January 26th
On BLIZZARD
It snowed again today. The last two winters have been especially snowy. Living in Toronto, snow is more of an annoyance than a work of magic, although I still enjoy watching the cityscape consumed by white torrents, especially downtown. But it makes public transit erratic and driving near impossible. Whenever I go out to shovel the front walk, it’s guaranteed that I will observe someone parked across the street get stuck in the snow, and serenade me with squealing tires for about fifteen minutes. Sometimes I offer help, sometimes I turn around concernedly, but decide they have the situation under control. In previous years I would ignore them entirely, but I am trying to be friendly this year, it’s one of my new year’s resolutions, along with writing every day and confining myself to three meals a day (which is not a diet, it’s a strategy)
Our street, Benson Avenue, is about twenty-five houses long. These houses are all on the north side of the street, and we (my wife Krista, and I) live in the second floor of number 16. In number 14 lives a retired teacher, who often plays the guitar on the front porch, and his bitchy wife. I don’t know if I’ve ever spoken with the wife, but my wife has had a few bitchy encounters with her. I don’t remember why I know that he’s a retired teacher, and it’s a distinct possibility that he is not, and I am transplanting the memory of a teacher that lived beside me on Haddon Road in Hamilton. Or did he live across the street?
In number 16 lives Aaron Zimmerman, who wears a long beard and colouful painter’s caps, and is an artist. He lives with his girlfriend Izzy, and they are very nice. They have two dogs, one of which is named The Captain, and I forget the name of the other one.
When we moved in, on the south side of the street there were abandoned buildings, which used to be transit barns where streetcars would converge. In fact, the street perpendicular to Benson on the east side, Wychwood, has a streetcar track running down it that goes to nowhere, which I found quite exciting when I discovered it, long before we lived here, when I first moved to Toronto. Wychwood is such a small street, it seemed ridiculous that it would ever have a streetcar track.
Soon after we moved to Benson Avenue, the buildings became a construction site. It was very annoying to be woken up to jackhammering. I frequently joked that the seemingly endless construction would be completed the day we moved out of our house (which we inevitably will – our apartment is so small!), but lo and behold, two months ago the Green Arts Barns opened, with artist live/work areas, a ‘covered street’ that has farmers markets every Saturday, artistic offices, a playground, and who knows what else. Which means our sleepy little street has become quite a hot spot, with several articles written about the new project in major newspapers and arts mags.
Right now it means that parking is a sore spot amongst the locals, who also have sent out notices requesting that we petition the city for speed bumps, notices which featured a cartoon which Krista and I found quite funny. It is a picture of a very angry man driving his car, which is too small for him, and yelling at some children that he is about to run over, “CAN’T YOU SEE I’M ON THE PHONE!?!” In winter, Benson avenue becomes a one-lane street, which means that inevitably a car will stop, trying to park, and traffic will be held up behind them, resulting in honking and tire squealing and getting out of vehicles and exchanges of words, and the issue being blamed on the Arts Barns.
Friday, February 27, 2009
On THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE
January 24th
On THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE
People that worked on the Golden Gate Bridge:
Joseph Strauss
Joseph Strauss designed a 55 mile long bridge over the Bering Strait as his graduate thesis. He created the initial design for the bridge, but was very inexperienced. He was born in Ohio to a musician mother and artist father. He personally campaigned for many years to have the bridge built. He was an amateur poet. He asked that a net be constructed during the creation of the bridge, which saved 19 lives. He downplayed the contributions of the other engineers working on the project, wishing to take the credit for himself. A statue of Strauss stands near the bridge.
Irving Morrow
Irving Morrow designed the towers, lighting and decoration of the bridge. He decided to paint it international orange. He was schooled at Berkeley and in Paris, was a resident of the bay area, and was relatively unknown. He created the bridge as much as a sculpture a roadway.
Charles Alton Ellis
Charles Alton Ellis was the principal engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge. He was a Greek scholar and mathematician who became a professor of engineering at the University of Illinois, and wrote the standard textbook of structural design. Fired in 1931, he continued to work full time on the project for no pay. In 2007 he was given major credit for design of the bridge. He collaborated extensively with Leon Moiseiff.
Leon Moiseiff
Leon Moiseiff was born in Latvia and came to the U.S. at the age of 19. He designed many famous suspension bridges, including the Manhattan Bridge. He designed the basic structure of the Golden Gate Bridge, working with Ellis from afar by telegram. He is most famous for the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which fluttered itself into disaster in 1940, given too much leeway to be flexible and twisting violently in a storm. He was the most famous of the designers, and later the most notorious.
STRAUSS: Ellis, I’m taking you off the project.
ELLIS: What? Why?
STRAUSS: You’ve been making too many telegrams to this Moiseiff character.
ELLIS: Moiseiff? He’s the greatest suspension bridge designer in America! He laid out this whole bridge! Of course I’m gonna wire the guy, every chance I get!
STRAUSS: I laid out this bridge, I tell, ya! Not Moiseiff! Moisieff is a Rusk! He’s as pinko as this sunburned hand!
ELLIS: Look, Joe, you and I both know that Leon Moiseiff has got nothing to do with this. You want all the credit for this damned bridge to yourself.
STRAUSS: Ridiculous. You’re out, Clifford Paine is in.
ELLIS: Clifford Paine can’t finish this bridge without my help. He doesn’t got the knowhow. I wrote the book on bridges!
STRAUSS: Look you. I don’t care what you wrote, you fraud. I’m sick of you acting like I’m some kind of amateur. When people look at this bridge, one name is gonna enter their heads: Joseph Strauss! I’m gonna have a statue of me built, and my words are gonna be splayed all over this bridge, and there ain’t nothing you can do about it!
ELLIS: Hey, Joe, come on. I don’t got no job after this, I can’t do anything else. It’s a nightmare out there, it’s the depression. If you fire me from this job I’m gonna come back every day until this bridge goes all the way from here to Marin county, whether you wanna pay me or not. If you can live with that, if you can see my wife and kids starve, then go ahead, fire me. Put up your statue, you’ll get a great view of it from Hell.
STRAUSS: GET OUTTA HERE!
ELLIS: ASK MOISEIFF! He’ll tell you I’m the only one who can build this bridge!
STRAUSS: I SAID GET OUT!
ELLIS: ASK MOISEIFF!
STRAUSS: Don’t make me throw you out of this office with my bare hands! I’ll throw you right into San Francisco Bay!
ELLIS: All right I’ll leave. But fuck you! Fuck you and your fucking bridge! It’s ugly as Hell anyway.
On THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE
People that worked on the Golden Gate Bridge:
Joseph Strauss
Joseph Strauss designed a 55 mile long bridge over the Bering Strait as his graduate thesis. He created the initial design for the bridge, but was very inexperienced. He was born in Ohio to a musician mother and artist father. He personally campaigned for many years to have the bridge built. He was an amateur poet. He asked that a net be constructed during the creation of the bridge, which saved 19 lives. He downplayed the contributions of the other engineers working on the project, wishing to take the credit for himself. A statue of Strauss stands near the bridge.
Irving Morrow
Irving Morrow designed the towers, lighting and decoration of the bridge. He decided to paint it international orange. He was schooled at Berkeley and in Paris, was a resident of the bay area, and was relatively unknown. He created the bridge as much as a sculpture a roadway.
Charles Alton Ellis
Charles Alton Ellis was the principal engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge. He was a Greek scholar and mathematician who became a professor of engineering at the University of Illinois, and wrote the standard textbook of structural design. Fired in 1931, he continued to work full time on the project for no pay. In 2007 he was given major credit for design of the bridge. He collaborated extensively with Leon Moiseiff.
Leon Moiseiff
Leon Moiseiff was born in Latvia and came to the U.S. at the age of 19. He designed many famous suspension bridges, including the Manhattan Bridge. He designed the basic structure of the Golden Gate Bridge, working with Ellis from afar by telegram. He is most famous for the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which fluttered itself into disaster in 1940, given too much leeway to be flexible and twisting violently in a storm. He was the most famous of the designers, and later the most notorious.
STRAUSS: Ellis, I’m taking you off the project.
ELLIS: What? Why?
STRAUSS: You’ve been making too many telegrams to this Moiseiff character.
ELLIS: Moiseiff? He’s the greatest suspension bridge designer in America! He laid out this whole bridge! Of course I’m gonna wire the guy, every chance I get!
STRAUSS: I laid out this bridge, I tell, ya! Not Moiseiff! Moisieff is a Rusk! He’s as pinko as this sunburned hand!
ELLIS: Look, Joe, you and I both know that Leon Moiseiff has got nothing to do with this. You want all the credit for this damned bridge to yourself.
STRAUSS: Ridiculous. You’re out, Clifford Paine is in.
ELLIS: Clifford Paine can’t finish this bridge without my help. He doesn’t got the knowhow. I wrote the book on bridges!
STRAUSS: Look you. I don’t care what you wrote, you fraud. I’m sick of you acting like I’m some kind of amateur. When people look at this bridge, one name is gonna enter their heads: Joseph Strauss! I’m gonna have a statue of me built, and my words are gonna be splayed all over this bridge, and there ain’t nothing you can do about it!
ELLIS: Hey, Joe, come on. I don’t got no job after this, I can’t do anything else. It’s a nightmare out there, it’s the depression. If you fire me from this job I’m gonna come back every day until this bridge goes all the way from here to Marin county, whether you wanna pay me or not. If you can live with that, if you can see my wife and kids starve, then go ahead, fire me. Put up your statue, you’ll get a great view of it from Hell.
STRAUSS: GET OUTTA HERE!
ELLIS: ASK MOISEIFF! He’ll tell you I’m the only one who can build this bridge!
STRAUSS: I SAID GET OUT!
ELLIS: ASK MOISEIFF!
STRAUSS: Don’t make me throw you out of this office with my bare hands! I’ll throw you right into San Francisco Bay!
ELLIS: All right I’ll leave. But fuck you! Fuck you and your fucking bridge! It’s ugly as Hell anyway.
On HOCKEY STICK
January 23rd
On HOCKEY STICK
Nine sticks clattered onto the parking lot pavement, and Brad’s stick was tossed by one of the other kids, a curly haired blond, into a pile of five. Brad thought about asking to be goalie, but thought again that it might be better to not speak. The dark green old tennis ball was dropped, and the game began. Goals were frequent, and Brad soon lost track of what the score was. It didn’t seem important to this group of pinch faced, freckled boys that were his neighbourhood chums. Brad dutifully ran back and forth along the parking lot, keeping a bead on the puck but quickly running out of breath. Sometimes he would stop and hit the ground with his stick, calling for a pass like he’d seen other kids do. Then he would stand and wait, and another kid would have placed his stick just under his, so when the ball traveled in his direction his stick would suddenly be lifted up, seemingly of its own accord, and his face would go red with embarrassment, his heart rising to his throat and his temples pounding. He would run after the ball, which had traveled all the way to the other end of the parking lot and into a snow bank. He thought he would impress the other boys by making the extra effort to get the ball, maybe redeem himself in their eyes. The boys talked a lot during the game, but Brad didn’t really register what they were saying. It seemed like a mixture of taunts and hockey jargon, with the names of several NHL players dropped.
Later, the tennis ball would hit Brad in the face when he wasn’t looking and give him a bloody nose. He cried awkward tears that he was trying to hold back but came out in choked sobs. He ran home but came back out half an hour later. None of the other kids said anything. Later on, he and a bunch of other boys surrounded one of the goalies, the younger brother of the blond-headed kid who owned his own goalie mask and a goalie stick but had no pads and used a baseball glove. The kids whacked at the goalie with their sticks until the tennis ball spurted out from beneath one of his shins. Brad touched it, and threw up his arms in celebration, a little too loudly for such a chintzy goal. It was ruled that it had already crossed the line when Brad touched it, so it wasn’t his goal.
Brad went home that night and told his mom he wanted skating lessons so he could join a hockey team, maybe as the goalie. His mom grabbed the Parks & Rec catalogue and they found a good beginner-level skating course at the local arena. Brad had been to the arena a couple of times before to watch some of his friends play. It was cold, dank and loud in there, with a seemingly endless series of dressing rooms filled with loud, sweaty kids. Brad’s mom set a date to go shopping for some skates and a helmet. He played video games for a few hours and then went to bed. He cried a little bit. It had been an emotional day.
On HOCKEY STICK
Nine sticks clattered onto the parking lot pavement, and Brad’s stick was tossed by one of the other kids, a curly haired blond, into a pile of five. Brad thought about asking to be goalie, but thought again that it might be better to not speak. The dark green old tennis ball was dropped, and the game began. Goals were frequent, and Brad soon lost track of what the score was. It didn’t seem important to this group of pinch faced, freckled boys that were his neighbourhood chums. Brad dutifully ran back and forth along the parking lot, keeping a bead on the puck but quickly running out of breath. Sometimes he would stop and hit the ground with his stick, calling for a pass like he’d seen other kids do. Then he would stand and wait, and another kid would have placed his stick just under his, so when the ball traveled in his direction his stick would suddenly be lifted up, seemingly of its own accord, and his face would go red with embarrassment, his heart rising to his throat and his temples pounding. He would run after the ball, which had traveled all the way to the other end of the parking lot and into a snow bank. He thought he would impress the other boys by making the extra effort to get the ball, maybe redeem himself in their eyes. The boys talked a lot during the game, but Brad didn’t really register what they were saying. It seemed like a mixture of taunts and hockey jargon, with the names of several NHL players dropped.
Later, the tennis ball would hit Brad in the face when he wasn’t looking and give him a bloody nose. He cried awkward tears that he was trying to hold back but came out in choked sobs. He ran home but came back out half an hour later. None of the other kids said anything. Later on, he and a bunch of other boys surrounded one of the goalies, the younger brother of the blond-headed kid who owned his own goalie mask and a goalie stick but had no pads and used a baseball glove. The kids whacked at the goalie with their sticks until the tennis ball spurted out from beneath one of his shins. Brad touched it, and threw up his arms in celebration, a little too loudly for such a chintzy goal. It was ruled that it had already crossed the line when Brad touched it, so it wasn’t his goal.
