Oh Canada!

Keen eyed readers will notice a new link to Kate Beaton's site. It was Lisa who first alerted me to her home-grown cartoony goodness, diverting me from at least two hours of work (thanks Lisa!). Kate is Canadian, so I might conceivably meet her someday. Which would be good because she is clearly someone you want to go out and have a pint or five with. In the meantime I'm going to rely on Kate for all my knowledge of Canadian history, like this gem.

A Very Long Day On The Train

I love to travel by train. Not only is it environmentally friendly, it's quiet, comfortable and I can spend the time reading, writing and catching up with administration. Driving is fun, but time-consuming. Flying is faster, but rarely as productive and never as restful.

One of the great advantages of St Catharines is that there is 10 am train to New York Penn Station every day. It's a long journey -- I've never arrived before 10 pm -- but if you plan it well you can have a very fulfilling day.

Of course, lately it's been hard booking a seat at short notice. I asked a conductor in the cafe car how the gas prices were affecting Amtrak and he said it was crazy, every train was booked solid. Which is good for Amtrak, I just hope it has a corollary effect on the way the system is being run. Because it needs work, especially where a border crossing is concerned.

Take my latest trip back from NY. Torrential rains hit the city the night before and there was chaos at Penn Station as thousands of commuters were stranded by electricity outages on the tracks. Flash flood warnings were out. By the time my 7 am train was up to Yonkers, the Hudson was very high, brown and turbulent, but the worst was over and everything was running smoothly.

And then there was a CRKGRNCH noise. "Uh Oh, that's not good", I thought. Seconds later there was the most almighty wallop and a noise like KGRUDKCRRNCHRRGRUCKRRNNNCHK as pieces of kindling flew past my window and the smell of the brakes grew hotter and hotter.

We had hit a tree.

The train had been passing through a steep cutting and there must have been a sudden landslide. The first crunch must have been a sapling or branch. The second must have been a much larger tree. Nobody was hurt and no windows were broken, but the engine had taken damage and there was wood pulp stuffed into the rubber seals of the windows, pulling them apart.

So we limped into Albany, where we were taken off our car and waited on the platform for replacement stock. After an hour a car was found, the engine was recoupled and we were loaded back on. Unfortunately, because of the delay we had lost our time slot. This meant that whenever another train approached we had to stop and allow it to pass because there's not enough track for two trains going in the same direction, so our one hour delay stretched into two.

Then just outside Niagara Falls, Canada we were delayed another hour because there was already a train in the station. Yep, only one train allowed in the station.

Then there was the usual hour while the customs guys went to each person and quizzed them on why they were entering the country, where were they staying etc. One guy asked all the questions, the other just stood there silently. I think they did the whole train. Two guys.

So I finally got into St C. three and a half hours late. It had been a long, long day and while the rail people were great, I was glad to finally get off the train.
All afternoon people had bitched and moaned. Many were travelling by train for the first time and swore never again, which is a shame because when it works it's a superb way to get from A to B. There will always be unexpected setbacks, but there needs to be more investment in tracks and rolling stock if Amtrak want to capitalize on their sudden windfall in customers.

Oh, and maybe someone can look into streamlining the customs process. Having more than two customs officers per train might be a good place to start.

Some good news, some not so good news

Good news: My brother is arriving tomorrow and will spend my birthday with me.
Bad news: My sister has to have a spinal tap.

The latter item has me pretty upset, even though I was expecting it.

I had put this evening aside to do some blogging, but I can't really think of anything else, so I'll call it a night.

Homo Sapiens is just so Old Hat

Humanity is very restrictive, don't you think? All that bipedalism, opposable thumbs and only two genders to choose feels kind of restrictive. So if you could be a non-human sentient being what would you be? Me, I'd be a Tine (from Vernor Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep). Group minds appeal to me and the Tines have the advantage of being one of a non-insect/biomechanoid group mind. They don't have opposable thumbs, they manipulate tools with teeth and stumpy paws. They can have 360 degree panoramic view. Their personality can change over generations as new members join a pack and old ones die. This process can be voluntary and heterogenous ('loose'-souled people) or controlled like a scientific experiment. I like the idea of having an evolving soul.

What would you be?

One of these things is not like the others

So as I'm waking up yesterday morning, there's a hockey report on the radio.
Hockey news this week has been quite interesting, not that I know anything about it, but as far as I can tell money is being thrown about like confetti. This report is about one of the latest hot signings. Don't ask me to remember his name, we'll call him 'Bob'. In any case this post isn't about him really, it's about the journalist who did a feature on him.

"Before Bob joined the NHL he did something that he doesn't really talk about with his teamates, but he credits it with making him a man."

Blimey, I think, it's a bit early for this sort of thing isn't it?

But it turns out that Bob, who sounds like a nice young man, worked for two years in Las Vegas as a Mormon missionary. The interviewer was terribly excited at all the crime and hardship that nice young Bob had witnessed, police shootouts, dead soldiers crunching underfoot as he went from boarded up door to boarded up door, all the while wearing a suit in 98 degree heat.

"His neighbours were prostitutes, strippers, and crack dealers," intoned the journalist.

Hang on, I thought. That's just not right. Prostitution and dealing crack = illegal. Stripping = perfectly legal. It's Niagara's second biggest industry after tourism. It's not a career choice for everyone, but there's nothing wrong with it per se. At the end of the day it's a way to pay the bills, like everythings else. How dare the interviewer lump them all together like that? Lazy journalism, it ticks me off.

And today's commentators on Quebec's 400th anniversary kept saying that the Irish ambassador was speaking 'Gaelic'. No she wasn't, she was speaking Irish. Gaelic refers to football or what they spoke in Scotland.

Vor really does mean 'Thief'

I watched Eastern Promises on DVD last night. Here are some of my thoughts:
a) Damn, Viggo Mortensen.
b) How much vodka do I have left in the freezer? Better get some more.
c) Cronenberg got the leather jackets spot on.
d) I wonder if compass star tattoos will become the new Maori sleeve as a result of this film?
e) This is the greatest male nude wrestling scene EVAH!
f) Has anyone else noticed that Cronenberg and Mortensen look like father and son? They are the spit of each other.
g) The make up girl in the corner is totally checking out Viggo as he gets his tats applied for a scene. Proper order.
h) Damn, Viggo Mortensen.

Gynoid, not Android

"My name is Divine Endurance. I am feminine. I am twenty-five small units high at the shoulder, and sixty-two small units long from nose to tail tip. I am independent and it is therefore the more flattering when I respond to affection. I am graceful, agile, and especially good at killing things prettily."

I bought Divine Endurance by Gwyneth Jones in my very early teens, essentially because the protagonist was a talking cat. I lucked out, DE is one of sleeper classics of 80s fantasy, one of the first to really get to grips with changing sexual politics of the late 20th century. It confused the hell out of me by having Cho, the young girl travelling with Divine Endurance, initiate a sexual relationship with a bandit/revolutionary leader Anakmati who is also the Royal Lady Derveet. 'How can you have sex with a woman?' I wondered, in all innocence. [True Story from my schooldays from around the same period. On my way to the lunch hall I'm cornered by the Mean Kids. Them: "Are you a Lesbian? Do you know what a lesbian is?" Me: "Yes, they're people from the island of Lesbos, in Greece. Sappho was one." In the hindsight it's no wonder I had no friends].

Divine Endurance is set in that favorite dystopia of the 80s, the post-apocalyptic world. But it looks east instead of west, most of the action takes place in Thailand. It's hard now to understand just how strange that was, most fantasy one way or another still referenced Tolkein, with occidental, nordic perspective. The dominant ethics are Buddhist, the symbolism is Hindu. Fertile women are in purdah, but the politics are gynocentric. At its heart the book is about the power of Eros, both in a sexual sense and in its original Greek sense as the generative force of the universe, simultaneously destroying and creating. There's no happy ending, but it's an absolutely superb story.

Music!

I'm having a great time listening to Ian's 'Best of 2007' CD and a collection of Luke Haines that he sent in the mail. Toptastic.

If you were a small dog Ian, I'd leave you all my money.

The cartoon above is by Tomi Ungerer, who illustrated Jeff Brown's 'Flat Stanley'. It amuses me that TU's personal work is so twisted. I will read 'Flat Stanley' with new eyes.

The Incomparable Mme CKS or What I Will be Doing on my Summer Holidays

One of the irritating things about being an academic is that when summer rolls around you find a lot of people say things like "So, you've got the summer off then?".

And the answer is "No, I will be working bloody hard earning my tenure."

But if I learnt one thing last year it was that you have to make some proper holiday time for yourself where you can leave your home and work offices, not check your email, and avoid your family.

So I'm going to Halifax to visit Queenie in August. People keep telling me that Halifax is a great town, the Dublin of Canada. I'm looking forward to a week of cafe's, vintage clothes stores, gossip, drink, music and maybe even dancing.

I'm so excited I've already got my holiday reading sorted out. I will be bringing Mmm. Chiang Kai-shek's biography and a pulp novel about the Soongs. I'm fascinated by Mme. and her sisters. I'm beginning to consider her something of a role model: intelligent, beautiful, rapacious, and she wears great shoes. Look at the photo. There she is at the Cairo summit in 1943, wearing peep-toes with huge bows. That's style. Shame about the husband, though.

The Secret (Sexy?) History of the Mullet

Ah, the mullet, that famous object of derision. Subject of many a joke and a special issue of Grand Royal (#2 if you must know). Long despised haircut of footballers. Known as the VORKUHILA in Germany. Quintessentially a late 70's style that has refused, despite the ridicule, to die.

Or is it? It turns out that the mullet has a long pedigree. In ancient Rome senators wore purple-bordered togas, married women wore a stola, and catamites wore mullets. Or at least that is the conclusion drawn by J. Pollini, in his article ‘Slave boys for sexual and religious service: images of pleasure and devotion’, in Boyle, A. J. and Dominik, W. J. (2003) (eds) Flavian Rome. Culture, Image, Text. Leiden, Boston. Pollini analysed the distinctive 'business in front, pleasure in back' style and concluded that it invariably appears in the context of 1) homosexual scenes between freeborn and slave men/youths
2) the ancient equivalent of altar boys (who may also have been pressed into service in category 1).
So the next time you see someone wearing a mullet you might want to point this out. Or you may want to keep your internal organs in a non-leaky condition, in which case it's probably better to just walk on by.

Struggles

It's been very tough. I've been going through a lot and with work and all I just couldn't blog. I'm really, really sorry.

Stuff!

I'm currently awaiting the arrival of my stuff. My latest source tells me it's sitting in Montreal. Sometime next week a container of STUFF will be delivered to me. Reading the shipping manifest is hilarious. Just about every item on it is scratched, marked or worn. But I want it anyway.

In preparation for my life to be taken over by a Giza-like pyramid of cardboard boxes, I've been tidying away all non-essential items. As I was packing up books this morning I thought this would probably be a good time to post some random reviews of STUFF I've read (note the emerging pattern?)

So today: Sherri S. Tepper, Grass

Let's see: Oppressive theocracy? Check. Ludicrously oversimplified sexual politics? Check? Female protagonist? Check. Deus ex Machina? Check. If you've read one SST, you've read them all.

Despite this Grass is a thoroughly satisfying read. Convincingly creepy mormon-esque future dystopia, humanity about to be wiped out by a disgusting plague, the mysterious extinction of an alien race, atavistic 'foxhunting' nobility, and miles and miles of lovingly described pampas, all come together very nicely.

So if you like your sci-fi intermingled with musings on the nature of God and humanity's role in creation, and if you've ever fancied getting it on with aliens this might be one to check out.

Like the Interweb needs more pictures of cats...

But they've settled down enough to take the odd photo.


Enda is Shy.


Iarla is Friendly.


Iarla is VERY friendly.


Enda and Iarla are friends.

I Have Cats

Their names are Iarla and Enda (although they might just as well go by their OTHER names: Shredder and Stinky). To date, they won't stay still long enough to be photographed, so here is a picture of a wapiti. I always wanted to know what a wapiti was. Mislead by the Ogden Nash poem "There goes the Wapiti/Hippety-hoppety" my mental image was a cross between a possum and a rabbit. Turns out it's a kind of elk. Isn't the natural world amazing?

Your Ovaries Are Senescing!!!

This week I've had Irish Election Fever. It's similar to the Boogie Woogie Flu in that it sounds entertaining but is ultimately embarrassing. Irish Election fever required listening to 'Morning Ireland', RTE Radio One's current Affairs program. This has brought into high relief the dire quality of CBC radio's morning programs. Little National news, barely any International news and a lot of self-satisfied waffle.

A couple of weeks ago this situation reached its nadir with a week long 'investigative series' on the IVF industry. For a whole week my impressionable, just-waking brain was subjected to a program that was the aural equivalent of a perfect stranger coming up to in the street, grabbing you by the shoulders and shouting 'Your ovaries are senescing! Your ovaries are senescing'. It was that subtle. By Friday I was practically brainwashed into thinking "Hmm, maybe I should try and have a child. Oh no, it's too late." I felt very angry about the whole program, which did nothing except point out the obvious: women have decreased fertility after they are 30, IVF is not a magic bullet. Er, yes, I knew that thank you.

