Red-nosed Reindeer, the animated Christmas Special recorded in 1964. The program was produced in the United States and Japan, and much of the voice-over work was done in Toronto by actors such as Mr. Scopp, who had decades of doing radio dramas on the CBC. They did the voices without ever seeing the animation.
"We had no idea what the characters looked like. We just invented what we'd thought they'd sound like," he told an interviewer in 2014.
Alfred Scopp, always known as Alfie, was born in London, England, in 1919. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Russia; his mother was born in England. Alfie was the fifth of seven children, and he said, "Every two years, there was a new baby." The Scopp family moved to Montreal when Alfie was a year old. The family lived in the St. Urbain Street neighbourhood made famous by the novelist Mordecai Richler. The Scopps were poor but happy, he said. Alfie quit school part way through grade eight. "The principle was an anti-Semite," recalled Alfie in a 1977 interview with Lorraine Thomson as part of an Actra Fraternal oral history project. "The principal said to me: `Scopp if you weren't Jewish, what would you rather be?' I replied Jewish, the class applauded, and the principal never spoke to me again."
It was the depression, and young Alfie worked as a messenger boy and in restaurants to help support the family. In 1940 he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force but first had to get his old principal to vouch for him, which he did. The air force turned out to be his ticket to show business. Mr. Scopp trained as a mechanic and volunteered for a post at Gander, Newfoundland, the largest airbase in the world at the time, used as a stop-over and maintenance base for aircraft being ferried to Britain. According to Mr. Scopp, there were 3,000 Americans, 5,000 Canadian air force personal, 2,000 soldiers, and 2,000 Brits stationed there. He started doing a vaudeville act, doing comedy where he was billed as the Bob Hope of Gander. He was put in charge of entertainment and began to write for others as well as perform for large audiences. One of the people he met at the base was another performer: Sammy Davis Jr. The two remained lifetime friends. The base also had its own radio station, VORG (Voice of Radio Gander) and the 23-year-old Alfie Scopp was recruited to host a program called Jive at Five and a sportscast where he learned the gift of speaking ad-lib. At the end of the war, after almost three years in Gander, he decided that his future was as a performer, but not in Montreal. He decided to go to Toronto and attend the Lorne Greene School of Broadcasting, run by the wartime CBC Radio news announcer Lorne Greene, who later became famous as the father on the American series Bonanza.
At first, Mr. Greene said there was no room, but he asked Alfie to ad-lib in his studio, and he talked for several minutes about hitch-hiking across the United States and Canada. All of a sudden, he was accepted. Other people in his class in 1946 included many future stars of American and Canadian television: Fred Davis, the future host of the CBC program Front Page Challenge, the actor Leslie Nielsen, Gordie Tapp, future star of the American program Hee Haw, and actor and comedian Don Heron. On his first day at class, Mr. Scopp showed up with a black eye, knocked down by a jealous boyfriend after a dance the night before. The teachers were already famous: John Drainie, Mavor Moore, Lister Sinclair and Andrew Allen, all Canadian drama heavyweights of their day.
Mr. Scopp started acting, first on stage, then in a long series of dramas on the CBC, first on radio then on television, once TV started in Canada on September 6, 1952. His first real paycheque for a radio drama was $45, which he joked covered 18 weeks rent; he was paying $2.50 a week for a room.
There was stage work and reviews, including Spring Thaw, which travelled across Canada. At the start, there was television work, including a one-hour program Mr. Scopp and his colleagues would write and perform live every week. Videotape was far in the future. He filled in time doing a voice-over on a National Film Board instructional film on accident protection. Work was work.
One day walking across the parking lot at the CBC building Alfie Scopp bumped into a friend who had just auditioned for the job of the clown on the Howdy Doody Show. Mr. Scopp called, auditioned and got the part.
"They gave me a seltzer bottle and said so far no one really knows how to do this. I sprayed everyone, fooling around. And the next day, they called, and I started work," said Mr. Scopp.
Playing the clown Clarabell on the Howdy Doody show on CBC was perhaps a bit undignified compared to the more serious work, but it was steady, and it lasted for five years. Five days a week. The secret was improvising, ad-libbing and being funny. He was a natural.
Mr. Scopp worked on the Wayne and Shuster Show, the Alex Barris Show and a raft of Canadian TV programs. He stepped behind the scenes at Front Page Challenge, hosted by his classmate Fred Davis. The idea of the program was to pick someone who had been in the news and have four panellists ask questions to guess the story or identity of the guest. Alfie Scopp's job was to chase down guests from around the world. The guest booking of which he was most proud was landing Sir Edmund Hilary, who climbed Mount Everest, and Jacques Picard, the French adventurer who dove to the deepest depths of the ocean. Both on the same program.
"When I spoke to Jacques Picard, he was a bit reluctant, but when I told him the other guest was Edmund Hilary, he said, I'll be there," recalled Mr. Scopp.
Alfie Scopp was involved with coming up with the idea for Hee Haw, the country television show that played in the United States. He suggested they use Canadian performers, in particular, Gordie Tapp and Don Heron, who played a hayseed, a version of his Ottawa Valley character.
"I was in Los Angles with them when they came up with the idea for Hee Haw. They said, 'Let's create a country Laugh-In,' " Alfie Scopp told the Globe and Mail. "They didn't know anything about country, so I said, get in touch with Gordie Tapp. He knows everything about country, from working on Country Hoedown.' They called him right away, and Gordie signed on for Hee Haw."
Alfie Scopp was instrumental in helping start the career of a young Canadian singer who went on to superstar status.
"I was idly watching a CBC TV show called Pick the Stars. An accordion player was on, and he was followed by this young fella who sang. A few bars into his song, and I yelled to my wife to come see his kid. We agreed he was something special, not so the audience – the accordion player won – we set a rigorous standard in Canada. Anyway, I learned the young singer's name was Robert Goulet, and he was a student at the Toronto Conservatory. Next day I met with Bob, liked him, and booked him on a show I was writing for, and Bob's TV career began."
After their first meeting, Mr. Scopp landed Mr. Goulet a small role on the Howdy Doody Show. This was long before Robert Goulet became Lancelot on the Broadway hit Camelot, which made his reputation. Alfie Scopp was the best man at two of Robert Goulet's weddings and a pallbearer at his funeral.
Mr. Scopp was in six major feature films, the most prominent being the Canadian producer Norman Jewison's Fiddler on The Roof. He played Avram, the bookseller.
Alfie Scopp slowed down when he was about 65 and worked when it interested him. In his long retirement, he liked to play golf, and he was a keen follower of the Toronto Blue Jays.
"My uncle was an avid baseball fan, stretching back to the 1930s. He was a season ticket holder for the Blue Jays from their inaugural season in 1977 until well into the 2000s and pined away the winters waiting for spring training to start," said Kevin Sacks.
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