If you’ve followed my posts in the past you will recall that, when I visit Canada, I like to report on the “horrible crime problem” in small Saskatchewan towns and cities.

Below is the police report from the latest edition of The Weyburn Review. (Weyburn is a city of about 10,000 residents, about 35 miles from the North Dakota/Montana border).

It’s shocking, but you will read that, among other atrocities:

- Harassing text messags [sic] were sent from one man to another! Thank God the investigation is still ongoing!
- The police attended several parties . . . (Shouldn’t they have been working, rather than attending parties?)
- And . . . a chronic problem here . . . a man left a motel without paying! And he is a “serial non-payer”!
- I like this one: “Police investigated a fraudulent e-mail that requested personal credit card information. The complainant became suspicious and avoided personal loss.” Whew! That was a close one! Can you imagine! A fraudulent email requesting personal information! I’d call the police, immediately, if I ever received such a thing! (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just send your credit card and bank account information to Ethel@EthelTheFrog.com and I’ll show you how it works).

Please don’t misunderstand me . . . I’m not making fun of these small town Canada “problems” . . . To the contrary, I’m envious! How would those of us who live in Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Detroit, Phoenix, San Jose, New York, etc., etc. like to say that our biggest crime problem is a noisy party, the receipt of a “fraudulent e-mail”, or the occasional intoxicated individual outside a bar!

Yes, it’s a little bit cold and snowy up here . . . but I don’t have to worry about being the victim of a drive-by shooting or a random crack-head murder. Poutine (Google it) is a bigger killer here than guns, drugs or gangs.

I’m off to sleep soundly.

Ethel

I apologize for the long time between posts; however, I have been dealing with a family medical situation that has been taking up most of my time. (The remainder of my time has been spent just trying to keep warm up here in The Great White North).

Today, I am going to put all “political correctness” aside and give you my list of “The World’s Shortest Books” (something you may have seen before, but worth a laugh anyhoo).

Here we go … The Worlds Shortest Books (drum roll, please):

MY BLACK GIRLFRIENDS, By Tiger Woods

____________________________________________

THINGS I LOVE ABOUT MY COUNTRY, By Jane Fonda & Cindy Sheehan
Illustrated by Michael Moore
Foreword by George Soros

________________________________________

MY CHRISTIAN ACCOMPLISHMENTS & HOW I HELPED AFTER KATRINA, By Rev Jesse Jackson & Rev Al Sharpton

______________________________________

THINGS I LOVE ABOUT BILL, By Hillary Clinton

______________________________________

Sequel: THINGS I LOVE ABOUT HILLARY, By Bill Clinton

_______________________________________

THINGS I CANNOT AFFORD, By Bill Gates

_______________________________________

THINGS I WOULD NOT DO FOR MONEY, By Dennis Rodman

_________________________________

THINGS WE KNOW TO BE TRUE, By Al Gore & John Kerry

_____________________________________

GUIDE TO THE PACIFIC, By Amelia Earhart

____________________________________

HOW TO LIVE LIFE TO THE FULLEST, By Dr. Jack Kevorkian

__________________________________

TO ALL THE MEN WE HAVE LOVED BEFORE, By Ellen DeGeneres & Rosie O’Donnell

__________________________________

GUIDE TO DATING ETIQUETTE, By Mike Tyson

__________________________________

THE AMISH PHONE DIRECTORY

___________________________________

MY PLAN TO FIND THE REAL KILLERS, By O. J. Simpson & Casey Anthony

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HOW TO DRINK & DRIVE SAFELY, By Ted Kennedy

__________________________________

MY BOOK OF MORALS, By Bill Clinton
With introduction by The Rev. Jesse Jackson and foreward by Tiger Woods with John Edwards

____________________________________________________

HOW TO WIN A SUPERBOWL, BY THE MINNESOTA VIKINGS

____________________________________________________

AND, JUST ADDED:

My Complete Knowledge of Military Strategy, By Nancy Pelosi
________________________________________________________

And the shortest book of them all…………………..

THINGS I DID TO DESERVE THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE, by Barack Obama

If you live in the Potrero/Flamingo/Tamarindo area, you no doubt are aware of Qué Magazine. If you’re visiting, make sure you pick up a free copy, which can be found at almost every bar, restaurant, rental car office, etc., etc. The “news” articles are hilarious, as are the photos and “fake”ads (which are not likely to be mistaken for the real ads).

An article, concerning a business called “Grand Opening Liquidations”, in the most recent issue of the magazine, struck me as particularly funny:

In the fall of 2009, Yuri and Sasha Karminov relocated from Moscow to Guanacaste, Costa Rica. At first the brothers struggled to find a niche in the Gold Coast market, dabbling for a time in a variety of misadventures which included restaurants, fishing charters, eco-tourism, surf shops, and so forth. It would seem that the more they tried, the more they realized the difficulties in growing a profitable tourism dependent business. They watched their life savings slowly being flushed down the drain, until one day Yuri had an epiphany of sorts: “The one thing that seems to be in constant supply here is available spaces to rent, and people willing to sell someone else on the dream life here in paradise.”

Just weeks later the two brothers opened Grand Opening Liquidations (“GOL”). “The sad truth is that business is tough, and in this area it’s tougher than a St. Petersburg meatcutter,” said Yuri. Most people will fail; unfortunately, these same people will refuse to see the writing on the wall until most, if not all, of their life savings have been dumped into a business that couldn’t help but fail. Lack of people, market share, finances, etc., all contribute to this problem. Thankfully Yuri and Sasha have found a solution!

“We help each other,” as Sasha likes to say. “It’s easy. When you decide to start a business here, we will do all the leg work; including finding you that not so ideal location, then paying too much for it. We then will begin to buy all the necessary supplies to start your not so unique idea. Once we have got everything in place, we set a date. And here is where the magic starts. Instead of wasting countless days and endless sleepless nights worrying about why your ideas isn’t working, you can go to beach, learn surf, fish, drink, party, ruin a marriage or two, and have good times. We will have a grand opening and a liquidation sale of your business at same time! This way you don’t have to loose all your money, just most of it. We expedite your life here so you can return to wherever you came from before anyone even misses you. Many of our clients still have enough money for Honda Civic and a deposit on a condo when they leave. Believe you me, taking the guess work out of your failure will save you a small, or perhaps large, fortune.”

Many of you are wondering, can it really be this easy? The answer is, yes. Currently Grand Opening Liquidations has a full schedule of “High Season” grand closures, but their staff can always get you ready for a September or October failure. These typically are less expensive because GOL can piggy back your new venture with a current client’s departure.

In the fall, Grand Opening Liquidations will be expanding into brokering bad land deals; which will include land you won’t actually own, land with no water rights, infra-structure problems, and property in high theft areas. Please don’t sit back and watch your dreams go up in smoke, when Grand Opening Liquidations can watch the smoke for you.

I encourage the good people at Qué Magazine to keep up the good work, and I encourage everyone in the area to pick up a copy of the magazine, support the advertisers therein, and buy advertising if you are a local business. (It would be a shame if Qué Magazine had to employ the services of Yuri and Sasha!)

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All of us here at EthelTheFrog.com wish you and yours a very Happy New Year, and thank you for visiting our humble blog.

QR codes are everywhere . . . and you’ll be seeing more and more of them everyday. They are on business cards, magazine ads, signs, t-shirts . . . even tattoos!

What are QR codes?

A QR code is a two-dimensional barcode that is readable by smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices. It allows the encoding of over 4000 characters in a two dimensional barcode. QR codes may be used to display text to the user, to open a URL, save a contact to the user’s address book or to compose text messages.

To read QR codes, you require an appropriate “app” (software) installed on your device. These apps are now ubiquitous and, usually, free. (For example, among many, many more, for Android devices, there is “Barcode Scanner”. On iOS devices (iPhones, etc.) there are also many QR code readers available on the App Store, such as “i-nigma”. On Symbian devices, you can use “Mobiltag Barcodes Reader”, among others.

We recommend that you publish the QR code for your mobile site on all your marketing materials – brochures, signs, print ads, business cards. There are now companies making rubber wrist bands, imprinted with your QR code.

(If you’re interested in reading more about QR Codes, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code , however, there’s more information there than you need or will want to read).

For example, here is a QR code for this blog:

There are scammers out there who are charging customers to create QR codes for them. Don’t be suckered in. Generating your own QR code for free couldn’t be easier. Just click on the QR Code Generator tab above. You can embed your contact, text, SMS, URL, email, or phone information into a code.

A feature that we offer that I have not seen in other free code generators is the ability to select the foreground and background colors of your code.

QR codes are an essential tool, if your restaurant, hotel, bar, real estate company, or other business has a mobile website. (If your business doesn’t have mobile website, you can generate your own and have it hosted for only $10 per month at Elm Twig Mobile Site Generator.)

macarenaMerry Christmas and Feliz Navidad, everyone!

I’ve never been much for guidebooks, so when trying to get my bearings in a strange American city, I normally start by asking the cabdriver or hotel clerk some silly question regarding the latest census figures. I say silly because I don’t really care how many people live in Olympia, Washington, or Columbus, Ohio. They’re nice enough places, but the numbers mean nothing to me. My second question might have to do with average annual rainfall, which, again, doesn’t tell me anything about the people who have chosen to call this place home.

What really interests me are the local gun laws. Can I carry a concealed weapon, and if so, under what circumstances? What’s the waiting period for a tommy gun? Could I buy a Glock 17 if I were recently divorced or fired from my job? I’ve learned from experience that it’s best to lead into this subject as delicately as possible, especially if you and the local citizen are alone and enclosed in a relatively small space. Bide your time, though, and you can walk away with some excellent stories. I’ve heard, for example, that the blind can legally hunt in both Texas and Michigan. They must be accompanied by a sighted companion, but still, it seems a bit risky. You wouldn’t want a blind person driving a car or piloting a plane, so why hand him a rifle? What sense does that make? I ask about guns not because I want one of my own but because the answers vary so widely from state to state. In a country that’s become so homogenous, I’m reassured by these last touches of regionalism.

Guns aren’t really an issue in Europe, so when I’m traveling abroad, my first question usually relates to barnyard animals. “What do your roosters say?” is a good icebreaker, as every country has its own unique interpretation. In Germany, where dogs bark “vow vow” and both the frog and the duck say “quack,” the rooster greets the dawn with a hearty “kik-a-ricki.” Greek roosters crow “kiri-a-kee,” and in France they scream “coco-rico,” which sounds like one of those horrible premixed cocktails with a pirate on the label. When told that an American rooster says “cock-a-doodle-doo,” my hosts look at me with disbelief and pity.

“When do you open your Christmas presents?” is another good conversation starter, as it explains a lot about national character. People who traditionally open gifts on Christmas Eve seem a bit more pious and family oriented than those who wait until Christmas morning. They go to mass, open presents, eat a late meal, return to church the following morning, and devote the rest of the day to eating another big meal. Gifts are generally reserved for children, and the parents tend not to go overboard. It’s nothing I’d want for myself, but I suppose it’s fine for those who prefer food and family to things of real value.

In France and Germany, gifts are exchanged on Christmas Eve, while in Holland the children receive presents on December 5, in celebration of Saint Nicholas Day. It sounded sort of quaint until I spoke to a man named Oscar, who filled me in on a few of the details as we walked from my hotel to the Amsterdam train station.

Unlike the jolly, obese American Santa, Saint Nicholas is painfully thin and dresses not unlike the pope, topping his robes with a tall hat resembling an embroidered tea cozy. The outfit, I was told, is a carryover from his former career, when he served as a bishop in Turkey.

One doesn’t want to be too much of a cultural chauvinist, but this seemed completely wrong to me. For starters, Santa didn’t use to do anything. He’s not retired, and, more important, he has nothing to do with Turkey. The climate’s all wrong, and people wouldn’t appreciate him. When asked how he got from Turkey to the North Pole, Oscar told me with complete conviction that Saint Nicholas currently resides in Spain, which again is simply not true. While he could probably live wherever he wanted, Santa chose the North Pole specifically because it is harsh and isolated. No one can spy on him, and he doesn’t have to worry about people coming to the door. Anyone can come to the door in Spain, and in that outfit, he’d most certainly be recognized. On top of that, aside from a few pleasantries, Santa doesn’t speak Spanish. He knows enough to get by, but he’s not fluent, and he certainly doesn’t eat tapas.

While our Santa flies on a sled, Saint Nicholas arrives by boat and then transfers to a white horse. The event is televised, and great crowds gather at the waterfront to greet him. I’m not sure if there’s a set date, but he generally docks in late November and spends a few weeks hanging out and asking people what they want.

“Is it just him alone?” I asked. “Or does he come with some backup?”

Oscar’s English was close to perfect, but he seemed thrown by a term normally reserved for police reinforcement.

“Helpers,” I said. “Does he have any elves?”

Maybe I’m just overly sensitive, but I couldn’t help but feel personally insulted when Oscar denounced the very idea as grotesque and unrealistic. “Elves,” he said. “They’re just so silly.”

The words silly and unrealistic were redefined when I learned that Saint Nicholas travels with what was consistently described as “six to eight black men.” I asked several Dutch people to narrow it down, but none of them could give me an exact number. It was always “six to eight,” which seems strange, seeing as they’ve had hundreds of years to get a decent count.

The six to eight black men were characterized as personal slaves until the mid-fifties, when the political climate changed and it was decided that instead of being slaves they were just good friends. I think history has proven that something usually comes between slavery and friendship, a period of time marked not by cookies and quiet times beside the fire but by bloodshed and mutual hostility. They have such violence in Holland, but rather than duking it out among themselves, Santa and his former slaves decided to take it out on the public. In the early years, if a child was naughty, Saint Nicholas and the six to eight black men would beat him with what Oscar described as “the small branch of a tree.”

“A switch?”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s it. They’d kick him and beat him with a switch. Then, if the youngster was really bad, they’d put him in a sack and take him back to Spain.”

“Saint Nicholas would kick you?”

“Well, not anymore,” Oscar said. “Now he just pretends to kick you.”

“And the six to eight black men?”

“Them, too.”

He considered this to be progressive, but in a way I think it’s almost more perverse than the original punishment. “I’m going to hurt you, but not really.” How many times have we fallen for that line? The fake slap invariably makes contact, adding the elements of shock and betrayal to what had previously been plain, old-fashioned fear. What kind of Santa spends his time pretending to kick people before stuffing them into a canvas sack? Then, of course, you’ve got the six to eight former slaves who could potentially go off at any moment. This, I think, is the greatest difference between us and the Dutch. While a certain segment of our population might be perfectly happy with the arrangement, if you told the average white American that six to eight nameless black men would be sneaking into his house in the middle of the night, he would barricade the doors and arm himself with whatever he could get his hands on.

“Six to eight, did you say?”

In the years before central heating, Dutch children would leave their shoes by the fireplace, the promise being that unless they planned to beat you, kick you, or stuff you into a sack, Saint Nicholas and the six to eight black men would fill your clogs with presents. Aside from the threats of violence and kidnapping, it’s not much different from hanging your stockings from the mantel. Now that so few people have a working fireplace, Dutch children are instructed to leave their shoes beside the radiator, furnace, or space heater. Saint Nicholas and the six to eight black men arrive on horses, which jump from the yard onto the roof. At this point, I guess, they either jump back down and use the door, or they stay put and vaporize through the pipes and electrical wires. Oscar wasn’t too clear about the particulars, but, really, who can blame him? We have the same problem with our Santa. He’s supposed to use the chimney, but if you don’t have one, he still manages to come through. It’s best not to think about it too hard.

While eight flying reindeer are a hard pill to swallow, our Christmas story remains relatively simple. Santa lives with his wife in a remote polar village and spends one night a year traveling around the world. If you’re bad, he leaves you coal. If you’re good and live in America, he’ll give you just about anything you want. We tell our children to be good and send them off to bed, where they lie awake, anticipating their great bounty. A Dutch parent has a decidedly hairier story to relate, telling his children, “Listen, you might want to pack a few of your things together before you go to bed. The former bishop from Turkey will be coming along with six to eight black men. They might put some candy in your shoes, they might stuff you in a sack and take you to Spain, or they might just pretend to kick you. We don’t know for sure, but we want you to be prepared.”

This is the reward for living in Holland. As a child you get to hear this story, and as an adult you get to turn around and repeat it. As an added bonus, the government has thrown in legalized drugs and prostitution — so what’s not to love about being Dutch?

Oscar finished his story just as we arrived at the station. He was a polite and interesting guy — very good company — but when he offered to wait until my train arrived, I begged off, saying I had some calls to make. Sitting alone in the vast terminal, surrounded by other polite, seemingly interesting Dutch people, I couldn’t help but feel second-rate. Yes, it was a small country, but it had six to eight black men and a really good bedtime story. Being a fairly competitive person, I felt jealous, then bitter, and was edging toward hostile when I remembered the blind hunter tramping off into the Michigan forest. He might bag a deer, or he might happily shoot his sighted companion in the stomach. He may find his way back to the car, or he may wander around for a week or two before stumbling through your front door. We don’t know for sure, but in pinning that license to his chest, he inspires the sort of narrative that ultimately makes me proud to be an American.

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Last minute Christmas gifts . . . or maybe something for yourself? Check out Big Bad Stuff!

Tequila Christmas Cake

1 cup sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1 cup water
1 tsp. salt
1 cup brown sugar
Lemon juice
4 large eggs
Nuts
1 bottle tequila
2 cups dried fruit

Sample the tequila to check quality. Take a large bowl; check the tequila again to be sure it is of the highest quality. Repeat. Turn on the electric mixer. Beat one cup of butter in a large fluffy bowl. Add 1 teaspoon of sugar. Beat again. At this point, it is best to make sure the tequila is still OK. Try another cup just in case. Turn off the mixerer thingy. Break 2 eegs and add to the bowl and chuck iin the cup of dried fruit. Pick the fruit up off the floor. Mix on the turner. If the fried druit getas stuck in the beaterers, just pry it loose with a drewscriver. Sample the tequila to test for tonsisticity. Next, sift 2 cups of salt, or something. Check the tequila. Now shift the lemon ice strain the nuts. Add one table. Add a spoon of sugar, or somefink. Whatever you can find. Greash the oven. Turn the cake tin 360 degees and try not to fall over. Don’t forget to beat off the turner. Finally, throw the bowl through the window. Finish the tequila and wipe the counter with the cat.

Cherry Mristmas

P.S. – All joking aside, a lot of holiday festivities involve alcohol . . . and drunk-driving is a serious problem at this time of year. Please don’t drink and drive.

I would like to share an experience with you, about drinking and driving.

A couple of nights ago, I was out for a few drinks with some friends and had a few too many beers and some rather nice Merlot. Knowing full well I may have been slightly over the limit, I did something I’ve never done before – I took a bus home.

I arrived home safely and without incident, which was a real surprise, as I have never driven a bus before and am not sure where I got this one.