Brad went home that night and told his mom he wanted skating lessons so he could join a hockey team, maybe as the goalie. His mom grabbed the Parks & Rec catalogue and they found a good beginner-level skating course at the local arena. Brad had been to the arena a couple of times before to watch some of his friends play. It was cold, dank and loud in there, with a seemingly endless series of dressing rooms filled with loud, sweaty kids. Brad’s mom set a date to go shopping for some skates and a helmet. He played video games for a few hours and then went to bed. He cried a little bit. It had been an emotional day.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
On NEWS ANCHOR
January 22nd
On NEWS ANCHOR
The words ‘News Anchor’ immediately made me think of Anchorman, which I often cite as the Greatest Movie of All Time. I don’t know if it is, it’s something I say to get people to watch it. But it made me think of what could possible be my five favourite comedies of the last 15 years (since 1993). These are the ones that had the greatest influence on me, in no particular order:
Anchorman (2004)
Ron Burgundy was the voice in my head for several years whenever I tried to make anything funny. My sketch group, Players Players, also stole Will Ferrell’s baritone for our classic businessmen sketch. It was also a key bridge – the apex of the Will Ferrell era (which made all other Will Ferrell sketches and films forgivable), but also the start of the Judd Apatow era. Also my introduction to actors Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, David Koechner, who all have a spot in may heart along with catchphrases.
Dumb and Dumber (1994)
This movie, reviled at the time by reactionary middle class types who couldn’t imagine liking a film with this title, and loved by my generation of high-school geeks, was overall super hilarious, but what set it apart from also great and loved Jim Carrey roles in Ace Ventura and Batman Forever (a great movie whose reputation was sullied in retrospect by association with the vomitorious Batman and Robin) was my identification with Lloyd Christmas’s crush on Lauren Holly’s character. Through high school and university I had crushes on dozens of girls and my fantasy was always modeled on Lloyd’s dream sequence set to The Cowsills.
Office Space (1999)
Like most of the world, I first caught this on video. In university I wrote a major paper comparing its liberation ideology to that of Fight Club and American Beauty. Its empathy got me through and eventually out of the Scotiabank office years, and also inspired a desire in me to think and act independently, as the main character does in the movie, and I truly believed that the respect I would gain from being my own man would outweigh the benefits of sucking up to my superiors. I haven’t always been able to act on this belief, and it’s something I still think about.
I Heart Huckabees (2004)
This movie epitomized the undergraduate experience for me in a way that Old School, a movie that I despised, did not, even though Huckabees was not set on a campus like Old School sort of was. The best part of Huckabees was how Jason Schwartzman and Mark Wahlberg (who, like Will Ferrell, have received criticism-free passes from me to do whatever they want in past or future because of this movie) float from idea to idea and are so galvanized by each one that the stakes of each scene go through the roof. Key moments: Scwartzman makes love to Isabelle Huppert in the filth, and Mark Wahlberg beats the fire truck to the fire with his fire bike (“I’m at the fire, where are you guys?”)
Tommy Boy (1995)
Far and away Chris Farley’s greatest achievement, he was a good to my high school friends and I. It was a major event when he died. He embodied physical comedy and giving everything to every moment. And he was perfectly contrasted to David Spade’s small sarcasm. One of the best comedy setpieces of all time: Chris Farley destroying a model car and lighting it on fire trying to demonstrate the importance of brakes. Reenacted by my friends and I dozens of times, this sequence is hardwired into my brain.
Honorable Mentions: 3 Wes Anderson movies (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, the Royal Tenenbaums), School of Rock, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Superbad, Tropic Thunder, Josie and the Pussycats. Also Austin Powers, Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle.
On NEWS ANCHOR
The words ‘News Anchor’ immediately made me think of Anchorman, which I often cite as the Greatest Movie of All Time. I don’t know if it is, it’s something I say to get people to watch it. But it made me think of what could possible be my five favourite comedies of the last 15 years (since 1993). These are the ones that had the greatest influence on me, in no particular order:
Anchorman (2004)
Ron Burgundy was the voice in my head for several years whenever I tried to make anything funny. My sketch group, Players Players, also stole Will Ferrell’s baritone for our classic businessmen sketch. It was also a key bridge – the apex of the Will Ferrell era (which made all other Will Ferrell sketches and films forgivable), but also the start of the Judd Apatow era. Also my introduction to actors Paul Rudd, Steve Carell, David Koechner, who all have a spot in may heart along with catchphrases.
Dumb and Dumber (1994)
This movie, reviled at the time by reactionary middle class types who couldn’t imagine liking a film with this title, and loved by my generation of high-school geeks, was overall super hilarious, but what set it apart from also great and loved Jim Carrey roles in Ace Ventura and Batman Forever (a great movie whose reputation was sullied in retrospect by association with the vomitorious Batman and Robin) was my identification with Lloyd Christmas’s crush on Lauren Holly’s character. Through high school and university I had crushes on dozens of girls and my fantasy was always modeled on Lloyd’s dream sequence set to The Cowsills.
Office Space (1999)
Like most of the world, I first caught this on video. In university I wrote a major paper comparing its liberation ideology to that of Fight Club and American Beauty. Its empathy got me through and eventually out of the Scotiabank office years, and also inspired a desire in me to think and act independently, as the main character does in the movie, and I truly believed that the respect I would gain from being my own man would outweigh the benefits of sucking up to my superiors. I haven’t always been able to act on this belief, and it’s something I still think about.
I Heart Huckabees (2004)
This movie epitomized the undergraduate experience for me in a way that Old School, a movie that I despised, did not, even though Huckabees was not set on a campus like Old School sort of was. The best part of Huckabees was how Jason Schwartzman and Mark Wahlberg (who, like Will Ferrell, have received criticism-free passes from me to do whatever they want in past or future because of this movie) float from idea to idea and are so galvanized by each one that the stakes of each scene go through the roof. Key moments: Scwartzman makes love to Isabelle Huppert in the filth, and Mark Wahlberg beats the fire truck to the fire with his fire bike (“I’m at the fire, where are you guys?”)
Tommy Boy (1995)
Far and away Chris Farley’s greatest achievement, he was a good to my high school friends and I. It was a major event when he died. He embodied physical comedy and giving everything to every moment. And he was perfectly contrasted to David Spade’s small sarcasm. One of the best comedy setpieces of all time: Chris Farley destroying a model car and lighting it on fire trying to demonstrate the importance of brakes. Reenacted by my friends and I dozens of times, this sequence is hardwired into my brain.
Honorable Mentions: 3 Wes Anderson movies (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, the Royal Tenenbaums), School of Rock, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Superbad, Tropic Thunder, Josie and the Pussycats. Also Austin Powers, Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle.
On SPINACH DIP
January 21st
On SPINACH DIP
Memoirs - Part VI
It was right around the time when I was killing the Lambs that I got into Spinach Dip and was reading this fascinating biography of Abraham Lincoln. Funny how, once you settle down in the suburbs, your life becomes largely about other people.
I first discovered a recipe for Spinach Dip on the internet when I was looking up how to reconfigure the Lambs' billiards room into a gas chamber. It may seem obvious to the seasoned suburbanite that spinach dip can be served in a pumpernickel bread bowl, but at the time this was quite a revelation to me.
I had no job at this time, so I spent my days balancing experiments in spinach dip with plotting to kill the neighbours and reading an excellent biography of Abraham Lincoln. Everyone knows that Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin, but few know the logs were from silverbirch trees, and the bark was left on the logs to give the cabin a glowing, futuristic look. I was also surprised to learn that Lincoln's wartime cabinet included a dog, three antique compasses and the President of Chile.
I developed a good relationship with my local baker, who made extra round pumpernickel loaves for me, enabling my new obsession. The main problem I had was that, after a day of eating spinach dip form pumpernickel bowls and reading about Lincoln, I would reek of spinach, which almost gave me away when I was in the Lamb's basement and boobytrapping their rec room. I had to bribe their dog, Wally, with enticing sports magazines which he would calmly read while I went about my business, despite the fact that my stench must have been overwhelming to his sensitive nose.
Like all personal fads of this nature, my addiction to experimenting with Spinach Dip petered out. The last dip I attempted to make was the difficult spinachless spinach dip, which I made while reading the final chapter about Lincoln's assassination, in which the author concluded that, based on new information he had unearthed in the course of his research, the assassination was not conducted by John Wilkes Booth but instead by a trained frog in a top hat that was paid by the President of Chile. As I read these words I looked up to see Mr. Lamb emerging from his basement into his living room, which was visible to me through a bay window that faced my kitchen. He was screaming very loudly and clutching his face, which was melting. Mrs. Lamb and Wally were already dead. Penelope later asked me why I had killed the Lambs, and I told her that I found their way of life insulting. It wasn't the real reason, but the one that made the most sense to me at the time. In retrospect, it was clichéd.
With the Lambs killed, my book on Lincoln finished and my spinach dip enthusiasm lost, I decided it was time to move on. This life didn't agree with me, and a wider world beckoned. We left our house under the cover of nightfall and traveled to a plastic surgeon's in Denver, who changed our faces so that we could move back to New York without anyone recognizing us.
On SPINACH DIP
Memoirs - Part VI
It was right around the time when I was killing the Lambs that I got into Spinach Dip and was reading this fascinating biography of Abraham Lincoln. Funny how, once you settle down in the suburbs, your life becomes largely about other people.
I first discovered a recipe for Spinach Dip on the internet when I was looking up how to reconfigure the Lambs' billiards room into a gas chamber. It may seem obvious to the seasoned suburbanite that spinach dip can be served in a pumpernickel bread bowl, but at the time this was quite a revelation to me.
I had no job at this time, so I spent my days balancing experiments in spinach dip with plotting to kill the neighbours and reading an excellent biography of Abraham Lincoln. Everyone knows that Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin, but few know the logs were from silverbirch trees, and the bark was left on the logs to give the cabin a glowing, futuristic look. I was also surprised to learn that Lincoln's wartime cabinet included a dog, three antique compasses and the President of Chile.
I developed a good relationship with my local baker, who made extra round pumpernickel loaves for me, enabling my new obsession. The main problem I had was that, after a day of eating spinach dip form pumpernickel bowls and reading about Lincoln, I would reek of spinach, which almost gave me away when I was in the Lamb's basement and boobytrapping their rec room. I had to bribe their dog, Wally, with enticing sports magazines which he would calmly read while I went about my business, despite the fact that my stench must have been overwhelming to his sensitive nose.
Like all personal fads of this nature, my addiction to experimenting with Spinach Dip petered out. The last dip I attempted to make was the difficult spinachless spinach dip, which I made while reading the final chapter about Lincoln's assassination, in which the author concluded that, based on new information he had unearthed in the course of his research, the assassination was not conducted by John Wilkes Booth but instead by a trained frog in a top hat that was paid by the President of Chile. As I read these words I looked up to see Mr. Lamb emerging from his basement into his living room, which was visible to me through a bay window that faced my kitchen. He was screaming very loudly and clutching his face, which was melting. Mrs. Lamb and Wally were already dead. Penelope later asked me why I had killed the Lambs, and I told her that I found their way of life insulting. It wasn't the real reason, but the one that made the most sense to me at the time. In retrospect, it was clichéd.
With the Lambs killed, my book on Lincoln finished and my spinach dip enthusiasm lost, I decided it was time to move on. This life didn't agree with me, and a wider world beckoned. We left our house under the cover of nightfall and traveled to a plastic surgeon's in Denver, who changed our faces so that we could move back to New York without anyone recognizing us.
On CHILE
January 20th
On CHILE
Ladies and Gentlemen, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet.
"People of Earth, imagine being me. Imagine growing up in a country barely wide enough so that two people can pass each other. Imagine being a women president in a country of sexist latinos. Imagine what it must be like for me, the president of Chile, whenever I am in America, people make jokes about chili dogs, chilly weather, and California Angels baseball player Chili Davis.
No, it ain't easy. But neither was my upbringing. Spending every day deciding whether to talk to people in Spanish, English, German, Portuguese or French, founding a theatre group/musical band called Las Clap Clap. And then I was tortured by Pinochet.
Look everyone, I could go on about myself all day, but that's not why we're here, is it? The real reason is to celebrate the opening of the Great Chilean Movator. As I mentioned before, it has always been frustrating living in a country where we only have just enough room to walk single file as we go North and South through our country, Argentina on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. We always have to say, "Oh, excuse me Senor Alvarez, I was trying to walk North and you are walking South. Let's squeeze past each other. Otherwise we'll end up in the Pacific Ocean, or, worse, Argentina." It caused a lot of pickpocketery and casual groping.
But look here! You know those moving sidewalks, like they have in big airports? We built one going South on the ground here, and then another one going North on top of it. It goes the entire country, from Peru in the North to the end of the world in the South. Not only do you not have to squeeze past anyone any more, you don't even have to walk anymore! This movator will just take you anywhere you want to go! As long as it is North or South, and why would you try and go anywhere else? What, are you gonna go West, and walk around in the ocean? Don't be stupid. And if you change your mind, and want to switch direction, all you have to do if you are travelling North is climb over the raiing here and jump down to the lower level. If you are travelling South, you have to wait until you get to the end, where there is a staircase to the top level.
Some people say, "Hey! If everyone is always on a moving sidewalk, how are you gonna get exercise?
Everyone's gonna turn real fat!" Look, don't worry about it! If you are getting fat just run on the movator! Or walk in the opposite direction! No one's stopping you! Or go take a swim in the Pacific Ocean. It's right over there!
My fellow Chileans, this is the best day in history. Now we can go back to our super tall skinny houses in or long, skinny cars and make love to our skinny spouses in our long thin beds, where we sleep in single file. Long live the age of convenience! Long Live the Movator!
On CHILE
Ladies and Gentlemen, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet.
"People of Earth, imagine being me. Imagine growing up in a country barely wide enough so that two people can pass each other. Imagine being a women president in a country of sexist latinos. Imagine what it must be like for me, the president of Chile, whenever I am in America, people make jokes about chili dogs, chilly weather, and California Angels baseball player Chili Davis.
No, it ain't easy. But neither was my upbringing. Spending every day deciding whether to talk to people in Spanish, English, German, Portuguese or French, founding a theatre group/musical band called Las Clap Clap. And then I was tortured by Pinochet.
Look everyone, I could go on about myself all day, but that's not why we're here, is it? The real reason is to celebrate the opening of the Great Chilean Movator. As I mentioned before, it has always been frustrating living in a country where we only have just enough room to walk single file as we go North and South through our country, Argentina on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. We always have to say, "Oh, excuse me Senor Alvarez, I was trying to walk North and you are walking South. Let's squeeze past each other. Otherwise we'll end up in the Pacific Ocean, or, worse, Argentina." It caused a lot of pickpocketery and casual groping.
But look here! You know those moving sidewalks, like they have in big airports? We built one going South on the ground here, and then another one going North on top of it. It goes the entire country, from Peru in the North to the end of the world in the South. Not only do you not have to squeeze past anyone any more, you don't even have to walk anymore! This movator will just take you anywhere you want to go! As long as it is North or South, and why would you try and go anywhere else? What, are you gonna go West, and walk around in the ocean? Don't be stupid. And if you change your mind, and want to switch direction, all you have to do if you are travelling North is climb over the raiing here and jump down to the lower level. If you are travelling South, you have to wait until you get to the end, where there is a staircase to the top level.
