The Kommandant is renown for her rare, yet amazingly pithy, insights into the human condition. My business partner calls her “Just the Facts” because of her down-to-earth intellectual style. After all, it is she who came up with the stunning insight regarding air travel: “They used to treat us like customers….now they just treat us like potential terrorists”.

Another good one this morning as she was reading the paper: “I remember not long ago going immediately to the comics…now my first stop is the obits”.

My Leica dealer just informed me that my M9 which was ordered in October and “promised” for end of January will unlikely be available before March….maybe! In fact he has only received two units since the beginning of the year and has had to refund several customers their deposits. The M9 was announced in September to huge fanfare; now 5 months later, nada.

The Leica S2 professional camera was similarly announced two years ago yet has still to make an appearance on store shelves. In the meantime, new competitive offerings promise to be available shortly, essential preempting much of the potential market for the S2.

The X1 luxury compact was also introduced in September at the same time as the M9. Still no sign of it. But the real diagnostic is the shortage of routine lenses that form the backbone of any dealer’s inventory. In fact, with the exception of “demos” there does not appear to be any Leica inventory to be had, anywhere! Now, I can understand how a shortage of a critical part may delay production of any given model. But in this case the problem transcends any one model and appears to be a far-reaching phenomenon. As a corporate turnaround specialist, the natural question that springs to my mind is: “Is this just a case of demand outstripping supply, or does it mean that the company has reached a critical point in its cash flow and is unable to find the money to buy the parts and pay the labor, to make the products that will save its skin? We call this the point-of-no-return on the spiral of decline. It means that one doesn’t have the cash to save oneself from disaster.

I remember a tragic individual case some years ago. Our Human Resources group had arranged a job interview for an excellent candidate who had lost her job some months previously. On the afternoon that she was due to meet the client, I received a phone call from her. She explained tearfully that she didn’t even have the money to put gas in her car to go to the interview (some kilometers away and not accessible by public transit). I had to send one of our local people over with a $50 loan so she could make the interview. THAT’s the point-of-no-return on the spiral of decline.

Speaking to the Leica dealer today, we both agreed that we had never seen such a case of lavish product introductions without any follow-up inventory. Had Leica simply kept mum, they might at least have kept selling off old inventory. Once the cat was out of the bag, people just stopped buying the “old” technology. Sheer craziness. We know that in today’s technology world, if you can’t get stock on the shelves in a few weeks, you’ll likely lose all momentum and customer confidence. Two year and even five-month delays are unconscionable and downright stupid!

On special occasions, where I want just that extra smoothness to the visage, I call upon the final oil-pass as the coup-de-grace to my shave. It has been some time since I did this, mainly because of laziness and the fact that my “regular” shaves have become so damn good and easy that I felt going the extra distance was hardly worth it. I was wrong. One forgets.

I had a craving for my old stub of Palmolive shave soap (in a stick – from Belgium). Nothing smells like Palmolive. It’s as close to Heaven as you’ll get in a shave product (others in that category include T&H 1805 shave cream, and Gold-Dachs shave soap). The Palmolive stick makes a wickedly thick lather that combined with a fresh Sputnik (Russia) blade in the E.J. Chatsworth produced a phenomenally smooth face. Until I bothered to make a 4th pass, this time with the trusty Jojoba oil that is. Wow! I’m stretching the skin on my face as I write and can’t even find a hint of stubble. The “polishing” pass is well worth the extra couple of minutes, and as a bonus, if you don’t soap off the oil but just dry off with your towel, it leaves a great moisturizer on your skin to fight the Winter dryness.

Now I’m off to see Mr. Daswani at Ruby Foo’s Hotel. He’s the globe-trotting tailor from Hong Kong who promises to make me a bespoke suit with my choice of fabric for $400 (and he’ll throw in a custom-made shirt). Hey, it’s a gift, why shouldn’t I give it a try? If you see me walking down the street looking like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame, you’ll know why!

I’ve had pretty disturbed sleep for the last few months. I’m a light sleeper and, even worse, I don’t wake up in the normal groggy manner; if I open my eyes, my brain immediately goes into high-gear and I’m wide awake.

Our neighborhood has gotten quite noisy in the middle of the night – it’s strange that people no longer seem to have a diurnal rhythm – every day and every hour seems appropriate for just about any activity. Understandably, renovation and restoration seem to be big in our neighborhood, since most of the homes are hovering around a hundred years old. But for the love of Jesus, do contractors have to deliver lumber and other construction materials at 4 AM so that their crews are ready to work by 7? Is it normal for trucks to be going up sleepy residential neighborhoods at such times?

In the Winter, there’s snow removal all night long. Giant diesel trucks slamming down their plows and noisily belching exhaust as they try to clear the streets. Not to mention the army of driveway cleaners and their massive blowers howling in the night (the City no longer allows driveway plows). Even the freaking paper boy likes to get an early start by launching the newspaper against our front door at 4:30 AM. In the Summer, the crows get an early start, usually around 4 AM, just as the first rays of daylight in Newfoundland start to peek over the Montreal horizon. I remember one night hearing a loud bang and seeing the bright blue-green flash of an electric condenser going up in smoke on one of the outside poles. “Some crow must have just got electrocuted”, I mumbled over to the Kommandant. Sure thing, next morning I found a monster crow flat on his back, sizzled like chicken at a redneck BBQ. Revenge was sweet.

And it’s not much better on the inside of the house either! The enormous room humidifiers required because of the nose-punishing Winter heating, regularly let out noisy belches of air like a modern day Vesuvius.

The Kommandant’s solution? “She who would sleep through a tornado” has, as usual, a pragmatic response: “Wear ear plugs”.

I decided instead to, in the words of Eckhart Tolle, “Stop resisting….it’s all an illusion”, and instead embrace the night. So if I wake up at 3, 4, or 5 AM, I just get up and get to work. This morning it was (mercifully) 5 AM. All I can say is: “Man, can you ever get a lot done between 5-8 AM!”. My office has returned to a semblance of order. I’m looking forward to my Greek coffee and toast with genuine hunger. And I’m going to find out where the paper boy lives if it kills me. Then I’m going to go to his house at 3 AM and throw frozen turds on his door.

So I went to my barber in the Pointe-Claire Village. My barber is a “she”, having bought the old village barber shop that has been around since likely the turn-of-the-century. She’s extremely good, BTW. I asked her some time ago why she had sold her high-end salon and bought a barber shop. She said that she preferred cutting men’s hair even though it was a lot less revenue (she charges $14 for a regular cut, and $16 for a scissors-only job) because men were far less demanding and just wanted to get a good cut and get the Hell out without too much chit-chat. Fifteen minutes, barabing-baraboom! And she cuts hair just like my old barber, who had the temerity to retire at age 90 leaving me stranded after 45 years, with quick confident strokes and a cool hand on the straight-edge razor.

But to my point. She was sick as a dog. Her nose was redder than Rudolf’s and she tried to speak very little in order to suppress her cough. “Geeez” I said to myself. “Here we go again!”. Grrrrrrr.

Mr. Italo and our intrepid New York correspondent, Mr. Dario, have been waging a years-old, and occasionally nasty, war regarding the superiority of Montreal bagels vs. the crap variants that come out of New York City. For me, the issue was settled one fine day when the owner of St. Viateur Bagel (the shrine of Montreal bageldom) wandered into our favorite Mile-End cafe. Mr. Italo, eager to score a couple on Mr. Dario (visiting Montreal at the time) asked the Holy Man which bagels were superior. “The ones you grew up with” he said in near Ekhart Tolle spiritual perfection.

Which leads me to the current subject: Can junk-food comfort us?

My wife and I have been cleaning up our dietary act for at least the last 15 years. It’s a process. As I’ve written before, after reading Michael Pollan’s new book, Food Rules, I was very encouraged to find that we have achieved a very high score (94%) in that regard. Ninety percent of our meat and fowl is organic and free-range. The vast majority of our fish is either organic, wild, or of Western hemisphere provenance. We eat virtually zero Asian cesspool sourced fish and seafood. About half our produce is local, although we still struggle with fruit, especially in the Canadian Winter. And we cook! Out of 90 meals in a month, 85 are at home. Few things ever come from a package and our recycling and garbage output has dwindled to once every two weeks where we need to put out the bin or bag.

That being said, I invariably find a box of old-style Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Post Shreddies, some Velveeta, or an occasional six-pack of Nutty Buddy ice-cream cones in my shopping cart. Nothing high-end, just some of the basic crap that I would occasionally convince [read nag] my poor widowed mother to buy when I was a kid (this stuff was anathema to her – she was Michael Pollan way before he was even a glint in his father’s eye!). Frankly, the stuff doesn’t even taste that great, but it has the power to take me back to a safer, kinder time, when someone else had to worry about paying the bills and I could just focus on having fun.

Even Pollan makes a case for the occasional digression from the pursuit of perfection. In fact, perfection is pretty annoying and fundamentally distasteful to the Psyche because it knows that ultimately it’s an illusion that can never be achieved. And “perfect” people are almost invariably self-absorbed, boring, social pariahs with whom you can never have any fun.

One of the serious epidemiological issues that surfaced during the recent H1N1 panic is how people infected with a variety of communicable illnesses continue to go to work and infect their co-workers. While this may be somewhat understandable among workers without paid sick-leave, it is hardly limited to this group. During the high-point of the H1N1 pandemic, while visiting a variety of clients, I was shocked at how often I found people from receptionists to senior mangers, at work, hacking and coughing, spreading their germs to everyone around them…me included. When I would challenge them about it, they would invariably give some excuse such as, “I’m not THAT sick!”, “No one’s going to do my work for me”, or “I have some urgent tasks to take care of”. And my clients are almost all health-care companies!

But it’s not just their fault. This is part of an insane machismo that pervades society and is driven by advertisers who promote the message: “Don’t let your sickness stop you from living…just take XYZ drug and keep going as usual”. I’m sure you’ve seen the ads…ADVIL is a notorious promoter of this ethic, although they are not alone. Strangely, these ads are almost always targeted to women. I guess they must find that playing to the prevailing Superwoman archetype is more lucrative than to the notorious male “Big Baby” incapacitated by the slightest sneeze. Funny enough, I just saw a similar ad directed to men but this time the guy in the ad is encouraged to take the drug in order to feel better so he can stay in bed and play video games! How sick is that?

And come to think of it, all the people I saw at work despite being sick were women. I guess the ads work….no matter who else gets sick. People really miss the point: The reason you feel like shit when you’re sick is because YOU’RE SICK!!!! You’re not supposed to be swimming, running, kayaking, or attending business meetings. You’re supposed to stay in bed and get well. How well? You’ll know when you don’t feel sick anymore! As a guideline, most colds and flu have about a 5-7 day contagion period during which you can transmit the virus or bacterium.

Weird how all the health-nuts are so into “natural” and the one thing they’re not willing to listen to Nature about is their own health!

A few months ago I wrote a post about my “Elements of Style”. It was a bit of a spoof of all the men’s magazine articles (PR driven for sure) about things every man should posses in his armamentarium. I’d like to add something to my list.

11. A great pair of beach sandals

Two years ago, while in Bethany Beach, I bought a pair of Reef Mick Fanning Signature sandals. They were pretty steep in price (for sandals), but I found myself wearing them every opportunity I could get away with. They even became my daily house “slipper”. The key advantage for me is that they offer exceptional cushioning for my 250+ lb., back-surgeried carcass; something I’ve never found in sandals, and even struggle with in good shoes.

I noticed a strange metal clip recessed into the Reef sole. I thought it was some safety hook for surfboards since the Reefs are apparently very popular with surfers (what do I know about surfing?!). Last October while in Naples, Florida, I found a huge Reef display at one of the department stores. I picked up a replacement pair for my now nearly destroyed originals. I handed them to the cashier, who looked at them and exclaimed, “Oh, Reefs….the sandals with the bottle opener!”. Huh? Bottle opener? Yup. Turns out that metal clip is a beer-bottle opener for those beach emergencies where you come across a bottle of brew in need of rescue.

Now this. Reef has come up with the Dram. The sandal has a flask built into its sole for emergencies when a beer is nowhere to be found. Perfect for my next bottle of Paddy’s Old Irish Whiskey (the best whiskey in the world in my humble opinion – thanks to Mr. Italo for introducing me to it). I found the Dram available on Amazon.com, but the Reef official website doesn’t seem to list it. This tells me that the forces of political correctness in America may already have forced the company to discontinue it in order to discourage drinking among the young. You may need to hurry up and get a pair if this model appeals to you.

The media has been giving Toyota quite a bit of grief these last few days, ever since their announced suspension of production of their biggest selling models in order to nail down and fix a potentially dangerous defect in their gas-pedal assembly. “Will the world’s largest automaker be able to recover?”, questioned one news program, and, “Toyota’s reputation in tatters!”, screamed another. The talking head at Toyota’s corporate PR department seemed befuddled. She stated that the move was consistent with the company’s absolute commitment to customer safety, and that customers would not only “get” that, but the brand would easily recover. Think Tylenol. I agree.

It goes to show you that no matter what you do, even when it’s the right thing, there’s always someone waiting to pounce on you, especially if you’re the top dog. It doesn’t matter that you’ve done everything right for 50 years and have built an enviable reputation; the moment you have a problem, the wolves are at your throat. Human nature at its basest.

Toyota’s move is unprecedented in the auto industry. While we can’t accurately predict what other companies would have done under the circumstances, I’d bet a case of Batter Blaster that the vast majority would have kept making and selling cars and just handled the recall under the normal recall procedure. After all, we’re talking a handful of incidents across the world. This ain’t no exploding Ford Pinto!

Strangely enough, I am a little disappointed in Toyota though, for its inept handling of the PR side. Perhaps this is a company that never really needed a Corporate Communications function; maybe they felt they were so above reproach that this couldn’t happen to them. There’s a lesson in that. Working as I have been in the PR world these last few months, I’ve come to learn that when the chips are down, you really need to have someone out there to tell your side of the story truthfully, accurately, and convincingly. I remember a little axiom I coined a few years ago: “Your life is like a vacuum; If you fail to fill it with what you want, others will fill it with what they want from you”.

My wife and I are food snobs. After all, if you score 94% on Michael Pollan’s Food Rules, you can’t be eating too much packaged crap. But not all crap is packaged and not all packaged food is necessarily crap (just the vast majority). In the past, for example, I’ve waxed enthusiastic about packaged specialty spices for various ethnic dishes and how these tend to be much fresher and flavorful than the stuff sitting in my spice-shelf for the past 35 years.

For the last four months, I’ve been working on a project for a PR firm. The folks at the firm have been charged with spinning a product that on the surface is (to me) extremely unappealing and distasteful. But no matter whom I speak to, they absolutely rave about the product and keep insisting that once I try it, I will be nuts for it. So today I finally bit. Batter Blaster canned, pressurized pancake/waffle batter. Yes, you read right. Pancake batter in a can. Organic. All-natural ingredients. Even Consumer Reports gave it a thumbs up.

I made two pancakes each for The Kommandant and myself as tonight’s dessert. She had no clue what I was doing. I told her it was a new quick recipe for pancakes. They were light, fluffy, airy, and without a hint of the typical artificial back-of-the-throat aftertaste. She loved them. It took all of 5 minutes to make them (and that was mostly the time waiting for them to cook in the skillet). Served with an outstanding Quebec maple syrup, they were excellent and compared favorably to our home-made version. With the kids now moved out, it’s becoming increasingly tough to make things that normally have to be made in quantity. Batter Blaster is a great occasional treat for empty nesters or singles/couples who don’t want to prepare a full recipe. Highly recommended.

Now I must brace myself from the jeers of derision from Mr. Italo and my other food-snob companions. But as the ancient Greeks said: Everything in moderation. Besides I like to be a little unpredictable, it keeps them on their toes.