tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83229742380452812212024-02-19T17:30:09.919-08:00Damn Fine HorrorUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger57125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-73053816109741515882012-04-15T10:32:00.001-07:002012-04-15T10:32:44.442-07:00MY NEW WEBSITE -DevilIntheFlesh.net <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> For those (very few) of you who have been wondering where I've been, I will relieve your curiosity.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> I've moved my web presence to a wordpress-powered blog, and I bought my own domain. It's surprisingly cheap for a .net address, although Devilintheflesh.com had already been bought up and was on sale for five thousand bucks!</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Why? Well, I really wanted my own domain. The 'blogspot' tag on my web address was something that bothered me, and so now I have my place: :<a href="http://devilintheflesh.net/" target="_blank">Devil In The Flesh</a>.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Why? Well, I realized that I had boxed myself with the parameters I had set up in this blog. I thought that bogging about horror and my fiction would be enough. But it's not. I like to blog about horror, writing, daily life, sex, porn, Science-Fiction, and whatever the hell I want. I have demons and I found I was censoring myself. So I moved house.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> I should have thought things through a little more clearly: wordpress is set to whatever theme you've ordered, and I have to use HTML code to do anything different. The search and link history function is far worse than blogger - I don't know where my links come from. But those are small sacrifices for having my own place.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> For those of you who follow me, be warned - there is now nudity (but nothing hard-core), some talk about sex, some views with which you might not necessarily agree. I've slowly been transferring all my most popular posts over to my new place. The demure book-bloggers from <a href="http://bookblogs.ning.com/" target="_blank">bookblogs.ning.com</a> might think twice about looking through my archives unless they really do want to read my enthusiastic tributes to porn stars like Gianna Michaels or Jenna Haze. But ultimately, I think I'm happier over there and will have more success. Although I might have to buy a custom or premium theme. Or learn how to make one.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> So again: D<a href="http://devilintheflesh.net/" target="_blank">evil in the flesh</a> is the new site. Devilintheflesh.net.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Hope to see you there! </span><br />
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</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-82311070634207599582012-02-26T01:00:00.000-08:002012-02-26T01:00:33.134-08:00'The Moment After 2': WTF did I just watch?<div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVxhpZbXn4Eoi9lilQlxKP4IFareHNXcZMaFoFTz-I6sDsz2B5xZ0AyPi7nwEcY_vw_4ldwwHBnqU1EBYWPkxJ224spPkbVUsgGRfjYx8sXElTiKxW64htm_CMaGpIng5HkXzb1qnkZUXo/s1600/TheMomentAfter2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVxhpZbXn4Eoi9lilQlxKP4IFareHNXcZMaFoFTz-I6sDsz2B5xZ0AyPi7nwEcY_vw_4ldwwHBnqU1EBYWPkxJ224spPkbVUsgGRfjYx8sXElTiKxW64htm_CMaGpIng5HkXzb1qnkZUXo/s320/TheMomentAfter2.jpg" width="224" /></a></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I have the complete Internet/pay-cable packages. I get HBO and the movie central channels. So my wife and I were playing catch-up with the 24-hour selection, trying to PVR everything that we could see, until we looked at the pay-per-view section, and realized that all the movie central movies, HBO shows, and Oscar films can be ordered for free. That’s pretty cool. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Or is it? To fill a rotating selection of films and TV shows over 5 channels, 24 hours a day, without news or commercials, is not easy. So when I look through the free-order stuff on my box, I see a lot of movies that I’ve never heard of. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I’ve seen a crappy, heavily subsidized comedy-drama written by a guy I lived with in university. I’ve seen three cheapo planetary disaster movies shot over the bridge in North Vancouver; I have no idea how they got made. To those of you who only see big-studio movies: there’s a whole world of trash and treasure, mostly trash, but it’s worth looking into if you get a chance. Unfortunately, <i>The Moment After (Part II</i>) is not a treasures. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Released through (or by) the Christiano Film Group, and directed by Wes Llewellyn, The Moment After (Part II) follows the story of Adam, a renegade FBI agent convicted of terrorism because he helped a rabbi escape from government. The world is dominated by Global Corp, a multinational entity that has converted the world to personal biochips and one currency. It throws religious people in jail. Poor Adam has to make do with taking smuggled communion bread and reading smuggled bible pages. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">He escapes into the desert and hooks up with a runaway band of Christians, or as Global calls them, ‘religious extremists.’</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The first third of the movie is a typical cheap-movie setup. The last third is a pedestrian showdown with the bad guy, who just might be Satan. It’s the middle third of the movie where things get terribly odd.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The runaways signal to each other by drawing Jesus fishes in the sand. They live in the desert, and in a strange similarity to the Jews and Egyptians, or the Christians and the Romans, the Americans in this movie are persecuted nomads who are at odds with a heathen, techno-savvy enemy. The leader of the religious renegades is a<i> rabbi</i> named Jacob, who carries a bible and preaches Jesus every chance he gets. One woman admits that she was a ‘science major’ but is now so much more happy following the way of the Lord. Everyone hugs, wears baggy mom jeans, and unconsciously throws in bible verses in everyday talk. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">And the dialogue! In one scene, one of the principal characters meets a Christian woman after a rousing hymm-sing. What follows is strangely awkward, and combined with the wholesomely meaningful looks exchanged, unexpectedly sexualized.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">‘The Lord is gracious, isn’t he?’</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">‘I suppose he is… um…’ </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">‘Laura.’ </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">‘Laura. It was good worshipping with you tonight. Good praise, sister.’ </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">‘It just feels like His Spirit moves so much when we worship like that. Don’t you?” </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“Yeah. Thank you.’ </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">‘God bless you, brother.’ </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">This is an awful movie. The acting is terrible, the gun violence is sanitized, the fight scenes are ridiculous, one character keeps a cigar in his mouth the entire movie and never smokes it, and every man has tousled mop of bedhead hair. But my fascination with the movie is cultural.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Do Christians feel in their hearts that there will come a time when they have to flee and take to the desert? I can’t see how any American citizen of European descent could claim a cultural memory that is more appropriate to someone of Mid-Eastern or African descent, and yet in these movies (and part 3 is coming) they’re the persecuted minority they were 2,000 years ago. <i>The Moment After (Part II) </i>was very successful with Christian audiences. Do they think this? Do they think that a large and secular government will always threaten a religious society? Interestingly, the Global soldiers wear camouflage and berets similar to UN peacekeepers. Behind the praying, the hugging, the brothering and sistering, <i>The Moment After</i> seems to lust for a time when Christians can fight and, more importantly, suffer for their right to exist, with the back-up knowledge that everything will go according to God’s plan, and in the end good will triumph.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">But that’s already happened. Jesus died for our sins over 2000 years ago. Those great and primarily secular civilizations collapsed and these days no one worships false idols. A president cannot be elected in the US without being avowedly religious. Catholicism has replaced Islam as the fastest growing religion on Earth. Mega-churches dot the continent. There’s no longer any reason to feel persecuted, and yet these… religious fetish movies sell like hot-cakes. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">But really? I hated the end. They could have gone apocalyptically, old-testament, crazily biblical with the climax, with big scary angels, but instead it was martial arts and machine guns in a barn. If you’re going to go the paranoid religious route, you should go big or not bother. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-53101242926602135652012-02-23T10:19:00.004-08:002012-02-23T10:20:37.567-08:00So I got approached by a holy roller<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhET1eOwqCHuezypm6alm9IBmleXBEX1P8mKGSXwo-41cT07DrHRI9Ze0PKDxoO-x59JKLU2Fi-E0ctwIBShhcVZqIdTDbsL2lOxK3WDNOsrl9a8iykkS2wopxAhDQsfgoFYGYKTtZVX2m3/s1600/atheist.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhET1eOwqCHuezypm6alm9IBmleXBEX1P8mKGSXwo-41cT07DrHRI9Ze0PKDxoO-x59JKLU2Fi-E0ctwIBShhcVZqIdTDbsL2lOxK3WDNOsrl9a8iykkS2wopxAhDQsfgoFYGYKTtZVX2m3/s1600/atheist.png" /></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-39657108061763032962012-02-21T01:02:00.002-08:002012-02-21T01:02:25.846-08:00Blindness<div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Have you ever heard of Usher’s Syndrome? Children are born deaf, or become deaf within the first year of life. Soon after, Retinitis Pigmentosa follows - a progressive blindness as the optic cells deteriorate and cataracts develop. But there is a team of doctors here in BC who insist that the day is fast approaching when blindness is thing of the past. We need simply the money and the will. The brains and technology are already here. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">On the evening of Valentine’s day, my wife and I went to Dinner in the Dark, a fundraiser for vision research. Tickets are expensive; there was an auction of Canucks memorabilia, a Gordie Howe jersey, a beautiful kid’s bike that we bid for and failed to win, and finally, the gimmick: we had to eat with blindfolds on.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I had thought we were to eat in pitch-dark. But just how would our waiters pour our wine and serve us dinner? The blindfolds made sense. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">A few things about Blindness charity dinners. They like details. All night they played Andrea Bocelli, and I was about to complain until I remembered he’s blind. The centrepiece was a glass vase of roses interwoven with leaves of kale. Why? Kale is full of eye-positive vitamins, although I don’t know why the centrepiece wasn’t also stuffed with carrots. Among the auction items were fancy bottles of French wine with braille labels. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">But on to the sensory part of the evening. We put on our blindfolds early in the evening and did a wine-tasting (in stemless glasses to avoid a glass catastrophe). Servers were instructed to tap our right shoulders to get our attention. “We can fool around and no one will notice,” murmured my wife flirtatiously, until I pointed out that <i>we</i> wouldn’t know if anyone was noticing<i> us.</i></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Being blind for an enforced period is odd. You quickly begin to bellow, because you aren’t sure if anyone is listening. You’re used to seeing someone’s face, someone’s eyes, looking at you, and you begin to fear that you’re being ignored. At first, when I put on the blindfold, I was heartened by the thin band of light that shone up along the bridge of my nose. At least I’ll be able to see my food, I thought. But that was wrong: my eyes got tired of looking down, and soon all the light gave me was a bright wash at the bottom of my perception, which is how many blind people ‘see.’ </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Another thing: many of us assume that we could survive being blind, thanks to our Daredevil-like spatial abilities and acute hearing. We think we’ll be fighting crime and playing piano concertos in our spare time. But I lost count of the times I stabbed my plate and brought an empty fork into my mouth; I struggled with dense, three-dimensional waves of junk sound in order to hear people who may or may not have been speaking to me. All I could hear was <i>rhubarb-rhubarb </i>and the clatter of forks. I had no idea how much I interpreted speech through faces, hand movements, context, body language, and eye direction. Hearing is something we romanticize - in reality it’s one of our least important senses. Hearing is supported so much by vision and touch. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">There were a number of parents of Usher’s Syndrome children at the event. You knew them because they still wore the blindfolds when we adjourned to the auction room before the main course. The rest of us chickened out and took off our blindfolds when we went to the auction; they kept them on. They wanted to know what it was like to be blind, to stumble around in the dark, to constantly be at ease in a world that can run you over, bang your shins, cop a feel, or just simply ignore you in your world of clattering sound. They wanted to know blindness long term, because their kids would know nothing but. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The keynote speaker was a blind journalist and writer. He told us, flat out, that he wanted us to donate to the cause, but not for him. He wanted to stay blind, because he had a gimmick: he wrote about being a blind father, and he travelled the world and wrote about being a pathetically blind traveller. He had a unique niche in the writing biz. He even went to Egypt during the uprising, and the hotel staff took care of him with an earnestness that suggested they thought God had given them an onerous task. At the end, after we had nearly soiled ourselves laughing at his jokes, he thanked his wife. “She lets me fail,” he explained. It was a privilege to hear him speak. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">We went home, paid the babysitter, and looked at our own kids. At the same time, many other parents were coming home and looking at their kids, and wondering if they were to be the blind people on the bus, desperately trying to prevent other passengers from stepping on their dogs tails. They probably thought of trust funds, surgical procedures that might one day work. I like to think they felt supported, that they had hope. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">So if you get a chance, donate to your local blindness-fighting charity. If the doctor who spoke that night is right, we’re around the corner. We just might beat blindness. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-91372785687597977532012-02-17T23:14:00.000-08:002012-02-17T23:15:08.105-08:00True Valentine's day Story<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3aFJoWmBafsGlach3EvpiKO40EPZsc3hgwmKf62NUfQ61PB3imGPCezCRDI4Tt3gFNZvPGb-M7COv6u0MXZmy6yW74SEyGV2IYRjIpVsOvaVbW8IK1nzxdI9vJLG14n0QFMbidPD2ReGf/s1600/ragecomic.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3aFJoWmBafsGlach3EvpiKO40EPZsc3hgwmKf62NUfQ61PB3imGPCezCRDI4Tt3gFNZvPGb-M7COv6u0MXZmy6yW74SEyGV2IYRjIpVsOvaVbW8IK1nzxdI9vJLG14n0QFMbidPD2ReGf/s1600/ragecomic.png" /></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-84546442099582411882012-02-15T10:33:00.000-08:002012-02-15T11:01:45.006-08:00The Magicians, The Magician King (Lev Grossman): Better than Harry Potter<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEujqrhCp_9mlOueI5qWRNAvglvph4dyyDHX9e9Ff-7d_x4ASZAq-92jxcdIZXnrr7Z6110UuZCcOjctnUMckO1TytxNFL7kF7ZIX9up9gGLdtkFuOgruIwrF4txAD5xxQht1NYJHrF508/s1600/Cover_TheMagicians.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEujqrhCp_9mlOueI5qWRNAvglvph4dyyDHX9e9Ff-7d_x4ASZAq-92jxcdIZXnrr7Z6110UuZCcOjctnUMckO1TytxNFL7kF7ZIX9up9gGLdtkFuOgruIwrF4txAD5xxQht1NYJHrF508/s1600/Cover_TheMagicians.jpg" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyajg01-FnhE5t5bxDXkcPqW1IJN1ybV2CqyUeL1fFlmDUdfRzqRpGFFOXwdHGrJbI8xlZkyBaVPU_5yUyZTLkp8HYY-89rNMKgWFNalskOb2y_adsC9ZR5-vhiWe_d5zHhYtXW0QKVwZx/s1600/the-magician-king-by-lev-grossman-201x300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyajg01-FnhE5t5bxDXkcPqW1IJN1ybV2CqyUeL1fFlmDUdfRzqRpGFFOXwdHGrJbI8xlZkyBaVPU_5yUyZTLkp8HYY-89rNMKgWFNalskOb2y_adsC9ZR5-vhiWe_d5zHhYtXW0QKVwZx/s1600/the-magician-king-by-lev-grossman-201x300.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
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</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I like the Harry Potter novels. Even if the first five books are a bit too much like five extended episodes of Scooby-doo. You know- there’s a pattern to all of them: Harry goes to Hogwarts, has the customary banquet in which the teacher wear their eccentric college robes. Strange things happen and things are not as they seem. Harry and his friends explore, there’s a battle and people are put at risk, the evil is vanquished, and then there’s another banquet. Add Draco, Crabbe and Goyle. Things do turn out for the better during the last two books, in which all sorts of people die and Harry and his friend at last leave the fictionally confining halls of Hogwarts. I like Harry Potter. My kids adore Harry Potter. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">But Lev Grossman’s books, <i>The Magicians </i>and <i>the Magician King</i>, are better. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">It’s unfair to say this. Grossman stole from JK Rowling with all the vim and vigour of a plundering pirate who happens to be classically educated writer of far greater talent. It’s about a school for magicians called Brakebills, in which eccentric genius kids practice magic in all its guises (including an astonishing test of physical magic that involves turning into a goose and flying across the world), in which there are cliques of friends who fall in love with each other and do their best to solve its mysteries. The school is covered in protective, concealing spells; there are portals that whisk people around the world; the students practice arcane little games; there are corresponding magic schools around the world. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">But these kids fall in love, get drunk, and have sex. They even - horror upon horrors - <i>use the internet.</i> Rowling admirers often reference the absence of technology in her books - there are no computers or internet but only the world of magic and that of the poor muggles, who only have cars and telephones. In the Grossman books, people use smartphones and wikipedia and the magic is still there, and the story is the richer for it. Magic is given a far richer and more scientific basis, and Grossman has somehow woven it into a mythology that is respectful of its theft victims while staying original; magic here is painted as something arduously, impossibly technical, available only to people with the memory, the pure bloody-mindedness, to memorize the infintesimally delicate arrays of finger movements, language, and intonations that form real magic. Grossman makes it seem possible.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Then there is the writing. Here is a perfect example: Julia is teaching herself magic because she couldn’t get into Brakebills. She performs her first spell from a file she found in a dusty forgotten corner of the internet. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px;"><i>What this image was, once she had zipped and decoded it, was a scan of a handwritten document. A couplet—two lines of words in a language she didn’t recognize, transcribed phonetically. Above each syllable was a musical staff indicating rhythm and (in a couple of cases) intonation. Below it was a drawing of a human hand performing a gesture. There was no indication of what the document was, no title or explanation. But it was interesting. It had a purposeful quality, draftsmanlike and precise. It didn’t look like an art project, or a joke. Too much work, and not enough funny.</i></div><div style="font: 14.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px;"><i>She practiced them separately first. Thank God for ten years of oboe lessons, on the strength of which she could sight-sing. The words were simple, but the hand positions were murder. Halfway through she went back to thinking it was a joke, but she was too stubborn to quit. She would have even then, but as an experiment she tried the first few syllables, and she discovered that something was different about this one. It made her fingertips feel hot. They buzzed like she’d touched a battery. The air resisted her, as if it had become slightly viscous. Something stirred in her chest that had never stirred there before. It had been sleeping her whole life, and now somehow, by doing this, she had poked it, and it stirred.</i></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px;"><span style="font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Times;"><i> </i></span>Throughout Grossman’s books, there is a constant beautiful but bemused quality, as if he begs the reader not to take the subject matter too seriously. After all, beneath the magic, people are just people and magic changed nothing. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Times; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px;"><i>The library was still plagued by outbreaks of flying books—three weeks ago a whole flock of Far Eastern atlases had taken wing, terrifyingly broad, muscular volumes like albatrosses, and wrecked the circulation area, sending students crawling under tables. The books actually found their way out through the front door and roosted in a tree by the welters board, from which they raucously heckled passersby in a babel of languages until they got rained on and dragged themselves sulkily back to the stacks, where they were being aggressively rebound.</i></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px;"><span style="font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Times;"><i> </i></span>Like I said before, I like Harry Potter. Rowling is talented and I credit her for inventing the genre of Adventurous Student Magician. But students are young adults, and they experiment, get in trouble, and make the most regrettable mistakes. They also grow up, and occupy a strange nether region that is neither childhood and adulthood. Harry was a child all the way through, despite some of Rowling’s hints of Harry's shouty independence. In the and, marriage and family happened offstage, as if Harry’s entrance into adulthood might have marred the mystery of Hogwarts. Lev Grossman has combined puberty, maturity, technology (but this book isn’t steampunk), magic, and misbehavior, and yet still added the magical world of Fillory over it all. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">If Harry has made Rowling a billionaire, may these two books, far better than the Potter books, please make Lev Grossman at least a millionaire? It would be somewhat fair. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-73592284790326068382012-02-11T23:33:00.000-08:002012-02-11T23:33:10.632-08:00Source Code (2010)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkvMmOM0MjluGhxvu-bdnrBslsr91iRUrXEB2SLad5fFUdSnGrgqTyvMc_VFkJBFkJJh5ESicrANMkbMwpfe8ehfnziYf4CxeEbGNw9zji3tGc3HSlYvqiKdTuz5Q8ApdwiyHRtBoyFpME/s1600/49259.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkvMmOM0MjluGhxvu-bdnrBslsr91iRUrXEB2SLad5fFUdSnGrgqTyvMc_VFkJBFkJJh5ESicrANMkbMwpfe8ehfnziYf4CxeEbGNw9zji3tGc3HSlYvqiKdTuz5Q8ApdwiyHRtBoyFpME/s320/49259.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><i><br />
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</i></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><i>Source Code</i>, the techno/SciFi thriller directed by Duncan Jones in 2011 (and on Movie Central right now, which is why you’re reading this), is a vigorous little thriller that makes the viewer think. How many alternate realities are out there anyway? </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Army helicopter pilot Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhall)wakes up in a commuter train sitting across from a beautiful woman named Christina. He realizes several things - he’s somehow in the body of Sean Fentress, a schoolteacher; he supposed to be Afghanistan and he’s not sure how he got here; there’s a bomb on the train and in eight minutes it kills him and everybody on the train.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">He wakes up in a strange capsule. Staring down upon him is a flatscreen with Air Force Captain Colleen Goodwin on it, telling him to focus and return to his mission. She’s looking down at him from a command centre, surrounded by eggheads. She’s his contact. Those eight minutes are going to start again, and he has to find that bomb and whoever planted it, because the explosion has already happened and Homeland Security needs to find out where in central Chicago the madman will plant his next and far larger bomb. Colter Stevens will have to relive those eight minutes as many times as necessary until he finds the bomber and the bomb. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Finally, after several unsucessful eight-minute runs, in which he chases a train-sick Indian Businessman, gets tazed by Amtrak security, and kisses Christina, only to die in the blasts, the government scientists tell him the truth. Colter was the victim of an insurgent attack, and only barely survived. The US government declared him dead, and harvested part of his brain so they could merge it with the memories found in the dead brains of terrorist attack victims. But the memories are only of the last eight minnutes of the victims life. Colter’s imprisonment in the capsule, the memories of Sean Fentriss, who died on the train, are all illusory. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">But here’s the kicker - Sean Fentriss’s memories are of an entirely whole world that includes details Fentriss couldn’t possibly know, such as the location of the bomb, the results of internet searches, and the reactions of each passenger to varying actions. That’s because the scientists have used quantum mechanics to put his consciousness into Fentriss’s source code (his memories), and now Colter is not just in Fentriss’s memories, but of another reality. Each action alters history and puts Colter on a different course. Every stream of time results in a different world, decoherent from the next, but all those streams are from the same quantum superposition. This is all thanks to Hugh Everett, a physicist who formulated the Many-Worlds Theory as an answer to the Schrodinger’s Cat paradox. Colter Stevens is in his own world, as much as the scientists want to think he’s simply a ghost being tossed again and again into the same point of the data stream. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">This poses many questions. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Jake Gyllenhall has been plagued by gay rumours. They’re muted, because everyone likes him and he’s not part of a creepy California ‘church,' but they’re there and constant. Could he have once been straight, and was then converted by the energy generated by the wishful thinking of a thousand horny gay gossip bloggers? Did someone in an alternated timestream stop Mohammed Atta while he was applying for crop-spray funding, thus preventing 9-11, and is now living in a wonderful world of cheap gas, cheap houses, and reading the fine books of a talented but slightly pompous Chicago author and senator named Barack Obama, and dozing away during John Kerry’s Oval Office speeches? In another timestream did Bill Gates and Steve Jobs team up and take over the entire planet with lovely, streamline computers that ran like our Apples, looked as damn sexy as our Apples, but were as flexible and cooperative as Windows PC’s? Or is there another reality in which the terrorist really won, and we’re all wandering blindly around a cloud of radioactive dust, looking for a few rats to shishkabob? </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Never question whether or not things could be different, that’s what I learned from this film. Ask whether things could be better or worse. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-34362918364644201392012-02-10T11:40:00.000-08:002012-02-10T11:40:16.126-08:00Review: 'Trollhunter'<div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV3yap0y5aCr6UjHGDCLFFhkW6hQX3w-oTXsjVwyd6_XyEKeXWcT3BjOijYbioWfbjo8STHB_MrHan9qHT1qAm_aRVN0SKIhOJbd0QLnEK1dub7oGqi0Zj_cuu6ImCDZdVpi2y6TdjJo1c/s1600/TrollHunterStill.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiV3yap0y5aCr6UjHGDCLFFhkW6hQX3w-oTXsjVwyd6_XyEKeXWcT3BjOijYbioWfbjo8STHB_MrHan9qHT1qAm_aRVN0SKIhOJbd0QLnEK1dub7oGqi0Zj_cuu6ImCDZdVpi2y6TdjJo1c/s320/TrollHunterStill.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">It’s to the point that every other movie I see is a found-footage movie. Just make a regular movie already; one that isn’t partially improvised and cobbled together from eight hours of found footage. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><i>Trollhunter</i>, a movie directed by Norse director André Øvredal, is yet another found-footage movie. Three students are investigating a possible bear poaching (because apparently bears are serious business in Norway) and get on the trail of a possible poacher. They follow this dour and taciturn man as he inexplicably places tires around the countryside, stays out all night, and lurks in his strange camping trailer that is outfitted with enough UV lamps to light up a Lady Gaga world tour. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIsj6sGwCS0gCvVVDirxNjbbc9_AQKxmRU-NKEOVk20vIZaazVlAVHtVUHaJ6PtS-IVU9xnw9s8VGABoesl8ds8MxppVuA5Pet3tKj1jK8QkzvkQdMAOhS757Kxj63U4Wy8L3RD-z3HQL1/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIsj6sGwCS0gCvVVDirxNjbbc9_AQKxmRU-NKEOVk20vIZaazVlAVHtVUHaJ6PtS-IVU9xnw9s8VGABoesl8ds8MxppVuA5Pet3tKj1jK8QkzvkQdMAOhS757Kxj63U4Wy8L3RD-z3HQL1/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">They follow him into the woods one night and the viewer makes several discoveries, which I’ll list in ascending order of importance: 1. There are many, many trolls in Norway. 2. The government knows and Hans, the supposed bear poacher, is actually a troll hunter for a covert government agency. 3. Otto Jerspersen, the actor portraying Hans, is a popular Norse comedian. Actually, I discovered this when I looked him up.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Hans, as grim, quiet and bearded as a depressed and divorced career scientist, wants the young film crew to follow him around: his job is dangerous, has no benefits, no overtime, no overnight pay, and no hazard pay. He wants them to expose the Troll Security Service to the public and hopefully improve his own lot. As they investigate a spike in troll misbehavior, they drive around the austerely beautiful Norse countryside (rain, cleanliness, enormous mountains and waterfalls everywhere), he lectures them on troll species classification, eating habits, gestation, and vulnerabilities. While he repeatedly says the old fairytale stories do not apply, trolls can smell the blood of Christians and turn to stone when exposed to sunlight.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtdSJWtdYuz7SJHVYbpKbQVMlyXVzBcGQN5ZjrAsIzd60Oy8NJnBa_FJPqAsukgglatTmpgR524dIlJRVTy1GSDQiESeyo0BeTrfyOx5odkh8QIFuMejwwfXTbibMWSYiwUIRocebclowx/s1600/TDW151.troll_hunter_hero.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtdSJWtdYuz7SJHVYbpKbQVMlyXVzBcGQN5ZjrAsIzd60Oy8NJnBa_FJPqAsukgglatTmpgR524dIlJRVTy1GSDQiESeyo0BeTrfyOx5odkh8QIFuMejwwfXTbibMWSYiwUIRocebclowx/s320/TDW151.troll_hunter_hero.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The trolls are amazing: comically ugly, with the hunched walk and comically enormous noses from fairytale lore. The special sound effect go beyond the caricatures: the trolls mutter and almost speak with fabulous monstrous rumbling noises, and at one point, while the cast hides in a cavenook to escape a family of trolls who have come in to sleep for the day, one troll lets out a long and deafening fart that almost suffocates the film crew. The acting (particularly from Jespersen, although I cannot see how he could ever be funny) is wonderful and the humour deadpan in a uniquely nordic way. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">But the inconsistencies are rife and ruin an otherwise wonderful movie: the peevish troll bureaucrats that follow the crew around are portrayed as chronically underfunded grunts who couldn’t direct a funeral, but they become suddenly sinister when it suits the plot. Northern European governments are simply not frightening; they’re too fair, too benign. Even in the Stieg Larsen books, the government bad guys are hopeless bunglers. The camera plays across a row of power lines, and Hans explains that they just look like power lines; they are in reality an electric fence to keep in a 200-foot mountain troll called a Jotnar. How can massive, violent, highly odorous creatures be kept secret from the public? And isn’t it lazy to simply film a series of electric pylons and and call it something else? </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">You will still like this movie, despite its plot issues, and its sudden and hurried ending. The climax, a battle with the Jotnar seen on the poster, is amazing, and you will be awed by this creature that is the size of a mountain. It’s still a good horror film. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-70142460775529306942012-02-08T23:20:00.000-08:002012-02-08T23:20:29.264-08:00A night that shall live in infamy<div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">This happened at least four years ago. I’ve tried to forget it.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">We were heading back to Halifax for our usual summer visit. The same routine - stay with in-laws, be infantilized, do nothing in our home town, eat a lot. Except this time my best friend was living nearby. I’d known this guy since the fifth grade. We’ve always been tight. Since I only saw him once every few years at best, we always had to do everything in one night: see each other, drink several years worth of booze, talk as much as possible about everything. Whenever I saw this guy, whom I’ll call Ricky, I had to plan on being bedridden the next day.