Some people say, "Hey! If everyone is always on a moving sidewalk, how are you gonna get exercise?
Everyone's gonna turn real fat!" Look, don't worry about it! If you are getting fat just run on the movator! Or walk in the opposite direction! No one's stopping you! Or go take a swim in the Pacific Ocean. It's right over there!
My fellow Chileans, this is the best day in history. Now we can go back to our super tall skinny houses in or long, skinny cars and make love to our skinny spouses in our long thin beds, where we sleep in single file. Long live the age of convenience! Long Live the Movator!
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
On DIGITAL CAMERA
January 19th
On DIGITAL CAMERA
I have a sister-in-law who is a photographer named Tracey. Here are some exciting things about Tracey:
1) Tracey was the maid of honour at our wedding, and took almost as many pictures as, maybe more than, our photographer.
2) Tracey is often described as a ‘firecracker’. She has very little respect for law and order, and is a corrupting influence. This is why we like her. For example, one time I was sitting in the all-u-can-eat section of the skydome and she wasn’t and she made me sneak two hot dogs and a box of popcorn down to her. Our first attempt, where she came up the ramp to my level and pretended that I had her wallet, didn’t work, but the second time, where I just put the food in my backpack and walked down, did work. And she also had alcohol in her pop cup.
3) Tracey gave us a hermit crab for Christmas one year. I later accidentally murdered it, but that is a separate and heart-rending tale.
4) Krista keeps a messy room, but Tracey keeps a catastrophe. In her house where she lived in Ottawa, she would live in one room until it became too messy to exist in, and then move on and sleep in another room, like the aliens in the hit movie Independence Day.
5) Tracey recently bought a house with her long term boyfriend Lorne in Oakville on Cobbler’s Lane, in a neighbourhood where all the streets are named after medieval professions (Silversmith Way, Merchant’s Gate, etc.)
6) The first time I met Tracey she came to a party with Krista before we were going out and fell asleep on the couch within half an hour of arriving.
7) Tracey really likes making and eating funnel cakes. They are her new specialty, along with margaritas that she makes in her new Margaritaville margaritamaker.
8) Tracey has excellent photography skills. She has done my headshots and our Parker and Seville publicity shots. Check them out!
9) One time Tracey made hamburgers for our 11-person cast and crew when we were touring in Ottawa.
10) One time Tracey fell off a giant fiberglass bulldog and seriously hurt herself.
11) If you have a secret, don’t tell Tracey. She delights in blurting out incendiary facts in the middle of dinner table conversations.
12) Tracey likes meat. When Krista and Tracey were little, Krista would trade her meat to Tracey in return for her vegetables.
13) Tracey is an avid softball player. Pretty talented too, from what a gather. A real leader on the field. Steals pitchers from Boston Pizza off the field.
14) Krista and Tracey used to share a bed together and hated each other.
15) Tracey’s favourite photography subject is her and Lorne doing something mildly sexy.
16) The only ‘item’ on Tracey’s facebook page is called “Tracey wins beer drinking competition”
17) The name of one of Tracey’s best friends is Stacey.
18) Tracey is, at heart, a considerate, loving and awesome sister-in-law.
On DIGITAL CAMERA
I have a sister-in-law who is a photographer named Tracey. Here are some exciting things about Tracey:
1) Tracey was the maid of honour at our wedding, and took almost as many pictures as, maybe more than, our photographer.
2) Tracey is often described as a ‘firecracker’. She has very little respect for law and order, and is a corrupting influence. This is why we like her. For example, one time I was sitting in the all-u-can-eat section of the skydome and she wasn’t and she made me sneak two hot dogs and a box of popcorn down to her. Our first attempt, where she came up the ramp to my level and pretended that I had her wallet, didn’t work, but the second time, where I just put the food in my backpack and walked down, did work. And she also had alcohol in her pop cup.
3) Tracey gave us a hermit crab for Christmas one year. I later accidentally murdered it, but that is a separate and heart-rending tale.
4) Krista keeps a messy room, but Tracey keeps a catastrophe. In her house where she lived in Ottawa, she would live in one room until it became too messy to exist in, and then move on and sleep in another room, like the aliens in the hit movie Independence Day.
5) Tracey recently bought a house with her long term boyfriend Lorne in Oakville on Cobbler’s Lane, in a neighbourhood where all the streets are named after medieval professions (Silversmith Way, Merchant’s Gate, etc.)
6) The first time I met Tracey she came to a party with Krista before we were going out and fell asleep on the couch within half an hour of arriving.
7) Tracey really likes making and eating funnel cakes. They are her new specialty, along with margaritas that she makes in her new Margaritaville margaritamaker.
8) Tracey has excellent photography skills. She has done my headshots and our Parker and Seville publicity shots. Check them out!
9) One time Tracey made hamburgers for our 11-person cast and crew when we were touring in Ottawa.
10) One time Tracey fell off a giant fiberglass bulldog and seriously hurt herself.
11) If you have a secret, don’t tell Tracey. She delights in blurting out incendiary facts in the middle of dinner table conversations.
12) Tracey likes meat. When Krista and Tracey were little, Krista would trade her meat to Tracey in return for her vegetables.
13) Tracey is an avid softball player. Pretty talented too, from what a gather. A real leader on the field. Steals pitchers from Boston Pizza off the field.
14) Krista and Tracey used to share a bed together and hated each other.
15) Tracey’s favourite photography subject is her and Lorne doing something mildly sexy.
16) The only ‘item’ on Tracey’s facebook page is called “Tracey wins beer drinking competition”
17) The name of one of Tracey’s best friends is Stacey.
18) Tracey is, at heart, a considerate, loving and awesome sister-in-law.
On THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
January 17th
On THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
Memoirs – Part V
Once again in hiding, I travelled to Des Moines, Iowa and adopted the name Jacksonville Florida. I got a job as a tax advisor and took up with a 39-year-old widow named Penelope and moved into a quiet suburban neighbourhood. Our next door neighbours were Adam and Trudy Lamb, an architect and a housewife, respectively. On our first day in our new neighbourhood, the Lambs invited us over for a dinner party.
Soon after we sat down to dinner, which was pork tenderloin, the Lambs initiated a conversation.
“Now do you two plan on having kids?” asked Mrs. Lamb, innocently.
At the same time, Penelope confirmed and I denied our desire to procreate.
“I had a recent bad experience with children,” I added to support my assertion.
“Yeah, they’re nasty, huh?” agreed Mr. Lamb. “We had a couple of our own, but they’re all grown up now.”
“Ever heard of Rumpole of the Bailey?” asked Mr. Lamb.
“No,” I replied, “That sounds like a string of nonsense words.” I knew what Rumpole of the Bailey was, of course, but I didn’t want to blow my cover.
“It’s a British TV show,” explained Mr. Lamb.
“We love British TV,” explained Mrs. Lamb.
“Anyway,” continued Mr. Lamb, “the guy who wrote that, John Mortimer, had two wives named Penelope. Isn’t that weird?”
“And he cheated on both of them,” added Mrs. Lamb, “and the first one used to write books about it. He didn’t care though, he just shrugged it off. Although they did divorce, so maybe not. The first Penelope was a lot older than him, and married when they met. They had to hire a private investigator on her husband’s behalf, and then give him evidence of their…”
She paused, partly searching for the word, partly for effect.
“Philandering!” She concluded, “Anyway, what could she expect, right? He clearly had no respect for the institution of marriage in the first place. What an odd way to go about living your life.”
Mr. Lamb stepped in, “The reason I brought it up is because your name is Penelope, isn’t that right?”
Penelope nodded.
“Not that I’m suggesting either of you is an affair-haver. It just brought that to mind, your name, which was the same as the guy’s wives names,” Mr. Lamb overexplained. “Maybe it’s more common in England. Are you English, Penelope?”
Penelope shook her head.
“And what was your name again, sir?” Mrs. Lamb asked me.
“Jacksonville Florida,” I answered.
The Lambs said nothing. They wanted to say many things, like “That’s not a name, it’s a city,” or “That is a bizarre name!” or “That sounds made up to me,” But they didn’t. They didn’t want to offend the new neighbour, even though any of these questions may have started a conversation much more interesting than the one we’d just had about John Mortimer’s wives. These conversation would have had stakes, implications, would have raised the possibility that I would someday soon murder the Lambs in their sleep. If they had called attention to the fictitious nature of my name, Jacksonville Florida, then they may have considered moving after that dinner party, which would have saved their lives. Instead the Lambs were silent. And the silence, as they say, was deafening.
On THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
Memoirs – Part V
Once again in hiding, I travelled to Des Moines, Iowa and adopted the name Jacksonville Florida. I got a job as a tax advisor and took up with a 39-year-old widow named Penelope and moved into a quiet suburban neighbourhood. Our next door neighbours were Adam and Trudy Lamb, an architect and a housewife, respectively. On our first day in our new neighbourhood, the Lambs invited us over for a dinner party.
Soon after we sat down to dinner, which was pork tenderloin, the Lambs initiated a conversation.
“Now do you two plan on having kids?” asked Mrs. Lamb, innocently.
At the same time, Penelope confirmed and I denied our desire to procreate.
“I had a recent bad experience with children,” I added to support my assertion.
“Yeah, they’re nasty, huh?” agreed Mr. Lamb. “We had a couple of our own, but they’re all grown up now.”
“Ever heard of Rumpole of the Bailey?” asked Mr. Lamb.
“No,” I replied, “That sounds like a string of nonsense words.” I knew what Rumpole of the Bailey was, of course, but I didn’t want to blow my cover.
“It’s a British TV show,” explained Mr. Lamb.
“We love British TV,” explained Mrs. Lamb.
“Anyway,” continued Mr. Lamb, “the guy who wrote that, John Mortimer, had two wives named Penelope. Isn’t that weird?”
“And he cheated on both of them,” added Mrs. Lamb, “and the first one used to write books about it. He didn’t care though, he just shrugged it off. Although they did divorce, so maybe not. The first Penelope was a lot older than him, and married when they met. They had to hire a private investigator on her husband’s behalf, and then give him evidence of their…”
She paused, partly searching for the word, partly for effect.
“Philandering!” She concluded, “Anyway, what could she expect, right? He clearly had no respect for the institution of marriage in the first place. What an odd way to go about living your life.”
Mr. Lamb stepped in, “The reason I brought it up is because your name is Penelope, isn’t that right?”
Penelope nodded.
“Not that I’m suggesting either of you is an affair-haver. It just brought that to mind, your name, which was the same as the guy’s wives names,” Mr. Lamb overexplained. “Maybe it’s more common in England. Are you English, Penelope?”
Penelope shook her head.
“And what was your name again, sir?” Mrs. Lamb asked me.
“Jacksonville Florida,” I answered.
The Lambs said nothing. They wanted to say many things, like “That’s not a name, it’s a city,” or “That is a bizarre name!” or “That sounds made up to me,” But they didn’t. They didn’t want to offend the new neighbour, even though any of these questions may have started a conversation much more interesting than the one we’d just had about John Mortimer’s wives. These conversation would have had stakes, implications, would have raised the possibility that I would someday soon murder the Lambs in their sleep. If they had called attention to the fictitious nature of my name, Jacksonville Florida, then they may have considered moving after that dinner party, which would have saved their lives. Instead the Lambs were silent. And the silence, as they say, was deafening.
Monday, February 23, 2009
On SNOW LEOPARD
January 16th
Only one miss.
On SNOW LEOPARD
La News Francaise 19th October 2007
THE SNOW LEOPARD
By Kyrgyz Antropov
Reviewed by Pierre LaPlace
Review translated from French by Oldovai Henderson
In each fledgling nation there comes a time when they realize they lack founding myths (Unless they already have a really good founding myth). For example, Canadian Paul Gross recently released the painfully earnest World War I film Passchaendale, and as bad as it is to watch for non-Canadians, for literate Canadians it must be an embarrassment.
So too is Kyrgyz Antropov’s new book of poetry, The Snow Leopard. Most of the poems contained in this ‘book’ are complicated analogies, where the nation of Kazakhstan is represented by a Snow Leopard and other countries are represented by other animals. The analogies are rarely effective, however, and often are glaringly transparent; for example, the poem ‘The Snow Leopard is birthed from the stomach of the Wild Bear’ and ‘The Snow Leopard is mocked in the Eagle by a native of the Lion in hit film’
Worse is the language of the poetry, which is repetitive, banal, excrutiating, inconsequential, and has little to do with the actual Kazakh character. Alarmingly, this illiterate tablet scratcher has been named Kazakhstan’s poet laureate, which leads me to believe he is the only one is this populous nation with access to a writing implement.
-
Dear La News Fancaise,
Thank you for your article on the book of poetry, “The Snow Leopard” by Kyrgyz Antropov that appeared in La News on October 19th. However, I found it very offensive and think that maybe you should go find all the existing copies of your newspaper that still exist and cut the article out of it because I found it very derogatory of the poetry that was described, and it made many Kazakhs upset.
Thank You
Kyrgyz Antropov
PS I have attached a new poem that I wrote that maybe you will publish in your newspaper.
The Snow Leopard by Kyrgyz Antropov.
A Snow Leopard crouches and waits
For the bushel badger* to trundle past.
It jumps out and catches him
With its snow teeth.
* The Bushel Badger represents Turkestan.
Thanks Again,
Kyrgyz.
-
La News Francaise 16th December 2007
Dear Mr. Antropov,
We regret to inform you we will not publish your poem, “The Snow Leopard”, as you requested. It is of poor quality and would not be at home on a dirty piece of toilet paper.
Apologies,
Pierre LaPlace, Ed.
La News Francaise
-
Dear La News Francaise:
How bout this one?
The Leopard of Snow
Rawrrrrarrrrawararaaarrrr flesh flies from a warthog* that the snow leopard eats rawwrraara
* the warthog is the kurds
Love,
Kyrgyz Antropov
-
La News Francaise, 3rd January 2008
Dear Mr. Antropov,
This has gone far enough. Your persistence depresses me. I am really going to snap here. Very angry.
Pierre LaPlace, ed.
La News Franciase
-
Dear La News Francaise,
I have just be selected Poet Laureate for all Central Asian Former Soviet Republics. This is good because I receive more money. I am sorry you are sad. Maybe you should look at life more positively, or more like a bunch of animals that represent countries. I won’t bother you again.
