Spiders 'n webs

There are times when the typist, even the gifted one, grows weary of the Qwerty keyboard and takes a camera into the countryside to see what the morning dew has done to the landscape.

On this particular morning in late August, I stumbled upon a circus of dew-encrusted spider's webs. There were hundreds of them in the field, each like a small ferris wheel, glistening in the low morning light.

Above is the bejewelled hub of a web, its spider nowhere in sight. Each droplet reflects the morning sun.








Left, Nabster! A spider nabs it's prey










Here is a tapestry of dew strung over a web.



And here is a fine necklace made of silken web and morning dew. Fit for a queen.

Favourite martini quote

I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host.

- Dorothy Parker, New Yorker, legendary wit, punster and wisecracker of the interwar period.

Surfin' Ca Na Da

On a warm sunny afternoon, this typist left the keyboard and headed to the beach to witness heroics by surfers. As you will see, it is a sport of ups and downs.

Surf's up

Oh dear!

Ahhhhh!

Surf's down

Words that should be banned: disconnect

Our WTSBB today is disconnect, the noun, as in: There's an unfortunate disconnect between how humans naturally function and what a lot of technology delivers.

In my many years in the steno pool, I typed the word disconnect as a verb, not a noun. "It's a good idea to disconnect the television during a thunder and lightning storm." This is perfectly acceptable on my keyboard.

I note that sandpaper-throated Rod Stewart also uses disconnect as a verb in his hit Tonight's the Night when he exhorts the object of his desire to "disconnect the telephone line." And we all know where old Rod was going with that one.

Correct usage of disconnect seems to depend on which side of the Atlantic you're on. The British
Oxford Online Dictionary agrees with Mr. Stewart. They define disconnect as a verb, not a noun.
But the American Merriam Webster Dictionary online allows disconnect as a noun: "a lack of or a break in connection, consistency, or agreement."

I am not one of those typists who wishes to freeze the English language in some glorified past. But but we typists have to protect our keyboards from management consultants, bureaucrats and other practitioners of gobbledygook who wish to kidnap our language and cloak it in jargon.

Disconnect used as a noun is the unattractive, perfunctory language of a machine. It is not the language of a real thinking human being. Let's pull the plug on disconnect.

The Rolling Stones: the sequel

Is there virtue in standing outside in the pouring rain for four hours awaiting one of the greatest rock and roll bands ever? No.

Is there bravery in standing outside in the pouring rain for four hours awaiting one of the greatest rock and roll bands ever? No.

Is there Satisfaction - sorry couldn't help that one - in standing outside in the pouring rain for four hours awaiting one of the greatest rock and roll bands ever? Well, no, not until Mick, Keith, Ron and Charlie hit the stage in Halifax and then the waiting became the stuff of heros and legend.

And one day, when we sit in our rocking chairs in the old folks home, blanket over our knees, hearing trumpet in our ear (due to damage caused by loud rock and roll concerts) we will tell our grandchildren of this heroic act.

Like veterans of Culloden and Agincourt, we will talk of the rain, the mud, the soaking wringing wet clothes, the cold feet, the shivers, the misery, the virtue, the bravery and the satisfaction of the long wait. And we will tell them over and over and over again.

And our grandchildren, bless them, will nod politely and then leave the old folks home saying to one another: "Grannie's sweet, but whatever you do, don't mention The Stones."

Rollin' with the Stones

The Rolling Stones are in town on Saturday. The Stones! Here! In my own backyard.

Thirty years ago, I would have killed to see them live.

Twenty years ago, I would have died to see them live.

Now? Well, they're playing in my own backyard, and they're The Stones.

So I'm going, and thankfully, I won't have to kill or die to see them. Ain't life sweet.

Long live The Stones.

Paging Mr Orwell, Mr. George Orwell

If there's a Mr. George Orwell in the building, author of the iconic twentieth century novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, would he please report to the front desk immediately. We have an urgent case of Newspeak and thought control in the building.

You see Mr. Orwell, the Conservative government in Canada has issued a memo ordering public servants to refer to it as the "New Government of Canada." Public servants have been told to cease calling it the "Canadian government" or any other unauthorized term.

So committed is the New Government of Canada to this Newspeak, that it has made the old term, Canadian government, a thoughtcrime.

And government scientist Andrew Okulitch learned the consequences of committing thoughcrime when he fired off an email challenging the edict.

Well, Mr. Orwell, the New Government of Canada was not amused. No, Mr. Orwell. So unamused was The New Government of Canada that it fired Dr. Okulitch for daring to challenge the Newspeak.

Of course, Dr. Okulitch quickly regained his job when he went public and revealed the lunacy of thoughtcrime and Newspeak in the New Government of Canada. Thankfully, we still have a free press in Canada.

But how much longer can we typists count on that when the Canadian government - Oops! Sorry, the New Government of Canada - is firing public servants for committing thoughtcrimes such as this?

So Mr. Orwell, we'd be grateful if you could report to the front desk immediately. This case is urgent and requires your attention.

Green with determination

Picture this. You're in a movie theatre watching a life-altering documentary. The film ends and you're left sitting in your seat, stunned by what you've just witnessed.

You think of the future, your kids' future, the future of everything. You are scared. You're mad. You want people to sit up and listen. You want change and you want it now.

So, what do you do?

Well, if you're Anna Banana, you launch a sit-down protest right then and there in the theatre. You refuse to leave until they promise to hold another screening of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

You want the politicians to see this film so they will learn about global warming and the threat it poses. You want this because politicians have the power to make change. But if they don't have the information, they won't be in a position to do so.

Since her sit-down protest in August, Anna Banana has launched the Green Mile walk, a relay walk that will transport a copy of An Inconvenient Truth from Anna Banana's home in Coldbrook to the Nova Scotia legislature where she hopes politicians will have a special screening. The walk is approximately 100 K.

Anna Banana is asking others to join her Green Mile walk which will occur in November when the provincial Legislative Assembly sits.

Readers may remember Anna Banana from the amusing Global Warming Panties photo she sent The Gifted Typist a few posts back.

Her story has been taken up by the papers and radio. This Gifted Typist believes that Anna Banana is a model for the modern-day little guy standing up to the monoliths, saying what she thinks and doing something about it.

The Gifted Typist will keep you posted on her progress.

When rags are rich fodder

What happens when a venerable institution of culture, comment and cartooning meets a venerable institution of cheap second hand clothes?

You get an article in The New Yorker on that Maritime cathedral of cheap clothes Frenchy's.

The September 25th edition carries the piece by the very gifted and esteemed typist Calvin Trillin.

In the piece, Trillin, a humourist, novelist and long-time contributor to The New Yorker, weaves a narrative of his history with Frenchy's which began in 1972 when he took a trip to the bargain mecca to clothe his scarecrow Mildew

Trillin, who spends his summers in Chester NS, tells us about his own sartorial history going back to home state of Kansas, and continuing through phases at Yale, New York and finally to Nova Scotia's Frenchy's where he found that treasured blue overcoat.

In typical Trillin style, the piece is unsentimental, without pretension and an abject pleasure to read. And if you are like me, a bargain hunter in your heart, you will finish his piece with the same knowing smile he must have had on his face when he typed the piece.

Neutralize II

There has been an update on today's Word That Should be Banned: Neutralize.

Montreal police now say that the Dawson shooter died from self-inflicted wounds after being shot in the arm by police.

This enlightens us somewhat to the details of this shooting, but is neutralize the correct word for shooting a gunman in the arm just before the said gunman shoots himself in the head?

No, at least not this this typist's dictionary.

Words that should be banned: neutralize

Today's word: neutralize.

Typists spend a lot of time punching in words that accurately describe people, places and events. So when I saw that Montreal police had "neutralized" the shooter at Dawson College, I had to scratch my head.

Neutralize? I thought they'd shot and killed the man.

Confused, I flipped through my dictionary and checked the definition of neutralize: to declare neutral; to grant neutrality to (eg. a state); to make neutral chemically or electrically; to make inert; to make ineffective; to counteract; it nullify.

Nowhere did it say that neutralize meant "shot and killed". If you pushed it, and pushed it hard, I suppose you could interpret "counteract" or "nullify" to mean "shot and killed."

It's hard to argue with a police force who "shot and killed" a murderer on the rampage and threatening to kill others, so what's wrong with saying so? If they "shot and killed" the man, why neutralize the account by saying they "neutalized" him?

Let's ditch "neutralize" as the word for shooting and killing and save it as a word to describe the act of achieving the PH balance of garden soil.

Panties II

Anna Banana offers this comment on "Panties" and the state of the world.

More later from Anna Banana's coooool quest to halt global warming.

Words that should be banned: Panties

This week we begin a new feature: Words that should be banned.

Today's word: "Panties."

By "Panties," I mean those undergarments worn on the bottom by members of female sex.

I'm not calling for a universal moratorium on the use of the word "Panties." I don't object to its use when deployed to describe the undergarment worn by a girl child between the ages of 2-12.

"Panties" is a perfectly acceptable description for an undergarment worn by this age group. But when you advance the age of the female wearer to, say, 30, 48, or 73, you have to ask yourself if
it is entirely appropriate to refer to the undergarment in question as "Panties?"

"Panties" infantilizes its wearer, reduces her to a juvenile status. "Panties" lacks the authority and confidence of an undergarment which should be worn by the grown woman. "Panties" are worn by little girls, some of whom have very recently graduated from diapers.

It's not that we lack a choice of words for the undergarment worn by the mature woman. We have the muscular "underpants" and the less strident "underwear" and the slightly mysterious "underthings."

Common slang parlance includes "undies" or if you're British "knickers" or "knick knicks" although the latter term might be creeping back into the territory of juvenile. Sensible undergarment retailers refer to them as "briefs."

Romantics might define the undergarment as "lingerie" although it's unlikely "lingerie" would be worn by a woman going out to play a game of rugby, for instance. But "lingerie" while not univerally appropriate is, at least, mature and dignified.

More descriptive terms might include "thongs" or "boy shorts." I'm sure there are plenty of other descriptions for the undergarment, but it is the age-appropriateness that concerns me.

Let us embrace an appropriate term for this undergarment of bottom regions and leave "panties" to the children. If you have other suggestions please offer.

Down with the bottom feeders

It's not every day that a Gifted Typist encounters a piece of human coral on the side of a busy city street, but this is exactly what occurred today as I idled in traffic waiting for a red light to go green.
The roadside coral-clad woman was holding up a sign for all to see. It said: deepseas.blogspot.com.

Being a Gifted Typist of curious temperament, I shouted through my downturned window: "Hey Lady, what's this?" And Coral Clad replied that it's a campaign to raise awareness around the destruction wrought by high-seas bottom trawling.

The fisheries practice of high-seas bottom trawling or dragging is, I gather, destroying fish populations, damaging marine habitats and threatening marine biodiversity in international waters.

So concerned is Coral Clad and her deepseas.blogspot.com friends that they are trying to get everyone to support a moratorium on high seas bottom trawling.

In November the United Nations General Assembly will consider a resolution asking for an interim prohibition on bottom trawling. Canada's Minister of Fisheries Loyola Hearn has not yet decided whether Canada will support the proposed moratorium, but other countries such as the UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Brazil and Chili have come out in support.

I asked Coral Clad if there was anything a Gifted Typist could do to support this campaign and she said, yes, you can type.

And so I type in support of the moratorium on high-seas bottom trawling. The typists at deepseas.blogspot.com kindly gave me permission to use Coral Clad's picture which I found posted on their website.

Conspiracy in a C-Cup?

Perhaps Jacy has stumbled onto something with her observation that the Tempest in a B-Cup could in fact be a Conspiracy in a C-Cup.

Oprah is right -- for years I thought I was a 36B, got fitted and found out I was a 34C.These puppies just don't seem like a C cup to me, and I suspect that somehow they are messing with bra sizes now in addition to everything else, but I followed the instructions of my bra lady and started buying the new size.

How could it be that Jacy spent all those years thinking she was a B, when, all of a sudden she is now a C? And how could it be that we all arrived at this conclusion at precisely the same cultural moment, when Oprah declared it on TV?

Could it be that the Brassiere-Manufacturing Industrial Complex (BMIC) has changed it sizes and sizing criteria to seed doubt in the Boobed Lumpen Proletariate, a proletariate that knows the fear of the gravity-inspired, one-way journey south?

I fear there's something rotten going on here.

Could there be a massive guerilla marketing campaign afoot here to promote the sale of brassieres, by tapping into fear of sagging?