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I told my wife that Friday night was my time with Ricky, and she agreed. I met him near the train station and took him out for Indian food at the Taj Mahal restaurant. Then it was off to drink at the Midtown on Grafton street. The Midtown has always been cheap and a good place to start a drunken night. With hindsight, starting the night with beer is stupid, because you’ll be bloated when you graduate to spirits. Then the night goes south, as it did with us.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">We talked for hours at the Midtown, then we went to the Economy Shoe Shop, which for years has been the ferny yuppie hangout on Argyle. We had at least eight rounds of rum and cokes, which is the maritime drink of choice. How do you order coke with two ounces of dark rum? ‘I’ll have a double dark’n’dirty, if you please!’ By this point we were making grand declarations of love and outrageous promises. I dimly recall Ricky promising to help murder an acquaintance or relative who’d been plaguing me, and he said so with drunken and pedantic honesty. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">After I had paid the waitress and tipped some unknown amount that she had suggested, we headed to The Liquor Dome. It had a Cabaret License, which allowed to stay open until three in the morning. That building had always been known as the Last Chance for Romance, because if you hadn’t gotten lucky anywhere else, you could always go to to the Dome, which had two floors and bars everywhere like adult diaper stations. Ricky was buying even more drinks and shoving them at me. I was having trouble standing. I finally persuaded Ricky that we should head home. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">We walked along Barrington Street where it was quiet. All the lights were dazzling and the air was whooshing in and out of my lungs, which is what happens when I am extremely drunk. I think we may have gone into an all-night store and inexplicably bought a litre of strawberry soymilk. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">We arrived at the corner of Barrington and Inglis, the beginning of the good part of town. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“Sometimes,” slurred Ricky. “There are <i>people</i> along here. Right about here. At night.”</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I had no idea what he was talking about. If had been sober I would have figured it out right away. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">There was a woman on the corner, standing by herself. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“You guys out drinkin?” she called.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“Yup,” answered Ricky. “And we’re not done yet!” </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">She was very nice and walked with us for half a block. “I got tequila at my place,” roared Ricky. “Let me buy some mix and we’ll meet back up with ya!” The thought of more liquor made me almost faint. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">She sort of faded away, back to the corner where we had found her, and I waited outside a convenience store while Ricky bought the sort of mix that’s whitish green and comes in a long bottle. The stuff you always pass over in a store because it looks poisonous. Ricky took a long time, an oddly long time, because he’d bought something else instead of tequila mix.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">When he came out, there was a middle-aged black woman with him. She wore a halter top, booty shorts, and walked with a herky-jerky strut. “She’s gonna do us both for eighty bucks!” said Ricky. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“What,” I said. He’d found her in the gas-station convenience store? </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“You come along with me, honey,” she said. She took my hand and led us off as I looked over my shoulder for the nice lady I’d met down on the corner. Where had she gone? I’d wanted to talk to her.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The area near the bottom of Inglis where it meets Barrington is odd. You’re just below mansions, endless green lawns, wrought-iron fences. There’s a heritage bus tour that goes through it, for Christ’s sake! It shouldn’t be next to several blocks of rooming houses, drug dealers, and a student ghetto for a university that requires a 60% average out of high school for admission. But this is how it’s always been.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">She took us into one of those places. Up some stairs, past rows of doors. She opened one door into a room with a floor covered in trash, beer cans, and a diagonal mattress. A hinky-looking man lay on the mattress smoking something out of a glass pipe. “I need the room,” she said to him, and he just said, “Okay,” and got up and walked out. “How’s it going?” he said to us as he walked by. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">She took us in. I was still very drunk, and regarding everything with clinical and numb amusement. She got down on her hands and knees, and took off her shorts as she bent over in our faces. Ricky knelt down and grabbed a cheek. “Take a look at that,” he said. “Not bad at all, eh?” For a crack addict she had reasonably good ass, I had to concede. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">My gaze wandered over to the mantlepiece, where there were a few pictures leaning against the mirror. “Whazzat?” I said, pointing.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Her face lit up. “Picture of my babies!” she said. “Wanna see?”</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“Sure,” I replied.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“NO!” said Ricky. “No, we don’t want to see!”</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">But she had already stood up, gotten down a picture, and showed me. Three girls. They looked to be about fourteen, seventeen, and twenty. Freckles, hoodies, tight curled hair. And that was it for me.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“I’m going outside,” I said. “Rick, I’ll see you in a bit.”</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">She took me by the hand and led me out to hall and to the foot of the stairs. Still buck naked, she gave me a big hug and went back into her room where Ricky was waiting.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I went down to the corner. The first woman was there. “Did you come back to look for me?” she said.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“Yeah.”</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">We went to her rooming house and sat together on the porch. “My buddy’s up there with that other woman,” I said. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“Her?” she said. “But she got no teeth.” </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“Oh,” I said.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“You wanna go upstairs to my room?”</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“Nah. But if you want to leave me here and head back out to your corner, I won’t mind. I know you gotta make some money.”</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“No, I’ll talk with you.” </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Her name was Liz. She was Hamilton originally. She had blonde curly hair and little sharp teeth. She had three daughters too, and she smoked rock. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Another girl joined us, a heavy, pale girl who wore a shapeless black hoodie that pooled around her head and made her look a little like Bergman’s spectre of death. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“Do you do dates?” she asked me.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“Nah,” I said. “You could have talked to my friend, but he’s up there with another girl.”</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“Her?” said the girl with the hoodie. “But she got no teeth. He know that?”</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Ricky came down a moment later. “Right after you left, she took out her friggin dentures and said, ‘let’s get started.’ I got outta there quick.”</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The four of us settled down and got to talking. Once or twice the hinky-looking man wandered by and said hello. I don’t remember much of what we talked about. I do remember Ricky handing Liz a twenty and holding open her shirt. Liz talked about how she kissed her clients and how that made her special. It was around 4:30 in the morning when I decided that I needed to head back to my in-laws where my wife and kids were sleeping. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Ricky and Liz joined me. We walked along Young Avenue, the site of the heritage bus tours, past the mansions, the gardens. Less than two hundred feet from my in-law’s house I gave both Ricky and Liz a massive hug and bid them goodnight. I found out later that Ricky went back to her room and bought himself a good time.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The punch line to this story should be that a crackwhore accompanied me along the nicest streets of my hometown. But I knew Liz as a mother, someone who spent time with me freely, and I really hope that she turned out alright. She was over forty when I met her, with three kids somewhere in Ontario, and a crack addiction. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The next morning we drove to the middle of nowhere to visit my grandmother. I barely survived. Ricky called me the next day and suggested we keep this particular story to ourselved. Which is why all names are changed. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-33329171436765520112012-02-06T10:53:00.000-08:002012-02-06T10:55:20.442-08:00The new OKGo video : Needing/Getting<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This band is amazing. From their first smash viral hit, A Million Ways, they've been at the forefront of inventive visuals. They usually get a grant to fund their work, and then release it into the wild. This time they've persuaded Chevy to fork out the money. The payoff? They use a Chevy van in this video, and the emblem is front and centre.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">They swear they've used only inventiveness and hard work to accomplish the impossible feats of synchronicity and timing in their past works. I don't believe them; I think they've used some sort of of editing or computer trickery to fix the glitches. In this new video, they appear to be doing the impossible: chaos theory and Murphy's Law should have made this video a bust.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Whatever the truth is, Chevy has a new product placement that is cheaper and a billion times more inventive and effective than paying Will Smith five million bucks to say a few lines, and OKGo has a new video. Enjoy, and if you can figure out how they hell they did this, let me know.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-34736410316488417402012-02-02T09:15:00.000-08:002012-02-02T16:43:46.871-08:00Indian food and some silly pictures<div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The in-laws are here this weekend. They’re lovely people, but they’re old. Any one of my generation should have boomers as parents, which means our parents slept with other people, did drugs, travelled, found themselves, and generally accumulated some faults and mistakes. My mother and father in-law are just a hair older than the oldest baby boomer. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">What does that mean? It means they got married right out of college, mommy immediately quit work to look after the kids, sacrificed everything, and deferred to daddy in every decision. Before the kids were born, they’d bought the house they were going to die in and daddy took his one and only job from which he's now retired.They’re unlike my parents, and the parents of many in my generation, who are mobile, and had many jobs, took some risks. They’re lovely people, but they’re old and I don’t have a lot in common with them. They’ve never made mistakes. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">They arrived yesterday, and while they were out on their daily walk (they’re the sort who take twice-weekly showers and daily walks), I shopped in the big Indian store near where I live. I made my favorite: Saag Paneer, which I’ll describe in a moment. I also made Eggplant Bartha and threw together a dahl. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Saag Paneer means spinach and farmer’s cheese. You throw three or four bunches of spinach into a mess of onion, garlic, turmeric, cumin, green chilis, and most importantly fenugreek, and then let simmer for an hour until the spinach has cooked down into an aromatic slime. It may sound awful but it’s my favorite dish. Purree partly, add a dash of cream, and put in salt and the blocks of cheese, and you have an pot of steaming emerald goodness. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">A dahl is simply lentils and spices. There are thousands of different recipes in every province of Indian. India has always been highly populated and very Hindu, and those two factors have come together and made good vegetarian cooking a necessity. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The third dish was the kicker: eggplant bartha, a curry made from eggplants and a typical blend of spices, garam masala and coriander being the dominant flavours. You have to roast the eggplants first. I don’t have a barbecue, so I had to do it in my oven. Indian eggplants are long and purplish, and in the oven the skin gets black and tight. By the end, I thought there were three severed and blackened arms in my oven.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">They’re scary when you first take them out. You have to cut the skin lengthwise, and peel it back. For a moment I thought I had dead and rotting squid on my stove. I’ve attached a picture for your edification.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyyiQNQDRotkU-RxFboOMOMf-or8ybvanf_78P0POlpj1k2pQfwp5jbFsQLD94DVyWFlG3qkhK8hDvskVKgDnNBhqeJyxtT6TKnkbo2wR6EiV45IYq1WsBwBW3NRGSUZHKpwSbJEPyXeM-/s1600/IMG_1046.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyyiQNQDRotkU-RxFboOMOMf-or8ybvanf_78P0POlpj1k2pQfwp5jbFsQLD94DVyWFlG3qkhK8hDvskVKgDnNBhqeJyxtT6TKnkbo2wR6EiV45IYq1WsBwBW3NRGSUZHKpwSbJEPyXeM-/s320/IMG_1046.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Above the eggplants is the completed saag.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I made some Naan bread later on, and had a three dish meal with fudge brownies for desert. I’d attack a picture of my apron but I don’t do that shit. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Some other silly pics:</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmkJy1b4-cBa_gE-skoTH0NvLQtjSQcVajIx9wIJe6cDYFYyoSiSLY65RzYX3JCiV8KP4memKgBveCXmXRunelCfh9E5NWci7NHlT0Kq6ApQIyvb_RxwYeFzNV93fuMp7ZM-yIEYQj4Qj9/s1600/ngtbm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmkJy1b4-cBa_gE-skoTH0NvLQtjSQcVajIx9wIJe6cDYFYyoSiSLY65RzYX3JCiV8KP4memKgBveCXmXRunelCfh9E5NWci7NHlT0Kq6ApQIyvb_RxwYeFzNV93fuMp7ZM-yIEYQj4Qj9/s320/ngtbm.jpg" width="237" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yoda makes everything better</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimivyXX4TPnQ4Jay-sRdHc7oFBy3psV7Hpge997_t6Qn8iWPVxDTMb6MBnbtV6ESca-_hUzgM4dddCs9BHzTDWtsYSUEl5TZ6MG5EM3ktMwCnGRlmDbx-lIxaaN-wwoYYjSxGWpM9NnNIN/s1600/hCM0y.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimivyXX4TPnQ4Jay-sRdHc7oFBy3psV7Hpge997_t6Qn8iWPVxDTMb6MBnbtV6ESca-_hUzgM4dddCs9BHzTDWtsYSUEl5TZ6MG5EM3ktMwCnGRlmDbx-lIxaaN-wwoYYjSxGWpM9NnNIN/s320/hCM0y.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDLb9r3ZqaAwTUjWf2NSM8c-pRp_i3v0M4w4JoSCiR37XQtkXl_d6q4wIsG2HrR4EaWlxbLyfZokEWec-nYZ5sgdqUWFBbGBDyyMNOY7WMBtN6nA1R88vmRkVJ73GHWcdy6AF7VYOOW5JG/s1600/7Two8.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDLb9r3ZqaAwTUjWf2NSM8c-pRp_i3v0M4w4JoSCiR37XQtkXl_d6q4wIsG2HrR4EaWlxbLyfZokEWec-nYZ5sgdqUWFBbGBDyyMNOY7WMBtN6nA1R88vmRkVJ73GHWcdy6AF7VYOOW5JG/s1600/7Two8.gif" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A boxer on a trampoline</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-11115785259468663012012-01-22T01:00:00.000-08:002012-01-22T13:34:35.762-08:00My candidacy for the Republican Nomination<div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Good evening, my fellow Republicans.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh48nD_7yyPkL29BADTUe2wYeqVKnSmFbB0LSB_W4ERPpYYv7Oz4UMRByBX_1zwgR4VaQWfZMbHDjYRE7KTnFeP7AcUtsdTHqeXNZc3L1kpa0IadIFiV1XqKLAk68S5e0yk_7hl62x50v-f/s1600/newt-yodels.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh48nD_7yyPkL29BADTUe2wYeqVKnSmFbB0LSB_W4ERPpYYv7Oz4UMRByBX_1zwgR4VaQWfZMbHDjYRE7KTnFeP7AcUtsdTHqeXNZc3L1kpa0IadIFiV1XqKLAk68S5e0yk_7hl62x50v-f/s320/newt-yodels.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><i>Who is this strange man who has appeared on my television screen during prime time?</i> you’re probably asking. <i>Why has he not even given his name?</i> I’ll get to that. I’ll get to everything. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I’m the newest Republican candidate for president. Yes, I know Mitt and Newt are ostensibly the front-runners. Newt may even beat Mitt if he can persuade Santorum to… um… to get behind him. But I’m here now. If I can persuade you that I’m your man, then Newt and Mitt will simply concede. So please have a listen.