That was quite the silly story. It ended (or so I thought) with them sending me a cheque for one cent.

Well, ever the customer service experts, AMEX has sent me my (hopefully final) Year-End Summary. That’s pretty weird given that I canceled the card in 2008. But the one cent credit kept the account “active” into 2009, so it must have triggered the automatic Year-End Summary robot.

And here, dear readers, is the relevant page (one of four, plus a four page front-and-back cover) showing a summary of my AMEX activity for 2009:

Thank you and good bye. No, really. Good-bye!

There are two problems with that sentence; first, “the couple” is a singular object, so the verb should be “flies” not “fly” (Bob flies, Bob and Fred fly). So the immediate reaction is to change the line to “the couple still flies separately.”

But that doesn’t account for the second problem; “the couple” — as a singular object — cannot fly “separately” because, well, it’s a single thing. So it’s not just a grammatical issue; there’s a conceptual mistake.

Vanity Fair, as far as I can tell, has high editorial standards, so how could this double-whammy get through? In seeking the rationale for the first problem (fly vs. flies) I thought, “What would Bill Walsh do?” (If you have any interest in editorial machinations in a context that is generally free of the polarizing descriptive vs. prescriptive arguments, you should read Bill’s blog and his web site. Bill flies no flags, he just makes sense.)

Then, as I brushed my teeth, it came to me. “The couple,” in this sentence, is shorthand for “the members of the couple.” So in fact, it is a plural, not singular. The “error” is in not spelling it out, but the editorial argument is (probably) that doing so is unnecessarily awkward, and in the context of the paragraph, the context of “the couple” is obvious. Note that this interpretation solves both problems.

Prescriptivists (of which I am not but am often accused of being) will reject that position, and the descriptivists (whom I have been accused of disliking, when in fact I often side with them) have already stopped reading this post because they never saw a problem in the first place.

But what I’m interested in is the editorial position. Personally, I would have re-cast the sentence as “Mendez and Winslet still fly separately,” or simply “They still fly separately,” but it depends on how the rest of the paragraph is cast.

However, I now understand the choice of “fly” over “flies” even if I don’t fully agree with it. And now I will move on to the next thing.

And so passes a Sunday morning chez nous.

The background part of the image looked familiar. Then I realized; holy crap! That’s my picture!

What I found on CTVmontreal.ca.

I had posted the original version of the image on the Monday Morning Photo Blog five years ago (January 17, 2005). I have never sold reproduction rights to it, nor has anyone asked me to use it for any purpose. And it is not a Creative Commons image (why it is not is a subject for another day.) Written very plainly on the page where the image appears is the text “All photographs taken, and copyright owned, by Ed Hawco. Please ask if you want to use any of these images for any purpose.”

My original copyrighted image.

Clearly, this was a rip off. But what kind of a rip off? Possibilities include:

1. CTVmontreal.ca as a corporation clearly and callously lifted the image from my photo blog without asking for permission.
2. A specific half-wit at CTVmontreal.ca, bucked policy by clearly and callously lifting the image from my photo blog without asking for permission.
3. CTVmontreal.ca obtained permission to use the image from someone other than me; a third party (person or agency) who stole my photo and is selling it as their own.

There are other possibilities too, but those are the most likely. I decided against number 1, which is the possibility that most knee-jerk reactors pounce on. My reason is simple: CTVmontreal.ca is not a thinking entity; it’s a corporation made up of people, and in all likelihood they have a policy against ripping off copyrighted work. Thus, if it was taken without permission, it was most likely a function of one rogue graphics dude who is too lazy, arrogant, or incompetent to go by the rules and ends up putting the company at risk by doing things that are stupid and illegal.

The situation described in number 3 is certainly not unheard of. In fact, that happens way more often than you probably think. However, I settled on number 2 as the most likely explanation.

Thus settled, I immediately sent an email to the managing editor and informed her of the situation, letting her know that I was not angry but she needs to know she’s using copyrighted material without permission. And by the way, permission for such an image used in this context is astoundingly cheap.

