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Further to my post about Dave Cooks The Turkey, another annual CBC Christmas tradition is the broadcasting of this Frederick Forsyth short story every Christmas Eve. It became a tradition for my wife and I while living in the UK. It is broadcast on the CBC show As It Happens as the finale of a week of short stories including How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Gift of the Magi. As it is normally broadcast shortly before 7pm Eastern Time in Canada, it meant that we could listen to it on the internet in the last minutes before Christmas arrived.
Forsyth wrote the story on Christmas Day 1976 for his wife, who requested that he write her a ghost story as a Christmas present. Forsyth, an ex-RAF pilot, drew on his experiences to write the tale of a pilot getting lost in the fog while returning to England on Christmas Eve in his De Havilland Vampire. It has been broadcast by CBC every Christmas Eve since 1979 due to popular demand. The original recording, narrated by CBC legend Alan Maitland (affectionately know as “Fireside Al”), is still broadcast, Maitland’s extraordinary voice contributing as much to the popularity of the recording as the story itself.
This year is the 30th anniversary of the the first reading of the story, and As It Happens ran a segment on the popularity of the broadcast before airing it. CBC’s excellent podcasting service allows me to post a link to the segment and the story here:
The Shepherd (by Frederick Forsyth) – duration 38:34
When dreaming of a White Christmas, be sure to quantify just how white you want it. Having experienced the third snowiest fall (autumn for British readers) since records began, and the snowiest since 1951, we then got a further 21cm on the night before Christmas Eve. By the time the shoveling was done, all I wanted for Christmas was a new back. As the snow builds up, the harder clearing it becomes as the piles of snow get higher. By the time we finished, the banks were above head height.
Christmas Day, however was perfect. As we had breakfast, we could see light flurries of snow falling outside the window – perfect Christmas weather. As the snow stopped, the clouds cleared, leaving a beautiful crisp, sunny day.
Two days later, I’m sitting here at 11pm, and the temperature outside is 12 degrees, almost a thirty degree swing from last Saturday. The snow is melting fast and the banks have almost disappeared. More storms are forecast for the middle of next week, but at least it gives my back a chance to recover.
The Vinyl Cafe is a weekly radio show on CBC hosted by Stuart McLean. The show normally consists of stories interspersed by live musc. McLean is a master storyteller, usually revealing some personal recollections or idiosyncracies of the town where the show is being broadcast from that week, reading a story sent in from a reader, and finally narrating one of his celebrated Dave and Morley stories. The show is listened to by 750,000 North Americans every week, and has recently been picked up by BBC Radio 7. The nearest comparison to the show would be Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, although personally I prefer McLean’s style, which is a little less sardonic that Keillor’s.
Dave and Morley are a fictional couple from Toronto with two kids, Stephanie and Sam. The title of the show comes from the name of the record store owned byDave. McLean’s stories relate to the misadventures of the family and their friends, and normally revolve in particular around the misadventures of the accident-prone Dave. A series of books have been published anthologising the stories from the show.
In 1996 McLean wrote a Christmas story for the show called ‘Dave Cooks the Turkey’. The story became so popular that it is now broadcast every Christmas due to popular demand, and has become a Canadian institution. The show was broadcast last Sunday and, thanks to CBC’s podcast archive, I can link to it here. Enjoy!
Dave Cooks the Turkey (approx. 20 minutes in duration)
As the weather outside was truly frightful yesterday, my wife, mother-in-law and I spent the whole day preparing food for Christmas, most notably cabbage rolls.
This is not a dish I encountered in Britain but is certainly very popular over here, and deservedly so. All of the central and eatern European communities seem to have their own version, and ours was based on an old family recipe. It is quite time consuming to prepare, taking the three of us several hours to assemble, but the results made every minute worth the trouble.
My father-in-law was of Serbo-Croatian descent, and it is through this side of the family that the recipe has been passed down. I don’t intend to include a full recipe here, as there was little measuring going on. We relied greatly on the memory and eyeballing of my mother-in-law and advice over the telephone from our aunt in Mississauga. The description below is therefore more of a culinary narrative of how we prepared the dish on this occasion but should give a general idea for anyone who wants to give them a try.
I will begin with some words of caution. When preparing cabbage rolls, if you are requested to core the cabbage, do not do as I did and cut it into four quarters prior to removing the core. When my fellow cooks saw what I had done, looks of horror appeared on their faces. I did not realise that the entire leaves are used to wrap the filling. My mistake resulted in me having to brave the snowstorm to grab a replacement cabbage from the supermarket.
Our filling for the rolls consisted of 3 sauteed onions, 1.5lb each of ground beef and ground pork, 5 cloves of garlic, 2 cups of rice and a chopped up pack of bacon. The mixture was then seasoned with salt and pepper and mixed well to create the stuffing for the rolls.
Then came the tricky part. Coring cabbages whole could be classified as a dangerous sport. If there is a safe way of doing this, I did not succeed in finding it but more by luck than judgement we ended up with a cored cabbage and three intact cooks.
The trick then is to steam the cabbage in a large pan of water until the outer leaves start to soften. If the leaves are too brittle or too soft, they are liable to snap or fall apart during the rolling process. We placed the cabbage in a large pan of simmering water for about 10-15 minutes before starting to slowly peel off the outer leaves as they became loose.
The outer leaves are then removed from the water, and the thick outer spine of the leaf is shaved off carefully. The leaf is stuffed with a roll of the meat mixture and rolled up, and then the ends of the leaf are tucked in to create the roll, as shown below:-
The process continues until the cabbage and/or the meat mixture is used up depending on the size of the cabbage and the amount of filling you use. This is our finished pile of rolls:-
These are then piled up in a big roasting pan and covered with two large cans of tomatoes (four standard British size), plenty of sauerkraut (we just piled on about half a large jar) and about 2 or 3 cups of tomato juice. The crowning glory was a few hunks of kielbasa placed on top, which release flavour into the sauce during the cooking process. The result looked like this:-
We cooked the rolls slowly on 300F for around 4 hours. It’s best to check it frequently during cooking, adding liquid if the sauce is drying out. Traditionally you can use the water used to cook the cabbage. Here is the result:-
We served two cabbage rolls per person along with mashed potato and carrots, and it was absolutely delicious. There was plenty left over, which we have frozen for the holiday season. With that out of the way, my wife made a delicious chocolate bundt cake and I prepared tourtière, a French-Canadian classic for Christmas Eve, but more on that another day perhaps.
Here in south-west Ontario we are currently in the midst of ’snow-mageddon’. This is not a term I have coined; nor does it come from an over-enthusiastic journalist. It comes direct from a missive issued by Environment Canada, the equivalent of the British Met Office. Amusingly, according to an article in the local Kitchener Record the agency claims that:-
The term ’snow-mageddon’ is not meant to alarm anyone or make light of the situation, but to highlight the cumulative effects and impacts that a series of snowstorms can have on a wide region.
You could have fooled me.
Nevertheless, the current weather is pretty extreme. We had 18cm of snow on Friday. We were working at RIM that day. When we went to start the van, we found that the battery was dead. Luckily we had enough time to get a cab, and shortly after we arrived the snow started to fall. By the time we left most of the 18cm had already fallen, and we were glad to not have the van with us as the roads were a nightmare. We got a lift to downtown Kitchener and waded home through the snow, and experience I can only liken to walking a mile through the deep, dry sand on a beach, but in temperatures of about minus 15 with wind-chill.
After a lovely crisp, cold day on Saturday, we had another good dump of snow today, about 10cm I would say. Although it has stopped for now, we still have very strong winds whipping the fallen snow around, making visibility enough of a problem to close a number of roads in the region. And we’re not finished yet. Another storm is forecast for Christmas Eve, bringing another 10 to 15cm. I’m beginning to wonder where we’re going to put it all, and winter only officially starts today.
This fall has been the snowiest since 1951, which makes me feel a little better and, to be honest, it hasn’t been too much of a pain apart from the driving, which will take some getting used to. Hving said that, you’d better ask me again in the spring. It’s very early days yet.
Here are some pictures of the street today:
You didn’t know the internet was in peril? Neither did just about anyone else until it had been saved – that was the idea.
I came across the story in the latest issue of Wired magazine.
The ’superhero’ in question is Dan Kaminsky. Dan is a well known figure in the hacking community, but works for the good guys. He hires himself out to the likes of Microsoft who pay him to hack into their software so that they can resolve all the vulnerabilities. The theory is that if Dan can’t break in then no-one can.
But hacking is more than a day job to Dan; he spends his free time pitting his wits against the best security systems on the internet, laying bare its darkest secrets. After all, he has to keep his skills at the cutting edge to keep his job.
Then, one day in March he discovered that DNS, the protocol that routes every piece of internet traffic in the world to the correct destination, was fatally flawed.
I’m no expert on these things, it seems that DNS can be thought of as the internet’s signposts. You type www.google.com into your browser, and DNS shows your instruction the best way to get to Google’s servers, and then shows Google’s response the best way back. Dan Kaminsky found a way to turn round the signposts, rerouting the traffic to wherever he wanted. This means, for example, that he could access anyone’s bank account, change the password and transfer money without being detected. He could reroute emails from anywhere he liked to himself, copy them, and forward them on without anyone knowing what had happened. It even gave him the power to alter encryption of top secret data so that he could intercept it and read it. In short, the discovery made Dan Kaminsky king of the internet. He had found the hacker’s Holy Grail.
He could have done some serious damage or stolen untold amounts of money. He could have blackmailed his way to fortune, or just sold his secret to the Russian mafia. Even worse, he could have gone for hacking glory, and published his exploits for the whole hacking community to see. Luckily for us, instead he contacted Paul Vixie, a DNS pioneer and one of the world’s leading authorities on the protocol.
By the end of the third minute, Vixie realized that Kaminsky had uncovered something that the best minds in computer science had overlooked [...] Vixie felt a deep flush of embarrassment, followed by a sense of pure panic.
“The first thing I want to say to you,” Vixie told Kaminsky, trying to contain the flood of feeling, “is never, ever repeat what you just told me over a cell phone.”
Vixie knew how easy it was to eavesdrop on a cell signal, and he had heard enough to know that he was facing a problem of global significance. If the information were intercepted by the wrong people, the wired world could be held ransom. Hackers could wreak havoc. Billions of dollars were at stake, and Vixie wasn’t going to take any risks.
From that moment on, they would talk only on landlines, in person, or via heavily encrypted email. If the information in an email were accidentally copied onto a hard drive, that hard drive would have to be completely erased, Vixie said. Secrecy was critical. They had to find a solution before the problem became public.
Within a couple of days sixteen of the leading DNS experts from around the world had been assembled in a conference room at Microsoft headqarters in Redmond, Washington. None of them knew why they were there.
The experts watched as Kaminsky opened his laptop and connected the overhead projector. He had created a “weaponized” version of his attack on this vulnerability to demonstrate its power. A mass of data flashed onscreen and told the story. In less than 10 seconds, Kaminsky had compromised a server running BIND 9, Vixie’s DNS routing software, which controls 80 percent of Internet traffic. It was undeniable proof that Kaminsky had the power to take down large swaths of the Internet.
[...]
David Ulevitch smiled despite himself. The founder of OpenDNS, a company that operates DNS servers worldwide, was witnessing a tour de force—the geek equivalent of Michael Phelps winning his eighth gold medal. As far as Ulevitch was concerned, there had never been a vulnerability of this magnitude that was so easy to use. “This is an amazingly catastrophic attack,” he marveled with a mix of grave concern and giddy awe.
The sixteen agreed that the first priority was to ensure total secrecy until the system could be patched. Amazingly, everything was kept under wraps until July 8th when the patches were ready for implementation. Even the companies supplying broadband services were kept in the dark, being told only that they had to install the patches, but not being told why.
Even once the patches had been installed by all the major players the nature of the flaw was kept secret. Kaminsky would get his moment of glory on August 6, when he would announce details of the problem at a hackers’ convention in Las Vegas. In the meantime, all parties were urged to update their software immediately. But the security industry objected, demanding that they needed to understand what the problem was in order to convince their bosses to install the patches. Reluctantly, Kaminsky revealed details of the flaw exclusively to three leading security experts. Within days one of them had published details on the internet.
Most of the net was patched by this stage, but there is a report of one use of the exploit to reroute Google traffic in Austin, Texas. If any banks were compromised, it’s unlikely that they would publicise the fact. There is still a small loophole, but the patches have made a breach statistically virtually impossible with current technology.
If this exploit had been discovered by someone lacking Kaminsky’s integrity, or if Kaminsky himself had been drawn to ‘the dark side’, the whole security of the internet would have been compromised. Who knows what the results on ecommerce, internet banking and global communication could have been? The world economy has enough problems at the moment without the devastating effects of a virtual shutdown of internet traffic. Dan Kaminsky has, for now at least, saved cyberspace as we know it, and maybe a whole lot more besides.
Last Friday we became proud owners of a 2004 Hyundai Elantra. We’re fortunate in that both of my wife’s brothers work in the car trade, and one of them got us a good deal on the vehicle.
On Saturday afternoon the snow started coming down and didn’t stop for the rest of the day. One of the bylaws here is that you can’t leave your car on the road overnight when there’s heavy snow, as they impede the snowploughs, so our neighbour dutifully went about pulling their van up on to the drive. You may be able to guess what happened next. Our neighbour lost control of the van in the heavy snow and it ploughed straight into the side of our car, only a day and a bit after we took ownership of it. The damage couldn’t have been much worse. It was a very large van, and after impact it must have slammed into the length of our car, causing damage along the length of our vehicle from the front bumper to the rear wheel-arch. Luckily it still drives OK, but the driver door doesn’t open from the outside.
I feel really sorry for our neighbour. For us it’s an inconvenience and a disappointment having had the car for such a short space of time, but I know from personal experience how it feels to crash into someone else. It hits your confidence, your self esteem and, definitely not least, your wallet. I’m just glad it wasn’t us hitting their car. Owing to our lack of Canadian driving experience (and my aforementioned experience of crashing into other vehicles) our insurance is already over three times what it was in the UK.
Anyway, hopefully our car willl be back in one piece by the end of next week or thereabouts and, most important of all, no one got hurt. Then I’ll put some snaps of it on here.
This may be old news to anyone who spends an unhealthy amount of time trawling the internet for their entertainment and enlightenment, but I post it for those regulars to this blog who may have missed this amazing, inspirational lecture.
Carnegie-Mellon University ran a series of talks named “The Last Lecture”, inviting guest speakers to imagine that they were given one last lecture to impart their accumulated wisdom to students before they died. Randy Pausch, a computer science and virtual reality professor at CMU, was scheduled to give the lecture on September 18 2007. Shortly beforehand he found out that he had terminal pancreatic cancer, making the theme all too real.
Pausch’s positivity, sense of humour and words of wisdom have made this talk a word-of-mouth phenoenon and an inspiration to millions. Pausch found himself on Oprah, and published a book called the ‘Last Lecture’ which has already sold around 400,000 copies. Don’t be put off by the ‘techy’ stuff. This is a talk you will remember for a long time. Start it up, pause it, get a hot drink while it downloads a bit of a buffer, and settle in.
Randy Pausch died on July 25 2008. Before he died he was invited to play a walk-on part in the latest Star Trek movie, and got to practice with the Pittsburgh Steelers NFL squad. He spent his remaining time working on cancer research, including testifying before congress to lobby for increased funding. In May 2008 he was listed by Time magazine as one of the world’s Top-100 Most Influential People.
Working full-time at trying to find work, writing résumés and preparing for interviews makes you think a lot about what it takes to be successful. This is about as good a summary as you can get in three minutes:
Emigrating to Canada has brought more than its fair share of challenges, heartaches and tests of will. Getting permission to drive, however, could hardly be put into any of these categories.
One morning shortly after arriving we headed down to the local drive test centre with our British licences in hand. Thirty minutes later, we walked out having swapped our UK licences for a temporary, but full, Ontario driving licence. Twenty-nine minutes were taken up with waiting around, form-filling, getting our photos taken and handing over cash. The other minute involved a rudimentary eye-test – the only challenge any Brit faces in getting a full licence in Ontario (although some other provinces evidently do require UK licence holders to take a driving test).
This seemed a good thing until I had the licence in my hand, at which point I started worrying about all the other crazy British drivers haring around the streets of Canada, blissfully unaware of the differences in the rules of the road, other than the obvious one about driving on the right – at least you’d hope that was obvious.
For example, if the traffic light is red in Canada you can still turn right as long as nothing is coming. This sounds a bit dodgy to British ears at first, but actually makes a lot of sense the more you think about it. It would certainly help at busy intersections in Britain, although come to think of it, most of the busy intersections in Britain have been converted into roundabouts.
And therein lies a big difference between driving in Britain and North America. Where two busy roads meet in Britain, a roundabout is the preferred solution. In Canada, it’s traffic lights. Personally, I’d go for the roundabout any time, and it seems that Canada’s road planners are starting to come to the same conclusion. To the horror of many Canadian motorists, the roundabout cometh.
To aid the uncertain Canadian motorist, the Region of Waterloo has issued this handy “All About Roundabouts” brochure, with helpful hints on how to deal with the new contraptions, and even this handy roundabout quiz. Some over in Britain may scoff at this “back to basics” approach, but having seen drivers trying to negotiate the few roundabouts which are already in place, I would say that more advice is needed, not less. In spite of the forest of signage, arrows and chevrons decorating every roundabout, even a law enforcement officer was caught on camera going round one the wrong way. To add to the problems, I understand that a good while ago there were roundabouts in Canada, but the person entering had the right of way, so watch out for older drivers who think they’ve been there and done that. One driver I saw yesterday was at least trying; they got in the left lane, signalled right and ended up going straight across the roundabout. They were probably the only person I’ve seen signalling, however. In fact, even the brochure doesn’t mention indicating before entering the roundabout – quite an oversight.
Of course, with time Canadian drivers will get the hang of it, and come to love roundabouts as we do in Britain. Then, of course, the traffic planners will unleash their master plan, and build what they really want – a replica of Swindon’s majestic Magic Roundabout:
I can’t wait to see the brochure for that one. Happy driving!
