This is a picture post, once more sharing some of the Facebook photos I selected from the last couple of weeks, to keep myself and my friends cheerful. I took the photos at Mud Lake, near the Champlain Bridge, outside my front door in our driveway and at the Arboretum. April really does have its compensations, especially when the remnants of snow have disappeared three weeks earlier than last year.
There's a long list of things we're not allowed to do just now, as far as the Pandemic is concerned, and the end is by no means in sight yet, although we had our first shots of the Moderna vaccine this week, on April 13th (me) and 16th (Chris), which does give a glimmer of hope. Our booster shots are scheduled for August.
We have been forbidden to cross the Ottawa River unless for medical appointments or for "the transportation of goods" which I doubt includes the garden plants I'd like to buy from a garden centre in Gatineau, which probably isn't open in any case. "Ottawa police will begin setting up checkpoints at the five inter-provincial crossings between Ottawa and Gatineau on Monday, as part of new COVID-19 restrictions announced by the Ontario government.
[... This is] intended to be on a 24-7 basis and will carry on for several weeks." So read the announcement yesterday, but it looks to me as if they have simply reprinted what was announced a year ago when, from April 1, 2020, to May 17, 2020, the police stopped more than 316,000 vehicles to question the drivers at these same checkpoints. I feel for the journalists having to do such repetitive work.
All of the above is of utter insignificance compared with the privations of some poor souls in this world, in Brazil for example, where nurses in the wards with too many patients have no time to sit beside and hold the hands of the dying. I am haunted by a photo I saw of a rubber glove filled with warm water and tied to the back of a patient's hand to give him the illusion of a human touch during his last moments. (Or hers.)
I did not start this post with the intention of writing about COVID-19. It was to have been a post about my considerable frustration over not being allowed to write about two memorably impressive talks I heard. The first was at a meeting I hosted recently myself, at which 45 of us eagerly heard about a newly developed community in our vicinity that promises to be the world's greenest and most sustainable ever. However, the presenter sent me an urgent message afterwards to warn me and the other participants that we must not publish a report of the presentation in the public domain, because the way we tell the story might not win official approval! (I do see his point.) Similarly, last Monday, my women's club heard a fascinating and likewise inspiring and impressive talk by a retired, high ranking VIP who is adamant that we do not report what we learned about measures taken to deal with a sensitive internal issue in her arena. As editor of our club's newsletter I do have to state that these events took place. What detail to add is a tricky choice; I'm strictly limited.
On January 1st this year, I wrote, "I refrain from counting my steps. I don't need a machine to tell me when I've had enough exercise." At the moment, however, I am counting the kilometres I cover per week after all, because I joined a team of women who are virtually walking to Kabul. We are talking about this in order to raise awareness of the plight of Afghan women who feel their hard-won rights are imperilled by the recent resurgence of militant fundamentalists in their country and by the demands made by Taliban delegates at the recent peace talks in Doha. There are widespread fears that, in spite of their ambitions to influence future developments in Afghan society, Afghan girls might once again, as at the start of the 21st century, be forcefully prevented from attending high school, from learning to read books other than the Qur'an, from wearing clothes other than the burqa, from refusing to get married at a very young age, from engaging in sports or making music in public, and so forth.
The most disturbing indications that this is a possibility are the recent murderous attacks on prominent Afghan women who have been advocating for equal rights or acting as reporters; it is alleged that the Taliban has a hit list for assassinations, and that some of the women we personally know are on that list.
As of yesterday, we University Women Helping Afghan Women (UWHAW) and friends had covered enough kilometres between us, starting in Ottawa, to have reached Amsterdam. This entailed some magical walking on water as we crossed the Atlantic last week. We virtually walked through the major cities in eastern Canada — Montreal, Quebec, Halifax, St. John's — reaching each of these at the weekends, strangely enough, and are now starting to head across Europe. Jill Moll, the organiser, is keeping track of where we are. The last I heard (yesterday), we had 4921 km behind us. In reality we're all just strolling or cycling round the block in our neighbourhoods, or doing our shopping on foot, or skiing in the parks, or even covering some distance on exercise machines (a doubly virtual activity!) but so many people are participating that it quickly adds up. We are allowed to count our families' mileage / kilometrage(?) too, so I have added the approximately 20 km that Chris puts beneath his feet on the treadmill to our weekly totals. In my case, for the last three weeks, my daily kilometres have so far ranged from 2.5 to 12; my average seems to be about 6 km a day, ~8000 steps.
That question got me wondering whether the group would want me to organise another series of presentations for the next season, so I sent them a query about it and got twelve positive responses straight away, along with suggestions for other activities besides: river clean-ups, planting community gardens and the like. I mentioned that to Emma, who helped me start the expert speaker series last autumn, and she thought I should find out how to start planting a "tiny forest."
The Club's Board members are talking about Succession Planning. I'm
useless at this, because I don't have the requisite persuasion skills; six people have so far
turned down my request to take over from me as the next editor of the
newsletter.
The preparation of the last issue of the Club's newsletter had me writing about a retired Lieutenant-General of the Royal Canadian Air Force, who has been persuaded to speak to CFUW-Ottawa members as a replacement for two top people from Ottawa's Public Health Service who are too bogged down with COVID-19 mitigation to come to our meeting.
I may be able to apply for a vaccination soon. This ought not to be at the same time as the back-tooth extraction I'll have to endure, having broken off the crown and cracked the roots of one of my molars. Not a pleasant prospect. My dentist seems reluctant to take that responsibility and is referring me to a specialist, who'll most likely operate on me at the end of April, not on my birthday, I hope.
This photo was taken by Alison this morning during our German Conversation Zoom meeting. Today we each presented an object that personally meant something to us. I am wearing a hat made by my great uncle's hat company. Before WW2, he had a store in Hamburg Germany plus one in London and Paris. But he was Jewish, so he lost everything due to the Nazi regime, and fled with his wife to Shanghai China in 1940. He started a hat company there and employed both Chinese and other German Jewish refugees. It was successful. After the war, they moved to South Africa. My mother inherited my great aunt's hat when she died.
I have inherited a Nazi flag, covered in metal badges, ripped from the wall of the officers' mess at Monte Cassini by my grandfather. I've been researching the battle that he was in then, from a little handwritten sketch he drew and the Internet records. It's quite a story, involving German paratroopers, a commanding officer who directed his troops while strapped to the bonnet of his Jeep, having been shot in the leg early on, and some of the nastiest house to house fighting of the war.
Instead of the British Safety-Critical Systems Symposium for which I'd have accompanied Chris to Bristol, had this been a normal year, all of the SCSS February 2021 meetings took place online. I watched the recording of one of the "after-dinner" speeches over his shoulder, Emma Taylor instructing the delegates how, if their messages are going to make the right impact on those who make decisions, engineers need to be "prepped, skilled and aware." This was all to do with communications.
"People weren't happy with what I was saying as a safety engineer," she confessed, and she wasn't getting through to those who should have been taking heed of her warnings, but then, while watching Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, who undeniably "pack a punch" when they are addressing the crowds, she experienced "penny-drop moments." How could she adopt their rhetorical techniques for more beneficial purposes?
The recipe for convincing rhetoric is 50% pathos, 40% ethos and 10% logos. An appeal to the emotions stands a much better chance of being remembered than a reasoned argument.* Watch popular action movies, suggests Ms. Taylor, and consider how the hero journeys through a series of crises supported by his friends, triumphing over his enemies. That's the basic formula. All you [engineers] have to fight with are your words. When you're talking to the "enemy," be sure to start with an arresting phrase or image that will catch his attention.
For a year or two Emma Taylor left software engineering and ventured into politics, and while she was an MEP candidate in England, although she lost the election she learned a thing or two. She learned to acknowledge, rather than answer, challenging questions. Journalists are not your friends, she realised. Your words can be twisted, weaponised against you, so you need to recognise these tactics (and the hurtful effect they have on you) and in return, use the right catch-phrases, act confident ...
"Landing" a message about software safety is the same. You have to be both bold and brave. Don't be inhibited, don't worry, don't obfuscate the truth, don't lie. Do hold on to your curiosity, do be aware, do keep practising.
She recommends the book Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss, who relies upon certain key strategies when negotiating for the release of hostages: "The best way to deal with negativity is to observe it without reaction and without judgement. Consciously label each negative feeling and replace it with positive, compassionate, solution-based thoughts."
Safety engineers can get angry with the people who oppose them, so they need persistence and resilience.
The same applies to anyone else who hopes to persuade.
* I remember studying Shakespeare's Julius Caesar at school and comparing the speeches Brutus and Mark Anthony made after the death of Caesar: same thing.
Back in January I wrote of Tom and Freddie, not to mention their parents and grandparents, being flummoxed by the so-called "partitive articles" they had to learn in French homework assignments. For a couple of weeks, by Zoom, on Wednesday mornings (afternoons, in their zone) I tried to teach them the phrases they were meant to be learning, until it dawned on me that this was doomed to failure because they hadn't a clue how to read French aloud from a page and were thoroughly disheartened by the whole subject. Nobody had ever taught them how to pronounce French words.
So once a week, over the course of a month or so, before their school reopened, I began to give the boys some basic rules and simple exercises that entailed a great deal of reading and repetition: they had to mimic the sounds I made, not so easy given the technical frustrations of video calls and the background distractions. Once or twice the ploy worked, perhaps for half a minute at a time, and Tom at least gained a little confidence.
I pity the poor primary school teachers in London who most likely know hardly any French themselves; what probably happens in the classroom is that their teacher gives the children videos to watch in French, while they sit there quietly (or not so quietly) ignoring it all. Tom and Freddie didn't seem to know that the letters -t, -z -s, -x ... at the ends of words are rarely pronounced, and hadn't a clue how to sound out the vowel combinations ou, eu, oi, or that é and è sound different. So that's what we concentrated on. As an experienced French speaker it's easy for me to forget that anglophone beginners have no idea that Qu'est-ce que c'est? literally means What-is-it-that-it-is? and that Qu'est-ce que...? is pronounced kesskuh, not kwestkuhkwuh. The problem, especially with girls in the class, is that boys feel stupid when they're obliged to make stupid noises and, worse yet, get them wrong. Then they're liable to sulk, teenagers even more so.
I endeavoured to make a joke of it and got them to repeat a few quirky, surrealistic sentences like "Deux ours jouent avec une boule rouge sur la route." or "Qu'est-ce que c'est dans l'hélicoptère? C'est un éléphant énorme!" Whether that really worked, I'm not convinced, but they didn't run away the whole time to play with the cat or the guitar in the background, only occasionally. We also tried intoning the nasal sounds -ain -in -an -en -on -oin and so on (first while holding our noses and then not holding our noses) and the French "u"-sound. Once they got the hang of it, that didn't cause so much trouble.
Part of a French conversation I got the boys to read aloud and practise went like this:
Tu veux jouer aux boules?
-- Non, je veux jouer à Minecraft. Minecraft est mon jeu favori.
Tu veux jouer avec moi?
-- Oui. Allons-y!
It's true that Minecraft is their favourite game. And they learned to read the words for the numbers one-to-twenty, for which they already knew the sounds but not the spellings.
If you want to find out whether or not your child can read French, see if (s)he can pronounce these English words (cognates) in the French way:
six, point, cage, Paris, judo, orange, queue, plan, secret, long, cause, accident, danger, fruit, instruction
If that goes badly, that's proof that (s)he needs some more tuition and reading practice. Try typing some of those words into Google Translate, select "French", and click on the sound icon. It could be a revelation!
