From Facebook, With Love

By Stephen Lautens

July 9, 2009


One of the newspapers recently reported that England is in the middle of yet another crisis. It seems that the wife of the new head of MI6 – the British Secret Intelligence Service – posted details about her family life on her Facebook page.

For those of you who keep track of the world of espionage, Lady Shelley Sawers is the wife of Sir John Sawers, who was appointed last month to head the British Secret Service. Yes, he is James Bond’s real life “M”.

Actually, the head of MI6 was known by the codename “C”, and the British government officially denied the existence of the whole outfit until 1992, which is a long way from having your own Facebook page.

Lady Shelley apparently shared with the world through her Facebook page details of where she and the new head of the British Secret Service live and spend holidays, and apparently photos of the family including Sir John in his Speedo bathing suit, which is no doubt complete with cyanide capsule compartment and grappling hook attachment.

Now as a result, the head of the British Secret Service has to move for security reasons, as the whereabouts of England’s chief spymaster and family is actually supposed to be a secret. Revealing details of their home and friends to the estimated 200 million Facebook users from the London networks who had access to the information meant it wasn’t a very well kept secret.

Lady Shelley’s Facebook page was only taken down after a British newspaper pointed out that it could be a problem if you wanted to keep foreign spies from leaving exploding cakes on your doorstep, so you can’t “poke” her anymore (and before you get excited, a Facebook “poke” is an electronic nudge or hello).

She also had 76 Facebook friends on her homepage and eight albums of family photos, but now we won’t get to see them. You wonder what it might have been like -

Favourite things: ability to deploy knock-out gas to end boring dinner parties, car that turns into a submarine, jetpacking home to beat traffic, going shopping at sales with two large men who have a license to kill.

Least favourite things: being strapped to a table with a laser about to cut me in two, being painted gold, sharks in the swimming pool, ninjas, tarantulas in my bed.

Favourite places: Swiss alps, Monte Carlo casinos, Carribean luxury hotels.

Least favourite places: volcano secret headquarters, minefields, pilotless airplanes, voodoo graveyards, anything with a trap door and pool full of piranhas.

Turnoffs: rude people (especially if they have a blow gun and paralyzing darts), guys in Nehru jackets bent on world domination, people who throw their hats at other people, guys with steel teeth, triple agents, slow-acting poisons when the antidote is across the room, falling out of an airplane without a parachute, people with secrets.

Current friends include: 006, 005, Moneypenny, Q, F, Miss Plenty Goodstuff, the Countess Bedready, Minister of Defence.

Three (3) new people want to be your friend.

One (1) new person wants to be your nemesis.

You have a message from: Ludwig von Hammerstrike, Doctor Inferno, Salazzar the Butcher, and Aunt Sophie.

Groups: Opera Friends, Ascot Book Club, Wives of Spies, Smersh Cooking Circle, People Who Can Get Their Hands on NATO Nuclear Launch Codes.

It’s too bad they made her close her Facebook page. Some people were never meant to keep a secret.

© Stephen Lautens, 2009

Don’t Raise Your Voice To Me

By Stephen Lautens

June 25, 2009


There is a lot of yelling in our house.

Don’t get me wrong – we’re not like the new neighbours across the street. They seem to like living in their front room with the windows wide open and describe each other’s shortcomings at the top of their lungs. My seven year old has even learned a few new, colourful words as a result. Our neighbours seem to alternate between yelling and singing the folk songs of their youth from some far off land, most fuelled by beer.

By contrast, we are a very happy household, although you wouldn’t know it if you listened at the keyhole. If you did, you’d also hear a whole lot of yelling.

Unlike our neighbours, none of the yelling questions anyone’s parentage or the personal habits of their mothers. The yelling in our house is entirely conversational.

For example, my wife can sense the very instant when I am in the bathroom with the door shut, the overhead exhaust fan on, water running in the sink and my razor up against my face. Without fail, that is when she chooses to ask me a question from two floors away.

My ears are still good enough that I know someone is speaking somewhere in the house. And because it isn’t a simple “No!”, I can safely assume it isn’t directed towards my son, who is currently intent on cloning himself using a combination of toothpaste, drool and salt mixed in an old medicine bottle. Appropriately, he refers to it as “Project Satan”.

My son has no problem being heard. He is one of the loudest kids I know. We could hire him out as a public address system or an emergency broadcast horn in case of civil unrest. He has a great future as a hog caller or auctioneer. Maybe a career in politics - although it is not as prestigious or respectable as a hog caller.

Him I have no trouble hearing from anywhere in the house. The problem is that in his case, he can’t hear my answer to any of his many questions – mostly involving a surplus of ice cream sandwiches taunting him from the freezer. I can offer an opinion on the merits of an all ice cream diet from a floor away, but somehow he never hears me. And by the time I make it down to the kitchen, the sandwich is already gone and the point is moot.

It’s not just that people will talk to me from other rooms of the house when my head is in the sink. My wife will start talking to me when she is in the basement with the dryer going full tilt – usually with four dollars in nickels going through the spin cycle. I’ll be standing in front of the dishwasher on “pots and pans” with the TV on.

For some reason, that is the perfect time to start discussing variable rate mortgages and where the new dent in the car came from.

For my part, I refuse to yell in the house. The result is that my other housemates tend to yell louder, or just keep on going until I relent. I will get up from my desk or chair and walk downstairs so no one has to raise their voice to be heard. When I ask what they wanted, the answer I get more often than not is: “Nothing important.”

That’s when it’s my turn to start yelling.

© Stephen Lautens, 2009

Have A Heart

May 28, 2009

By Stephen Lautens

I’m amazed at all the fuss people are making about our Governor General recently snacking on a seal heart.

I have to say I don’t have any strong feelings one way or the other about seals in general or the seal hunt in particular, although I know it is a hot button for a lot of people. Passions run high here and overseas about seals, so it’s not surprising that taking a bite of a raw seal heart has given our Governor General a certain amount of indigestion.

The Europeans apparently got in a real snit about it. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, I find it particularly rich, since they have a long history of hunting stags, wild boars, rabbits and blasting the heads off grouse and other birds to put them on the table. Wild game is not only considered a delicacy, but is a staple of a lot of European diets. The last time I was in a fancy restaurant in Europe, what I was given by the waiter looked more like a zoo brochure than a menu.

The animal rights people were also up in arms at the idea of cutting open an animal and eating it. Or as the VP of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals told the papers, “It amazes us that a Canadian official would indulge in such bloodlust.” He said that the incident gives Canadians “even more Neanderthal image around the world than they already have."

While I have never worked on a farm, I am under no illusions about where the meat in my grocery store comes from. I know it doesn’t start out on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in plastic wrap. It starts out as an animal. Maybe we city folk don’t like to think too much about where that juicy steak on the barbeque comes from, but unless our school system is worse than I think, not many of us believe steaks grow on trees.

Maybe it was Governor General Michaëlle Jean’s eating the heart thing – as someone said, a little too “primitive” for our friends in Europe, who oddly have no problem snacking on force-fed goose livers, various other organs or sausages made of blood. All that is okay, but apparently the heart is wrong.

I’ve travelled a bit and have been offered a lot of things to eat that are strange by the standards of anyone who only eats fast food. I’ve had sea slug, shark and various things that crawl in the night. I didn’t enjoy most of them, but the world is a big place and people eat things out of tradition or necessity that the rest of us wouldn’t touch on a bet.

I have no problems with people who buck the evolutionary trend of our species and opt for an all vegetable diet, even though we humans have been eating meat for as long as we have been able to catch it. For the first million or so years the meat also did its best to catch us.

I remember back in college a student who did his best to make his dog into a vegetarian. I suppose it is possible to turn a dog into a rabbit, but I can tell you, that was one unhappy dog, and grateful for any hot dogs slipped accidentally to him under the picnic table.

So hats off to our GG. She’s a braver woman than me, even if only for doing what comes naturally.

© Stephen Lautens, 2009