I'm not suggesting that Our Lady of the Perpetually Well-Fitted Brassiere Oprah is a willing conspirator. But perhaps she is an instrument in the marketing campaign of the century.

Remember they didn't sell you Listerine by telling you it was a good mouthwash, they sold you Listerine by telling you about halitosis.

Schoooooool's in for ever!

In the '70s, it was Alice Cooper’s “Schoooooool’s out for ever!”

Today, it's: “Schoooooool’s in for ever!”

And I sing it with all the Cooperian, greasy-faced, biting-the-head-off-a-chicken commitment that Gothfather Alice gave it.

“No more free-time,
No more sun screen,
No more mother’s dirty looks!”

Huh? How did that happen?

Here's how. I merrily dropped off Human Gene Projects #1 and #2 this morning for the first day of school. Had to work the face muscles pretty hard to suppress the grin as I bid them farewell, but bid them farewell I did.

Then I merrily skipped home and merrily poured a stiff drink which I merrily didn't drink because the gin-before-9am routine always makes me ill. Never mind, the gin will get drunk.

“School’s in for winter
School’s in til summer
School holidays’ve been blown to pieces!”

Such, such, is the joy of this day. There is an air of peace and tranquility, as though a ceasefire has just been declared.

“In for winter
In till summer
We might not let them out at all.”

I tried not to leap about the house and break into song. I needed to settle down for a morning of typing, but joy is a such difficult emotion to suppress.

“Schools in for ever
School’s in for winter
School’s in with fever
School’s in completely.”

But there will be time for typing tomorrow and the next day and the next. Why? Because Schoool's in for ever!

Yeaaaaaaaaah!

Toilet paper Code Orange

The intel had been in-coming for days. “There’s only one roll of toilet paper left in the house," the chatter kept saying. "You’d better get more or we’re going to run out.”

Looking back, I should have listened to my agents. I should have taken pre-emptive action.

But you’re never sure with the chatter. There’s so much of it out there, and it’s coming in all the time. “We’re out of granola bars. We’re out of outboard-motor pleasure boats. We’re out of two-seater Porsche Boxters.” (Actually, we were never really “in” pleasure boats and Porsches.)

Most of the time you can’t distinguish the good chatter from the bad.

So, I let things go. I ignored all the warnings because there were other priorities that seemed more important; more important, that is, until the morning I woke up early and discovered there were only four squares of toilet paper left in the house.

The chatter was correct. We were now under an imminent attack of no toilet paper. I should have listened.

The first thing I did was declare a Code Orange and impose rations. There were four full bladders in the house and there were four squares of toilet paper. You do the math.

Next, I called an emergency session with my second in command who can’t be named. We met in the situation room.

“This is not our finest hour,” I growled in my best Winston Churchill BBC radio voice. (Actually, before seven in the morning, I look a bit like Winston Churchill.) “Never has so much toilet paper been owed to so many by so few.”

I was just getting into the rhythms of my moral-building speech when my second in command interrupted with some down-to-earth tactical issues. “We have to establish a reliable supply and then plan a route,” he said. “And we have to do this now. Our men are depending on us.”

My second in command is always so practical in a crisis.

“Land, air or water?” I asked, feeling the panic mounting in my own bladder.

He scratched his head. “Well, if it’s speed we’re after, we should try air. We can use that old DC 9 you stored away in garage just in case we ever had need for it. Surely we need it now.”

“But that thing hasn’t been used in years,” I said. “It could be dangerous.”

“Madam,” he said sternly. “When the men wake up, they’ll be desperate to go to the bathroom. We have exactly four squares of toilet paper left in the house. With all due respect, this situation developed because someone didn’t listen to the chatter and failed to restock supplies.”

He was right. I’d failed my men. I hung my head in shame.

“But you’re right about the DC 9,” continued my second in command. I perked up. “The DC 9 is risky. I suppose we could go overland. Yes, we can saddle up the mules and take the Himalayan route. It won’t be easy, but it’s our best chance. I’ll make the journey.”

“No,” I said, stopping him in his tracks. “I’m the one who put the men and the men’s bladders in danger. This is my journey to make. You stay and feed the men their Cheerios when they wake up.”

And so I saddled up the mules and made the overland journey through the mountain pass to my supply base at the grocery store. We were in luck that morning: supplies were in, routes were clear and the weather was fine.

