A whale of a weekend
on George Hamilton (Jamaica), 24/May/2011 03:03, 34 days ago
It was a pretty successful weekend.I saw some wild animals around Toronto, the world did not end, and I did not get snarged.Progressing from least scary to most scary, here are the Torontonian animals , first the herbivorous deer from Sherway Gardens, although these ones could easily be cannibals.Second, the cougars from near gate 175 at Toronto's Pearson airport terminal 1. The big cats are definitely more menacing than the vegetarian-looking deer.I see that my Microsoft Word spell-checker has jumped into action and red-underlined snarge as if it were not a real word, but it truly is a real word.The Globe and Mail page L6 would not have had an article about it on May 23, 2011 if it were not.Even, at some time in the past snarge was the word of the week somewhere on the Internet.Unfortunately it has more than two letters so Scrabble aficionados have not chosen it as their patron saint; but yes, it is an English word.When you learn about snarge you might opt to rather have your world end than be snarged, but sometimes you do not have a choice in this.You might visualize somebody remarking“Well I was in the world, but now it seems to have gone away”, or some unfortunate lamenting “I used to be un-snarged, but I no longer am.”The world ending and snarging both sound pretty dreadful, so let's first put them into perspective. You do not get that many chances for your world to end for example the Jamaican Gleaner has a reference to the world ending in 1920, and I quote:“Over 90 years ago, Alexander Bedward, of August Town fame, was reportedly preparing for the rapture when he was arrested and taken to a mental institution. He prophesied that he would ascend into heaven on December 31, 1920”.Apparently Alexander had the good luck to die of old age in his ninth decade, which was a better deal than for one of his followers who climbed a very high tree so he could jump off and rapture more easily.This person learned that the law of gravity does not take time off even if the world is ending, nor did the undertakers.However, you do not have to wait 90 years to get snarged, you just need to head off to the right place.You could opt for the Hawaiian locations identified by the Globe and Mail article, or else closer to Jamaica try the Bay of Fundy, off Canada's New Brunswick, where Murr Brewster wrote about the subject, or you could go anywhere else that has oceans and that has whales.The blue water below looks terribly inviting and one would just want to jump in without thought. However something very large below the surface has just sneakily snarged in the depths, so we should stay on board for now.I learned about snarging as I read the Globe and Mail from cover to cover for an hour and a half this morning waiting for flight AC984 to leave the gate.The pilot did not wish to fly to an island where the air traffic controllers had chosen not to go to work.He is a sensible pilot, I will fly with him again.By coincidence, before I got on the plane I had bought the book“Moby Dick”.This is true. Yes, really. I was sold by the tasteful binding and the fact that it is a classic. I did not have any premonition that I would be writing about snarging. I kid you not. It's eerie and not irie.But apart from that, in more ways than one it was a whale of a weekend.