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">You’re in a pickle, aren’t you, Republicans? You’ve got a popular, smart, and telegenic president; an economy that’s in the crapper; a stand-off with Iran and North Korea; and a debt that so massive that in a short time the richest man in the country won’t be able to afford three months interest on the national debt.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">So this is my platform - it’s the platform of a left-wing Canadian, but at least you’ll know where I stand. I’m a placater, a mollifier, a consensus builder, and an old pro at kissing babies and grandmas.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">First, and I need get this out of the way. I’m not a social conservative, and that’s that last thing you need anyway. I promise not to do anything about abortion - that might offend you, but the last spate of Republican presidents didn’t do anything about it either. Abortion gets out votes and no one ever follows through on it. Same-sex marriage is coming to most states, so don’t bother trying to stop it. The gays and the Gay Agenda aren’t destroying marriage, Kim Kardashian, Sinead O’Connor, John Edwards, and Newt Gingrich are destroying marriage. I’m not pro-gun, but I’m not going to try to take them away from you, since all the police budget-cuts mean you’re going to need them more than ever. So I want you to put all the social stuff aside; that’s not going to defeat Obama. Don’t look to me for religious guidance - leave that to your minister. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The keys to getting the United States out of this mess (which is no fault of yours, by the way) is <i>not</i> great change. I know: the President ran on change, and every four years the Republican candidate threatens to throttle the machinery of government in the bathtub and kill it down to size before he promptly spends the country into the ground. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Here is what I propose. There’s a lot to running a country, but I think this one-plank platform will do be worth the price of admission alone. I guarantee President Obama hasn’t thought of this. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq_uW5TG_gQ31vJWONXTz8z5XjcDUqGhmDcIk4lRUEDb-ReqiNgTB15IW90xRrmw67UP26kQ6a8b3crkqhHigrWfPpRJSPrDvrJKk2IjOhMEU-fqoe6T5e23xQ4GIAuiNNwKnRP3tVPxjk/s1600/mitt-romeny-straps-dog-to-roof-car.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq_uW5TG_gQ31vJWONXTz8z5XjcDUqGhmDcIk4lRUEDb-ReqiNgTB15IW90xRrmw67UP26kQ6a8b3crkqhHigrWfPpRJSPrDvrJKk2IjOhMEU-fqoe6T5e23xQ4GIAuiNNwKnRP3tVPxjk/s1600/mitt-romeny-straps-dog-to-roof-car.png" /></a></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Let’s look at the cause of conflict - profit, religion, and beneath all of that is a little undercurrent of sex. In the past too many societies have raised young men on a strict diet of no sex, and then sent them out into the world where they become frustrated killing machines. I don’t think there is any way you can change people’s minds about religion - the middle east will be fighting over Jerusalem until that area is a giant pile of radioactive dust, and we should leave them to it. I think we need to bypass all that silliness and concentrate on making something exciting happen within our borders. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Sex - that’s an Achilles heel in every human being. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I don’t want to bother with legalizing heroin or Marijuana. I propose we legalize and tax sex. The sale of sex, specifically.</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The US, one of the worlds great producers of porn and beautiful people, can become the world’s greatest destinations for sex tourism in the history of our planet. Do you want it hot and sultry? Hot-lanta, baby! Like it edgy, with some clunky-rimmed glasses alongside? The Big Apple beckons! Like it spicy and with just a hint of violence? LA’s your lady! Like your men buff and shaved? That’s… well, that’s the entire west coast. Like your women wholesome and polite, and willing to talk politics and unions before, during, and after? The ladies of Madison, Wisconsin will debate at the drop of a hat! Like muscles and stamina? Our pro-sports teams have off-seasons, and sometimes our fellas get bored and would love to meet up with some European policy wonkettes! </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCpLPpIL-XwD7-NCjH8uNY5y3nZ9gof1lZ6y8o7uXFyy40D2L1PKmUsd8bhIpxt6lElllvxDAcMWBIAgY5fU9O2azVjqFnpW5LlonswQFun7UvUVW77VhyphenhyphenXxkS55M_zdJRglKjE_YP2LyQ/s1600/perry+hot+dog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCpLPpIL-XwD7-NCjH8uNY5y3nZ9gof1lZ6y8o7uXFyy40D2L1PKmUsd8bhIpxt6lElllvxDAcMWBIAgY5fU9O2azVjqFnpW5LlonswQFun7UvUVW77VhyphenhyphenXxkS55M_zdJRglKjE_YP2LyQ/s1600/perry+hot+dog.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Once this thing takes off, the tax implications are incredible. We could pay down the debt. You can’t outsource living genitalia when it’s right at home. There is nothing outside of our borders that can compare to a young God-fearing debutante, or a fresh-faced Christian quarterback. Best of all, you’ve got droves of them in your party, and if you told them they’d be helping to defeat Obama, I’m willing to bet they’d get with the program mighty quick!</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">We’d have to have a sea-change in our sexual mores, of course. ‘Prostitute’ is an unpleasant and clinical term and should be replaced with something softer and more pleasing:<i> Pleasure Professional. Senator. Pleasure Deacon. </i>Something along those lines. </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The best part? Government regulation. Yes, I’ve already foreseen the possibility that we might give rise to massive sexual conglomerates that kill all healthy competition and funnel their profits to tax havens. There will be no lobbyists, no CEOs with ties to big government, no tax holidays. This will all be done by a the new Department of Pleasure Provision. Uncle Sam will get his share and we will pay off that debt!</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I’d like to talk a little more, but I’m hearing some ominous thumping noises at the back door. I think the eff-bee-eye have tracked down my signal, and I’m sure they didn’t appreciate me beaming in during a Patriot game. So I’ll be going now and don’t worry about me - there’s a tricked up little Civic with a motor like a f-15 jammed up inside and they don’t stand a chance of catching me! </div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZnFPR3NXIMsqSaGJI0cYbE88ZmoU69wp2vM9WuAEZosXjWo7x-e6d8d6LZTf67-AxD-zER6qdP2PSEOTBSHuJ7pMwjqO6SvLNCFrjx2wEIilR7VbAQSq3o1cuNHRXKluL2tPTg2gG4gaO/s1600/RickPerryCornDog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZnFPR3NXIMsqSaGJI0cYbE88ZmoU69wp2vM9WuAEZosXjWo7x-e6d8d6LZTf67-AxD-zER6qdP2PSEOTBSHuJ7pMwjqO6SvLNCFrjx2wEIilR7VbAQSq3o1cuNHRXKluL2tPTg2gG4gaO/s320/RickPerryCornDog.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8zQ3YyOUzunqFwjoHncvZUN3jw_yFNJ5TSRs9Xb9h99odHRYRhuPnBDv4j6CtxKcMS2IwUciQvCrHtS40e92Qhtpk5TI-xgWtfEob-ghQfXrbFw0-kQIQ59MDc27HqotIU5zyLSd3chAJ/s1600/corndog1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8zQ3YyOUzunqFwjoHncvZUN3jw_yFNJ5TSRs9Xb9h99odHRYRhuPnBDv4j6CtxKcMS2IwUciQvCrHtS40e92Qhtpk5TI-xgWtfEob-ghQfXrbFw0-kQIQ59MDc27HqotIU5zyLSd3chAJ/s320/corndog1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'Times New Roman'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Vote for a steady course and a legalized adult playland. Vote for a Campbell/Flint ticket! Vote for fluid exchange we can believe in!</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-9710052446949826962012-01-16T21:07:00.000-08:002012-01-16T21:07:25.215-08:00Photos from the weekend<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSlbCHEjGZjcEomnwFDeioEU_BtIeMWctHxTi7v4ZnItliX-xwbkEC6nTzCWv2G_esHnJJC-O2AgfCV269JSHg1Cdnnmhirox6CVUfYyEWrPmG3yslnrpvVD7FXf0kNrYjZrb5IpZ6Ia2A/s1600/IMG_1032.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSlbCHEjGZjcEomnwFDeioEU_BtIeMWctHxTi7v4ZnItliX-xwbkEC6nTzCWv2G_esHnJJC-O2AgfCV269JSHg1Cdnnmhirox6CVUfYyEWrPmG3yslnrpvVD7FXf0kNrYjZrb5IpZ6Ia2A/s320/IMG_1032.jpg" width="239" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is a Costa Rican Owl Butterfly next to my hand. My hand is not small.<br />
</td></tr>
</tbody></table> Not much happened this weekend. It was beautiful, not rainy, so we went to the park, and went to the lookout where all the tourists go. We fed ducks and did lots of family stuff.<br />
<br />
We went to Stanley Park yesterday because the park staff were giving a talk on raccoons. Let me tell you something about those little black-masked bastards - they're smart, have opposable thumbs, and can problem solve. If they figure out how to unlock your raccoon-proof garbage can, they will somehow teach that skill to other raccoons in the neighbourhood. I can almost see three hundred years in the future, where we're all retarded internet denizens, completely insensate, and human-sized raccoons are harvesting our physical bodies for meat. I bet we taste pretty good to something that considers stale cookies and stolen dogfood a treat.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVZlIk5Vhlf7raqIWj1mEE7u1EcKTPwlor6ZNGdoY7ToqQ6S4BiIyZYkyKGPLOdsP1e-rj6q5RWPjSTB30DguXbxE6tNAaD8-hh0Ap0JmY_t8jtGSjUWis4rFTu-bI4juMhjUyG17Bwfgm/s1600/IMG_1036.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVZlIk5Vhlf7raqIWj1mEE7u1EcKTPwlor6ZNGdoY7ToqQ6S4BiIyZYkyKGPLOdsP1e-rj6q5RWPjSTB30DguXbxE6tNAaD8-hh0Ap0JmY_t8jtGSjUWis4rFTu-bI4juMhjUyG17Bwfgm/s320/IMG_1036.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Feeding ducks and an American Coot.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUDtRWllRmQ8lQJWiVDoMMN6NwF2TsM4UrVXSm-y6MbykZJYTXOZi63VuCXonKiGS0ZOSk5lHRgvR5JgOZpGhE8CvhvUMfyuGH8m-JHNGCr9BmETirPzDHpnsCOqFrsdiP9iesI6jeWuA-/s1600/IMG_1035.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUDtRWllRmQ8lQJWiVDoMMN6NwF2TsM4UrVXSm-y6MbykZJYTXOZi63VuCXonKiGS0ZOSk5lHRgvR5JgOZpGhE8CvhvUMfyuGH8m-JHNGCr9BmETirPzDHpnsCOqFrsdiP9iesI6jeWuA-/s320/IMG_1035.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A lovely scene that belies their violence.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQhyphenhyphenZUEG8TX1I5wl0AkLA39BfhEcR4RNLSQ-zsgqPEGtgQBQHui4VCmUuEd8eCysp-jIIsrUqc9Z0TTjKX4bl-LsmaQYQ-A8LvUGyG0NOOCKiTCwdxPkegxmUQv4rcwNqVZPniO8HdV3Hv/s1600/IMG_1038.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQhyphenhyphenZUEG8TX1I5wl0AkLA39BfhEcR4RNLSQ-zsgqPEGtgQBQHui4VCmUuEd8eCysp-jIIsrUqc9Z0TTjKX4bl-LsmaQYQ-A8LvUGyG0NOOCKiTCwdxPkegxmUQv4rcwNqVZPniO8HdV3Hv/s320/IMG_1038.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">That view I mentioned. Please click.</td></tr>
</tbody></table> My wife parked the van while I took the two boys on a hike around Lost Lagoon. The older one was being a twit and holding back, so I texted my wife to keep an eye out for him and took the younger one along the path.<br />
<br />
There was a sharp, rippling shriek, and a bestial hiss from the bushes by the shore. We went closer; I imagined that a skunk or raccoon had taken on a goose for a challenge.<br />
<br />
We looked into the bushes. Some idiot had taken a large box of cream-filled cookies and dogfood and put it in the bushes. Two enormously fat raccoons were stuffing their faces.<br />
<br />
Later on, the park staff complained to us that the Stanley Park raccoons had become diurnal (active during the day) and were at risk of becoming diabetic from all the sweets they were eating (this is a downtown park). I'm not worried about them. They're becoming like us and one day they're going to want a twitter feed. They just want piece of the action.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-91704055724153685372012-01-13T13:57:00.000-08:002012-01-14T08:11:24.799-08:00Win a Night with Tim Tebow<div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFHzSzf8jJNe1OB8pNfcWFyTBhqppB8k8jk1DORRRVZ-Yr9Z618Ic8VAYo7AweVT2FLV6iyU_lLmfRKueaeA2Bxbhuyusnw7I-FnxC690B-wNzuxv5_XoLuZ9mr4wEaUFqubVDCtC-sTBW/s1600/0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFHzSzf8jJNe1OB8pNfcWFyTBhqppB8k8jk1DORRRVZ-Yr9Z618Ic8VAYo7AweVT2FLV6iyU_lLmfRKueaeA2Bxbhuyusnw7I-FnxC690B-wNzuxv5_XoLuZ9mr4wEaUFqubVDCtC-sTBW/s1600/0.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font: 24.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; text-indent: 18.0px;">Spend the night with TIM TEBOW!</div><div style="font: 24.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 27.0px; text-align: center; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">This Saturday, February 5<span style="font: 9.0px Georgia;"><sup>th</sup></span>, 2012, in Indianapolis, as the Saints face off against the mighty upstarts, the Denver Broncos, the NFL is auctioning off its most precious resource for charity. For the kids! </div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">We’re selling tickets now so no one will miss out on this outstanding opportunity! Go to <a href="http://climbmounttim.com/">http://climbmounttim.com</a> to buy’em before they run out! Tickets are $150 dollars each. There is no by limit, so the more you buy, the greater the chance you’ll win. There can be only one woman. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Tim Tebow is 6’3” and 245 fat-free pounds of untouched Christian wilderness, and a week after the Superbowl he’ll be all yours for the taking! </div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">If you win Saturday’s draw, you will be flown to Denver the following Friday to stay at the Denver Ritz-Carlton. That evening, you’ll be treated to a make-over courtesy of the experts at Sephora Beauty, a free massage from the Ritz-Carlton Spa, and a $2000 shopping trip to Mona Lucero and Twice as Haute. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">On Saturday morning, Tim Tebow himself will pick you up at your hotel. Take your tongues off the floor, ladies! He’s not coming to your room until later that evening. A whole day of Tim-time awaits you. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">First, a moment of mutual tebowing in the Curtis street lobby of the Ritz (<i>offer void if participant refuses to tebow</i>). Then it’s off to Summit Church to meet Tim’s pastor. There’ll be loads of fun bible study, a rousing round of Speaking in Tongues <i>(Participant is permitted to speak gibberish if she does not feel The Spirit)</i>, and a quick round of song with the Summit Church Grandmother’s Chorale, which is among the many groups Tim’s charity supports. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">A quick lunch (<i>Refreshments provided by the Ladies’ Auxiliary. You’ve never tasted cucumber sandwiches like these!</i>), and then to the gym to watch Tim work out. Feast your eyes as he does the Monster Tire Jump! Revel in his manly triceps as he tebows yet again! But don’t worry, ladies, he’s going to leave a little something extra just for you! </div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">That evening, after dinner at the Elway restaurant in the Ritz, you and Tim will head up the honeymoon suite, and there you will take possession of Tim’s highly-prized virtue *,**,***,****! </div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><i>* A Condom must be used. For his protection, not yours. </i></div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><i></i></div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><i>** Participant must sign a waiver that acknowledges a refusal to press a suit in the event that Tim 1) fails to perform 2) his prayers for performance are not answered 3) weeps in shame 4) tebows all night. </i></div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><i></i></div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><i>*** Enjoy your conquest while you can, because the moment Tim comes home, he will be signing an abstinence pledge, which these days is a good as a virginity ring.</i></div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><i></i></div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><i>**** In the event of Tim being unable to attend for reasons of illness, injury, or uncontrollable fear, Demaryius Thomas will substitute. He’s not untouched. </i></div><div><i><br />
</i></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-58083418841899803542012-01-13T00:20:00.000-08:002012-01-13T00:20:08.039-08:00Lulu the Cat<div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Many years ago, sometimes during the mid-nineties when I was perpetually in school, one of my best friends in the music faculty asked me something.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“Mac,” he said. “You know anything ‘bout cats?”</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I looked at him. He was a heavily built Italian guy, with jet black hair and a brilliant smile that he’d had even as a baby. In the time he’d been at school, he’d gotten to know the backstage guys, got keys to every door in the building and kept them in a ring on his belt, and had a small female labour pool who warmed his bed, did his homework, and helped him learn his music. God had given him so much in his way with people, and somehow God, in His infinite wisdom, had given him a mild learning disability. He couldn’t read music. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">That year he’d become the general dogsbody for our music teacher. He did things for people, free of charge. Whenever he asked me for a favour, I jumped at the chance; I had to somehow pay him back for all his meals I’d eaten, the drinks he’d bought, all the millions of things he’d done. Now he was asking me something about cats. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“I had cats when I was kid,” I said. “I guess I know a few things.”</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“David wants me to take his cat to the vet. It needs shots or something, I dunno. They gave me a list for the vet to read. Help me bring it to the vet?”</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“Absolutely,” I said eagerly.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">We took a cab over to our teacher’s apartment. David and his wife were big, hard-working, and very hard drinking Southerners. They had a house in Vermont, but they’d done their best to make the Saint Catherine’s street two-bedroom a home: A black baby grand, a wall full of mirrors (I was told they made a place look larger), autographed posters, enormous poofy couches, shag carpets, and (this was something many people had remarked on and it had never been explained) black candles on the dining room table. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">When we arrived, the gigantic Lulu waddled daintily out to meet us. She was black and white, a mixed breed, but carried herself like a prize-winning Persian. Anthony stood back as I scratched Lulu behind the ears and then unceremoniously rammed her into a carrier. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">To this day I don’t know why David and his wife sent Anthony, a big Italian who throughout his life never had so much as a pet rock, to oversee the medical care of their prize kitty. A few years later, I heard that they’d hired an untrained music student to care for David’s senile and incontinent mother in-law, but that’s another story. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The vet was a burly man with a heavy gallic moustache. He tossed poor Lulu onto his metal examining table, shoving his large hairy fingers into here and there, taking her temperature, and finally giving her several needles into the bulging nape of her neck. Lulu, although a mouser of reputed savagery and sadism, lay there and peed herself, her furry limbs spread like a dead octopus over the smooth stainless steel. The vet had an Italian name and Anthony chatted with him (<i>“E voi che siete Italiano?</i>”). I knew just enough Italian to remember this exchange, while the vet was weighing Lulu. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“Thirteen pounds. That’s a very heavy cat,” said the vet.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“You should see the owners,” said Anthony.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">We left. Anthony had paid the vet bill and put the receipt into an envelope. On the cab ride back, Anthony bent down and took a look at Lulu inside the cat carrier.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“Did the vet give the cat a sedative or something?”</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“No. Why?”</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“Because she’s so quiet.”</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">On the way to the vet, she’d cried unhappily with a high, kittenish meow that belied her size. Now she was quiet as a stone and stared straight out the window. She didn’t seem angry. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">We got back to David’s apartment. Lulu emerged from the carrier, and seemed to grow and fluff out as she put the vet’s big and knobby hands out of her mind. I looked around the kitchen, opened a small pantry, and there, against the wall, were several hundred cans of Fancy Feast. I opened one and poured it into Lulu’s bowl. The meat, or whatever it was, came out the same shape as the can, with the can’s metal striations shiny, perfect, and straight against the wet mess of cat food. Lulu dug into her food. Her tail rose in pleasure, and I noticed something down there. I bent over to take a closer look.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Sticking unobtrusively out of Lulu’s ass was the vet’s rectal thermometer. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“Jesus,” I said. I grasped it, pulled, and it slid firmly out. I stood there for a moment, aghast, upset, and as of yet unaware that later in the day I would tell of this several times and I would be laughed at, by both my friends and Lulu’s owners. After a moment, I went to the sink, and washed catshit off the thermometer. As the person whom Anthony had designated as a animal expert, I felt ashamed and somehow responsible that Lulu got violated. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I placed the thermometer, spanking clean, on the coffee table with a note. <i>Dear David, The vet left his thermometer up Lulu. Here it is - Mac. PS. Don’t worry, I washed it.</i></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">A few years later, I heard that David’s mother left Lulu outside all night during a Vermont winter. In the morning, all that was left of her was a pile of snow against the patio door with two little eyes peeking out. Lulu survived that as well. </div><div><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-77449756606979086722012-01-07T23:12:00.000-08:002012-01-07T23:25:16.258-08:00A lonely Saturday night on the Internet<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHDddQYRQ-rlvr5GsRtvaGhj82xn4C-QxmM7J-eGzBHIjskVeazKxty_AKd0Lkw2Bhv5pC8h8HmqdfjHQjONNM8ikAhN6ls00DBLlLVZg8Q7MypeTY2yr6aIiE4LM5BbvTSYZSRmgCm_2g/s1600/Vxpek.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHDddQYRQ-rlvr5GsRtvaGhj82xn4C-QxmM7J-eGzBHIjskVeazKxty_AKd0Lkw2Bhv5pC8h8HmqdfjHQjONNM8ikAhN6ls00DBLlLVZg8Q7MypeTY2yr6aIiE4LM5BbvTSYZSRmgCm_2g/s320/Vxpek.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Too easy and ethnocentric, I know. </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxRU7ykBkZqI2Ecvc0ArFZrkBX-GIlUgN777djKvX3GYFwkmvkW97CZXZsAA8YbUspStXIBNkJaYjOIZRjtKWzl44hj2oLqD3KrJPnIPqQu7aJsnPAxvtip4qOzeAripYQB3z9VniCr7Zp/s1600/tumblr_lw9ghjw2Ks1r89embo1_500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxRU7ykBkZqI2Ecvc0ArFZrkBX-GIlUgN777djKvX3GYFwkmvkW97CZXZsAA8YbUspStXIBNkJaYjOIZRjtKWzl44hj2oLqD3KrJPnIPqQu7aJsnPAxvtip4qOzeAripYQB3z9VniCr7Zp/s320/tumblr_lw9ghjw2Ks1r89embo1_500.jpg" width="241" /></a></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0F36RJprP07QPRU0LiPpnOAg9pqDXvkxDzN015uJImBjDGQMrQMUWDCTIAEKineF1mz8GFJksOnJA5_yZ8qAXIAWy5OgR39M5wHd6iBxW_TWv2uzLWyhv6G5QxPryeUqa9SXWkk9yGj4A/s1600/wdftz.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0F36RJprP07QPRU0LiPpnOAg9pqDXvkxDzN015uJImBjDGQMrQMUWDCTIAEKineF1mz8GFJksOnJA5_yZ8qAXIAWy5OgR39M5wHd6iBxW_TWv2uzLWyhv6G5QxPryeUqa9SXWkk9yGj4A/s320/wdftz.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The school needs to call this man.</td></tr>
</tbody></table> Internet people are visual. I don't have a lot to blog about tonight; I really shot my wad with my Stephen King review last night.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia;">So instead I’m going to fill you in on what’s been going on. Just a little pause for station identification, if you will. Also, some funny pictures. </span><br />
<div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Someone in my son’s class has been making death threats. This is the fourth grade, so the kids are between 8-10 (my son’s nine). Someone found a note in her backpack. It said <i>If you don’t stop talking to me I will kill you.</i> This is the second such note. </span></div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Now, when I heard about this, I thought that teachers in my day would have brushed that under the rug and continued on with the lesson on General Frontenac. But my kid’s teachers (there are two in a job-sharing situation) are taking it very seriously. First, they worked out that only a student within the fourth/fifth grade split class could have written the note. Then they asked the class <i>en masse </i>for the culprit to come forward. <i>If you come forward and confess, things will be much easier for you</i>. You know they’re searching the faces of every single person in that class, looking for the slightest guilty tremor. But nothing; no dice. </span></div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The next step was a visit from the cops, and a lecture from those boys and blue about how serious it is to threaten someone with death. Each child has met the teacher alone for extra-special scrutiny: <i>How do you think this person is feeling? How would you feel if you were that person</i>? The final step: handwriting analysis. That’s right, they’re going CSI on a class of fourth and fifth graders. Each kid will have to submit some handwriting, and then the clock will start ticking. I doubt whoever did this was prescient enough to disguise his or her own handwriting. I also think that you could whittle down the pool of suspects by looking at the neatness of the handwriting: if it’s really neat, then a girl probably did it. I’m not being necessarily sexist: many of the student assignments are posted on the wall outside class, and the girls <i>always</i> have neater handwriting. </span></div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I’ll keep you posted on the elementary school death threat situation, but in the meantime, some funny pictures. Because the internet has to have its dopamine fix, its visual stimulation, and its flashy and funny things. </span></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqwkJ5EaDUFzBUJ2ohsbNgh68stISwj6yCh4kNp0d8pwD-ke-l8sssUeaB0DbVNXiSF14rk0bdRV34ho5Az6TOB70ve60-QnflPSeF31qCksM1-7nPBimBsPV8KQg7iWdRFMNMbVEDALGo/s1600/3932421951_53566abae1_b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="282" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqwkJ5EaDUFzBUJ2ohsbNgh68stISwj6yCh4kNp0d8pwD-ke-l8sssUeaB0DbVNXiSF14rk0bdRV34ho5Az6TOB70ve60-QnflPSeF31qCksM1-7nPBimBsPV8KQg7iWdRFMNMbVEDALGo/s320/3932421951_53566abae1_b.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Beautiful steampunk pens. Drooling? They're Montblanc limited editions. These five pens cost more than a house.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPaBrg8V-U1DPUrcqtseny-DQUa1RZinnIE7ZcZJabpm5k7J1aHaoVaNyaP1py2wXmhvPKHlHnfWtV7KhKp-fliHm4nMH0p8RBxN6b4EZJSVSdvXu58GMQ3X-2wqj6AswNls01tOJPgKJ0/s1600/oxeer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="177" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPaBrg8V-U1DPUrcqtseny-DQUa1RZinnIE7ZcZJabpm5k7J1aHaoVaNyaP1py2wXmhvPKHlHnfWtV7KhKp-fliHm4nMH0p8RBxN6b4EZJSVSdvXu58GMQ3X-2wqj6AswNls01tOJPgKJ0/s320/oxeer.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A rude ghost spying on kitty's derrier.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy7TU74enGBrgMEA_B3ZyrItmJz-ompWhjrTwE3h_c-o21WCO8sMWknE4fVEvrVi063Je5UURvHK2qXJ3R0wAFSLU0b8m1ij1te8w7MwswKQMOEbcDMVYVmt6ASTtkyQqbhYjI-Fo0s5XG/s1600/oE6zV.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy7TU74enGBrgMEA_B3ZyrItmJz-ompWhjrTwE3h_c-o21WCO8sMWknE4fVEvrVi063Je5UURvHK2qXJ3R0wAFSLU0b8m1ij1te8w7MwswKQMOEbcDMVYVmt6ASTtkyQqbhYjI-Fo0s5XG/s320/oE6zV.jpg" width="249" /></a></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfWuAw1l6Uo9YpfP1gUtTVCF6oRFIAZALwDdAj-mNOBvEX_swtWVHVVF1p2j9200oP3aRc8qTQRhsfgy-p85KRLczSUWhvz_NVwkL_OmT7b_9zI5oxKbak-huibLUYZWjsNNcD5GSxawOo/s1600/4ABEt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfWuAw1l6Uo9YpfP1gUtTVCF6oRFIAZALwDdAj-mNOBvEX_swtWVHVVF1p2j9200oP3aRc8qTQRhsfgy-p85KRLczSUWhvz_NVwkL_OmT7b_9zI5oxKbak-huibLUYZWjsNNcD5GSxawOo/s320/4ABEt.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Spiders can be cute. Really!</td></tr>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-58362255767329638742012-01-07T00:15:00.000-08:002012-01-08T21:17:56.302-08:0011/22/63 - Stephen King<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy-Zvkb571qEmmH2y_Qft_Kd9odyJTPf5lx4tqzl7jeniHPXyPG_ZZlEh1bM30ZPwFqEQnqLPNZJ7Tyiqewa_JpZOD37535RwAOT7qWmXWCh5J0clYsiLF4t4BuVF2PST321cKVhW9-6r1/s1600/1451627289.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgy-Zvkb571qEmmH2y_Qft_Kd9odyJTPf5lx4tqzl7jeniHPXyPG_ZZlEh1bM30ZPwFqEQnqLPNZJ7Tyiqewa_JpZOD37535RwAOT7qWmXWCh5J0clYsiLF4t4BuVF2PST321cKVhW9-6r1/s1600/1451627289.jpg" /></a></div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><i>11/22/63</i> is a massive, breathtaking novel that may finally affirm Stephen King as a great writer. I’ll get to that book in the moment (just finished it today), but I want to talk about something else first. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I recently read a speech by Brian Keene, which he gave during Anthocon 2011. It was called <a href="http://www.briankeene.com/?p=9691" target="_blank">'Know Your Genre'</a>.’ He runs through the history of horror literature, dividing it into waves that span from the 1900’s to the present. It’s a decent speech, and near the end he poked fun at several posters on the Shocklines message board who aren’t all that familiar with Robert Bloch. He gave the impression that without a knowledge of that very definite and linear progression of horror writers, a new horror writer is in trouble. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I felt the speech was too precise - it posited horror writing as wizardry that must be handed down from one generation to another. Stephen King himself, along with Dean Koontz and Peter Straub, is named as part of the Fourth Wave that came to be during the seventies and eighties. Before the fourth wave came the third: Serling, Bloch, Bradbury, Matheson. After the fourth wave came writers like Keene, Joe Hill, Tim Lebbon, Wrath James White. Going by Keene’s speech, I can almost see these writers at neat, persnickety horror-genre reunions in which the tables are grouped by age and rank. Then they get drunk and knock up the serving staff with illegitimate children. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">My own take on the ‘Know Your Genre’ theme? I’ve been a horror fan all my life. I think the progression of the genre is far more amorphous that we’d care to admit. I think that to group it into this square Danse Macabre is limiting and not particularly accurate. I also think that Stephen King wasn’t part of a wave of any kind. He was a meteor that sent waves crashing out in every direction. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve read horror published within the last five years that has some element of Stephen King. Often, these efforts fall way short of the mark, but I can still tell.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Let’s discuss King’s influences. If you’ve read Bradbury, you know how much King owes to Bradbury’s collection ‘The October Country.’ But Bradbury was more a Science Fiction writer; he hung out with Heinlein and Forrest J. Ackerman. Right there is a broken link in the genre chain.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">One of King’s favorite tropes is the simple, childlike character with precognitive ability: Danny Torrance in <i>The Shining</i>, Mother Abigail in <i>The Stand</i>, the blind girl in <i>The Langoliers</i>, Charlie in <i>Firestarter,</i> John Smith in <i>The Dead Zone.</i> In <i>The Stand</i>, a character wistfully remembers reading Richard Adam’s <i>Watership Down.</i> If someone in a King book talks or thinks of a book, it’s because King thought it was significant. Who is the central character in that novel of talking rabbits? Fiver, the dreamy and runty little<i> rabbit with psychic powers.</i> He foretells the arrival of the dog who attacks General Woundwort. Two of King’s great influences are fantasy authors. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">So we have the greatest horror writer in the genre, who happens to be one of the best-selling authors world-wide, who has non-horror writers as his influences, who writes best-selling novels that sometimes aren’t even horror. King is a great storyteller who happens to like writing horror; he could write anything and you’d still be reading the review at the front your newspaper’s book section. He takes whatever he needs from every genre and has melded it all into a cohesive whole, into a style that reminds me more of Charles Dickens or Mark Twain. And he isn’t part of a wave of the seventies and eighties - he’s still here and right now he’s at the top of the heap.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><i>11/22/63</i> is a sort-of time travel novel, but that’s a conceit that allows King to write a story that at its heart is of adventure and love. It is not a horror novel. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Jake Epping, a high school English teacher, discovers that the owner of the local diner has been travelling back in time to buy his wholesale meat at 1950’s prices. Besides buying cheap ground beef and winning long odds sports bets, Al Templeton has been researching the Kennedy assassination - he wants to stop it. But here’s the wrinkle - the time portal he uses takes him back to the same place in 1958, five years before Lee Harvey Oswald kills Kennedy, and when he steps back into the present in 2011, only two minutes have passed. During his last visit, when he was gone for years while planning to change history, Al got lung cancer and had to return to the present to find a replacement who will save the president. Now dying and desperate for a chance to see his dream fulfilled, he wants the divorced and childless Jake Epping to go back in time to kill Lee Harvey Oswald. After Jake sees the time portal (which is in Al’s pantry) and what it can do, he agrees. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">What follows is a dizzying trip back to the year between 1958 and 1963. Ford Sunliners, hipsters, Glen Miller, gullwing fins, crewcuts, segregation, soda-shop rootbeer, taking a trip two towns over to buy condoms, poodle skirts - these are just a few of details among thousands that King and his research assistant have put into this novel. Jake comes into a world that is vastly more simple, kind, and cheap, and finds himself falling in love with it. He travels the country, starting in Maine, going to Florida, and finally to Texas to hunker down and wait for Lee to arrive in Fort Worth before he makes that fateful trip to Dallas. Jake falls in love, makes friends, trying desperately to keep his future self apart from his past self, which has become a teacher and respected member of the community. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I became completely immersed in this book, much in the way I do when reading George RR Martin or Jonathan Franzen. Amidst the world-building, the characters that seem to step living and breathing off the page, there is the King obsession with words, and the deeper meaning below them: names, places, and actions all have similar but not identical siblings throughout the book, engendering a sense of unease and unreality that belies that fabulous, rock-solid historical detail. It is as if magic is bubbling up through cracks in asphalt. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">King, as he always has, writes in serviceable, clear prose, which you would think is the easy way out, but why don’t more authors write like this? As in Betty Smith’s writing, there is never any doubt as to what is happening. But, on rare occasions, King busts out with beauties like this:</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 16.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px;"><i> It’s all of a piece, I thought. It’s an echo so close to perfect you can’t tell which one is the living voice and which is the ghost-voice returning.</i></div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px;"><i> For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.</i></div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px;"><i> </i>Here, and in a few other passages like it, which I can count on the fingers of one hand, is where the true mystic emerges. This is talent, it’s magic, it’s (too make a pun with the title of one his novels)…<i>IT</i>. I think that here, in this one passage, lies much of what makes Stephen King tick. It’s not horror, not any particular genre, but story. Storytelling, narrative. Hope, dancing (dancing is an enormous theme in this novel) against the entirely purposeless force of decay. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px;"> Buy this novel. Start it on a Friday so you won’t miss work or school. But read it. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 16.0px 0.0px;"> Stephen King still has it. After his accident, at the age of sixty-four, he’s still the equal of the young turk who wrote<i> The Dead Zone</i> and <i>The Stand</i>. He might even be better.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-10837077821133224362012-01-04T23:06:00.000-08:002012-01-04T23:06:11.654-08:00My old second-hand Bookstore<div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
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<div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">When you’re a young fan of horror, there’s not much choice; at least, there wasn’t much choice when I was growing up. In the 21<span style="font: 9.0px Cochin;"><sup>st</sup></span> century, you can order horror novels off the internet - which you’d think would be cheaper, but instead you’re paying fifty to eighty dollars for a book about giant monster crabs, because in ten years it will fetch a big price at the Las Vegas Monster Crab Book Convention. But I digress. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">There wasn’t much at the regular bookstore; horror is never a big draw. Also, new books were and are expensive, and that was before the advent of the small press. No monster crab and zombie collectibles, just an American price on the spine above a<i> much</i> higher Canadian price. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Faced with exorbitant prices and and little choice, the discerning (desperate really) horror fan had to go the second-hand route. Where on Earth could you go? The United Cigar Store, on Barrington Street in downtown Halifax. Nova Scotia.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">This place is so obscure that I can’t find a picture of it on google; I looked. It sold cigarettes and cigars (I think it did, anyway), and the rest of the store space was devoted to second-hand books and magazines. There was the obligatory rack of old porn mags (<i>Hustler, Oui, Gallery, </i>and<i> Juggs, </i>which should have been called <i>Hard-Up Women with Back Problems </i>), and if I knew my horror history then like I do now, I would have taken a peek at them to see if I could find an old Stephen King story.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">It was/is the most normal-looking store. Dirty old tile, bright trashy lights, soft drinks and bags of chips up front, a small rotating rack of bestseller hardbacks that had probably been bought at the bookstore in Scotia Square a block over. The bestsellers and candy were a beating heart with the dead and lost books a dying corpse around it. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Some odd things about this place: It had two racks side-by-side, one full of identical copies of the killer-bee disaster novel, <i>The Swarm</i>(Arthur Herzog), and the other full of identical copies of the psycho killer-whale thriller <i>Orca</i> (also by Arthur Herzog). I have no idea why they had hundreds of copies of these two books, or why they didn’t just junk them all. Those stupid books stayed there for years and years.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja_jDftZh0jUDgsQ-GDVEzeuXIJqTro1OIqpgJ5BhPU05FbuxoSMQ2iNjCo3aN97wPamQHfVVxywMIBANf5FYB3oZyycbbvUK4RTZ_vZKDePANKLtTR7Zx2tVvqEI01OK1v5IXJT2-36Do/s1600/Pan-24686+Herzog+The+Swarm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja_jDftZh0jUDgsQ-GDVEzeuXIJqTro1OIqpgJ5BhPU05FbuxoSMQ2iNjCo3aN97wPamQHfVVxywMIBANf5FYB3oZyycbbvUK4RTZ_vZKDePANKLtTR7Zx2tVvqEI01OK1v5IXJT2-36Do/s320/Pan-24686+Herzog+The+Swarm.jpg" width="196" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFVbctbiTYPZ7-LB9LEMruvHbjEirRWhdkXHwmE6nGYji5WLFxpR_KsrVsnvdKg7uqIDEQzOTb25Lm9eTYUQAVjh38X0EzDHv-yACkeuHgsSmm-ReNkn3Dnhdq50mE_UOZqcaJguAjpM5-/s1600/100569.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFVbctbiTYPZ7-LB9LEMruvHbjEirRWhdkXHwmE6nGYji5WLFxpR_KsrVsnvdKg7uqIDEQzOTb25Lm9eTYUQAVjh38X0EzDHv-yACkeuHgsSmm-ReNkn3Dnhdq50mE_UOZqcaJguAjpM5-/s320/100569.jpg" width="203" /></a></div><br />
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</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The other racks had regular, non-identical second-hand books, and a wonderful horror selection. The lovely schlock I waded through when I went to that place! For one of my birthdays a friend of mine just gave me a stack of random novels he bought in bulk from that store. I loved it, because the horror rack in a second hand store is like a beach full of flotsam and old condoms, with treasure buried somewhere beneath.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-TipDsf65D1qa6J8aBs8tlQRHA9t1nSj9HDd_d1zPSMg7cNASvRWTKcSaTnRNW28WyAlOYMxlWEhtgc5fIfCq0KGrncEONXKsiy_Lv6z6USVkXJMOd7BINMZeemEO6KWlxwoLI2kffJ2-/s1600/5_31_2010_10_14_31_PM.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-TipDsf65D1qa6J8aBs8tlQRHA9t1nSj9HDd_d1zPSMg7cNASvRWTKcSaTnRNW28WyAlOYMxlWEhtgc5fIfCq0KGrncEONXKsiy_Lv6z6USVkXJMOd7BINMZeemEO6KWlxwoLI2kffJ2-/s320/5_31_2010_10_14_31_PM.JPG" width="187" /></a></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">What did I find there? All the old James Herbert rat-apocalypse books <i>(The Rats</i>, <i>Lair,</i> and <i>Domain</i>), the classic <i>Incubus,</i> by Ray Russel (which I’ve written about), a wonderful coming-of-age werewolf novel called <i>The Orphan,</i> by Robert Stallman, and an absolutely enraging piece-of-shit called<i> Spawn of Hell </i>(William Schoell), which was about strange slug creatures with the faces of their victims’ relatives grafted onto their heads. I re-read <i>Spawn of Hell</i> whenever I wanted to get mad. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The United Cigar Store is still there. The incongrous racks of identical Herzog novels are gone, thanks to the 21<span style="font: 9.0px Cochin;"><sup>st</sup></span> century business climate. But a lot of the old second-hand books (the horror in particular) are still there. I would guess that a few of them have not been touched in twenty years. They’re probably lousy with bedbugs and crumbling to acidic dust, although I like to think they’re still there, fine but just a little faded, waiting to be picked up for a buck or two. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">If you’re ever in Halifax, that store is still there, and still in the most central location in Halifax. It’s mainly second-hand, but a lot of stores in Halifax are second-hand. There is a huge second-hand bookstore in the AT&T mall at the corner of Spring Garden and Barrington, and it looks far more dusty and decrepit than The United Cigar Store, if you are so inclined. You can go to these places, or you can go to the wonderful and impossibly ancient Lawrence’s Books here in Vancouver, and see the strange and wondrous world of things that people gave up because they had to move, spring-clean, make a few bucks, get divorced, or clean out a house after a death. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The inarguable weight and size of books, their tendency to rot and smell, make them automatically antique and obsolete before their time. There were second-hand bookstores long before ebooks, and they have always been places where the slightly oddball among us have come to search for things others might not have valued. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The second-hand books will moulder as we buy less physical books. Second-hand stores are going to disappear, and the only thing left will be the typical box of 50-cent paperbacks at the Goodwill or the small-town antique store. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">So if you see a second-hand store, go in. Look around, remember. No one will make a second-hand store for second-hand bookstores. </div><div><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-49054905865352164852011-12-31T21:43:00.000-08:002011-12-31T21:44:01.788-08:00'Return to Bloodfart Lake': I'm drunk so don't judge me, godammit<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeSmtD4jHSqtbP7P9b6OXmFDZ88yCE5Ix8afeLs9qpkD-KcfD2Vys1UOxT5OiRYQbcRbwiYrjfCrfBkxTjx1KwXbp0zuGRihSKRUTldUKkBOzg9van9P7lrbbp1oXhB3-V8WZmOJkNmoql/s1600/returnbloodfartlake-dvd.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeSmtD4jHSqtbP7P9b6OXmFDZ88yCE5Ix8afeLs9qpkD-KcfD2Vys1UOxT5OiRYQbcRbwiYrjfCrfBkxTjx1KwXbp0zuGRihSKRUTldUKkBOzg9van9P7lrbbp1oXhB3-V8WZmOJkNmoql/s320/returnbloodfartlake-dvd.jpg" width="223" /></a></div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Don't even talk to me about this. It's New Year's Eve, my wife is at work, and since it's 2012 in two and a half hours, the world just might end, if the ancient Mayans have anything to say about it, not to mention the makers of a shitty apocalyptic John Cusack movie (which had its effects done by a firm based in Victoria, BC!)</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Did I mention the kids are in bed, I'm alone, and I'm full of beer and prosecco? I shouldn't mention that. One should not drink and drive, nor should one drink and blog. But here I am, and I want to shout to the world that there is a movie coming out called <i>Return To Bloodfart Lake. </i>Not only that, the lead actress in this wonderful movie has big hooters and looks good in a red bikini.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Is this a scam? No idea. I've never seen the first movie, or this movie, which is its sequel. Horror movies and horror novels are full of boners, bloopers, and crapheaps that we're supposed to hail as brilliant even though most of them are an Elephant-in-the-Room awkward tour-de-force of bad writing and rape, but I've never heard of the <i>Bloodfart Lake </i>franchise. Is Bloodfart Lake near Camp Crystal Lake? I don't know. All I know is that it's the second installment, and the third instalment might be called <i>Bloodfart Lake III: The Sharting. </i></span><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i> </i>But the Bloodfart Lake saga is just the tip of the iceberg. There's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0815165/" target="_blank">'The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror'</a>, which I haven't seen but you are welcome to try out. Even worse than that is the cinematic opus known as '<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274518/" target="_blank">Gayniggers from Outer Space'</a>. These are real movies, sort of. I guess they're movies, in that they were shot with cameras and real actors were hired and maybe paid with food or perhaps oxycontin.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> It's happened. It used to be that taking pictures cost money - you had to really think about what you wanted to capture on film. That shit had to go to a developer, and he held your pics hostage until you paid him money. If you had a bad hair day, or if the boyfriend you included in your family photo turned out to be an philandering meth addict, you sucked it up and pasted those pictured in your album, because otherwise there was no picture. No memory. No nothing. Photos were made from the hooves of living creatures, and you had to think of that every time you pressed 'click' on your camera.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Then digital cameras arrived, and photo labs dropped out of existence. That was pretty cool, actually. You could take a picture and have it printed at Futureshop or Costco, or just with your printer.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> But now you can make a movie on your phone. The next generation of smartphones will carry 8mp cameras (a lot of the droids already have 8mp but Apple had to wait for the 4s to get on the 8mp bandwagon), and these days everyone can make a movie. This is both good and bad. Good in that someone in Nigeria can make a cinematic masterpiece without whoring him/herself out; bad in that my kids might be making homemade porn while I'm reading the newspaper in the next room. Bad in that someone might make <i>Return to Bloodfart Lake. </i></span><br />
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</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Edit: It turns our that <i>Terror at Bloodfart Lake</i> is available on youtube. You can see it <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu77E-838m4" target="_blank">here</a>. I skimmed through it - it looks like a few goth boys and girls made it while they were drunk and high. I doubt anyone got paid. They just ran Dad's camcorder and called it a movie. Not only that: I looked at the poster that I posted at the beginning of this article. It's clearly a picture of some girl's head shopped onto the body of an innocent bikini model.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-62166685213240503282011-12-30T09:45:00.000-08:002011-12-30T09:48:18.598-08:00'The Adventures of Tintin'<div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZtGQJXqi2hibVM0oe7Iw5D27UvOhdcYJ9U_JxfZR2mNR-ZjUZwa_BMmnfp3GRVX7mstXIMniC0TjdaO1SXTFVuvL0q_O7AUhCQKVJNVswqHQceGYF0BsXfO24b3L2rfo9g4zxG5ti9ZcN/s1600/3a164ead9aded304_2011_the_adventures_of_tintin-1920x1440.preview.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZtGQJXqi2hibVM0oe7Iw5D27UvOhdcYJ9U_JxfZR2mNR-ZjUZwa_BMmnfp3GRVX7mstXIMniC0TjdaO1SXTFVuvL0q_O7AUhCQKVJNVswqHQceGYF0BsXfO24b3L2rfo9g4zxG5ti9ZcN/s320/3a164ead9aded304_2011_the_adventures_of_tintin-1920x1440.preview.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Well, it had to happen. We had to go see <i>The Adventured of Tintin.</i></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">It’s in 3-D. I don’t know about you, but 3-D in the theatres is terrible. The new 3-D flatscreens are miles better. To top it off, the theatre was full of people trying to fill the emotional void left by boxing day, so the theatre was crowded and we were late to begin with. We had trouble finding seats. When we finally did get settled in, we were three rows from the front, so I’m now worried that I’ve given myself and my kids brain cancer. Then, to top everything off, about a quarter of the way through the movie, a teenage girl barfed all over her seat. She and her father left, but a moment later we were engulfed by the odour of vomit. So we had to move and find new seats. Somewhere amidst all this, I saw the movie and I will do my damn best to tell you what it’s like.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-Jystc1r1uE9VTae_IeJmlfPTBW7CTNc6JctjudS55tFRZ-BUtAOuBAX1qvefaWsNRqqxnzoDgMhdkLEPOIqC-EJapWKtJ-k7XEFTjWzvnjzesLk4YgJOxglza9K01DJbYWTHse3DaGN7/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-Jystc1r1uE9VTae_IeJmlfPTBW7CTNc6JctjudS55tFRZ-BUtAOuBAX1qvefaWsNRqqxnzoDgMhdkLEPOIqC-EJapWKtJ-k7XEFTjWzvnjzesLk4YgJOxglza9K01DJbYWTHse3DaGN7/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">It’s live action/animated, using a technique called motion capture, but you already knew that. It’s directed by Stephen Spielberg; Jamie Bell, the kid from Billy Elliot, plays Tintin, and Andy Serkis (Gollum, Caesar from <i>Rise of the Planet of the Ape</i>s) plays Captain Haddock; Daniel Craig plays the bad guy who was unfairly engendered from a completely harmless character from the comics. But you already knew everything I’ve just told you. Is it a good movie? Does Spielberg <i>et al</i> do a reasonably good job tackling the mighty mythology that is <i>Tintin</i>?</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Yes. Mostly. There are hiccups and misteps throughout, and there are a few too many horrendously intricate and incomprehensible action scenes, but on the whole the vehicle drives. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The racism, animal cruelty, and colonial patronizing of the original comics are largely gone, but that had to be done. The Thompsons are still there, and still inexplicable as ever (twins? Lovers? Colleagues? Members of a local make-work collective for the mentally handicapped? It’s never been explained). Captain Haddock is as gloriously dangerous and drunk as he has ever been.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The movie is a amalgam of <i>The Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham’s Treasure,</i> and <i>The Crab with the Golden Claws</i>, with an entirely new villain thrown in. The action has been upped, so that Tintin and the Captain have to discuss the complex plot (for the audience’s sake) while fighting bad guys and running for their lives. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">But here it is in a nutshell: Tintin discovers a model ship called The Unicorn, which hides a secret, or part of a secret, that leads to buried treasure. He teams up with Captain Haddock, whose ancestor hid the treasure under the sea, and together they traverse the globe in a race with the bad guys to find the last piece of the puzzle. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">As I mentioned before, the actions scenes are overdone, but there is one massive and exciting exception.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilHWgHKHrSDlo-7lv5fEy-RdNnxPAf8CjnNE-SiL77Rkmsyy4h9PkDaljf48xTxtWCG03crbccnO4OTd5-kB8xZMz0WcCMZN1kwJqhE5-Dz_bzJeurMJqHfTe3O8bNRwU4l7wbcMYLBmng/s1600/Tin+Tin+in+Desert.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="232" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilHWgHKHrSDlo-7lv5fEy-RdNnxPAf8CjnNE-SiL77Rkmsyy4h9PkDaljf48xTxtWCG03crbccnO4OTd5-kB8xZMz0WcCMZN1kwJqhE5-Dz_bzJeurMJqHfTe3O8bNRwU4l7wbcMYLBmng/s320/Tin+Tin+in+Desert.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidTuAG8vS-ixlp09qPGb3HIaOFOQHKAJCDuracPWEEuMH63BO4sBVdzY35ri9AzSTwHGWgj0QlBudyyinatm1SR0RWZLn6ktwl7DIEVRIwixLOh9ywGv0oX2BB4rUyLRly99DlbQl5hUoX/s1600/TT2-224x300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidTuAG8vS-ixlp09qPGb3HIaOFOQHKAJCDuracPWEEuMH63BO4sBVdzY35ri9AzSTwHGWgj0QlBudyyinatm1SR0RWZLn6ktwl7DIEVRIwixLOh9ywGv0oX2BB4rUyLRly99DlbQl5hUoX/s1600/TT2-224x300.jpg" /></a></div>In <i>The Secret of the Unicorn</i>, Captain Haddock recounts to Tintin his ancestor’s unsuccessful fight to repel pirates from the <i>Unicorn</i>, and his eventual revenge on those pirates, and their leader, Red Rackham. It’s the single most exciting story in the entire Tintin oeuvre. How exciting is it? Well, Captain Haddock has to get horrendously drunk and <i>destroy his apartment</i> to do the story justice. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The best scene in the movie is when Red Rackham’s crew descends upon the<i> Unicorn </i>and a massive pitched battle breaks out. It’s three-dimensional in both imagery and concept as the brigands come at Sir Francis Haddock from all corners, as the pirate ship itself gets tangled in the <i>Unicorn</i>’s mast and swings back and forth like Calculus’s pendulum and everything, including Red Rackham’s cape, dances with flame. This battle sequence alone is worth the price of admission. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The movie ends with the possibility of a sequel, with Peter Jackson at the helm. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Steven Spielberg was a great admirer of Hergé, and Hergé was a great admirer of his. Both men are/were exponents of adventure storytelling and fantasy, and both men will be remembered and admired for generations. Hergé’s simple, shadowless drawings seem to become richer and more complex as time marches on, and Spielberg’s older works (<i>ET, Duel, Jaws</i>) shine more readily than anything done by James Cameron, because they were done with the same ephemeral and linear magic he shares with Hergé. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Now I’m going to wait, very patiently, for Spielberg and Jackson to tackle Asterix. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-21419314782361424292011-12-24T00:16:00.000-08:002011-12-24T00:21:08.784-08:00Prometheus - Oh yes. Very much oh yes.<div style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></div><div style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><i><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Click to Embiggen. Really, you should see this bigger.<br />
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<i> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Let's see. There's the original<i> Alien</i> (Ridley Scott), <i>Alien 2</i> (James Cameron), and the very elegiac<i> Alien 3</i>, directed my David Fincher. <i>Alien Resurrection </i>followed (Jean-Pierre Jeanet), but they had to clone Ripley in order to continue the mythology.</span></div><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Then Alien vs. Predator came along, with not Ripley connection whatsoever, and then<i> Alien vs. Predator: Requiem,</i> again with no Ripley, who is essentially the glue that holds the mythology together. These movies don't count - why? Because <i>Prometheus</i>, that's why. Ridley friggen Scott has come along to make <i>Prometheus</i>, which is an extreme prequel to the whole mess. </span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/NIBiimdaj3A?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This movie looks so damn beautiful and honest I just want to curl up and revert to my childhood. Apparently it's gory and claustrophobic, but whatever. The youngsters on the internet aren't bothered by gore, trust me; they watch the real thing while they eat their noodles and keep porn on another tab. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> I'm not the sort of guy who has contacts in the film biz (not even here in Vancouver), but I can look at the title, the hints the director is dropping, and the general feel of the trailer, to give you an inkling of what this movie might be about. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> Prometheus was a greek Titan, and there are many myths about him. He tricked Zeus, and stole fire from Him to give to humanity. He is also credited for creating the human race out of clay (and misapplying the genitals and giving cause to homosexuality, according to one Roman comedy writer), and in some instances he gave empirical knowledge to humanity as well. In some ways, he is similar to the biblical snake in the Garden of Eden, because he gave self-awareness, in other way Zeus is a tyrant and Prometheus saved us all by giving us life and sentience. Either way, Prometheus was a brash, tricky figure who liked to mess with great powers. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> So how does with figure into Ridley Scott's <i>Prometheus</i>? Well, we're probably Prometheus, and the Aliens are the deadly knowledge we attempt to steal. Or, we're the knowledge, the infection, and somehow we were set free to wreak havoc, and the Aliens are the Eagle who as punishment eats out Prometheus's liver. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> The myth of Pandora's Box in in the Promethean myth as well. She came from Zeus in retaliation for the theft of fire, and her opened box released disease and death. But that's too simple. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> I hope there's more. I hope it isn't the<i> Aliens-are-the-great-secret-that-we-try-to-exploit-for-profit-and-we-will-pay-for-our-folly-by-being-eviscerated-and-turned-into-egg-incubators </i>schtick that has been so prevalent in all the other movies. I hope there's some great origin story<i> a la</i> Battlestar Galactica that Ridley Scott thinks up. </span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW98tsq8fLs3DGhwi4v-2Z1rTW7Pqz4lYTvPsHpEzZ5tbpgV2TFc9QMkFxj2nZzIlCHbxn58DzkUAUNFIhMwQ7jlrQeDr-ZeBSGCw5cVtP8-aMlBx1g1lBZk4bubvMAXIyrdI0lEIPhIFV/s1600/Space+Jockey+Prometheus+Image.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW98tsq8fLs3DGhwi4v-2Z1rTW7Pqz4lYTvPsHpEzZ5tbpgV2TFc9QMkFxj2nZzIlCHbxn58DzkUAUNFIhMwQ7jlrQeDr-ZeBSGCw5cVtP8-aMlBx1g1lBZk4bubvMAXIyrdI0lEIPhIFV/s1600/Space+Jockey+Prometheus+Image.png" /></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> I think there might be. In the brief glimpses in the trailer that I can see, I can see ancient and impossible structures on the planet the protagonists are exploring. I can see origin and intelligence there, and maybe something that hints at our own origins as well. But the structures in the trailer, the alien design so famously conceptualized by HR Geiger, look so very Lovecraftian. </span><br />
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<div style="font-family: Times; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We call it <i>Lovecraftian</i>, because Lovecraft himself was the first writer to dedicate his life to the prospect of impossibly ancient things that dwell in the far cosmos and spell our doom. But if you read Jules Verne, HG Wells, or basic greek mythology, you can see the places where L</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">ovecraft went before he began to write.</span> </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We're afraid of the unknown, that there just might be God out there, or perhaps even more than one god. We're afraid of horrors that we might discover, and our greatest fear is that we cannot help but continue to look for them. Horror is what killed the curious cat. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-83039368207526101832011-12-16T01:11:00.000-08:002011-12-18T14:25:22.062-08:00Living with A Stoner<div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">During my third year of university, I had to find a roommate. I couldn’t afford a place of my own. So I did what most people do: I looked at the walls of the Student Union Building (which, at McGill University, was called the William Shatner Centre, and no I am not making this up) where there were housing ads taped alongside the fliers for protests marches and student social clubs.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I was embryonically stupid then. I wouldn’t say I was a genius now, but I’m surprised that back then I didn’t need an artificial lung to take over when I forgot to breath. I met a fellow I’ll call Murray, and despite the filth of his apartment (where we would live), I agreed to live with him. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I arrived to begin school in September and the horror started. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I might have been stupid, but he was barely human. He went through terrible marijuana binges where he would shut himself into an the airtight front room (the door would be closed and the door to the balcony was sealed off with insulating plastic), smoke himself into a stupor, and watch TV all night. In the morning before I went to school, I would sometimes look through the window on the door to the front room to see what lay beyond: Murray sprawled on the floor in an insensate heap amidst his twisted sleeping bag, his rear end more often then not poking out from his partly pulled-down shorts. Grapefruit halves with dead cigarettes stubbed out inside them and upside down pizza boxes littered the floor around him. It was almost exactly akin to the scene in <i>The Texas Chainsaw Massacre</i> when a young women enters a murderer’s house and sees a living room so terribly, insanely messy that it seems to ooze evil and menace. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I often got ready for class as quietly as possible so I didn’t wake him up. If he did wake up, he would emerge from the fetid depths of the front room, the sleeping bag wrapped around his upper body but his bare legs and sagging underwear exposed, to shuffle into the bathroom and pee, farting like an old man. Then he would shuffle back to go asleep. I never understood why he slept in the front room like he was a stoned and hibernating bear; his own bedroom was four feet away.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">When I got ready for class, I often put the phone off the hook. Otherwise his mother would call, wake him up, and I would have to look at him. His mother was rightly worried about him : Murray’s little brother was in his first year of Engineering; his older sister was doing her MBA at Yale. She was worried about her disappointing middle child. So she called every morning if I let her. When Murray would answer the phone, the conversation went like this (I heard this almost every morning so it’s burned into my head. You have to imagine his Montreal urban anglophone accent, which sounds a little like a New York accent. You also have to imagine that she owned the building and he was sort of this half-assed disaster landlord who did absolutely nothing, for himself or anyone.)</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“Hi mom. Yeah, I was up. No, I’m going to head out and look for a job. Yeah. I have to go. I have to go. <i>Good</i>-bye. <i>Good</i>-bye.<i> Good</i>-bye. I have to…<i> Good</i>-bye. Okay, I’m hanging up the phone. <i>Good</i>-bye. <i>Good-</i>bye.” This went on for many minutes, and sometimes happened several times in a morning. Sometimes, on snowy days, she’d arrange for him to clear the walk in front of his uncle’s Jewish tombstone store. That was all he ever did when I lived with him. He was a perversely fascinating creature, and like Gollum, he didn’t know how hideous he had become. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">But somehow, <i>somehow</i>, through those twists of fate that happen to stoners and the unfortunate idiots who live with them, our female roommate left (understandably - she probably would have killed him if she hadn’t left), and Murray rented a room to someone even worse that he was. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Joey was in his early thirties and psychotic. By psychotic, I mean he talked and screamed to himself, and kept a long line of pill bottles on the mantle of his room. Thank God he was smaller than me, or else I would have been terrified of him. Murray hated him, and for a while we sort of bonded over our fear and loathing of this chaotic and doomed man.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Then the inevitable violence happened. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Joey liked to smoke when he wasn’t coasting on his many suppressants. The deal he had struck with Murray was that he would smoke with his door closed, since I hated the smell. But Joey began to smoke with the door open, and the cigarette smoke reached me. It was the end of the year, it was getting hot in that Montreal way, and the apartment was on the third floor. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">One day I charged into the living room, hot, angry, and infuriated that the smell of cigarettes had come into my room. I yelled that he had to close his door. He came out. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">“I need the fresh air, fuck!” he yelled (the use of the word ‘fuck’ is at the end of a sentence is a Montreal thing, and it comes from Quebec french)</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I charged and he met me in the middle of the living room. For a few seconds I had him in a headlock, him grunting in rage, and then I was saying: “Joey. Stop. We have to stop. Jesus Christ, we have to <i>stop</i>.” I let him go. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">After he rose, I held out my hand, he held out his, and we shook. He went back into his room. I looked at my arm, where there was a gash that had somehow opened during that encounter. When Joey came out to the kitchen to fix himself a snack and smiling as if nothing had happened, he had a flap of skin two inches long hanging from his arm. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Beyond my initial and heat-driven rage at Joey, I wasn’t angry had him. He was ill and couldn’t be anything else. I was angry at Murray for renting a room to this man. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I moved two days later, Murray screaming at me as I carried my stuff to a rented van. He said I owed him money, and I insisted that he’d made my life hell and that I owed him nothing. I probably should have payed him something, but hate is a powerful motivator when you realize you can effect revenge through money. I wanted his parents to be angry at their 26 year-old son who couldn’t run their investments and rented to psychotic welfare cases. But more than anything I just wanted to be finished, to not contribute a single cent more of my worth to sustaining what I realized was a rotating door system of college kids and crazy people who lived with this useless man-child.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">This happened a long time ago, but I still think of it from time to time, and wonder if Murray (who would now be in his mid-forties) is still offering himself as a roommate to bewildered college kids, or if the great wave of money and gentrification that swept through downtown Montreal swept him up as well, along with his parents’ apartment buildings and the tombstone store up the street. I almost hope not. He added some clownish colour to that great city and I learned a lot when I lived with him. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-13740056430263156112011-12-15T00:12:00.001-08:002011-12-15T00:12:48.681-08:00I won't buy Limited Editions<div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I’m never going to buy a limited edition. There, I said it.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I prefer just plain old bookstore books, or second-hand books. Some of my best books have been second-hand. I’ve bought <i>A Tree Grows in Brooklyn</i>, <i>Ulysses</i>, all my Doris Lessing books, <i>Blood Meridian</i>, and TED Klein’s <i>Dark Gods </i>and <i>The Ceremonies</i> - all at the second hand store. I spent less than thirty bucks for all those books and I treasure them.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I should give you a little background here - for nearly a decade I was taking care of two children. When my first son was six months I was with him full-time, and when the second was three months old I was full time with him as well. I was up to my elbows in clothe diapers and baby shit, and I didn’t have much time for anything. I’d been a devoted reader of horror fiction but I’d fallen away from it. I no longer went to horror movies and I didn’t read very much at all. When the oldest started going to school, I slowly began to emerge from my self-imposed cultural exile and dared to read again. Since publishing in general has become so web-centred, I got on the internet and looked for horror. Every horror writer on earth has a website; there are discussion boards everywhere. There are a whole lot of horror authors I never would have known existed if I hadn’t ventured out and looked at the online world of dark fiction. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I learned a lot about limited editions - beautiful, signed, numbered and lettered (whatever that means), new or re-released, and on sale for fifty or eighty bucks a pop with the near certainty it will sell for mega-cheddah on the secondary markets. Every few days a little notice will pop up : <i>Hey kids, there are only ten copies left of </i><b><i>Satan’s Zombie Ate My Gramma </i></b><i>so you’d better set eighty bucks aside! </i></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I can’t bring myself to ever buy a limited edition. I can’t understand why anyone else would want to buy one either. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Whenever I’m out in public I see people reading books. Like anyone, I read the covers. I’ve only ever seen two horror authors read by the general public - King and Koontz. No one else, save for the one time I saw a young woman with<i> World War Z.</i> King and Koontz are the biggest names in the biz, and take up entire shelves. Incidentally, the other two space-takers in the shelves of bookstores (at least in Canada) are women: Kelly Armstrong and Laurell K. Hamilton. All four sell a tonne of books, and their books are easy to find.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I understand that the industry is suffering, that it’s hard to get on those shelves in the first place, and hence the mail-order, small-press route many authors are taking. But… why not ebooks? Why not cheap physical books that are made cheaply and ship fast? Why the necessity to guarantee that your reader’s have received a book that no one else will be able to read? I think books should be made available for anyone who wants to buy them, but that’s just me. I like to think there’s a place for the reader that no one talks about - the guy who wants a quick and easy horror book for the weekend. When done, it will be either given away or lost under that bed amid the dust-bunnies and old plates. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I can see the logic: if a books comes out in limited numbers, and there is no way to read it in any other form save by that limited, numbered edition bound in pixie-hide, then your primitive brain tells you that it must be something special. Yet whenever I’ve read a borrowed copy, or read the previous incarnation of a book that has become a collector’s-item re-release of a classic horror novel, I’ve been unimpressed. I get the feeling that if you dusted the mystery off this book that has rarified itself to near archeological status, it wouldn’t stand a chance next to King or Koontz. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">So what are we buying when we buy a book that is designed to become a collectible, much like those plates or coins you see on the infomercials? I have no idea. I’d rather just read a good book. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-12796115280547320562011-12-10T00:02:00.000-08:002011-12-10T16:47:37.863-08:00'Shame' - Can we talk about our global porn addiction?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7vNr3fztzns0hb6snVC5UPEPjawG6LZXCzO2nPvnRlOui-mp2uvrj3TIyb8pnpAugAsvJxcn0xFL3jDRvDTHcUmTg2taHVK0GAqjHIBZgvdkNlY2eeRXl7QVtipc31ZmtP3kC4SH11K_I/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7vNr3fztzns0hb6snVC5UPEPjawG6LZXCzO2nPvnRlOui-mp2uvrj3TIyb8pnpAugAsvJxcn0xFL3jDRvDTHcUmTg2taHVK0GAqjHIBZgvdkNlY2eeRXl7QVtipc31ZmtP3kC4SH11K_I/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I can’t wait to see <i>Shame.</i> I’ve heard opposing reviews - it’s slow, arty, it’s about subject that we’ve become far too prudish about; it’s brilliant, brave, about a subject we’ve become too unhealthily obsessed about. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">It’s about sex addiction, and thank God someone has made a movie about it. I’ve seen movies about alcoholism, drug addiction, and even gambling addiction, but never legitimate sex addiction. It’s high time someone’s tackled it, brought it out into the open. I’d love for people to see this movie and maybe ask if they see parts of themselves staring back. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I’ve heard a lot of talk about addiction - how to solve it, what causes it. What I keep hearing is this - you become more addicted when the supply is readily accessible and cheap.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Let’s talk about porn. When I was a teenager, my friends and I had to walk across town and find the one East Indian corner store that rented VHS porn. You had to pay<i> real money </i>to see porn. You brought it home; it was a big, square piece of hollow black plastic, and we had to keep it safe. You had to hide it someplace away from your parents. When you and your friends nervously watched the stuff, you had to keep your hand on the remote in case your mother wandered downstairs in her nightgown to see just what the hell you all were doing. And then, when you were done and it was the next day, you had to bring that tape back to the store. You had to rent, carry, hide, and then return pornography by a certain date. Porn was like a library book. Think on that for a moment. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I can’t quite explain the pre-internet, corporeal nature of porn. You had to rent the stuff, or search around in your dad’s closet where he kept it in an old suitcase. Your dad’s porn was the strangest porn: glossy European magazines where skinny men with moustaches and black socks fucked dishwater blonde girls who never stopped smiling as though they were smelling strudel straight from the oven. My own dad had all those magazines locked away alongside something called <i>The Anarchist’s Cookbook </i>(19171), which taught you how to make bombs, grow marijauna, pick locks, and hack old payphones. Porn took trouble to acquire and keep, caused trouble when it was found, and was hard to find if you were underage. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Then the internet arrived. ASCII code could be converted into pictures. Porn was free, and for the first time, we found that freedom had nothing to do with cost. Porn was released, free to meet other porns and have pornlets. Porn had had it pretty rough before; it was once trapped in steaming, sticky theatres, forced into hardcore labor rooms where the doors were hung with seedy beads, kidnapped and held for ransom in the sun-baked California warehouses. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Now it’s confusing. No one pays for porn, but yet the stuff is still being made. I can order it on my cable pay-per-view, but what would be the point of that? Porn is everywhere. It’s easy to find, to acquire, effortless to store in the limitless and Stygian depths of our computers. Yes, we all leave massive, day-glo, virtual computer porn trails like we were massive and horny slugs, and we would be fucked if a computer tech were to go over our hard drives. But what are the odds of a cyber CSI team confiscating our machines? There are billions of us!</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Which leads me back to <i>Sham</i>e, and what it might mean for us. One of our most potent drugs is free of both cost and risk; our kids are consuming it at twelve and younger. Porn is part and parcel of sex addiction.This movie could start a conversation.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I’m not anti-sex; I’m not going to be like Ted Bundy on the eve of his execution and conveniently blame everything on porn; I won’t suggest we start banning desires. But this movie could at least, much like the pro hockey discussion still in its infancy about concussion, start us talking about this massive and interconnected beehive of masturbation stations, and what it means for the brains of our future generations. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/62nelnMXW3M" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8322974238045281221.post-69989210412334134772011-11-24T23:22:00.000-08:002011-11-24T23:22:59.688-08:00Some Books on Puberty, Because I'm a Geek parent<div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_050ME5ir1rNIp-BlYAksg68YcpO69uJFrC1egtQ4zG5afQoeGP6o8DrvJVJSfTGDsvI36sx2kNgD0dLCpjcOWjX_80Z7PMpkZaPWLb2LM9owG_9xcvMB7HSujZwh2PHJc6aC9zkIe8U8/s1600/whats_happening_to_me-peter_mayle.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_050ME5ir1rNIp-BlYAksg68YcpO69uJFrC1egtQ4zG5afQoeGP6o8DrvJVJSfTGDsvI36sx2kNgD0dLCpjcOWjX_80Z7PMpkZaPWLb2LM9owG_9xcvMB7HSujZwh2PHJc6aC9zkIe8U8/s320/whats_happening_to_me-peter_mayle.gif" width="297" /></a></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">A few days ago a package from Amazon came in the mail. There were some regular kids’ books, and then two not so regular: <i>What’s Happening to Me? </i>and <i>Where did I Come From?, </i>both by Peter Mayle. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 15.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><i></i></div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">These two are classic texts in the puberty genre. They’re not too judgmental, and the facts are almost completely correct save for one notable exception - perhaps to reassure insecure pubertal boys, the book calmingly states that although penises may cover a wide range of sizes when flaccid, they are all generally the same size when erect. Any woman who’s been with more than one man, and any man who’s seen porn, <i>knows </i>this is not true. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">The night they arrived, my wife and I leafed through <i>What’s Happening to Me?</i> while our eight year-old leafed through <i>Where did I come from?</i> in his room. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHth5HQWYEWTLGDehVuiEq_c_TOIa50IBFr8Cde9bRy9s3OGyx09SSN7KaMzwTLQBgku7euc09_lwZ22DwFf7xa2gxv_zotxfx4IzyLk1vcXOg3dKwHSy8DJnCHcEgN_O3zIRraB2qYJ1j/s1600/Whats-Happening-Masturbation.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="163" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHth5HQWYEWTLGDehVuiEq_c_TOIa50IBFr8Cde9bRy9s3OGyx09SSN7KaMzwTLQBgku7euc09_lwZ22DwFf7xa2gxv_zotxfx4IzyLk1vcXOg3dKwHSy8DJnCHcEgN_O3zIRraB2qYJ1j/s320/Whats-Happening-Masturbation.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3Z_7pAQiHMQkMmNUoeGSXQ0ioNwarANa6-aPiOIfZOrp5CrjUBWk-3vEXQOzrL6cB47FfNITlMyFjUVBmH3whhLmVo5opgEWbkHZHWKQp5MIUJRN9bmVtnhhd1HD24XBQUrBj4mbx0xji/s1600/Whats-Happening-Wet-Dream.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3Z_7pAQiHMQkMmNUoeGSXQ0ioNwarANa6-aPiOIfZOrp5CrjUBWk-3vEXQOzrL6cB47FfNITlMyFjUVBmH3whhLmVo5opgEWbkHZHWKQp5MIUJRN9bmVtnhhd1HD24XBQUrBj4mbx0xji/s320/Whats-Happening-Wet-Dream.jpg" width="316" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This, boys and girls, is a wet dream. Wet because he's in the<br />
ocean, I suppose. </td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">I’m not complaining about these books. Not at all. I’m glad my kids are going to read them, and not get their sex-ed from the psychotic bed-wetter at school. There’s no religion in these books, no proselytizing. The explanation for masturbation is adorable - kids’ bodies are ready for reproduction at thirteen, but kids aren’t socially or emotionally ready for reproduction. Nature has invented a solution: Rub one out! It’s not bad, but sometimes you may feel embarrassed. To illustrate this point, there is a wonderful picture of a tiny, round-bodied little ginger-haired boy sitting in bed with his hands down his pants as a long and judgemental lighting bolt points angrily at him. The books covers feelings, curiosity, and even reassure us that having pubic hair that is not the same colour as the hair on our head is normal. I can’t really complain.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Except… this books makes sex look no different than your average kids’ book. It’s cute and acessible. The boys and girls are little caucasian cherubs that resemble Ewoks or cabbage-patch kids. It demystifies sex and while this is good on the surface, I wish I could tell my kids what I’ve gleaned. I wish I could tell them this:</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; text-indent: 18.0px;">-----------------------------</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Look. Sex is one of the three most primal things we do. The other two are being born, and dying. Being born is something you get out of the way quickly. But the other two are inextricably linked. They are tangled in a greasy Gordian knot that for most of our life-span we pretend does not exist. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">We try not to die, and in the time that we succeed in not dying, we’re trying to have sex. Evolution wired us so that we are fooled into thinking that we have sex for pleasure, but we do it to survive. It’s about passing on enough of your genes so that your death becomes moot. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Got all this, I hope? This means that sex is complicated, and it’s powerful. We’re doing our best, through a combination of internet porn and female empowerment, to make sex seem like a recreational sport. It’s <i>not.</i> It’s both the most umimportant, pleasurable, and fun thing you’ll ever do, and at the same time it is a force that has enslaved populations and countries, toppled kingdoms, fomented mass murder, inspired car design, and was nearly the undoing of an otherwise brilliant and unbeatable American president. It’s spawned massive government-regulated sex industries and made countless innocent children disappear. If you look at someone under the age of thirty, there’s a good chance that he or she is thinking about it. It’s powerful. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Is it something to afraid of, you ask? No. It’s a natural phenomenon, like wax and wane of the moon, or the vast sheets of ice that fall from icebergs in the Newfoundland spring. It’s not different than the leopard seal that hunts penguins, who are hunting food to feed their chicks. It’s life and creation, and I hope you have a chance to be involved in it. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">You don’t want to have kids? You don’t want to join the Circle of Life? That’s fine. I want you to do what makes you happy. You’ve been born, you’re going to have sex, and you will eventually (and I don’t want to think of this) die; you’re doing all three primal things anyway. But every day you will be interacting with people who are on their journeys from, towards, or through these three things. You have to be aware of that, and these earnest and funny little drawings aren’t going to be telling you any of this. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Rather than have you read this, your mother and I are probably going to muddle through your sex education like all parents do, and you’ll recount the awful discomfort you felt when I try to lecture you on ‘taking the gentlemanly precautions’, or when your mother asks you if ‘you really like that girl or whether you’re just using her, because she seems really nice.’ </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">We’ll make mistakes, because we’re trying to educate you on something ephemeral and elemental.</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">In fact, the more I go on, the more futile it seems. How about I change tack and just be practical?</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><br />
</div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;">Wear condoms, know where the clitoris and G-spot are, try not to cheat because you’ll eventually get caught, don’t be too smug to your friends if you find a Friend With Benefits, and above all be nice. Be respectful to strippers or the doorman will have legal reason to beat you up. Porn isn’t a bad thing but I learn to hide it, dammit. </div><div style="font: 14.0px Cochin; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 18.0px;"><i>There. </i>That wasn’t too bad, was it? </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4