Kyrgyz.
Only one miss.
On SNOW LEOPARD
La News Francaise 19th October 2007
THE SNOW LEOPARD
By Kyrgyz Antropov
Reviewed by Pierre LaPlace
Review translated from French by Oldovai Henderson
In each fledgling nation there comes a time when they realize they lack founding myths (Unless they already have a really good founding myth). For example, Canadian Paul Gross recently released the painfully earnest World War I film Passchaendale, and as bad as it is to watch for non-Canadians, for literate Canadians it must be an embarrassment.
So too is Kyrgyz Antropov’s new book of poetry, The Snow Leopard. Most of the poems contained in this ‘book’ are complicated analogies, where the nation of Kazakhstan is represented by a Snow Leopard and other countries are represented by other animals. The analogies are rarely effective, however, and often are glaringly transparent; for example, the poem ‘The Snow Leopard is birthed from the stomach of the Wild Bear’ and ‘The Snow Leopard is mocked in the Eagle by a native of the Lion in hit film’
Worse is the language of the poetry, which is repetitive, banal, excrutiating, inconsequential, and has little to do with the actual Kazakh character. Alarmingly, this illiterate tablet scratcher has been named Kazakhstan’s poet laureate, which leads me to believe he is the only one is this populous nation with access to a writing implement.
-
Dear La News Fancaise,
Thank you for your article on the book of poetry, “The Snow Leopard” by Kyrgyz Antropov that appeared in La News on October 19th. However, I found it very offensive and think that maybe you should go find all the existing copies of your newspaper that still exist and cut the article out of it because I found it very derogatory of the poetry that was described, and it made many Kazakhs upset.
Thank You
Kyrgyz Antropov
PS I have attached a new poem that I wrote that maybe you will publish in your newspaper.
The Snow Leopard by Kyrgyz Antropov.
A Snow Leopard crouches and waits
For the bushel badger* to trundle past.
It jumps out and catches him
With its snow teeth.
* The Bushel Badger represents Turkestan.
Thanks Again,
Kyrgyz.
-
La News Francaise 16th December 2007
Dear Mr. Antropov,
We regret to inform you we will not publish your poem, “The Snow Leopard”, as you requested. It is of poor quality and would not be at home on a dirty piece of toilet paper.
Apologies,
Pierre LaPlace, Ed.
La News Francaise
-
Dear La News Francaise:
How bout this one?
The Leopard of Snow
Rawrrrrarrrrawararaaarrrr flesh flies from a warthog* that the snow leopard eats rawwrraara
* the warthog is the kurds
Love,
Kyrgyz Antropov
-
La News Francaise, 3rd January 2008
Dear Mr. Antropov,
This has gone far enough. Your persistence depresses me. I am really going to snap here. Very angry.
Pierre LaPlace, ed.
La News Franciase
-
Dear La News Francaise,
I have just be selected Poet Laureate for all Central Asian Former Soviet Republics. This is good because I receive more money. I am sorry you are sad. Maybe you should look at life more positively, or more like a bunch of animals that represent countries. I won’t bother you again.
Kyrgyz.
on LET FREEDOM RING
January 15th
Although confused at first, I eventually figured out this distinctly American phrase. First the Liberty Bell and now this – I think January has two themes: patriotism and winter. I’m excited to see what the answer is on inauguration Tuesday. Maybe Barackobama!
On LET FREEDOM RING
I looked up ‘Let Freedom Ring’ on Wikipedia and a Jazz Album by Jackie McLean, and a book by Sean Hannity came up. I also put ‘Let Freedom Ring’ into google, and a bunch of right-wing websites popped up. Eventually I discovered that it comes from the patriotic song “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”
Sean Hannity is on a show that, until recently, was called Hannity and Colmes. What I just discovered through Wikiresearch is that Colmes is supposed to be Hannity’s liberal foil. I had always thought they were two crazy conservative guys, but then again I only have seen them through the Daily Show and Colbert Report.
Alan Colmes was also on my favourite ever episode of the Colbert Report, where he became co-host for one episode, criticized Colbert for putting Watership Down in his non-fiction section, and turned into a bat at the end of the show.
I was recently down in Florida and, for fun, we would listen to the right wing radio and laugh at the crazy things they would say. I was a bit worried that my parents knew what station it was, and I’m not sure if they listen to laugh or listen to listen. But mostly they seem like normal liberal Canadians.
When I write things like that, I can’t help but feel I am playing into the hands of the provocateurs. I’ve ushered at Massey Hall for a bunch of comedy concerts, and even though I agreed with him, Bill Maher’s pandering to his liberal lefty crowd seemed just as lazy as Jeff Dunham and Artie Lange with their boorish right-wingers. I’m not saying anything original when I say right wing crazies are crazy, wrong and hurtful. They treat important issues like they are players in a team sport that they have to rah rah to victory. They are tremendously frightened that people will impinge on their Christmases and hunting and military. They sound like children who have been given two sides and their reasoning for believing in something is because it is their assigned side.
Anyway, I hope these people are on their way to becoming obsolete. After watching a bunch of youtube clips of the ‘culture wars’ I kind of want to barf a little, even though it seems interesting at the time, like candy.
Soon Barack Obama will be inaugurated, and we’ll be doing comedy that night. Of all the promise that Obama has, it’s the promise that he’ll somehow be able to stop the fear and hate and pandering which makes me hope hardest. Listening to people say things that don’t make sense like it’s perfect sense is only so funny.
Let Freedom Ring!
Let our muscles relax.
The pinched days are done
No more talk of facts.
Trust is welcome
Let’s all take a nap
America, America
Is a place on a map.
God Bless! He said sarcastically?
Although confused at first, I eventually figured out this distinctly American phrase. First the Liberty Bell and now this – I think January has two themes: patriotism and winter. I’m excited to see what the answer is on inauguration Tuesday. Maybe Barackobama!
On LET FREEDOM RING
I looked up ‘Let Freedom Ring’ on Wikipedia and a Jazz Album by Jackie McLean, and a book by Sean Hannity came up. I also put ‘Let Freedom Ring’ into google, and a bunch of right-wing websites popped up. Eventually I discovered that it comes from the patriotic song “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”
Sean Hannity is on a show that, until recently, was called Hannity and Colmes. What I just discovered through Wikiresearch is that Colmes is supposed to be Hannity’s liberal foil. I had always thought they were two crazy conservative guys, but then again I only have seen them through the Daily Show and Colbert Report.
Alan Colmes was also on my favourite ever episode of the Colbert Report, where he became co-host for one episode, criticized Colbert for putting Watership Down in his non-fiction section, and turned into a bat at the end of the show.
I was recently down in Florida and, for fun, we would listen to the right wing radio and laugh at the crazy things they would say. I was a bit worried that my parents knew what station it was, and I’m not sure if they listen to laugh or listen to listen. But mostly they seem like normal liberal Canadians.
When I write things like that, I can’t help but feel I am playing into the hands of the provocateurs. I’ve ushered at Massey Hall for a bunch of comedy concerts, and even though I agreed with him, Bill Maher’s pandering to his liberal lefty crowd seemed just as lazy as Jeff Dunham and Artie Lange with their boorish right-wingers. I’m not saying anything original when I say right wing crazies are crazy, wrong and hurtful. They treat important issues like they are players in a team sport that they have to rah rah to victory. They are tremendously frightened that people will impinge on their Christmases and hunting and military. They sound like children who have been given two sides and their reasoning for believing in something is because it is their assigned side.
Anyway, I hope these people are on their way to becoming obsolete. After watching a bunch of youtube clips of the ‘culture wars’ I kind of want to barf a little, even though it seems interesting at the time, like candy.
Soon Barack Obama will be inaugurated, and we’ll be doing comedy that night. Of all the promise that Obama has, it’s the promise that he’ll somehow be able to stop the fear and hate and pandering which makes me hope hardest. Listening to people say things that don’t make sense like it’s perfect sense is only so funny.
Let Freedom Ring!
Let our muscles relax.
The pinched days are done
No more talk of facts.
Trust is welcome
Let’s all take a nap
America, America
Is a place on a map.
God Bless! He said sarcastically?
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
On MITTENS
On MITTENS
Memoirs – Part IV
The night after the day I was officially ousted from office as the mayor of Washington, D.C., I was walking the street and trying to think of what to do next, and I saw a pair of tiny pink mittens lying in the street, wet and old and disgusting. They were in the middle of a gasoline and urine filled flow that travelled along the street and into a nearby ravine. I thought of Gwendolyn and the children I’d never have. Just then I heard a faint cry, and I followed the stream into the ravine and into a long concrete tunnel. The cries grew louder, and after another fifteen minutes of wading through filth I found a tiny girl curled up by a grate and weeping.
She told me her story: her parents had traded her to a pawn shop for a new television set. The pawn shop owner flipped her over to a illegal darkroom using child labour to mass-produce photos of puppies to be placed in keychains. She had run away and this is the farthest places she could get to. I vowed to protect her, and we established a lair down in the Washington sewers. My long legs served me well in wading through the dreck, and I constructed a pair of stilts for her that she never took off and she soon felt like they were a part of her body. She made new ones for her arms as well, and would travel around the sewers using all four of her elongated limbs.
More abandoned children joined us over time, and we gave them stilt limbs and taught them how to move through the underground tunnels that covered the underside of the city. The more talented children were soon able to move up and down vertical shafts, and one particularly talented boy appended his stilts with claws that affixed themselves to the gunk that hung on the top of the tunnels.
Soon rumours spread through Washington of the Sewer King and his army of Spider Children. An initial reaction of curiosity and excitement soon gave way to fear, and inevitably a mob was gathered to go down into the tunnels and flush out the oddities.
A triad of girls that we had labeled Listeners was crouching under the grates in the Mall, where they overheard the mob gathering. They quickly travelled to my lair and all of the children were called together. A plan was hastily concocted and, through a series of traps and misdirections, the mob was led on a wild goose chase around the underbelly of the city until they finally trapped us underneath the World War II memorial. Several of the children died when the police condoned the use of a flame thrower, but then the ground collapsed and the golden eagles and stars of the monument mixed with the tar and the sewage and the bodies of dead children.
I hoped to see Jesus again, but he left me to figure out the situation on my own. Some of the children, including the first girl I had discovered all those weeks ago, had protected themselves from the destruction by removing their stilts and creating a canopy out of discarded ceramic tiles that fused with a trove of “I Heart DC” t-shirts to create a strong web. When these children were discovered, they had lost their spiderlike quality with their stilts and were recognized as human children. They were all adopted by Hollywood actors. I got away.
Memoirs – Part IV
The night after the day I was officially ousted from office as the mayor of Washington, D.C., I was walking the street and trying to think of what to do next, and I saw a pair of tiny pink mittens lying in the street, wet and old and disgusting. They were in the middle of a gasoline and urine filled flow that travelled along the street and into a nearby ravine. I thought of Gwendolyn and the children I’d never have. Just then I heard a faint cry, and I followed the stream into the ravine and into a long concrete tunnel. The cries grew louder, and after another fifteen minutes of wading through filth I found a tiny girl curled up by a grate and weeping.
She told me her story: her parents had traded her to a pawn shop for a new television set. The pawn shop owner flipped her over to a illegal darkroom using child labour to mass-produce photos of puppies to be placed in keychains. She had run away and this is the farthest places she could get to. I vowed to protect her, and we established a lair down in the Washington sewers. My long legs served me well in wading through the dreck, and I constructed a pair of stilts for her that she never took off and she soon felt like they were a part of her body. She made new ones for her arms as well, and would travel around the sewers using all four of her elongated limbs.
More abandoned children joined us over time, and we gave them stilt limbs and taught them how to move through the underground tunnels that covered the underside of the city. The more talented children were soon able to move up and down vertical shafts, and one particularly talented boy appended his stilts with claws that affixed themselves to the gunk that hung on the top of the tunnels.
Soon rumours spread through Washington of the Sewer King and his army of Spider Children. An initial reaction of curiosity and excitement soon gave way to fear, and inevitably a mob was gathered to go down into the tunnels and flush out the oddities.
A triad of girls that we had labeled Listeners was crouching under the grates in the Mall, where they overheard the mob gathering. They quickly travelled to my lair and all of the children were called together. A plan was hastily concocted and, through a series of traps and misdirections, the mob was led on a wild goose chase around the underbelly of the city until they finally trapped us underneath the World War II memorial. Several of the children died when the police condoned the use of a flame thrower, but then the ground collapsed and the golden eagles and stars of the monument mixed with the tar and the sewage and the bodies of dead children.
I hoped to see Jesus again, but he left me to figure out the situation on my own. Some of the children, including the first girl I had discovered all those weeks ago, had protected themselves from the destruction by removing their stilts and creating a canopy out of discarded ceramic tiles that fused with a trove of “I Heart DC” t-shirts to create a strong web. When these children were discovered, they had lost their spiderlike quality with their stilts and were recognized as human children. They were all adopted by Hollywood actors. I got away.
On SKATING RINK
January 13th
On SKATING RINK
I used to be a really huge hockey fan, but I’ve pretty much abandoned it for baseball. Even though they are mostly in different seasons, and I still feel a little weird being excited for the 2nd month of baseball while the Stanley Cup Playoffs are still on. My friend Paul Frank dislikes hockey solely because it takes attention away from baseball. That’s how much I love baseball. I first turned to hockey when I came back from London, England in 1993 and I had missed the hoopla around the Blue Jays World Series run in ’92, and thus was a little heartbroken. I was totally with baseball in 1989 and 1990, and then they won without my help. They never needed me at all!
The Leafs needed me though – they were on the brink of success, just like the Jays were in 1989 (As seen in the classic film Sky High: The story of the 1989 Toronto Blue Jays). This promise of Leaf success proved to be misleading, and over time my disappointment grew. I still stuck with hockey and ignored baseball, though, mostly because my friends were all big hockey fans, and my favourite video games were hockey games. Then I went to university, and abandoned sports for having a life. Now I don’t like hockey any more for these reasons:
1) Felix Potvin doesn’t play for the Leafs anymore.
2) Now that I look at it, goaltending seems more like luck than I thought it was. I used to love goalies, now it seems like they just stand there and get hit with the puck.
3) I HATE the rule which gives the overtime/shootout loser of a game a point, because it makes overtime less exciting because the stakes are lowered, it screws up historic statistics by inflating the value of points (because some games are worth 2 points and some are worth 3), and it is obsolete because now, with the shootout, all games have a winner no matter what. The whole point of the rule was to reduce the amount of ties, and now there are no ties.