When I returned to base with the jumbo pack of triple-ply, the men were there to meet me, waving their hands and smiling. Their bladders were saved. Hooray! All of our bladders were saved. Hooray! I was the hero. Long live triple ply.

For a man with a widescreen, size matters

When it comes to the differences between men and women, I’ve never been one to evoke the Men-are-from-Mars-Women-from-Venus thesis. This isn’t because I know or care one whit about the differences between the sexes.

It’s just that these Venus and Mars books never seem to tell you what planet the slackers and the slobs are from. (Slackers are from Neptune; Slobs are from Uranus? Tell me for heaven’s sake. I want to know!)

Sorry, but if these people who write these books aren’t going to have the decency to include me and those who surround me in their fashionable theories, then I’m probably not going to pay much attention to their books. Simple as that.

That said, there are moments when you have to wonder if there isn’t a smidgen of truth this Venus and Mars business. This occurs to me whenever I’m in the presence of a man, a woman and a widescreen plasma TV.

In case you haven’t noticed, they’re all the rage these days, these supersized television sets. Forget the old rabbit ears and the floor-model cabinetry from the seventies. We’ve entered the era of the plasma, the LCD and a rear-projection wide-screen. It’s all so twenty-first century.

But what interests me about these modern widescreen TVs is the way they seem to divide us along the fault-lines of gender. It’s not as simple as saying men like widescreen TVs and women don’t.

Women, once they’ve seen them, like their widescreen plasmas as much as men do. No, the differences I’ve observed appear more in the way men and women perceive their widescreen TV. It’s almost like they’re talking two different languages.

Women, upon seeing a widescreen for the first time, will likely comment on something simple like picture quality. “My,” you might hear a woman say. “What a clear picture.”

If she wanted to be macho about it, she might remark on the screen’s dpi count. But women, being women, don’t need macho acronyms to make their point.

Women will also be interested in the thinness of these screens. Again, being women, they’ll be thinking about where in the room the thing will fit and how heavy it will be to lug into the house. Practical concerns for such a sexy toy, I hear you muse, but this is a woman’s way.

Men, on the other hand, focus on very different questions. I wouldn’t want to be accused of double entendre here, but has anyone else noticed how men tend to obsess over the number of, ahem, inches on the widescreens?

Just go into a widescreen showroom and listen to them talking about these TVs. Men are obsessed with the size. And they aren’t talking feet or centimeters, either. It’s all about the inches.

A real man wants to know is whether it’s a thirty six inch, forty two inch or – saints preserve us - a seventy-four inch rear projection. And once they’ve got their many-inched widescreen, it’s a rite of passage to compare notes with other men. You know the sort of thing: “Hey buddy, how many inches is yours?”

So, ladies and gentlemen, I guess we have incontrovertible evidence that size does matter, at least to men. Now, if we could just get them to let go of the remote control.

Tempest in a B-cup

I suppose it had to happen sooner or later, the dreaded bra fitting. On the list of womanly things that must be done, the bra fitting ranks right up there with Pap smear and the mammogram.

It’s always the same with these things. You know you should, but you’re always lookin for a good excuse not to. (I have the cats to de-worm and that old stump in the backyard really should be pulled up.)

In the case of the Pap and the mammogram, avoidance techniques only get you so far before guilt kicks in. (They say you should go once a year...) If you don’t act on this guilt, worry will sink her claws into you. (So-and-So’s cousin found a lump last month…) And if you fail to act on worry, you’ll be clobbered by terror. (Oh my God, what’s that? A lump? A tumour? Am I going to die?)

And, if you’re like me, you’ll hoof it down to your GP’s office and end up in one of those excruciating “through-the-stirrups” conversations. (So, Doctor, tell me, any new developments in the world of gynaecological instrumentation?)

With the bra fitting, the enemy isn’t disease or gynaecological instrumentation. It’s physics, but more on that in a minute.

When I first heard the infamous Oprah treatise that 85 percent of women are wearing the wrong bra size, I harrumphed and thought, yeah right, a tempest in a B-cup. I surveyed my own top drawer and decided, no, I’m not letting Oprah or anyone else browbeat me into new bra-buying behaviours.

So confident was I in the fit of my bras that one day I nipped into a bra shop to prove the point. And there I encountered my very first bra-tender. In case you’re not familiar with bra-tenders they are the big guns, the black belts, the crack commandos of bra fitting.