The managing editor emailed me back within a couple of hours to apologize, and to inform me that the image has been removed from the web site. She told me that 80% of the photos they use are taken by their own photographers, and the other 20% are used with permission. She doesn’t know how this one got into their database, but she would look into it. (Judging by some file data I extracted, it looks like they’ve been using the image for at least seven months; it was put in the database on my birthday last June.)

I replied by thanking her for addressing the situation, and I reassured her again that I wasn’t angry. I told her that the price for usage rights was in the range of “lunch money.”

She emailed me back later to apologize again, and to reiterate that they take these issues seriously. She also informed me that she has escalated the issue to the head office in Toronto to ensure that everyone is aware of the rules and to make sure it doesn’t happen again. She never brought up the possibility of paying. (But why would she when she has a ready store of free images? Although it should be said that the image they replaced it with is dead boring.)

The reason why I’m telling you this is not because I want to slag CTVmontreal.ca. (In fact, I commend them for their quick and decisive reply.) Rather, I want to make the point that in this hot-tempered atmosphere of copyright sensitivity, at a time when the world is neatly cleaved into the old-school copyright defenders and the new-school “free sharing” enthusiasts, each side should relax a bit and not get all Balkanized. Each school of thought has merit and there is room for both.

Specifically:

• Copyright defenders should not get all paranoid that every bit of file sharing and “creative commons” material represents some crazy communist plot to rip the very cash from their pockets.
• Free sharing enthusiasts should recognize that not all creative effort is a gift to the world and that some people need to make a living this way.

And that, dear readers, is my oversimplified view.

It’s just a starting point really. In my various travels around the web I am constantly shaking my head at the paranoid, silly, reactionary, and just plain stupid thinking of people on both sides of the fence. Yes, the world is changing! Adapt!

We need to find a way to keep both approaches in play and in balance. By not overreacting (as a few people who I told this story to on the day it occurred did), by understanding that (a) in this context the image doesn’t have much monetary value, so I’m not really out anything, (b) the “perpetrator” is a big corporation that probably has very strict rules that were broken by one rogue, (c) there’s no point in getting all hot blooded over it, and (d) by telling this story here, I am doing my little bit to calm these choppy waters and to find my place in a world where most creative work is cheap, but that cheapness opens up other possibilities.

It is composed of (in order, from bottom to top):

• Standard Blork San Marzano pizza sauce
• A dusting of dried oregano
• A respectable portion of conventional grated full-fat mozzarella cheese
• Baby spinach sautéed with a clove of garlic
• Crimini mushrooms, sautéed.
• Proscuitto
• A sprinkle of grated aged asiago cheese — applied after the pizza came out of the oven.

The result:

Kaapow!

The only thing missing is a name. Any suggestions as to what I should call this glorious pie?

Update: here’s a video of me flipping the dough that I used for this pizza:

Blork Flips Out from Ed Hawco on Vimeo.

If you answered “a person who selflessly does a good deed,” you are wrong. A Samaritan is simply a person from Samaria, a mountainous region of the Holy Land between Judea and Galilee — more or less what we now call the West Bank of Israel. The ancient Samaritans had a lot in common with the ancient Jews, but they weren’t on the same team, so to speak. Or perhaps it’s better to say they were on the same team (the Abrahams) but were on different shifts.

Put it this way; when the Parable of the Good Samaritan was written in the first century A.D. the idea of a Samaritan doing a good deed for a non-Samaritan (in this case a Jew) was a bit unusual. Those were very politically, culturally, and religiously loaded days in the Holy Land (not unlike today), so there was not a lot of trust between people of different tribes. So one of the key points of the parable is that one should do good deeds for everyone, even those who are “others.”

In that case, the Samaritan was an “other,” and he did a good deed for a Jew. Jesus, himself a Jew, told this parable as a way of illustrating that even those questionable “others” can do good deeds. But the Samaritan was not a “Samaritan” because he was good. It was because he was from Samaria. The fact that he was good made him a good Samaritan, which does not exclude the possibility of there being loads of bad Samaritans.

It’s as if I wrote a parable about a New Yorker doing a good deed for a Quebecer. It would be the Parable of the Good New Yorker. Naturally, that parable would not imply that every New Yorker is good. More importantly, it would not imply that any good person should be referred to as a “New Yorker!”

And yet I see and hear, on a regular basis, people referring to someone who does a good deed as a “Samaritan.” I hear things like “I had a flat tire and a Samaritan came along and helped me fix it,” or “If it wasn’t for that Samaritan I’d still be down that well!” Really? A Samaritan — a person from the Levant, a old biblical guy in a robe and sandals — came along and fixed your tire?

I think not. However, if you said “I had a flat tire and a Good Samaritan came along and helped me fix it,” or “If it wasn’t for that Good Samaritan I’d still be down that well!” then you would not be making an error. People would understand that by “Good Samaritan” you mean someone like the man in the parable of the Good Samaritan. But when you just say “Samaritan,” all you mean is some dude from Samaria!

• House of Meetings, by Martin Amis
• The Wasted Vigil, by Nadeem Aslam
• Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin
• Let it Come Down, by Paul Bowles
• The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain
• That Summer in Paris, by Morely Callaghan
• The Loved and the Lost, by Morley Callaghan
• A Month in the Country, by J. L. Carr
• The Favorite Game, by Leonard Cohen
• Coffee with Hemingway, by Kirk Curnutt
• Burma Chronicles, by Guy Delisle
• Shenzhen, by Guy Delisle
• Ministry of Fear, by Graham Greene
• The Tenth Man, by Graham Greene
• A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway
• The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War, by Ernest Hemingway
• The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill
• Crow Lake, by Mary Lawson
• Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis
• The Razor’s Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham
• Breakable You, by Brian Morton
• Coming Up for Air, by George Orwell
• Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell
• Lush Life, by Richard Price
• Paul in the Country, by Michel Rabagliati
• Everyman, by Philip Roth
• Gomorrah, by Roberto Saviano (translated by Virginia Jewiss)
• My Dinner with Andre (screenplay), by Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory
• Chef, by Jaspreet Singh
• Night Train to Turkistan, by Stuart Stevens
• Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace
• Young Hearts Crying, by Richard Yates

That’s 32 books, 23 of which are categorized as fiction, three memoirs, three “other” non-fiction, and three “graphic” novels (all of which are fiction/memoir hybrids). The alarming thing is that only one of these was written by a woman.

I don’t plan my reading with any particular agenda in mind, but I do like to keep things varied; to read authors I haven’t read before, to mix up fiction and non-fiction, and to get different perspectives. But this is my worst male to female ratio yet. I’m not alone in this; it’s been a bad decade for women writers, according to this recent editorial in the Washington Post and this follow-up analysis on Maisonneuve.org.

Another notable thing about my reading list — and this was not intentional — is the number of older books. It was something of a 20th century retrospective:

• Three books from the 1920s.*
• Four books from the 1930s.**
• Three books from the 1940s.
• Three books from the 1950s.
• One book from the 1960s.*
• Four books from the 1980s.
• One book from the 1990s.**
• 13 books from the 2000s.

* Morely Callaghan’s That Summer in Paris was published in 1963, but it’s a memoir of the 1920s and is entirely “of” the 1920s. The same can be said of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which was published posthumously in 1964. Interestingly, both books cover the same basic ground, with Callaghan’s memoir being, essentially, a memoir of knowing Hemingway in Paris in the 1920s.

** Hemingway’s The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War was published in 1998 but the stories were written in the 1930s and possibly the 1940s. Graham Greene’s The Tenth Man was written in 1942 and then forgotten about. It was found, and published, in 1985.

If you think that’s a lot of reading and you wish you could keep up, consider Julien Smith of In Over Your Head; he read more than a book a week in 2009, and managed to co-write and publish one too! He has thoughtfully written this blog post that explains how you too can read a book a week in 2010 (but he left out the part about writing one).