Stomp and Soweto Gospel Choir

Took two of the grandchildren to see Stomp last night. The kids are 9 & 11, and were captivated by the performance. The 9 yr old was in danger of falling out of her seat she’d get leaning so far forward to keep track of all that was going on. I had seen it before, and was not at all bored by seeing it again. It is well worth seeing by anyone who has any love of rhythm.

And I took the youngest, who won’t be 4 until May, to see the Soweto Gospel Choir at the end of February. She’s my singing and dancing girl. She loved the singing and the tribal dress, and ended up out in the aisle trying to follow the dance sequences so she could show her mom when she got home.

I love introducing the kids to new things. Broadening your horizons constantly is one of the only ways you are going to find what is your passion in life. And for most of us, even if we can’t make music a career, we certainly benefit from all the things we can get from music – peace, joy, exhilaration, hope . . . the list is huge.

I don’t know how I’d get along without music.

Dancing Girl with one of the Soweto Choir.

Civilian rights and dash cams

I’m beginning to wonder why we’re not seeing more legal charges against police officers with the use of dash cams in the cruisers.

I sometimes watch those TV shows – World’s Most Amazing Video-type of program – and frequently they’ll have a show that seems to be mainly taken from police cameras. I simply cannot believe what I see there.

Recently there was a sequence where two police officers completely emptied their revolvers at an unarmed, fleeing person who had been pulled over for some minor infraction and then gotten stupid and resisted (not violently) and run. It was pretty scary too, to see that those bozos didn’t hit anything once with all those bullets. What if they had really needed to hit something to save their lives? Who is training these incompetents?

There have been countless videos showing police officers needlessly crashing their cruisers into a suspect’s car and doing major damage to both vehicles and to both drivers. Who pays for these cruisers that they ruin without need? And since it seems that they crash them either out of a disinclination to have to chase the guy if he exits and runs (it’s also amazing how many *really* fat police officers there are) or out of adolescent spite and testosterone overdosing – who chose these guys to be peace officers in the first place, and who is making sure that they are fit to remain in that position?

And for those police officers that aren’t really fat – has anyone else notice that some forces seem to have these Schwarzeneggar types pretty consistently? I know the stories of steroid use/abuse on the police force in my own city are in every hard-core gym in town, and just looking at the types that are on some of the other forces, it’s pretty obvious that Mother Nature is getting a large helping hand. Are these guys ever tested for steroid abuse when thy flip out on some poor citizen? Are they tested for anything? Ever?

Pretty scary stuff . . . . and that’s before we even start talking about the recent (over)use of Tazers and stun guns, which seem to be turning out to be just new, shiny, fascinating – and dangerous – toys for big boys, and they can’t resist using them whether they need to or not.

I asked a police sergeant I knew years ago, out of curiosity, how many men he was in charge of.  He gave me the strangest look, and said “Only two.  The rest are animals.”  If that’s the situation in ‘Toronto The Good’, how much more dreadful must it be in other places?

Work words

I am also getting distinctly depressed with the prevalence of “moo-zarella” and “halapeenos” (or worse, jala-pe-nos) on cooking shows. Can’t people even articulate the words that are to do with the business they are in?

In real estate, and especially on HGTV, most everything french gets a french pronunciation except foyer, which real estate people insist on pronouncing ‘foy-er’ instead of ‘foy-ay’. Why is that?

And clothing? Good grief!! The number of shops that advertise ‘mock-neck’ sweaters is too numerous to keep track of. I keep trying to tell them that if I had a ‘mock-neck’ my head would really be in trouble – but they just don’t get it. Fabric names get butchered beyond belief.

Dinosaurs and curmudgeons, unite! Do not do business with those whose ignorance about their work is so deep that they can’t even talk about it properly.

Lazy journalists and educators

Has the plural “there are” and its contraction “there’re” been completely erased from the English language? Even SpellChek notes the contraction as an error.

I hear even the supposed best and most literate journalists, newsreaders and commentators using the singular “there is” and its contraction “there’s” in place of the correct plural form.

I find this distinctly depressing.

It’s doubly depressing when the majority of people I can find who actually speak reasonably good English were all educated in foreign countries, whose standards of English instruction are far better than those in North American schools.

I suppose it’s not the end of the world, but it would really bolster my confidence in the education my children and grandchildren were getting if I could find a teacher who could spell.

Not yet ready for prime time

Why is it that so many tech toy and computer companies seem to get away with putting things out for sale that are completely unready to be used? They seem to do it over and over again, from what I read, and I have problems accepting the fact that these corporate decision makers have no more respect for their customers than to throw them in as lemming beta-testers for each new product that they want to appear to have beaten their rivals to the market with.

Have consumers taught these companies that they can get away with this kind of disrespectful behaviour – and repeatedly? Are there people so desperate for the next new thing that they’ll buy it whether it works or not?

I had forgotten how often I had read these things when I bought my Archos media hoo-hah before Christmas. After numerous software upgrades and the tech support phone number being removed from the website, I gave up. It sits here, in its little black bag, unused, with it’s owner hoping that they’ll get their act together before I go off on the long trip I bought it for.

BAH!!

And if you want to see what happened with that, and the service -or lack thereof- that I endured on my trip from both Archos and Sony (why did I ever buy anthing from Sony when I know their reputation is so bad?) you can check it out on my trip blog at: grannym.wordpress.com