The Oppenheimer Report - 12/26/11

Years ago, when Shauna and I were still making our annual pilgrimage out to Banff, Alberta we stayed at the same resort for 12 years. In keeping with her tendency to exhaustively research any facility in which we planned to stay, Shauna chose a place called the Douglas Fir Resort and Chalets for its view, its facilities, its competent staff, and for the good room rate she was able to negotiate. Banff hotels tended to be a bit pricey in those days; at the time, it was a popular international destination for a lot of European and Japanese tourists. With the most recent economic downturn, I’m not sure it still is, but the Canadian Rockies really are spectacular. Anyhow, our stays at the DFR became longer and longer. We grew very fond of the staff, we knew all of the maintenance guys, all of the front desk clerks, all the managers, and got along famously with just about everybody who worked there. Then one day it all changed. A new manager was hired and within a short time, he managed to undo all the goodwill everyone else at the resort had built up. He not only alienated us, he became legendary in the community for his assholiness. The man was a creep and a lousy manager to boot. Within one year from the time he took over at the DFR, all he managed was to drive away every good and effective employee the DFR had to offer. For our last two years out there, that jerk made our stay miserable, largely because he made his staff so miserable. I suppose he resented that we were regulars and that we had for years been given a proprietary rate, though we were off-season customers and really were no trouble. The final straw, after seeing all of our favorite staff members defect one by one, was when this bozo started spreading vicious rumors about us in a feeble attempt to turn the staff against us. We stopped going out to Banff for many reasons, but first and foremost was the negative impact this one man had on the place we loved to stay. They say that karma is a bitch, and the other day, we got word from several of our friends out in Banff that the prick was finally fired. It was as if Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz had just dumped a pail of water on the wicked witch, so consistently gleeful were the reports we received from local residents. We came to find out that nobody in Banff liked this guy. All his machinations and misdeeds were finally revealed when the last original employee recently quit and the Japanese owners were apprised of some “discrepancies” in his exit interview. Now, I’d be astonished if anybody in the community will provide him with a favorable reference. First, North Korea’s Kim “Little Elvis” Jung Il croaks and within a week, the much despised-manager of the DFR is summarily removed. Talk about your two-fers! The DFR was an excellent facility, family-friendly, with a great location on Banff’s scenic Tunnel Mountain, and we sincerely hope that they soon regain their fine status as one of the better facilities in the Banff resort community. It’s remarkable what one person can do to destroy years of goodwill.

I don’t recall, but I believe I ended the last report of 2010 hoping that 2011 would be a better year. Certainly the struggling economy has to be front and center. When I reflect on the past year, the events that stick out in my mind are the natural disasters: the F5 tornado that flattened Joplin, Missouri, the devastating earthquake and resulting tsunami that hammered Japan and caused the Fukishima nuclear power plant disaster, the record-setting floods in Australia, and the uncontrollable wildfire that literally incinerated the town of Slave Lake, Alberta. It was a banner year for Bieber and a train wreck for Sheen. Dr. Conrad Murray’s conviction sent a sobering message to other pill-pushers in star-f-cked LA: physician do no harm. It was a year of the Arab Spring, when like dominoes, tyrants were toppled one by one. It was the year when angry countrymen around the world took to the streets to demand accountability from their governments, a time when leadership in the United States and Europe seemed largely absent. Americans occupied everything from Wall Street to Main Street, but little changed. I watched the movie Too Big to Fail the other night, which is a re-enactment of the events that led up to the 2008 mortgage backed securities crisis. It made me bristle. Never before did I grasp the financial Armageddon we almost set in play with our fiscal irresponsibility. It was the year my mom died. Other notable obits: Apple’s Stephen Jobs, Muammar Gaddafi, Liz Taylor, and Wilson Great batch (who?). Finally, 2011 was the year I made it my daily practice to acknowledge my thanks for each day I am alive and healthy, married to my wife, safe and free, and blessed with good and honorable parents and friends. My hope for 2012 and beyond is that we deal with our universal crises in leadership, that America fixes her broken democracy; that somehow the unthinkable happens and peace and harmony become “viral.” And yes, as always, I aspire to be a better, kinder man. Like that’s going to happen. Happy New Year to one and all.

-Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2011 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 12/19/11

Some Christmasy thoughts …

I learned a new word the other day: Krampus. My cartoonist friend Patrick from Canmore, Alberta mentioned the word in a Facebook post, prompting me to look it up. I found out that Krampus is the Anti-Santa, and he looks like the demonic creature from that scary movie Jeepers Creepers. I always assumed that if children were on the naughty end of the naughty-nice spectrum, Santa put coal in their stocking, and that was that. Getting dissed by Santa seems humiliating enough, right? Apparently, that’s the Disney version. Krampus is the dark little secret of Christmas, and it dates way back to the you-ve-got-to-be-tough-to-play-with-the-big-boys-Christmas-isn’t-for-pussies-or-whiners, nihilistic Germanic mythology. Remember, Hansel and Gretel, and that evil, deceptive witch who tried to eat them after their stepmother banishes them to the woods? Those Germans know how to tell character-building bedtime stories. According to Austrian folk lore, Krampus helps Santa out by roaming the streets shortly before Christmas to weed out bad and undeserving children. When he comes across a naughty child, he stuffs him or her in his bag, and takes them back to his lair, presumably to peel off their skin with his razor sharp teeth and eat them alive like string cheese. O.K., perhaps I extrapolate. It’s a win-win for Christmas, because Santa can then focus on being jolly and rewarding the truly deserving, while Krampus clears out all the bad karma AND gets enough meat to fill his freezer for the next year. Basically, it’s a Wes Craven movie with a happy ending. I say forget roaming the streets; just troll the toy section of any Wal-Mart, plenty of brats there. I wonder if Mr. Krampus could be persuaded to take out some of the naughty adults as well. How about eviscerating that greedy former CEO from Confederation Life featured on 60 Minutes a few weeks ago? Maybe he could give Bernie Madoff-with-the-money a nibble as well. Eat the rich; joy to the world. Occupy Wal-Mart!

Recently, I was at the supermarket reading the ingredients on the label of some seemingly healthful food, which, as it turns out it clearly was not, and in the background there was that canned Christmas music we hear everywhere. The Twelve Days of Christmas was playing, perhaps sung by Alvin and the Chipmunks, and I found myself involuntarily humming the tune as I read the ingredients. All those unpronounceable chemicals: “…on the fifth day of Christmas my can good gave to meeee, 12 grams of fat, monosodium glutamate, sodium bisulphate, nose hair of troll, and a flat-u-lence guar-an-tee. Don’t judge me, we all have different ways of coping during the holidays; this is mine.

Tomorrow night we light the first candles of Hanukkah (Quadaffi is the only name I know that has more spellings), so Happy Chanukah to all my fellow tribesmen, and a merry Kwanzaa, Christmas, etc. to the rest of you. While Christmas has never been a favorite of mine, mostly because it puts so much pressure on families to give and receive stuff, I do embrace the sputtering hope of universal goodwill. Any holiday can be an opportunity to open our hearts right? Any day of the year for that matter. I’ll probably call my friend Edmond who is homebound in Buffalo and pretty sick with MS to remind myself that his attitude is usually better than mine. All I want is what I’ve got, and maybe a little less. I leave you once again with the holiday exclamation I coined last year: Ho! Ho! Ho! and don’t be one! And remember kids, quit yer whining about that new XBox game you want or you may end as an hors d’ouevre at the Krampus Christmas party!

Peace on Earth … sounds good to me.

The Oppenheimer Report - 12/12/11

We’re slowly making progress on the pump house after a few minor setbacks, including the necessity to divert an underground spring. That spring may have been the reason our old shed became a leaning tower of Pisa. It’s always something. I remember when they first broke ground to build this house, we got a call from the builder to inform us that he had hit bedrock while excavating for the basement. We were on the phone with him as they drilled pilot holes and blew up some large chunks of granite for removal. No matter what the building project, my experience has been that 80% of the time or more, there are complications. Luckily, this setback was not particularly expensive. Now the footers are set and the structural framing for the floor is down. Hopefully, the weather will co-operate and we will start stacking logs next week. I’m cautiously optimistic.

Our carpenter’s assistant is a crusty old guy (three years older than I) named Rob, who lives nearby. The other day, after we’d taken the debris from the old shed to the dump, I gave Rob a ride home, because Rob doesn’t have a driver’s license anymore (I thought it was better not to ask why). He’s quite a character and I get a kick out of him. To me, he represents the one extreme of the folks up here we affectionately refer to as “colorful locals,” and I’m guessing he was a bit of a wild man in his heyday. A jack of all trades, Rob makes his living as a trapper. He also raises some rare breed of turkeys. Not all turkeys are fit to eat and these turkeys (Royal Palms and various iterations thereof) are more about decoration than food. When we got to his house, he asked me if I’d like to see his birds. He seemed rather proud of them, so what was I going to say? To me, turkeys are waaaay over on the “ugly ass” end of the bird spectrum, just a notch or two above ostriches and vultures, but when Rob opened up the coop, I was surprised by what I saw. These turkeys, apart from the fact that they were enormous, were pretty good looking, I mean for turkeys. He told me that they are dumber than wood, which kind of flies in the face of what I heard on TV just before Thanksgiving when there was that big, turkeys-are-smart-and-have-feelings movement to boycott their omnipresent slaughter. Anyhow, it was a learning experience, and I have a newfound respect for one of Nature's uglier creatures. As Rob so eloquently put it: “Ya gotta watch out how you handle ’em ... Them f-ckers’ll break your arm if you’re not careful.” Duly noted.

Have you ever been ass-dialed? It’s been happening to us a lot lately. People inadvertently dial your number on their cell phone, perhaps by sitting down on the phone and accidentally pressing “redial” or a speed dial number, then you hear muffled conversations through their pants pockets. We now have several answering machine messages with five minutes of this and I wonder if any embarrassing conversations have ever been recorded, albeit through someone’s pants pocket.

In the news, perhaps you caught the lunar eclipse last weekend? If you didn’t, there will be another one in 2014. Russian strongman Vlad Putin didn’t win any popularity contests last week as angry Russians took to the streets to protest what they deemed to be election fraud in the latest parliamentary elections. Putin’s United Russia Party seemed to maintain a clear majority in the election, but Russians are crying foul. I doubt that 30,000 protesters in Moscow will spark a Russian Spring, but what is telling about these protests is that the response from the police was noticeably less violent. Compare this to the blood spilling freely in the streets of Syria at present. Badly coifed former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was sentenced to 14 years in a Federal prison last week. His hair alone got him five years. Let that be a lesson to all you corrupt politicians out there. BTW, how many Wall Street bankers can you name who went to jail? Britain has effectively isolated herself from the rest of Europe by refusing to tow the party line on the Euro, and some experts feel the long term consequences of that decision will be disastrous for the British economy. Only twelve shopping days left til our credit cards are maxed out. Did you see all those pub-crawling Santas roaming around in Manhattan last weekend for SantaCon 2011? Now that’s my kind of event! Talk about confusing the kids! Look Mommy, Santa’s puking in that Salvation Army pot! Truly this is the most wonderful time of the year.



Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2011 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report - 12/5/11

Last week, I mentioned that we were in the process of rebuilding our pump house, and foolishly, I anticipated that the weather would hold out. This building project was delayed because our log guy had to work around hunting season. It’s hard to pull logs out of the woods when every hoser and his brother is out there shooting at anything that moves. Tuesday, in the teeming, cold rain we tore down about 2/3 of the old pump house and burned most of the wood in our fire pit by the lake. I brought the landscape trailer around to the front yard so that when we tore off the roof, I could trail the debris to the dump. I figured that we could finish the demolition on Wednesday and then reconstruction could begin this week. Wednesday morning, I woke up bright and early and whisked open the curtains to see that we were experiencing a blinding snowstorm. By 11AM, we had 8” of snow on the ground and most of the debris I was going to take to the dump was now buried. Funny, because radar showed a storm but forecasted that it would blow well south of Katrine. Unfortunately, predicted paths and actual paths are sometimes vastly different. Looks like we’re going to be doing some shoveling and I’m hoping that the lake effect storms off Georgian Bay don’t stray north and hammer us before this project is completed. We’ll be craning the logs down to the building site and that could be a little difficult in two feet of snow.

Herman Cain couldn’t take the heat so he got out of the kitchen. Indignant over the dirty Washington politics, he opted out of the Republican race last week. Apparently, his campaign manager didn’t properly vet him when it came to the part about skeletons in the closet. I have no idea whether Cain would have been a good candidate, but my guess is that if he couldn’t handle a little Washington mudslinging in the primaries, he probably would have folded if he made it to the big show. By the time the Washington press was finished with Ross Perot, he looked like a whiney flake. I liked Dana Carvey’s wonderful impression of Perot on SNL. Sadly, I fear elections have become more about who has the best spin doctors, and the candidates most capable to actually lead aren’t interested in doing the dance.

Out of curiosity and I suppose greed, the other day I participated in an online auction called Quibids. I’m sure some of you have heard of it. I was intrigued by all the ads telling me that someone had “won” a 46” TV for $2.50, and I wanted to see what was really going on. I don’t really need any more stuff in my already cluttered existence, but I was curious to see what the deal was. The way it works is as follows. First, you purchase bids. The minimum order is $60 for 100 bids. Once you have bids to spend you can go to the online auction and see what is up for grabs. This is not a site for people with a gambling problem, and I found myself down $30 within an hour, because I became swallowed up in the bidding process before I completely understood the proper strategy. The big ticket items are the hardest auctions to win, and there are a lot of hidden fees and service charges even if you do win. I procured a $10 Walmart gift card, but spent $2.40 in bids to get it and then there is an additional $2.99 in shipping charges. Not such a great deal. Bigger ticket items usually draw more bidders and as a novice, I quickly realized that some of those bidders are pros. Still, it is possible to get some big ticket items for a small fraction of their retail value if you get lucky or bid skillfully. I look at my $60 “investment” the same way I look at the money I fritter away at a slot machine in a casino. It’s not an intelligent way to spend money, but I try not to spend too much time assessing the value of my entertainment dollars. My buddy Bob and I spent a fortune on chamber of horror wax museums in Niagara Falls, and I would not say that was great value, but at the time, and under the influence of alcohol, I enjoyed myself. What is most interesting to me is to watch as bidding wars take place. Using programmed bidding - you can set the price at which you begin bidding and have a program automatically make as many bids as you chose - people often spend fifty to one hundred bids to win something, only to be sandbagged by some schmuck who just happens to get lucky and jump in at the end using only a couple of bids. I imagine a lot of bidders are looking for bargains for the holidays, so I’m guessing Quibids will do well this season. I heard that after Black Friday (why black?) and Cyber Monday, Americans had spent $52 Billion so far for holiday gifts. Do you think Santa uses Quibids? Everybody loves a deal.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2011 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED