Surprise at the Gun Show

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The Canadian Rockies Trail Guide by Brian Patton and Bart Robinson, 1971 edition

Every year there is a Gun Show in Calgary on Easter weekend, and every year since I have known Bob Henderson, he’s been coming to it with his brother and friends. Of course, they started coming long before I met them, but I didn’t even know there was a gun show until a few years ago.

Today I went for the first time.

I was trying to estimate how many rifles were in the show, held in the BMO Centre at the Calgary Stampede Grounds. On the tables in the outer fringes of the show floor, there weren’t a lot, but the number climbed as I got to the middle aisles. Evening it all out, I started with an estimate of about 50 guns per row, maybe 2,500 in the whole place. This is just rifles. There were handguns there too. These were collectors’ pieces as far as I could tell (the handguns). The rifles were a mixture of current hunting guns and collectible non-functioning antiques.

I didn’t go to look at guns, but you can’t really help it when it’s a gun show. I don’t know enough about them to really appreciate what I was looking at.

However, this show is also a collectors’ fair, particularly for police and militaria collectors. That’s how I met Bob in the first place. I was a volunteer a few years ago for a museum exhibition about German prisoners of war who spent the Second World War here in Canada. Bob Henderson has an extensive collection of artefacts, pictures, and documentation about these men and the Canadians who guarded them, the Veterans Guard of Canada. I have been making painfully slow progress in putting pictures of Bob’s collection up on a website, German Prisoners of War in Canada.

I’m not into cap badges and shoulder flashes, although the show offers a lot to those who are. But I did get something I hadn’t expected to see: the original version of The Canadian Rockies Trail Guide, a hiker’s manual, published in 1971 by Summerthought Publishing of Banff, Alberta, written by Brian Patton and Bart Robinson.

This book holds so many familiar names of hikes and ski trips from years gone by. Emerald Lake, Twin Falls, Dolomite Pass, it goes on and on. It was a great guide then and you can still get it now, in the form of a new edition.

Travel writer Andrew Hempstead and his wife Dianne bought Summerthought in 2006 and continue to publish the guide, now into its  9th edition. It’s a classic and also a necessity for anyone who seriously wants to hike the Canadian Rockies. Summerthought offers other mountain books too, and have passionately been expanding their list year by year.

http://www.summerthought.com/canadian.rockies.trail.guide.htm

9th Edition of the Canadian Rockies Trail Guide

Lessons in Management from Flint and the Doughnut-Delivering Unicorn

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A boy named Flint wrote a letter to TV meteorologist Albert Ramon of station KVUE in Austin, Texas.

Here’s the original letter. It’s wonderful, charming, creative, and disarming. Nice work, Flint, if you’re reading this.

Letter from Flint to Mr. Ramon

This would be a useful teaching tool in MBA school.

Lesson 1: Use the charm offensive when you already have the upper hand.

Dear Mr. Ramon,

Thank you for coming to our school and teaching us about weather.

Charming downward is praise. Charming upward is grovelling. Flint subtly establishes the power dynamic in his very first sentence.

Lesson 2: Make your mission statement clear and concise. It should be concrete and aspirational.

Lesson 3: Capitalism 101. There is only one first place.

Some day when I become supreme Ultra-Lord of the universe

Lesson 4: Open with an offer that sounds great but costs you nothing.

Lesson 5: Manage the workers’ expectations. Make it clear that they are at the bottom of the corporate ladder and you’re at the top.

I will not make you a slave, … [but I could and don't you ever forget it]

Lesson 6: Always leave yourself room to back out if things don’t run as planned.

If by some unexpected turn of events Flint does not become supreme Ultra-Lord of the universe, the no slavery clause will be null and void.

Lesson 7: Salesmanship = Selling the dream.

… you will live in my 200 story castle

Living in a 200 story castle sounds irresistible. Mr. Ramon will be powerless to resist the glamorous castle lifestyle Flint is offering. He has no idea he’ll be living in a garret in the attic with three field mice and doing all the chores for the ugly step-sisters.

Lesson 8: Simple design is good design. Form follows function.

…  where unicorn servants will feed you doughnuts off their horns.

Why invent a complex donut server when the unicorn does the job efficiently and elegantly? Think of it as the iPhone of annular baked product delivery systems.

Lesson 9: Copy the most successful people.

One way to become a billionaire is to sell something that doesn’t exist (high-tech concepts, social media empires, unicorn servants) for a super-high price (loads of cash, not being made a slave).

Lesson 10: Make the best use of your resources.

We all had the chance once to get rich using a cheap resource, but 99.99999% of us missed out on the profits to be made by putting tap water into bottles and selling it back to ourselves at a premium price. Flint is ahead of the game this time. He’s leveraging the potential of another cheap, if imaginary, resource, the unicorn.

Lesson 11: Show me the money.

I will personally make you a throne that is half platnum and half solid gold and jewel encrested.

In an acquisition, you need some cash or precious metals to go along with the overvalued intangibles.

Lesson 12: Sell the sizzle, not the steak.

Make them want the deal so much they can taste it. Know your demographic and push all their buttons.

Thank you again for teaching us about meteoroligy, you’re more awesome than a monkey wearing a tuxedo made out bacon riding a cyborg unicorn with a lightsaber for the horn an the tip of a space shuttle closing in on Mars while ingulfed in flames. And in case you didn’t know, that’s pretty dang sweet.

Flint’s done his market research. His target, meteoroligy expert Mr. Ramon, has always wanted a lightsaber and dreams of going to Mars. His favourite book is David Sedaris’s When You Are Engulfed in Flames and he secretly admires monkeys, particularly monkeys in tuxedos.

The bacon nails it. I can hear Mr. Ramon begging to get in on the ground floor of this opportunity and it hasn’t cost Flint a cent.

Sincerely, Flint.

P.S. Look on back for a drawing.