4) I have gone back on my belief that franchises in the South, especially Stanley Cup franchises in Tampa, Anaheim and Carolina, are as worthy of existence as more traditional markets. That seemed to make sense as long as fans were coming to all the games, and it seemed like hockey was going to grow as a sport, but it looks like that ain’t happening. Contract the league! Move North!
5) Up until this year, the Leafs were a collection of free agents going nowhere fast. I’ll cheer for winners or losers, but they have to be lovable losers. This year’s are more lovable, but also more anonymous.
6) There are so many different ways to score in baseball!
7) All my comedian friends love baseball.
8) I can go to 26 baseball games in a year for $114. I can only go to Leafs games if I am lucky enough to get tix from my parents.
9) Baseball games are a party.
10) You don’t feel bad if you fall asleep during a baseball game
11) All the stadiums are different in baseball. It used to be that way in hockey, but not anymore. I miss Maple Leaf Gardens.
12) Baseball is a game for stats geeks. I am a stats geek.
13) Baseball links me to when I was nine. Hockey links to me when I was fifteen. I was cooler at nine than fifteen.
I’m glad I was able to get that off my chest.
On SKATING RINK
I used to be a really huge hockey fan, but I’ve pretty much abandoned it for baseball. Even though they are mostly in different seasons, and I still feel a little weird being excited for the 2nd month of baseball while the Stanley Cup Playoffs are still on. My friend Paul Frank dislikes hockey solely because it takes attention away from baseball. That’s how much I love baseball. I first turned to hockey when I came back from London, England in 1993 and I had missed the hoopla around the Blue Jays World Series run in ’92, and thus was a little heartbroken. I was totally with baseball in 1989 and 1990, and then they won without my help. They never needed me at all!
The Leafs needed me though – they were on the brink of success, just like the Jays were in 1989 (As seen in the classic film Sky High: The story of the 1989 Toronto Blue Jays). This promise of Leaf success proved to be misleading, and over time my disappointment grew. I still stuck with hockey and ignored baseball, though, mostly because my friends were all big hockey fans, and my favourite video games were hockey games. Then I went to university, and abandoned sports for having a life. Now I don’t like hockey any more for these reasons:
1) Felix Potvin doesn’t play for the Leafs anymore.
2) Now that I look at it, goaltending seems more like luck than I thought it was. I used to love goalies, now it seems like they just stand there and get hit with the puck.
3) I HATE the rule which gives the overtime/shootout loser of a game a point, because it makes overtime less exciting because the stakes are lowered, it screws up historic statistics by inflating the value of points (because some games are worth 2 points and some are worth 3), and it is obsolete because now, with the shootout, all games have a winner no matter what. The whole point of the rule was to reduce the amount of ties, and now there are no ties.
4) I have gone back on my belief that franchises in the South, especially Stanley Cup franchises in Tampa, Anaheim and Carolina, are as worthy of existence as more traditional markets. That seemed to make sense as long as fans were coming to all the games, and it seemed like hockey was going to grow as a sport, but it looks like that ain’t happening. Contract the league! Move North!
5) Up until this year, the Leafs were a collection of free agents going nowhere fast. I’ll cheer for winners or losers, but they have to be lovable losers. This year’s are more lovable, but also more anonymous.
6) There are so many different ways to score in baseball!
7) All my comedian friends love baseball.
8) I can go to 26 baseball games in a year for $114. I can only go to Leafs games if I am lucky enough to get tix from my parents.
9) Baseball games are a party.
10) You don’t feel bad if you fall asleep during a baseball game
11) All the stadiums are different in baseball. It used to be that way in hockey, but not anymore. I miss Maple Leaf Gardens.
12) Baseball is a game for stats geeks. I am a stats geek.
13) Baseball links me to when I was nine. Hockey links to me when I was fifteen. I was cooler at nine than fifteen.
I’m glad I was able to get that off my chest.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
On LANCE ARMSTRONG
January 12th
On LANCE ARMSTRONG
An interview with Lance Armstrong
Every week here at Biking Weekly, we like to interview one of our biking heroes. This week, cyclist Lance Armstrong!
BW: When you won the Tour de France eight times, were you using steroids?
LA: I won it seven times.
BW: Quit avoiding the question!
LA. Yes. Wait, no.
BW: (shakes head in disapproval)
LA: Anyways……
BW: When you won Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year in 2001, were you on steroids?
LA: No, but I was surprised because very few Americans care about cycling.
BW: But you are American. Don’t you care about cycling?
LA: Yes, a few people, like myself do. That’s why I said ‘very few’ and not ‘no one’
BW: Choosing your words carefully, I see.
LA: Can I have someone else interview me?
BW: Were you disappointed you never won Time’s Man of the Year?
LA: I did, in 2006.
BW: That was the year they made everyone man of the year.
LA: No, just the people who read the cover of Time that week.
BW: Still, a real pandering move by Time.
LA: Anyway, George Bush, Joseph Stalin and Ayatollah Khomeini were all men of the year, so….
BW: Also Pierre Laval, who later in life was executed by a firing squad for high treason by the French, because of his participation in the Vichy government.
LA: I didn’t know that.
BW: I’m reading all this off Wikipedia.
LA: (shrugs)
BW: It says here you have cancer.
LA: Not anymore!!!
BW: Oh! You beat it! Well done!
LA: How long have you been writing for Biking Weekly?
BW: It’s Bike Weekly.
LA: No, I think it’s Biking Weekly.
BW: Look, I just made up that magazine so I could come and interview you. I’m a big fan.
LA: But you didn’t know I had cancer?
BW: I respect people’s privacy.
LA: But I told everyone. It was a big thing.
BW: Okay, really, I have no idea who you are. I am a secret agent from SMERSH.
LA: Isn’t that the Russian Spy Agency in James Bond?
BW: I love James Bond!!
LA: This is the second worst interview I’ve ever been interviewed in.
BW: Mm hmmm. (tapping pencil against mouth, thoughtfully) and what was the first?
LA: The first worst?
BW: Yes.
LA: This one.
BW: But you just said it was the second worst.
LA: I know, but it got worse since I said that.
BW: What was your third worst?
LA: With that French magazine, Paris Match.
BW: What was so bad about that?
LA: It was all in French, and I suspect mostly about Sheryl Crow.
BW: One of the Counting Crows.
LA: No, my ex.
BW: Your X. What does that mean?
LA: We used to be engaged.
BW: Ooo hoo hoo hoo! Salacious!
LA: (silence)
BW: Well, are you going to tell me more about that?
LA: She’s got a great singing voice, and lots of stamina in bed. Also, I think that song “Every Day is a Winding Road” is about bicycling. I love winding roads! I like to bike on them. So it’s a song about how great everything is.
BW: That wasn’t my interpretation.
LA: Really. What do you think that song is about?
BW: It’s about how every day sucks, because you want to be on a straight road and get where you’re going, but there’s all these goddamn winds in the road that fuck up your life.
LA: I never thought of it that way. Maybe… we’re both right?
They kiss.
On LANCE ARMSTRONG
An interview with Lance Armstrong
Every week here at Biking Weekly, we like to interview one of our biking heroes. This week, cyclist Lance Armstrong!
BW: When you won the Tour de France eight times, were you using steroids?
LA: I won it seven times.
BW: Quit avoiding the question!
LA. Yes. Wait, no.
BW: (shakes head in disapproval)
LA: Anyways……
BW: When you won Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year in 2001, were you on steroids?
LA: No, but I was surprised because very few Americans care about cycling.
BW: But you are American. Don’t you care about cycling?
LA: Yes, a few people, like myself do. That’s why I said ‘very few’ and not ‘no one’
BW: Choosing your words carefully, I see.
LA: Can I have someone else interview me?
BW: Were you disappointed you never won Time’s Man of the Year?
LA: I did, in 2006.
BW: That was the year they made everyone man of the year.
LA: No, just the people who read the cover of Time that week.
BW: Still, a real pandering move by Time.
LA: Anyway, George Bush, Joseph Stalin and Ayatollah Khomeini were all men of the year, so….
BW: Also Pierre Laval, who later in life was executed by a firing squad for high treason by the French, because of his participation in the Vichy government.
LA: I didn’t know that.
BW: I’m reading all this off Wikipedia.
LA: (shrugs)
BW: It says here you have cancer.
LA: Not anymore!!!
BW: Oh! You beat it! Well done!
LA: How long have you been writing for Biking Weekly?
BW: It’s Bike Weekly.
LA: No, I think it’s Biking Weekly.
BW: Look, I just made up that magazine so I could come and interview you. I’m a big fan.
LA: But you didn’t know I had cancer?
BW: I respect people’s privacy.
LA: But I told everyone. It was a big thing.
BW: Okay, really, I have no idea who you are. I am a secret agent from SMERSH.
LA: Isn’t that the Russian Spy Agency in James Bond?
BW: I love James Bond!!
LA: This is the second worst interview I’ve ever been interviewed in.
BW: Mm hmmm. (tapping pencil against mouth, thoughtfully) and what was the first?
LA: The first worst?
BW: Yes.
LA: This one.
BW: But you just said it was the second worst.
LA: I know, but it got worse since I said that.
BW: What was your third worst?
LA: With that French magazine, Paris Match.
BW: What was so bad about that?
LA: It was all in French, and I suspect mostly about Sheryl Crow.
BW: One of the Counting Crows.
LA: No, my ex.
BW: Your X. What does that mean?
LA: We used to be engaged.
BW: Ooo hoo hoo hoo! Salacious!
LA: (silence)
BW: Well, are you going to tell me more about that?
LA: She’s got a great singing voice, and lots of stamina in bed. Also, I think that song “Every Day is a Winding Road” is about bicycling. I love winding roads! I like to bike on them. So it’s a song about how great everything is.
BW: That wasn’t my interpretation.
LA: Really. What do you think that song is about?
BW: It’s about how every day sucks, because you want to be on a straight road and get where you’re going, but there’s all these goddamn winds in the road that fuck up your life.
LA: I never thought of it that way. Maybe… we’re both right?
They kiss.
On VETERANARIAN
January 10-11th
On VETERANARIAN
(Memoirs will return. In its place, Veterantarian Hospital)
Veteranarian Hospital
Dr. Hutchison was very handsome, all the female pet owners agreed. But from Patches’ perspective, he was hideous. A hideous man with a well-tended Caesar cut, who jabbed Patches with needles and touched him in odd places and, when it was done, wrapped a pink bandana around his neck. Patches kind of liked the bandana part, but hated how he liked it. It was a good looking bandana, don’t get Patches wrong, but when he wore it at the dog park, it was a public manifestation of the shame he felt for being molested by this tall man with classical features and a sunny disposition. A perversely sunny disposition.
Stranger were some of the other dogs in the vet’s office who had their tongues out and their tails wagging, leering at Patches as he ashamedly walked out of the vet’s office, his hair neatly trimmed. At first he thought the other dogs had never been to the vet before, but as he saw the same dogs again and again, he realized they perversely liked going in the room with the fascist steel table. Patches wondered what kind of sick dogs looked forward to such treatment. They probably had terrible home lives.
-
Mr. Hutchison hated his own life, and he didn’t know why. Ever since he was seven years old, he wanted to be a veterinarian. He achieved his goal with minimal effort, finishing in the middle of his class, set up shop in a suburban location, and hired two very attractive vet techs, both of whom he had since slept with, with hardly any complications. Sometimes he thought that maybe he should be a sculptor – he looked at things and saw other shapes beneath the surface, and wanted to chip away at their exteriors until something beautiful, or perhaps beautifully ugly, emerged. He had this feeling most of all when he looked at himself in the mirror, and imagined chipping his own body away until it was a conservatively dressed, fat midget. He threw up a little in his mouth about fifteen times a day, usually when he met a new client and their pet. Maybe a career path based on what he wanted when he was a seven-year-old boy was a bad decision. After all, he never asked seven-year-old boys for advice regarding anything else. Because they were stupid, they were missing a lifetime of experience that told them what was really fun to do.
-
The owner of Patches, a pregnant teen named Heidi, exuded a sense of wisdom that was completely unrelated to the amount of wisdom she actually had. Something in the way her features rested on her faces allowed people to trust her when she gave them flowers, or asked for a dog, or said it would be okay to have unprotected sex. Really, Heidi had no idea what she was doing in life, and tried not to think about it. Most of her friends reflected on that all the time, how they thought they had no idea where their life was going, but really, they had a general idea, and what was happening was a minor variation on their plans, and they were reflecting on the slight dissonance on where they thought their life was going, and how it was actually going. Heidi really didn’t know what was going to happen in her life, and when her teachers said she had an equal chance at winning a Nobel Prize, flaming out and dying in another few months, or living an anonymous life as an office worker, it was true. This was terrifying, so Heidi didn’t think about it because it was like trying to direct a storm. Heidi had freckles, and blond pigtails, and when people looked into her eyes, expecting the eyes of a seventeen year old girl with freckles and pigtails, they saw the eyes of an ancient bird of prey crossed with mother earth.
On VETERANARIAN
(Memoirs will return. In its place, Veterantarian Hospital)
Veteranarian Hospital
Dr. Hutchison was very handsome, all the female pet owners agreed. But from Patches’ perspective, he was hideous. A hideous man with a well-tended Caesar cut, who jabbed Patches with needles and touched him in odd places and, when it was done, wrapped a pink bandana around his neck. Patches kind of liked the bandana part, but hated how he liked it. It was a good looking bandana, don’t get Patches wrong, but when he wore it at the dog park, it was a public manifestation of the shame he felt for being molested by this tall man with classical features and a sunny disposition. A perversely sunny disposition.
Stranger were some of the other dogs in the vet’s office who had their tongues out and their tails wagging, leering at Patches as he ashamedly walked out of the vet’s office, his hair neatly trimmed. At first he thought the other dogs had never been to the vet before, but as he saw the same dogs again and again, he realized they perversely liked going in the room with the fascist steel table. Patches wondered what kind of sick dogs looked forward to such treatment. They probably had terrible home lives.
-
Mr. Hutchison hated his own life, and he didn’t know why. Ever since he was seven years old, he wanted to be a veterinarian. He achieved his goal with minimal effort, finishing in the middle of his class, set up shop in a suburban location, and hired two very attractive vet techs, both of whom he had since slept with, with hardly any complications. Sometimes he thought that maybe he should be a sculptor – he looked at things and saw other shapes beneath the surface, and wanted to chip away at their exteriors until something beautiful, or perhaps beautifully ugly, emerged. He had this feeling most of all when he looked at himself in the mirror, and imagined chipping his own body away until it was a conservatively dressed, fat midget. He threw up a little in his mouth about fifteen times a day, usually when he met a new client and their pet. Maybe a career path based on what he wanted when he was a seven-year-old boy was a bad decision. After all, he never asked seven-year-old boys for advice regarding anything else. Because they were stupid, they were missing a lifetime of experience that told them what was really fun to do.
-
The owner of Patches, a pregnant teen named Heidi, exuded a sense of wisdom that was completely unrelated to the amount of wisdom she actually had. Something in the way her features rested on her faces allowed people to trust her when she gave them flowers, or asked for a dog, or said it would be okay to have unprotected sex. Really, Heidi had no idea what she was doing in life, and tried not to think about it. Most of her friends reflected on that all the time, how they thought they had no idea where their life was going, but really, they had a general idea, and what was happening was a minor variation on their plans, and they were reflecting on the slight dissonance on where they thought their life was going, and how it was actually going. Heidi really didn’t know what was going to happen in her life, and when her teachers said she had an equal chance at winning a Nobel Prize, flaming out and dying in another few months, or living an anonymous life as an office worker, it was true. This was terrifying, so Heidi didn’t think about it because it was like trying to direct a storm. Heidi had freckles, and blond pigtails, and when people looked into her eyes, expecting the eyes of a seventeen year old girl with freckles and pigtails, they saw the eyes of an ancient bird of prey crossed with mother earth.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
On GODZILLA
January 9th
On GODZILLA
Memoirs – Part III
For the next eight years I associated with the Jewish and Latin American communist communities in New York City. I started writing freelance articles for the two communist newspapers in the city, The Little Havana Hammer and the Hebrew Sickle. All of this was under the cover of complete secrecy, according to the police I was an employee of an imaginary water treatment plant known as Water Treatment Plant 801. I had to pay off the police to keep my identity secret, we all did. We would raise money for our bribes with coffee houses where we would read poetry that were thinly disguised analogies of economic ideas. Then we would pass the hat around, also a lot of money was donated by the Irish community by mistake, because we named our coffee house events “IRA”, which stood for International Revolution Association.
My first assignment for the Little Havana Hammer was an article on sculptor Jorge Sanchez, who worked in large scale papier mache. When I interviewed him he was creating a full-scale papier mache statue of Godzilla in Central Park, and he had created a giant lizard foot that was ten feet tall. It was meant to represent capitalism, but it was never finished, and he ended up living in the foot for several years.
A few years later I got an assignment from the Hebrew Sickle to go to different factories in New Jersey and interview factory workers who moonlit as musicians. I met a chemical plant worker who played the tuba, and a textiles worker who sang falsetto. I introduced them to one another, and they became the communist community’s most popular jazz duo until they both died in a lightning storm caused by a nuclear plant in Hoboken.
Eventually I became vice-secretary of the Manhattan chapter of Comintern, after a brutal struggle with a 60-year-old Bolivian man with one eye. We both had gangs of thugs who we indoctrinated in communist theory by day and set upon each other by night. 305 men and women died in the street war until I threw the Bolivian off of a catwalk at the Metropolitan Opera House.
When I reached the age of 24 I became disillusioned with communism and started work in the mail room for Salisbury-Wigginton, an investment firm on Wall Street. I started in the basement and every year I was promoted to the floor above me, like clockwork, until I was 35 years old and the vice-president of marketing on the ninth floor.
At that time the F.B.I. had gathered enough evidence to convict me for arson and the murder of the old man in the Rockies. As they came up the elevator, my assistant Thea warned me using her extra-sensory perception, and I escaped using the back stairs. I caught a cab and traveled to Washington D.C. where I disguised myself by running for mayor. Under the pseudonym Hatter Johnson, I was mayor for three years until I had to resign as a result of a corruption scandal. It turned out that the Narcotics division had been paying Columbians to import cocaine into the city to increase the department’s budget, which was foolish because those drugs would have been imported without the illegal incentives provided by the police. I was the one who took the fall.
On GODZILLA
Memoirs – Part III
For the next eight years I associated with the Jewish and Latin American communist communities in New York City. I started writing freelance articles for the two communist newspapers in the city, The Little Havana Hammer and the Hebrew Sickle. All of this was under the cover of complete secrecy, according to the police I was an employee of an imaginary water treatment plant known as Water Treatment Plant 801. I had to pay off the police to keep my identity secret, we all did. We would raise money for our bribes with coffee houses where we would read poetry that were thinly disguised analogies of economic ideas. Then we would pass the hat around, also a lot of money was donated by the Irish community by mistake, because we named our coffee house events “IRA”, which stood for International Revolution Association.
My first assignment for the Little Havana Hammer was an article on sculptor Jorge Sanchez, who worked in large scale papier mache. When I interviewed him he was creating a full-scale papier mache statue of Godzilla in Central Park, and he had created a giant lizard foot that was ten feet tall. It was meant to represent capitalism, but it was never finished, and he ended up living in the foot for several years.
A few years later I got an assignment from the Hebrew Sickle to go to different factories in New Jersey and interview factory workers who moonlit as musicians. I met a chemical plant worker who played the tuba, and a textiles worker who sang falsetto. I introduced them to one another, and they became the communist community’s most popular jazz duo until they both died in a lightning storm caused by a nuclear plant in Hoboken.
Eventually I became vice-secretary of the Manhattan chapter of Comintern, after a brutal struggle with a 60-year-old Bolivian man with one eye. We both had gangs of thugs who we indoctrinated in communist theory by day and set upon each other by night. 305 men and women died in the street war until I threw the Bolivian off of a catwalk at the Metropolitan Opera House.
When I reached the age of 24 I became disillusioned with communism and started work in the mail room for Salisbury-Wigginton, an investment firm on Wall Street. I started in the basement and every year I was promoted to the floor above me, like clockwork, until I was 35 years old and the vice-president of marketing on the ninth floor.
At that time the F.B.I. had gathered enough evidence to convict me for arson and the murder of the old man in the Rockies. As they came up the elevator, my assistant Thea warned me using her extra-sensory perception, and I escaped using the back stairs. I caught a cab and traveled to Washington D.C. where I disguised myself by running for mayor. Under the pseudonym Hatter Johnson, I was mayor for three years until I had to resign as a result of a corruption scandal. It turned out that the Narcotics division had been paying Columbians to import cocaine into the city to increase the department’s budget, which was foolish because those drugs would have been imported without the illegal incentives provided by the police. I was the one who took the fall.
On HOT COCOA
January 8th
On HOT COCOA
Memoirs – Part II
It turned out I was the only passenger on the train to Salem. The Baton Rouge-Salem line was only created as an economy-stimulating make-work project in the 1930s, and train service continued because a corrupt politician had a mistress that he would train in from Oregon. She wasn’t on the train that day.
Somewhere in the mountains between Utah and Colorado, on the ninth day of my trip, and unbeknownst to either the train engineer or me, the train derailed. It was late January and a heavy snowfall had reduced visibility to zero. The train travelled for another half hour on ice formations that, by odd chance, had naturally taken the form of rails, until finally the train tumbled into a small gully. The train engineer died instantly, but I was thrown from a window and then into a twenty foot snowdrift. I made a makeshift sling out of snow and pine needles for my broken arm, and walked for 78 miles until I came upon a small cabin on top of a ledge.
An old man in a top hat answered the door. His eyes were red and watery, and he was quite stout. He took pity on me and gave me warm clothes, which were large in the torso and short in the leg, and a blanket. He made us both a mug of Hot Cocoa. On my mug was the official logo of the 1904 World’s Fair/Olympics in St. Louis, and on his was the face of a sad clown.
“What is your name, son?” asked the gentleman.
“Jack Rabbit,” I answered.
“Jackrabbit?” He asked.
“No, Jack,” and I paused to indicate the space, “Rabbit.”
“Like John Updike?” he said, confused.
“No, that was just ‘Rabbit’.” I would have said, if I had known who John Updike was. In reality I said, “What?”
We had gotten off to a bad start, and it got worse when he offered to adopt me. One thing led to another and by the time the cocoa was finished, a fire had started that would consume the entire house. For the next three days I wandered through the mountains while the old man followed me with a gun. To disguise myself, I rolled in bird dung on some bare rocks, making my black cloak white. Finally we were both caught in an avalanche, and I watched a large falling tree decapitate the old man and I was trapped in a small cave. I slept for four hours, exhausted.
When I opened my eyes Jesus was before me, a two-dimensional Jesus that looked like it had been literally ripped from an illuminated manuscript, with edges of torn paper. When Jesus spoke to me, his mouth moved up and down like a Steinbach nutcracker, and sunbeams emerged from the square void between his teeth. He blurted out a series of nonsense words which at the time I thought were Aramaic and I wrote them down on a piece of parchment I had kept in my cloak for emergencies. Later, when I researched the meaning of these words, I found they corresponded to no known language. After about five hours, He started to sing the Alphabet over and over. That lasted for another seven hours, and then he disappeared and I was lying in a gutter in New York City, completely naked.
On HOT COCOA
Memoirs – Part II
It turned out I was the only passenger on the train to Salem. The Baton Rouge-Salem line was only created as an economy-stimulating make-work project in the 1930s, and train service continued because a corrupt politician had a mistress that he would train in from Oregon. She wasn’t on the train that day.
Somewhere in the mountains between Utah and Colorado, on the ninth day of my trip, and unbeknownst to either the train engineer or me, the train derailed. It was late January and a heavy snowfall had reduced visibility to zero. The train travelled for another half hour on ice formations that, by odd chance, had naturally taken the form of rails, until finally the train tumbled into a small gully. The train engineer died instantly, but I was thrown from a window and then into a twenty foot snowdrift. I made a makeshift sling out of snow and pine needles for my broken arm, and walked for 78 miles until I came upon a small cabin on top of a ledge.
An old man in a top hat answered the door. His eyes were red and watery, and he was quite stout. He took pity on me and gave me warm clothes, which were large in the torso and short in the leg, and a blanket. He made us both a mug of Hot Cocoa. On my mug was the official logo of the 1904 World’s Fair/Olympics in St. Louis, and on his was the face of a sad clown.
“What is your name, son?” asked the gentleman.
“Jack Rabbit,” I answered.
“Jackrabbit?” He asked.
“No, Jack,” and I paused to indicate the space, “Rabbit.”
“Like John Updike?” he said, confused.
“No, that was just ‘Rabbit’.” I would have said, if I had known who John Updike was. In reality I said, “What?”
We had gotten off to a bad start, and it got worse when he offered to adopt me. One thing led to another and by the time the cocoa was finished, a fire had started that would consume the entire house. For the next three days I wandered through the mountains while the old man followed me with a gun. To disguise myself, I rolled in bird dung on some bare rocks, making my black cloak white. Finally we were both caught in an avalanche, and I watched a large falling tree decapitate the old man and I was trapped in a small cave. I slept for four hours, exhausted.
When I opened my eyes Jesus was before me, a two-dimensional Jesus that looked like it had been literally ripped from an illuminated manuscript, with edges of torn paper. When Jesus spoke to me, his mouth moved up and down like a Steinbach nutcracker, and sunbeams emerged from the square void between his teeth. He blurted out a series of nonsense words which at the time I thought were Aramaic and I wrote them down on a piece of parchment I had kept in my cloak for emergencies. Later, when I researched the meaning of these words, I found they corresponded to no known language. After about five hours, He started to sing the Alphabet over and over. That lasted for another seven hours, and then he disappeared and I was lying in a gutter in New York City, completely naked.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
On JACKRABBIT
January 7th
Hanged again. Fuck this game.
On JACKRABBIT
Memoirs – Part I
Dear reader, I was not always the man you see handsomely displayed on the dust jacket of this book. If you flip to that photo, you’ll see a man in a violet valeur cape tied above the sternum, a cigarette holder tightly wedged between 30 foot teeth, with facial hair that looks like it was drawn on with a calligraphy pen, a top hat precariously perched on his head like a medieval tenement, his eyes burning red like smouldering embers at the bottom of black pits. Even my name, proudly emblazoned on the cover of this memoir, is not the moniker I was given when I was born.
When I was born, I was named Georges St. Pierre Beaulieu Clemenceau IV, in the Louisiana Bayou. But because of my unusual physical features, I was known as Jackrabbit. My shins were twice as long as my thighs, which were twice as long as my torso, and my knees were bulbous fists, looking like bloated, pus engorged cysts. My arms were normal sized. My hair was a brown mop of curls like Terry Fox, and I was always wearing green short shorts with bright yellow piping. My parents were taken away from me when I was four years old by a mysterious mist. I survived by selling raw hot dog wieners at the state fair, calling them “Bayou Treats”. I could only attend school on days when the tide was low enough for me to cross the Bog. I taught myself to read using three issues of Playboy from 1959.
When I reached the age of 12 puberty struck with the urgency of a careening cement truck. I grew a full beard in one day, and lost my virginity to the daughter of the owner of the Riverboat Gambler, a local saloon. She was blind in one eye and had seven fingers on one hand, which she would run through my overgrown chest hair. I refused to shave and by the age of 13 I looked like a young Rasputin and took to wearing black robes. I changed my name from Jackrabbit to Jack Rabbit. I was accepted with a full scholarship to Constabulary University in Salem, Oregon, but deferred my acceptance for two years in order to finish a Popsicle stick art project that I gave to Gwendolyn, a local girl that I had fallen in love with.
She asked me why I was wearing robes when it was 120 degrees out. She said she missed the old Jackrabbit, and that if I was trying to hide my unusual shins and knees, I should show them proudly, for they were given me by our Lord our God. She thought the popsicle art piece was an oil refinery, but I had intended it to be a sewage treatment plant, after the treatment plant where we had first met, hiding from a gang of marauding toughs who were posing as racists but were really just homophobes.
I flinched when she misidentified the piece, and walked to the train station without speaking to her. I boarded the 10:23 train to Salem, Oregon, and never saw Louisiana again.
Hanged again. Fuck this game.
On JACKRABBIT
Memoirs – Part I
Dear reader, I was not always the man you see handsomely displayed on the dust jacket of this book. If you flip to that photo, you’ll see a man in a violet valeur cape tied above the sternum, a cigarette holder tightly wedged between 30 foot teeth, with facial hair that looks like it was drawn on with a calligraphy pen, a top hat precariously perched on his head like a medieval tenement, his eyes burning red like smouldering embers at the bottom of black pits. Even my name, proudly emblazoned on the cover of this memoir, is not the moniker I was given when I was born.
When I was born, I was named Georges St. Pierre Beaulieu Clemenceau IV, in the Louisiana Bayou. But because of my unusual physical features, I was known as Jackrabbit. My shins were twice as long as my thighs, which were twice as long as my torso, and my knees were bulbous fists, looking like bloated, pus engorged cysts. My arms were normal sized. My hair was a brown mop of curls like Terry Fox, and I was always wearing green short shorts with bright yellow piping. My parents were taken away from me when I was four years old by a mysterious mist. I survived by selling raw hot dog wieners at the state fair, calling them “Bayou Treats”. I could only attend school on days when the tide was low enough for me to cross the Bog. I taught myself to read using three issues of Playboy from 1959.
When I reached the age of 12 puberty struck with the urgency of a careening cement truck. I grew a full beard in one day, and lost my virginity to the daughter of the owner of the Riverboat Gambler, a local saloon. She was blind in one eye and had seven fingers on one hand, which she would run through my overgrown chest hair. I refused to shave and by the age of 13 I looked like a young Rasputin and took to wearing black robes. I changed my name from Jackrabbit to Jack Rabbit. I was accepted with a full scholarship to Constabulary University in Salem, Oregon, but deferred my acceptance for two years in order to finish a Popsicle stick art project that I gave to Gwendolyn, a local girl that I had fallen in love with.
She asked me why I was wearing robes when it was 120 degrees out. She said she missed the old Jackrabbit, and that if I was trying to hide my unusual shins and knees, I should show them proudly, for they were given me by our Lord our God. She thought the popsicle art piece was an oil refinery, but I had intended it to be a sewage treatment plant, after the treatment plant where we had first met, hiding from a gang of marauding toughs who were posing as racists but were really just homophobes.
I flinched when she misidentified the piece, and walked to the train station without speaking to her. I boarded the 10:23 train to Salem, Oregon, and never saw Louisiana again.
On MADRID
January 6th
Today I was legitimately hanged for the first time. The odds were stacked against me, as the word was six letters long, and two of those letters were D, which I did not try until I had already placed a shoe on the foot of the poor dead man I was trying to save. The cruel dictatorship’s reign of terror continues, try as might to stop it with my powers of vocabulary.
On MADRID
Speaking of longtime dictatorships, here’s some fast facts about Madrid:
1) Madrid is the third largest city in the European Union, bigger than Paris, France (and Paris, Texas).
2) In Spain, they call counties Autonomous Communities. Madrid is in the Autonomous Community of Madrid.
4) Originally, Madrid was known as Ursaria, which means “Land of Bears”.
4) The town motto of Madrid is, “On water I was built, my walls are made of fire. This is my ensign and escutcheon.” Presumably one would say this while displaying the town escutcheon (and ensign). A rule of thumb that applies to any situation, really.
5) An escutcheon is a different thing depending on the context you’re using the word in. In heraldry, as the Madrilenos are using it in the above motto, they mean the shield in a coat of arms, which in their case depicts a bear trying to knock down a strawberry tree. On a boat, an escutcheon is a plate on the stern of a ship with the boat’s name on it, i.e. the H.M.S. Strawberry-Eating Bear. In a doctor’s office, the escutcheon refers to the male or female distribution of pubic hair. As in “Mrs. Johnson, your escutcheon is a bushy as a strawberry bush the top of a strawberry tree! Lucky there are no bears around.”
6) The capital of Spain was moved from Seville to Madrid in 1561 by Philip II. Take that, Seville!
7) Madrid was the first city to have its civilians targeted by bombs dropped from airplanes. As depicted in the painting, Guernica. (The lesser-known painting Madrid is a picture of cows quietly eating grass in the town of Guernica.)
8) Madrid is sister city to New York, but partner city to Paris. Big difference. You see, Madrid loves New York (and wears a T-shirt to prove it), but it has sex with Paris.
9) In the Soviet Union, they call sister cities brother cities.
10) Apparently, Terminal 4 at Madrid’s airport is really something to see.
11) Drinking in public is a popular pastime for the youth of Madrid.
12) Madrid is the world centre of bullfighting! That makes sense.
13) The fans of Madrid’s poorer soccer team, Atletico Madrid, are known as The Sufferers, or The Cubs Fans.
14) Madrid’s subway system is the second largest in Europe now, after London. (What happened, Berlin?) Its subway lines appear to have been created haphazardly in broad, looping strokes.
15) My sister recently spent time in Madrid, but I do not recall her mentioning anything in particular about it.
There you have it – the jewel of the Iberian Peninsula. The closest I have personally come to Spain is Portugal, and I have also worked in a bank in a Portuguese neighbourhood in Toronto. I had the impression the people there did not like me. The Portuguese women would fight amongst each other to be the one to get the Portuguese-speaking teller, backing away from me and pointing at each other, like children trying to avoid going off the high-dive. Perhaps someday I will have an understanding with those who speak foreign tongues. But right now, we both have a deep-seated fear of one another.
Today I was legitimately hanged for the first time. The odds were stacked against me, as the word was six letters long, and two of those letters were D, which I did not try until I had already placed a shoe on the foot of the poor dead man I was trying to save. The cruel dictatorship’s reign of terror continues, try as might to stop it with my powers of vocabulary.
On MADRID
Speaking of longtime dictatorships, here’s some fast facts about Madrid:
1) Madrid is the third largest city in the European Union, bigger than Paris, France (and Paris, Texas).
2) In Spain, they call counties Autonomous Communities. Madrid is in the Autonomous Community of Madrid.
4) Originally, Madrid was known as Ursaria, which means “Land of Bears”.
4) The town motto of Madrid is, “On water I was built, my walls are made of fire. This is my ensign and escutcheon.” Presumably one would say this while displaying the town escutcheon (and ensign). A rule of thumb that applies to any situation, really.
5) An escutcheon is a different thing depending on the context you’re using the word in. In heraldry, as the Madrilenos are using it in the above motto, they mean the shield in a coat of arms, which in their case depicts a bear trying to knock down a strawberry tree. On a boat, an escutcheon is a plate on the stern of a ship with the boat’s name on it, i.e. the H.M.S. Strawberry-Eating Bear. In a doctor’s office, the escutcheon refers to the male or female distribution of pubic hair. As in “Mrs. Johnson, your escutcheon is a bushy as a strawberry bush the top of a strawberry tree! Lucky there are no bears around.”
6) The capital of Spain was moved from Seville to Madrid in 1561 by Philip II. Take that, Seville!
7) Madrid was the first city to have its civilians targeted by bombs dropped from airplanes. As depicted in the painting, Guernica. (The lesser-known painting Madrid is a picture of cows quietly eating grass in the town of Guernica.)
8) Madrid is sister city to New York, but partner city to Paris. Big difference. You see, Madrid loves New York (and wears a T-shirt to prove it), but it has sex with Paris.
9) In the Soviet Union, they call sister cities brother cities.
10) Apparently, Terminal 4 at Madrid’s airport is really something to see.
11) Drinking in public is a popular pastime for the youth of Madrid.
12) Madrid is the world centre of bullfighting! That makes sense.
13) The fans of Madrid’s poorer soccer team, Atletico Madrid, are known as The Sufferers, or The Cubs Fans.
14) Madrid’s subway system is the second largest in Europe now, after London. (What happened, Berlin?) Its subway lines appear to have been created haphazardly in broad, looping strokes.
15) My sister recently spent time in Madrid, but I do not recall her mentioning anything in particular about it.
There you have it – the jewel of the Iberian Peninsula. The closest I have personally come to Spain is Portugal, and I have also worked in a bank in a Portuguese neighbourhood in Toronto. I had the impression the people there did not like me. The Portuguese women would fight amongst each other to be the one to get the Portuguese-speaking teller, backing away from me and pointing at each other, like children trying to avoid going off the high-dive. Perhaps someday I will have an understanding with those who speak foreign tongues. But right now, we both have a deep-seated fear of one another.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
On HARRY POTTER
January 5th
No fooling – no hanged limbs. Perfect score!
On HARRY POTTER
Look everyone, Harry Potter is the best! I first met Harry Potter in his first year at wizard school and was a good friend all the way until he dropped out of school to fight evil. Come to think of it, did Harry Potter ever graduate? He’s the Bill Gates of wizardry. Probably very rich. How do wizards make money? Besides owning shops in Diagon Alley! I probably knew how it all worked when I was reading the books. Maybe everyone in Wizardry works for the government. The wizard government.
I remember the first sitcom writing class at Humber College, where I went for Comedy School, our legendary (crazy) teacher Lorne Frohman was talking about ideas, and how angry he was that he had not come up with the idea of a school for wizards. “Wizard School!” He would say, shaking his head. As if that was the secret to J. K. Rowlings’s success. This is how a Harry Potter book by Lorne Frohman would go.
“Wizard School!” yelled Professor Snape. “Why didn’t I think of that? Hey, did I ever tell you how I wrote a sitcom for Dolly Parton? I’m Lorne Frohman. I mean, Professor Snape.”
Lorne Frohman also told us about an idea he had for an Umpire School movie, which had the exact same plotline as the movie Stripes, starring Bill Murray. The lesson was you don’t need to come up with a plotline on your own, just follow one from an already existing film. Which, seriously, is a good idea. That’s how Airplane! Was written. Another good idea: Umpire School! I would watch that movie, should it exist, immediately. I should write Lorne Frohman and ask him if I can lift it from him. He never used it. He either never finished the script or no one was interested in it. And then, when I make millions, it will be me that Lorne Frohman will curse to his students. “Umpire School! That was my idea! I’m Professor Snape! I mean, Lorne Frohman!”
UMPIRE SCHOOL
By David Barclay
Our hero’s sidekick, Sanchez, enters the classroom. Our hero, Hoagie Carmichael, is already seated with several other students. They are waiting for the teacher to arrive.
SANCHEZ
Sorry I am late boss!
HOAGIE CARMICHAEL
Sanchez! Get over here before Professor Snape sees you! Oh, why is my life so much like the movie Stripes, starring Bill Murray, and his romantic interest, played by Sean Young?
Enter Professor Snape.
SNAPE
Late again Potter! Wha-wha? This isn’t wizard school! It’s umpire school!
A spitball from an unseen source lands on his forehead.
SNAPE
Weasley!!!!!!!!!!!
Very irreverent. Hoagy Carmichael, it turns out, was a songwriter with the best name! And his real name is Hoagland Howard Carmichael.
Krista and I went to a Slytherin party for the launch of the sixth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It was down at the Harbourfront, and I bought myself a Gryffindor tie. We heard the first chapter read aloud of the new book, and then a band called the Wyrd Sisters played. Is it strange that I want to be in Gryffindor, but kind of wish I wanted to be in another house like Ravenclaw? But not enough to officially want to be in that house? There’s a true-to-life analogy there somewhere.
No fooling – no hanged limbs. Perfect score!
On HARRY POTTER
Look everyone, Harry Potter is the best! I first met Harry Potter in his first year at wizard school and was a good friend all the way until he dropped out of school to fight evil. Come to think of it, did Harry Potter ever graduate? He’s the Bill Gates of wizardry. Probably very rich. How do wizards make money? Besides owning shops in Diagon Alley! I probably knew how it all worked when I was reading the books. Maybe everyone in Wizardry works for the government. The wizard government.
I remember the first sitcom writing class at Humber College, where I went for Comedy School, our legendary (crazy) teacher Lorne Frohman was talking about ideas, and how angry he was that he had not come up with the idea of a school for wizards. “Wizard School!” He would say, shaking his head. As if that was the secret to J. K. Rowlings’s success. This is how a Harry Potter book by Lorne Frohman would go.
“Wizard School!” yelled Professor Snape. “Why didn’t I think of that? Hey, did I ever tell you how I wrote a sitcom for Dolly Parton? I’m Lorne Frohman. I mean, Professor Snape.”
Lorne Frohman also told us about an idea he had for an Umpire School movie, which had the exact same plotline as the movie Stripes, starring Bill Murray. The lesson was you don’t need to come up with a plotline on your own, just follow one from an already existing film. Which, seriously, is a good idea. That’s how Airplane! Was written. Another good idea: Umpire School! I would watch that movie, should it exist, immediately. I should write Lorne Frohman and ask him if I can lift it from him. He never used it. He either never finished the script or no one was interested in it. And then, when I make millions, it will be me that Lorne Frohman will curse to his students. “Umpire School! That was my idea! I’m Professor Snape! I mean, Lorne Frohman!”
UMPIRE SCHOOL
By David Barclay
Our hero’s sidekick, Sanchez, enters the classroom. Our hero, Hoagie Carmichael, is already seated with several other students. They are waiting for the teacher to arrive.
SANCHEZ
Sorry I am late boss!
HOAGIE CARMICHAEL
Sanchez! Get over here before Professor Snape sees you! Oh, why is my life so much like the movie Stripes, starring Bill Murray, and his romantic interest, played by Sean Young?
Enter Professor Snape.
SNAPE
Late again Potter! Wha-wha? This isn’t wizard school! It’s umpire school!
A spitball from an unseen source lands on his forehead.
SNAPE
Weasley!!!!!!!!!!!
Very irreverent. Hoagy Carmichael, it turns out, was a songwriter with the best name! And his real name is Hoagland Howard Carmichael.
Krista and I went to a Slytherin party for the launch of the sixth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It was down at the Harbourfront, and I bought myself a Gryffindor tie. We heard the first chapter read aloud of the new book, and then a band called the Wyrd Sisters played. Is it strange that I want to be in Gryffindor, but kind of wish I wanted to be in another house like Ravenclaw? But not enough to officially want to be in that house? There’s a true-to-life analogy there somewhere.
On SNOWBALL FIGHT
January 3-4
Got it with only three misses!
On SNOWBALL FIGHT
I have a never-fail technique in a snowball fight: make two snowballs, one in each hand. Approach your victim. Lob the snowball in your non-throwing hand up in the air. When they look up at the snowball, nail them in the face! Works every time. For some reason, this improves my aim. Maybe I’m not thinking about aiming as much.
I hit Krista in the eye this way once and it made it go red and bloodshot. She didn’t speak to me for a while. Sometimes it’s disorienting when you’re in a state of warfare with girls and they take themselves out of the war and get offended. It’s a girl way of getting revenge, moving from the physical battlefield to the social.
Onetime my friends Allan, Bob, Amy, Sonia, Meera, Eileen and I went on a McMaster Outdoors Club trip to Bark Lake, which is Up North. The first night we arrived we played cards and made blunts until three or four in the morning, and then we put the four girls to bed before moving to the boys cabin. When we were in the girls’ room, Bob duct taped the door so it wouldn’t lock when we left. He didn’t have a plan, sometimes Bob just did things because he could.
Allan, Bob and I had to do something with our hidden advantage. Allan suggested we get up real early, run into their room and dump a bunch of snow on their bed. Bob and I thought this was a bit extreme, and would get us into Real Trouble. Bob suggested we go into their room and leave a note saying we could have woken them up, but we didn’t. Ha ha! Allan and I agreed that this was too lame, or at least too creepy. I struck upon a compromise.
We went into their rooms (how did we get in there? No questions were asked) and roused the girls for a sunrise hike! What is more Outdoors Club than a sunrise hike? The girls, on about three hours sleep (as were we), did not want to go. Half of them (Meera and Sonia) submissively agreed and forlornly started preparing, whereas the other two (Amy and Eileen) really made a stink. We told them we’d meet them out front. When they finally got up, put on all their outdoor gear, and got to the front door of their dorm, we had left them a note saying “Sunrise Hike Cancelled!! Love, The Boys xoxoxoxox”
What a great prank! What a great start to our trip! But the war had only just started. The boys had no time to lose as we rushed back to our cabin, retrieved our stockpile of filled supersoakers, and barricaded the door to our room with furniture. Then it was the waiting game as we prepared for the inevitable revenge attack. But it never came. When we saw the girls later, they refused to talk to us. It was the girl form of revenge, which is effective, but not very much fun. Not very pranky. These were girls we liked too, so it was a real blow to not have them talking to us. It was Allan’s birthday too.
We learned later that while we were barricading ourselves in our room, they went on a sunrise hike on their own. What a bunch of jerks. The moral of this story is that revenge is tenfold, but in kind. No fair switching battlefields.
Got it with only three misses!
On SNOWBALL FIGHT
I have a never-fail technique in a snowball fight: make two snowballs, one in each hand. Approach your victim. Lob the snowball in your non-throwing hand up in the air. When they look up at the snowball, nail them in the face! Works every time. For some reason, this improves my aim. Maybe I’m not thinking about aiming as much.
I hit Krista in the eye this way once and it made it go red and bloodshot. She didn’t speak to me for a while. Sometimes it’s disorienting when you’re in a state of warfare with girls and they take themselves out of the war and get offended. It’s a girl way of getting revenge, moving from the physical battlefield to the social.
Onetime my friends Allan, Bob, Amy, Sonia, Meera, Eileen and I went on a McMaster Outdoors Club trip to Bark Lake, which is Up North. The first night we arrived we played cards and made blunts until three or four in the morning, and then we put the four girls to bed before moving to the boys cabin. When we were in the girls’ room, Bob duct taped the door so it wouldn’t lock when we left. He didn’t have a plan, sometimes Bob just did things because he could.
Allan, Bob and I had to do something with our hidden advantage. Allan suggested we get up real early, run into their room and dump a bunch of snow on their bed. Bob and I thought this was a bit extreme, and would get us into Real Trouble. Bob suggested we go into their room and leave a note saying we could have woken them up, but we didn’t. Ha ha! Allan and I agreed that this was too lame, or at least too creepy. I struck upon a compromise.
We went into their rooms (how did we get in there? No questions were asked) and roused the girls for a sunrise hike! What is more Outdoors Club than a sunrise hike? The girls, on about three hours sleep (as were we), did not want to go. Half of them (Meera and Sonia) submissively agreed and forlornly started preparing, whereas the other two (Amy and Eileen) really made a stink. We told them we’d meet them out front. When they finally got up, put on all their outdoor gear, and got to the front door of their dorm, we had left them a note saying “Sunrise Hike Cancelled!! Love, The Boys xoxoxoxox”
What a great prank! What a great start to our trip! But the war had only just started. The boys had no time to lose as we rushed back to our cabin, retrieved our stockpile of filled supersoakers, and barricaded the door to our room with furniture. Then it was the waiting game as we prepared for the inevitable revenge attack. But it never came. When we saw the girls later, they refused to talk to us. It was the girl form of revenge, which is effective, but not very much fun. Not very pranky. These were girls we liked too, so it was a real blow to not have them talking to us. It was Allan’s birthday too.
We learned later that while we were barricading ourselves in our room, they went on a sunrise hike on their own. What a bunch of jerks. The moral of this story is that revenge is tenfold, but in kind. No fair switching battlefields.
Monday, February 9, 2009
On THE LIBERTY BELL
January 2nd
I figure out the puzzle before being hanged, having only a head and two arms in the noose.
On THE LIBERTY BELL
I know two twin brothers, Steve and David Pukin. Steve lives in Toronto, like me. David lives in Chicago now, taking forensics at a college there, but in 2005 Steve and David lived together in a big pink house on Bellevue Avenue in Kensington Market in Toronto. Steve and David are from Winnipeg, Steve was part of our group of friends at McMaster in the drama program, and we met David through him. They don’t like to play it up that much, but both Pukins really like the Smashing Pumpkins. Steve, at least, is well known in the online Pumpkins community, and has organized several tribute concerts.
So, when we were out at our local pub on the Pukins’ birthday, we ended up talking about the Billy Corgan concert tour that was going on that summer. Steve and David were bummed because the only show that would have fit into their schedule was in Philadelphia, which was eight hours away. I was a bit drunk (others would tell you I was very drunk) and suggested a road trip. Well, I told them that I would drive them to Philadelphia as a birthday present, and told Krista she would be coming too. When Steve called the next day I told him I always keep my drunken promises, and so I arranged procurement of the Barcmovan (my parents’s minivan) and picked up Steve, David, and their Pumpkins friend Erin, and off we went towards Philadelphia, PA.
The first incident we had on ‘the road’ (before we had left Erin’s driveway), was when I backed into a wooden porch and broke the right taillight. Krista spent the next little while taping the plastic shards of the taillight together with duct tape, I think because she thought it would help explain the whole ‘taillight situation’ at the border. Sometimes my wife (girlfriend at the time) has a logic that is all her own. We trundled along, Erin sleeping in the back and only waking up to complain, and the Pukins chirping in the middle seats about Philadelphia and the Smashing Pumpkins. It became clear that Krista and I would be the parents on the road trip. When we got to the border, Krista turned around and told the twins to stay cool and say nothing.
We pulled up to the customs officer and she asked us where we were going. We told her, to the Billy Corgan concert in Philadelphia. She responded, in customs officer deadpan, “Did you hear the Smashing Pumpkins are getting back together?” Steve and David jumped out of their seats with excitement, responding with a torrent of rumour and hearsay that they had picked up online. David tried to open the side door to the van to talk more freely with the border guard, but the Barcmovan doesn’t allow doors to be opened while the engine is on, so the van just beeped angrily, and David tried to stick his head between the driver’s headrest and the window as we pulled away.
Shortly after Krista started her driving shift (we split the duties into 3 shifts, Me, Krista, and then Steve, because David didn’t have a license) we were pulled over and Krista got a speeding ticket. Not only was that bad for the obvious reason that we now had to pay a speeding ticket from a foreign nation, but it also turned out to be a lesson Steve and David really took to heart. Which is why, during Steve’s shift, we ended up driving five miles under the limit at three in the morning on a Pennsylvania highway with no cars for miles around. I gently suggested we could drive a couple miles over the limit, and the fuzz probably wouldn’t bother us. The fuzz is what we all called the cops the entire trip. I said it first as a joke, and then Steve and David started yelling ‘The fuzz!’ anytime we saw a car that looking like a police car. So whenever Steve got a little brave and started creeping up his speed, David would remind him that the fuzz were probably watching and he’s slow back down. Krista was asleep.
Once we got into Philadelphia, we did usual touristy things: we climbed up the Rocky steps and had our pictures taken at the top in celebratory poses (except for me, I feigned exhaustion), had cheesesteaks from Jim’s Steaks (which is one of at least three places which were ‘the famous one’) and went to the Liberty Bell. I wanted to spend longer reading the accompanying exhibit, but we had to run to try and catch the Duck Boat tour, which we didn’t make. It’s true, though, the Liberty Bell does have a crack in it.
We drove back after a lovely night with a few more ridiculous incidents, and we all agreed that it was a road trip for the ages, and we would have to do another one soon.
I figure out the puzzle before being hanged, having only a head and two arms in the noose.
On THE LIBERTY BELL
I know two twin brothers, Steve and David Pukin. Steve lives in Toronto, like me. David lives in Chicago now, taking forensics at a college there, but in 2005 Steve and David lived together in a big pink house on Bellevue Avenue in Kensington Market in Toronto. Steve and David are from Winnipeg, Steve was part of our group of friends at McMaster in the drama program, and we met David through him. They don’t like to play it up that much, but both Pukins really like the Smashing Pumpkins. Steve, at least, is well known in the online Pumpkins community, and has organized several tribute concerts.
So, when we were out at our local pub on the Pukins’ birthday, we ended up talking about the Billy Corgan concert tour that was going on that summer. Steve and David were bummed because the only show that would have fit into their schedule was in Philadelphia, which was eight hours away. I was a bit drunk (others would tell you I was very drunk) and suggested a road trip. Well, I told them that I would drive them to Philadelphia as a birthday present, and told Krista she would be coming too. When Steve called the next day I told him I always keep my drunken promises, and so I arranged procurement of the Barcmovan (my parents’s minivan) and picked up Steve, David, and their Pumpkins friend Erin, and off we went towards Philadelphia, PA.
The first incident we had on ‘the road’ (before we had left Erin’s driveway), was when I backed into a wooden porch and broke the right taillight. Krista spent the next little while taping the plastic shards of the taillight together with duct tape, I think because she thought it would help explain the whole ‘taillight situation’ at the border. Sometimes my wife (girlfriend at the time) has a logic that is all her own. We trundled along, Erin sleeping in the back and only waking up to complain, and the Pukins chirping in the middle seats about Philadelphia and the Smashing Pumpkins. It became clear that Krista and I would be the parents on the road trip. When we got to the border, Krista turned around and told the twins to stay cool and say nothing.
We pulled up to the customs officer and she asked us where we were going. We told her, to the Billy Corgan concert in Philadelphia. She responded, in customs officer deadpan, “Did you hear the Smashing Pumpkins are getting back together?” Steve and David jumped out of their seats with excitement, responding with a torrent of rumour and hearsay that they had picked up online. David tried to open the side door to the van to talk more freely with the border guard, but the Barcmovan doesn’t allow doors to be opened while the engine is on, so the van just beeped angrily, and David tried to stick his head between the driver’s headrest and the window as we pulled away.
Shortly after Krista started her driving shift (we split the duties into 3 shifts, Me, Krista, and then Steve, because David didn’t have a license) we were pulled over and Krista got a speeding ticket. Not only was that bad for the obvious reason that we now had to pay a speeding ticket from a foreign nation, but it also turned out to be a lesson Steve and David really took to heart. Which is why, during Steve’s shift, we ended up driving five miles under the limit at three in the morning on a Pennsylvania highway with no cars for miles around. I gently suggested we could drive a couple miles over the limit, and the fuzz probably wouldn’t bother us. The fuzz is what we all called the cops the entire trip. I said it first as a joke, and then Steve and David started yelling ‘The fuzz!’ anytime we saw a car that looking like a police car. So whenever Steve got a little brave and started creeping up his speed, David would remind him that the fuzz were probably watching and he’s slow back down. Krista was asleep.
Once we got into Philadelphia, we did usual touristy things: we climbed up the Rocky steps and had our pictures taken at the top in celebratory poses (except for me, I feigned exhaustion), had cheesesteaks from Jim’s Steaks (which is one of at least three places which were ‘the famous one’) and went to the Liberty Bell. I wanted to spend longer reading the accompanying exhibit, but we had to run to try and catch the Duck Boat tour, which we didn’t make. It’s true, though, the Liberty Bell does have a crack in it.
We drove back after a lovely night with a few more ridiculous incidents, and we all agreed that it was a road trip for the ages, and we would have to do another one soon.
On NOISEMAKER
January 1st
I played the first puzzle with Krista (my wife) at around one in the morning on January 1st, and even though the sheet shows that we got hunged, I want the world to know that I knew the answer before she lost it for us while I was playing my turn at
On NOISEMAKER
I’ve never really liked New Year’s Eve celebrations, and in recent years it has turned into a conscious antipathy. I can’t say exactly what it is about December 31st; when I was in high school I didn’t drink, but I went to some drinking parties. In university I would always be back in
The real reason I don’t like New Year’s Eve parties is because I get excited about New Year’s Day: I like starting new calendars and throwing out the old ones. I’m a little neurotic about it – last year I had five day-by-day calendars and one wall calendar. So in my mind, I wake up on New Year’s Day fresh and new, my entire year a blank slate ready for me to get to work, armed with several calendars to help me keep track of my progress. A hangover and sleep-in ruins that fantasy, it lets the old year with all its anxieties and disappointments seep into the new.
The last few years I have had what seems like a good excuse to not go to New Year’s Eve parties. I work at Massey Hall as an usher, and there is an annual Yuk Yuk’s New Year’s Eve extravaganza that I sign up for every year. Whenever people ask me what I’m doing, I am working, sacrificing one of the great party nights of the year to be loyal to my employer. The problem is the shift ends at around 11pm, allowing a little bit of time to go to a party.
Last year was the worst – I somehow agreed to host a New Year’s Party at my house, even though I wouldn’t be home? My old high school friend Snel called me up a few days before, and asked what I was doing New Year’s Eve. I confidently told him that I would be at work and so…. And he said that he and our friend Troup would stop by at 11:30, thus foiling my plan and surprising me into agreement. The show went long and Snel and Troup ended up sitting on my porch in the cold for half an hour, and I got home at 11:55pm, just in time for the perfect New Year’s! That’s what I told everyone anyway.
This year I went to Adam Walker’s apartment on the Danforth near
Now a blog!
That first post, called intro, I wrote on January 2nd, but I am creating this blog on February 9th. Today I decided to post my entries on a blog because some people were curious and it looks like I will be able to follow through on this cockamamie idea. Also, my wife has started a blog, and whatever she does, I do, because of our wedding vows. I'll be putting up about two entries a day starting from January 1st, I would put it all up at once but that might be overwhelming for my many readers. Plus I will edit a couple of them, just in case I said something I didn't expect would be made public. The point of this is to improve my writing, so any feedback is welcome, and don't worry, I am aware that many of them are stinko. Hopefully they will improve as the year goes on. Thanks for reading.
Intro
For Christmas this year I received a day-by-day calendar from my Mom. It is a Hangman Lift-a Flap calendar, and every day I get a new game of Hangman. I get to lift the flap of whatever letter I think is in the word – if it is in the word, it tells me what numbered space I fill in, if not, I get a thumbs down and fill in part of the man being hanged from the gallows. On January 2nd, I have decided to use it as a tool to practice writing, by writing at least 500 words every day on the topic, provided by the answer to the hangman puzzle.
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