Their purpose is singular: to wean you off your old ill-fitting ways and get you into something that supports, lifts and pushes together. (The old Jane Russell project of lifting and separating is so last century). And once step foot on their turf, you can kiss your privacy bye bye; ditto any preconceived notions about the way you think your bra should fit.

“How’s that one feel?” one of them called out as I struggled in the changing room to get the first bra on. The curtain was then ripped opened and I was shunted to and fro, prodded and snapped until my bra-tender made her assessment. “You need a bigger cup. I’ll get one.” Yes, I thought, and fill it with bourbon while you’re at it.

As the fitting continued, I learned that I am one of Oprah’s infamous 85 percent, part of the great unsupported masses who have made the mistake of wearing a bra too big on the circumference and too small in the cup. And here is where the physics comes in. I can sum it up for you in one simple but devastating concept: gravity.

Gravity, my girlfriends, is not our friend. As that too-big bra band creeps upward on our backs, everything out front heads south. And it gets worse. If we do nothing to correct this gravity-fuelled southward journey, the journey could turn out to be one-way.

But there is good news too. According to my bra tender, gravity can be beaten if you keep the circumference snug and increase the cup size when necessary. So, I’m afraid that Oprah was right about this one. The choice is yours. And I know that mine doesn’t involve an early retirement in Florida.

Bye Bye Cool

July 1. That was the day that COOL rolled out of my life once and for all. And as I watched it riding off into the sunset, I knew I'd be feeling the loss for a long, long time.

By COOL I mean the 1965 Mercedes Benz 190C I owned with He Who Can't be Named. We bought it spontaneously a couple of years ago in a knee-jerk to reaction to turning the big 4-0.

"We may be for forty," we told each other. "But we're still COOL."

And so we were. This thing was a four-door, white-with-chrome trim, mobster car that wouldn't have looked out of place in a black-and-white Brit crime flick circa '66. It had 48,000 miles and barely a spot of rust. And it even had the Merc ring on the tip of the hood.

This was a big car in every sense. Unlike the silent, hermetically sealed luxury car of today, this thing drove like a Sherman Tank. The motor didn't purr; it rumbled. And here's the clincher: It had a trunk big enough for five dead bodies, (fictional of course.) Those kind of cars don't come along often and at 40, we couldn't resist.

During our short stint of ownership, we'd fired it up, roll down the windows, and cruise the city in the summer, waving at on-lookers and listening to golden oldies AM radio. The Everly Brothers, Sha-na-na and The Beatles.

The car didn't go fast and sometimes it needed coaxing when the light turned green, but like a pet who's been with the family for 18 years, you never expected too much and were just glad it was still out and about.

It wasn't in bad shape; it just needed a good tune up, a few new sparkplugs and some carb work, nothing an old-school mechanic couldn't have handled.

Sometimes at the end of a sun-soaked day when were driving down Spring Garden Road, listening to the tinny tunes and seeing the young babes on sidewalks dressed in retro sixties garb, it almost was 1965. Those moments were golden, COOL.

But, alas, we didn't have the COOL lifestyle to match our COOL car. For starters, we have two kids and the '65 Merc had no seat belts in the back. There were laps belts in front but no airbags. I guess they had a different definition of safety back in '65.

The other problem was the lack of time for TLC. Having a car of this vintage is like having another child. It demands your time and attention which is in such short supply when you're a parents.

The saddest part of this story is that we already had the car we needed, a practical vehicle with all the safety features, room for kids and their stuff; a car, in other words, badly lacking in COOL.

I believe, the industry buzz word for our family car is Cute Ute, which is a catchy little marketing term for what is essentially a dull car. It's not a flashy SUV or one of those spiffy lifted-up station wagons. It's not roomy like a mini-van, and it certainly isn't executive or sporty.

It's just a Cute Ute, something they probably market to the "Yummy Mummy." Yummy Mummy? Ok, now I'm going to throw up.

Anyway, we buffed up the old Merc and said good-bye to COOL. It did my heart good to see that the people who bought it really were COOL. The old Merc deserved at least that.

And now when I torque around town in my Cute Ute, I sometimes tune into Golden Oldies AM and remember the days when I was COOL.