The Oppenheimer Report 5/28/13

I am writing this on my new (and apparently obsolete) computer which, for the time being is running fine. Windows 8 continues to be a problem for me and I was not until yesterday could I even load a word processing software onto this computer. Everything must be done online these days, and I do not like this one bit. Basically, I was unable to write on this computer for weeks because I could not download the large MS Office file that includes the word processing software I prefer to use. I also bought a computer without a touch screen, and Windows 8 was designed for touch screen computers and tablets. It is not “mouse friendly.” Thank you Microsoft may I have another! Heaven forbid I should be one step behind in our technological race to extinction! There is simply too much for an old fool like me to learn. I need a password to open my computer, a password for my email accounts, a password to access my passwords, and I am having trouble keeping track of them all. Frankly there really isn’t much to hide on my computer anyway, so I might as well just leave it unprotected. OK, there was that one midget hermaphrodite porn site, but everyone has a few skeletons in their hard drive. I believe anybody who thinks a couple of passwords will protect them from the omnipresent threat of identity theft is barking up the wrong tree with both oars out of the water.

 On this subject of advancing technology, my favorite pet peeve, I am presently reading David Sedaris’ latest book Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls. Sedaris is by far my favorite contemporary comedic writer, and in his usual tongue in cheek fashion he discusses cell phones and their increasing ability to multi task. He said he skipped IPhones 4 and 5 and is holding out for #7, which he understand includes a Taser. Then he will be able to email someone, call someone, text someone, take a picture, watch a sports event, and defend against an attacker, all at the same time. The other day Shauna and I were in Huntsville and she realized that she’d forgotten to record some must see program, like Real Housewives of Saskatoon, on our “PVR” at home. No problem, because she has an application on her Blackberry, which by the way she loves more than she loves me, and it enables her to remotely access our PVR and program whatever recording she desires. We could be in the wilderness, if said wilderness had cell service, and be comforted in the knowledge that when we returned home we wouldn’t have missed one cat fight, one dramatic pause with music, one random murder, or scandalous celebrity meltdown. At what point do we lose control of our lives when we become so reliant on this “labor saving” technology? Do I really need an electric machine to peel my potatoes?   

 That EF5 tornado that leveled Moore, Oklahoma was something to behold, wasn’t it? Given the short warning, the path it took, and the long amount of time it was on the ground, I am surprised more people were not killed.  How strange as well that it followed basically the same path as a similar destructive tornado that hit the area back in 1999. Weather junkie that I have become, I just watched a video entitled “Inside the Tornado,” which I found on the Weather Channel website, and I could not believe what I was seeing. Somone, probably an experienced storm chaser, was able to film this tornado as it passed directly over the camera. I do not know how this was possible without having the camera destroyed, but it is the wildest natural disaster video I can ever remember viewing. What immediately struck me was how loud it was.

 
Did you see the video of that Muslim extremist Adelbolago calmly “discussing” his brutal act just after he and another man butchered a British soldier to death with a meat cleaver and knives in the streets of London? He claims the act was retribution for all the Muslims who have been killed at the hands of British soldiers. Now they’re saying this guy was deported from Kenya in 2010 and may have links to Al-Qaeda. How do we let these guys get in to our countries? Last week I spoke of the increasing use of face recognition technology in day to day life, and I had an Orwellian thought. After I watched that disturbing phone video of this man calmly discussing why he chose to slaughter another man like livestock, on the streets of a major international city, to bring attention to his plight, I wondered how long it will be before there is an application for our cell phones that allows us to target the monsters and the nut jobs. Perhaps we could call it BigFaceBrotherBook, but I’ll leave it to the twenty-somethings of Silicone Valley to come up with a catchy name. All one needs to do is take a cell phone picture and hit send to homeland security for verification. I don’t think we’re all that far from this now, because we are all being recorded almost everywhere in public. I guess this would make every public place the new battlefield. Final notes … there was a hung jury in the sentencing phase of the much hyped Jody Arias trial. They just couldn’t agree to put her to death. And speaking of face recognition, I heard the other day that actor Brad Pitt may suffer from that weird disease that prohibits people from being able to recognize familiar faces, making him I suppose a less than ideal customer for my new homeland security app.   

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 5/20/13

Happy Victoria Day! Although I heard on the news that Newfoundland had had snow last weekend, up here in the GWN we are finally experiencing the seasonal weather we have so far been missing. I put the dock down yesterday and fired up the dingy for its shakedown cruise. Flowers have been planted, trees pruned, and our rather pathetic lawn has been mown for the first time of the season.

Last Friday I played four of my songs at the musician’s showcase in Burk’s Falls and although the house was not as packed as it has been for previous showcases, there was a healthy crowd of 40 or 50 listeners, and I am told by Shauna that I did not suck. And she would tell me. Though I have played in public many times over the last thirty years, I am always a little more nervous when I know that people are actually listening. You know you’re in trouble when some drunk comes up while you are in the middle of a song and loudly asks if you know any Johnny Cash. I played four songs written over my songwriting “career” to date, and the last song I performed I wrote less than two weeks ago. It is always a challenge to play new songs in public, because I am still tweaking the lyrics, but sometimes I’ve got to leap before I look, with both oars out of the water. One of the great things about this showcase is that I have met some gifted local musicians and songwriters and have come to realize that I am not the only talented genius in the area.

One of my favorite open mics in Toronto, which no longer exists, was held at a sports bar in downtown Toronto called Grace O’Malley's. The reason it was so enjoyable for me was because of the host, a country singer/songwriter named Tim Hicks. Open mic hosts can sometimes be real jerks, largely because it’s not any musician’s first choice for work. As a host you are dealing with a lot of wannabe musicians, and some of the acts are simply atrocious. A good host must diplomatically weed out or abbreviate the worst acts while keeping everyone happy. In most cases open mics are not designed to foster new talent but rather to boost liquor sales on a slow night. If they are successful in this latter endeavor, then the performances often suffer. Tim ran a good open mic. He knew how to give someone the hook without really offending them, he was patient, and he is a very good artist as well. I was in touch with him recently and he seems to be doing well as a professional musician. That is something not many people can say. He’s had some success with several of his songs, won some regional country music awards, and is now getting some serious industry interest out of Nashville. His song and video Stronger Beer has received more than 250,000 hits on YouTube. You can Google it - it’s a tongue in cheek comparison between American and Canadian pop culture. His “new country” song Get By is an ITune top 160 right now for downloads, and I think a pretty good, radio friendly song. I never thought I’d see the day when artistic success was measured in hits and downloads, but that is the music business in the 21^st century. Last night Shauna and I watched the Billboard Music Awards, and if that is the direction pop music is taking then heaven help us. Kids these days. I wish I was cute and nineteen, I’d be famous!

Final notes. There was an earthquake late last week in Quebec not far from the Ontario border, and people as far west as Toronto and Cleveland felt the rumble. We don’t usually think of the Northeast as prone to earthquakes, but I understand Western New York sits on or near a major fault line, and if memory serves me correctly (as it does less and less often), the University of Buffalo has an earthquake monitoring station. Saw an interesting 60 Minutes segment last night on advances is face recognition technology. I always thought face recognition was something that was only used for national security, but as it turns out, face recognition technology has become cheaper and more available, and it is now being used by big businesses to target potential customers. Privacy schmivacy, when it comes to selling jeans, anything goes.

Toronto mayor Rob Ford made CNN last week after allegations there was a cell phone video showing the mayor smoking crack with a drug dealer. Channeling with former DC mayor Marion Barry are we? No confirmations either way, but Toronto media is not  giving the story a lot of airplay. Ford has a lot of enemies and bad press rolls off him like water off a duck's back. Speaking of Toronto, the Leafs broke our hearts (once again), losing Game 7 in Boston, in overtime, after they had dominated the entire game and were up by 3 points! Arrrgh!!! Finally, as I finish writing this report, an F4 tornado has just blown through Oklahoma near Oklahoma City and the damage is obviously severe. My heart goes out to all the victims of this latest natural disaster.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 5-13-13

Go Leafs Go!

It’s feast or famine up here in the Great White North. Two weeks ago we were experiencing severe flooding and now there is a fire ban in the area because it is so dry. Half the trees I planted last season have died for lack of water, proving that I truly do have a brown thumb. As I began this report on Thursday morning, the skies were grey and the weatherman was calling for rain from a Colorado low rolling in. On Saturday the thermometer had plunged thirty-five degrees and now there are frost warnings. I make the same mistake every year; assuming that the hot dry weather means that winter is over, I go out and buy a bunch of flowers or put my germinated seeds outside to harden, and then BANG, the weather changes. Good thing I don’t try to make my living as a farmer. Conventional wisdom up here is to hold off planting until the end of May, but nobody ever accused me of being wise.

Murderess Jody Arias was convicted of first degree murder in the killing of Travis Alexander in Arizona. While I did not follow the high profile trial closely, I think anyone on a jury could see that her story did not add up. After the Casey Anthony acquittal last year and the O.J. fiasco back in the 90s, I was beginning to have my doubts about the criminal justice system in America. This time I think the jurors got it right. Back when I still lived in Buffalo, my one and only experience with jury duty was as a juror in a murder trial. Some guy had shot another guy to death in a bar, appropriately named The Peyton Place Lounge, and was pleading self defense. He claimed he’d never used a gun before in his life, yet he managed to shoot the victim in the heart and lung, in a dark bar, from a distance of fifty feet, in the back, with a handgun his girlfriend just happened to be carrying in her purse. First of all, the victim was walking away from him at the time, so it was hard to believe this murder was self defense, and secondly, it’s not easy to kill a man with a small caliber handgun, in a dark bar, from fifty feet. Beginner’s luck I guess. I sat on that jury for over a month, listened to ballistics testimony, and coroner’s reports, and police reports, and eyewitness accounts ad nauseam, and shortly before Christmas, we convicted the guy of first degree murder. Anyone who thinks that sitting on a jury is exciting has never done it. Even though this was a murder trial, it was excruciatingly boring. Ultimately, what sunk the defendant was ballistics testimony, and during jury selection the defense must have overlooked the fact that five of the jurors were experienced marksmen. Thankfully, the DA did a good job of presenting the case against the defendant. Of course, we as jurors were instructed not to watch the news or read newspapers during the trial, but after the trial we found out that the defendant had had a long history of violence. He’d kidnapped women and handcuffed them to the rafters of his attic for days, he probably shot his grandmother to death with a shotgun, although there was not enough evidence to convict, and there were several other suspicious murders that had his fingerprints all over them. In this recent Arias trial, the jurors were allowed to go home every night, and I can’t believe they were able to completely ignore all the press about the case. These days, with Twitter, and cell phones, and the internet, and all the different ways we are bombarded with information, it seems unlikely that somebody on that jury did not hear something from the outside world about this trial. Everybody loves a train wreck. What I found interesting in this Arias trial is that in Arizona, jurors are allowed to question the witnesses, including the defendant.

This coming Friday, I will be performing a few of my songs at The Village Tavern in nearby Burk’s Falls, and it should be an interesting experience. Unlike the noisy open mics I am used to playing, this showcase is a venue where people might actually be listening. I have been writing songs now for well over thirty years, and I think I will play one of the first songs I wrote, one I wrote about fifteen years ago, and one I wrote several weeks ago. The most recent song, tentatively entitled “Better” is in the polishing stage, and the lyrics are as yet unfinished. It would be much easier to play songs I am used to playing in public, but that is too much in my comfort zone. Playing a new song in public will be challenging, but it’s the only way I will grow as a performer. What is it they say … do one thing every day that scares you? I scare myself every day, just looking in the mirror. As I sign off tonight, it is Sunday night, it’s snowing lightly, and the Toronto Maple Leafs just tied up the series with the Boston Bruins 3-3. Do I dare to dream? Game 7 is in Boston Monday night, so I may not be dreaming long, but GO LEAFS GO!!!!

-Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 5/6/13

The other day I was in the retail wonderland which is Canadian Tire, or as some Canadians call it “Crappy Tire”, and I decided to buy our dog Jasper a new toy. She is enamored of a stuffed, multi-colored fish with a rope loop attached at each end, which we have dubbed “fishy rope”. We are now on fishy rope #2, but try as I might I have not found an exact replica of this toy in over five years. Jasper has a pile of toys but she only really plays with four or five of them. The rest of them she simply takes out of her toy bin and distributes around the house in such a way as to be the greatest tripping hazard. Fishy rope and “froggie” the croaking stuffed frog are her top two, and if either of these two goes missing, she falls into a spiritual decline. Fishy rope is getting pretty disgusting, and although it has been washed numerous times, it is rapidly decomposing like spoiled fruit. So, the other day I found what I thought would be a suitable replacement (I’d purchased fishy ropes 1 and 2 at Canadian Tire as well), and I thought I was buying a stuffed beaver with rope loops. What better toy for a Canadian dog than a stuffed beaver, right? When I showed it to Shauna later she started to laugh, because what I had in fact purchased was a stuffed flying squirrel. After all the problems we have had with flying squirrels, perhaps this is some kind of karmic retribution. Of course Jasper loves it and it has taken a place of honor among the other top five.

I heard a disturbing fact reported on the news the other night: 38000 people committed suicide last year America, an all time record. Men are reported to be four times more likely than women to kill themselves, and it is becoming a public health crisis. Also notable in this statistic is the alarming increase in recent veterans who are committing suicide. Perhaps this escalation is due to the recent financial crisis, or maybe it’s just getting harder for people to cope with the stress of day to day life. I’d be interested to see if there has been a rise in this statistic in countries where the quality of life is much lower. In America. people throw hissy fits when their internet service is disrupted for a day, or the lights go off during the Superbowl. Juxtapose that with a woman in Afghanistan who simply wants to avoid being raped and beaten by men who still believe the earth is flat.

And speaking of things I should not complain about but do (because I live in a free country and am spoiled rotten), I mentioned a few weeks ago that I recently purchased a new laptop, loaded with Windows 8. Once again Microsoft has produced a bad operating system, and there are entire websites dealing with complaints about Windows 8. I am now awaiting some kind of quick fix by my computer friend, who strongly recommended that switch back to the much more reliable Windows 7, a system that worked just fine for me. One of the problems, according to my guy, is that Windows 8 was designed with touch screens in mind, and if one‘s computer does not have one, it is not user friendly. Ya gotta love advancing technology. I got so sick of trying to work with the new computer that I am writing this on my old computer with the damaged keyboard. I went out and bought a wireless keyboard for twenty bucks to and now I’m back in business. The thing that irks me the most about all of this is the pathetic customer service Microsoft offers. I needed to load a word processing software onto the new computer, because for the first time ever Windows did not provide it. This is when I learned that one cannot purchase a software disk anymore - everything is downloaded from the internet. This can be a problem if, like I do, one lives in a remote area with limited internet access. Downloading 2 gigabytes of software can take forever, and in my case, after four hours of trying, I got an error message indicating that those fours hours were wasted. My internet provider charges me according to the amount of data I download, so this was a lose, lose for me. Good luck trying to get a satisfactory result from the Microsoft order taker in Pakistan. I finally cancelled my order.

Singer songwriter George “No Show” Jones passed away recently and was commemorated at the Grand Ol Opry last week. The guy wrote some great songs, and one of his friends made the point that Jones was a country song. In other words, he’d lived the songs he wrote. Before he sobered up, Jones got the nickname “No Show” because he drank a lot and was notorious for missing his gigs. 11 ½ years after 9-11 new World Trade center presently under construction was topped off last week, making it (I believe) the tallest building in the western hemisphere. Finally, it is that time of year when the bugs come out and the scratching begins. I bought a Skeeter Vac a few years ago, and that helps. Someone suggested burning Neem seed oil as an effective way to kill mosquitoes, so I‘m trying that. I also bought one of those clip on mosquito repellants made by Off. If anyone figure out how to eradicate black flies, I’m all ears. I do not like wearing netting over my head.

Jasper … go kill the flying squirrel!

-Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED