Slow traffic day.

Today was the annual slow traffic day in our neck of the what-was-once woods.  The folks responsible for slowing down traffic are the good folks at Targa Newfoundland.  Every year we all gather at some point to watch as expensive and expensively modified cars race through our streets.  And every year the point is to make the most creative remark about the cars as they go by often comparing them to the young and not so young drivers that terrorize our town daily.

The best one this year came from the guy working on our heating system that said "Jesus, they only close the road because the Targa cars would frustrate the shit out of the usual speeders"!  He also informed me that he had gone faster than that when he was hooked to a tow truck in his old work van.

My beef today is the educational system and it's refusal to allow the kids to witness this event by keeping them in class in the name of safety. The same crowd that will cancel school two days in advance based upon the long range forecast.  This doesn't apply to my boy...I keep him home deliberately not to thumb my nose at the school folk but to allow him, a ten year old boy, to witness something cool that is actually brought to a remote place that doesn't always get to have cool.  In exchange he had to wash himself thoroughly this morning and do two pages of math practice the night before.  It turned out to be the easiest homework he has done in his life.

I don't expect my behaviour in this issue to be followed by many parents that simply can't deal with their youngster all morning long because they have punched into Facebook long before the bus has toted them from the roadside, but I only hope that a few more would jump on board...enough for the schools to note that absenteeism trumps the H1N1 on this morning annually and to send the youngin's home to watch legalized speeding.  Now I don't think all the teachers are stunned, but i do think that some of them need to be reminded that there is more to education than a classroom, and hell maybe I'll take A Crack At that job too.

Adults say the stupidest things.

Janet came up with this idea some time ago, and I'll be stealing it for this post. You simply take a stupid question that a tourist or other visitor to the studio asks, and examine it critically.

This week's installment comes to us from a visitor that had come by with a group collecting information for the government that will be used to better exhibit this region in tourism material. The speaker was to represent an uninformed tourist and help the facilitator gain insight into what the average Joe needs to know about our space and this one didn't disappoint with the newly "most mocked" querry..."did you learn this skill from your mother?"

Now this might be a reasonable question for knitting, quilting, or say...mat hooking. Shit, it might even be reasonable to some folks out there that grew up in traditional printshops, if those people weren't deformed freaks that lived to the ripe old age of twelve as a result of hanging out with those nasty chemicals during those good developmental years. Now, I have tried to gain some good info on boatbuilding from my elders, and as traditional skills go the question could be applied to almost anything from baking a cake to good oral sex...just testing to see if you were still with me. But, the point is this isn't really one of those traditional skills for outport Newfoundland, and many of the locals still have no idea what it is we do in the studio. What this means is that what was a stupid question at the time of it's asking turned out to be an eye-opener for those of us that assume people know the difference, and the asker was in fact the best equipped person among the group for having the guts to voice everything and anything that came into his mind. Now if we could infuse that enthusiasm into many of the locals, and more of the visitors to the studio, it can only be a good thing for all printmakers everywhere.

I wasn't sure where this post was going when I started and I'm still not sure it actually went anywhere but it killed a little time and did seem to come across as sharing some little insight. I can't promise they'll all be like this but I'll take another Crack At It in the future.

Photo Credits: Janet Davis
Photo Captions: Top: Duke placing dampened papers on inked lino-plates. Bottom: Hard to Port! Duke pulls the press bed through, printing cards, mini-prints, and bookmarks for Norton's Cove Studio.