I was even more irritated by how the 'investigative' aspect was utterly neglected. One morning the reporter purred "The first thing women see when they come to the office of Dr B is a wall of baby pictures and thank you notes from the grateful women he has helped to become mothers". I was SHOCKED to hear this, having already listened to many tales of woe from couples who had spent many tens of thousands of dollars on cycle after cycle of unsuccessful IVF, getting into debt, selling their home, sometimes even divorcing from the stress of it all. My first thought would have been to ask the doctor was this ethical, to prime the hopes of women who have only a slim chance of success? But no, the reporter blithely moved on to another zombie-voiced woman saying "freedom in my 20s...didn't think of it...career...I'm 36...doom...dooooom". The whole thing was a textbook case of lazy, derivative journalism. When my pirate ship with eight sails and fifty cannons comes into view I am so going to enforce journalistic standards (also, the penalty for littering will be crucifiction, you have been warned).

New Game

I call it Blogger Scrabble (Scroggle?), although really it's Call My Bluff. I've been playing it for a while now. Every time I've left a comment on Blogger I've amused myself by thinking up definitions for the jaw-breaking passwords of vowels and consonants. So I've decided to share the results in my comments. Lucky you.

Mmm...chocolate

I have made a marvellous and serendipitous discovery. If you get a bar of Green and Black's Mayan Gold chocolate and leave it in your dashboard for months while it freezes, thaws, melts, solidifies, melts, and soldifies again you will get a chocolate bar that resembles Aero, but much, much nicer.

Uglies

This caught my eye the other day, as I was checking out some other stuff on Amazon (for Queenie's Kitty in fact). I'm mentally wiped out after a year of teaching so a teen trilogy sounded just the ticket.

And Scott Westerfield's Uglies series is not bad. It's not a shivers-up-your-arms classic, but it has enough solid interest to make it worth recommending to someone with young teens who might need a little self-image persepctive in their lives.

Briefly, the series (Uglies, Pretties, and Specials) follows the coming of age of Tally Youngblood, a girl who lives in a future environment where our civilization (the Rusties) imploded centuries ago from our dependance on petroleum. Humanity now lives in environmentally harmonious communities with a sophisticated bioscience industry. Most adults live and work in small suburbs. Children leave their parents to be educated up to the age of sixteen in Dorms. In their late teens early twenties they live in the City, eventually meet a partner, and settle down to the suburbs to produce the next generation, all in a sustainable, green kind of way.

The twist in the tale is all about appearance and conformity. At the age of sixteen, every citizen undergoes major cosmetic surgery. The idea is that if everybody is equally good-looking the desire and envy that subconsciously drive human relationships is eradicated. Disagreements, prejudice, discrimination, favouritism - all are done away with. Pre-Operative children are called Uglies and encouraged to disparage themselves, secure in the knowledge that on their sixteenth birthday they will become Pretty. In Pretty City they party all night and sleep all day. Not surprisingly, you can't wait to grow up.

Tally is scheduled to follow the same path as her parents and her peers, until a problem brings her to the attention of the barely-rumoured to exist Special Circumstances. Told by the Specials that she will not be allowed to turn Pretty until she finds and betrays a community of City runaways who refuse to have the operation, she is exiled into the Wild. There she discovers - surprise, surprise - that the transformation from Ugly to Pretty is a not entirely beneficial tradeoff between security and freedom.

To my jaded old eyes many of the bells and whistles features that other teens have raved about - bungee jackets, hoverboards - are the least interesting elements (but work as handy deus ex machina). Far more engaging is Tally's not always successful struggle against her conditioning and her determination to find her own way.

"I ain't no whoremonger"

"so come and see me whenever you want. I ain't coming on to you, I just feel we have a connection."

As opening lines go it takes some beating.

He's a good ol' dude, and clearly has lost many years to rock & roll. Saturday night he tells me about his experiences with astral projection and the signficance of numbers.

"Did ya ever wake up in the middle of the night and it was 4.44? Did ya? I have, several times and it makes you wonder, it really does. Or the other day, it was the fifth hour of the fifth day of the fifth month. Something special there."

People want to make meaning of their lives, it's both sad and wonderful to see them reaching out for such small building blocks.

He's writing his memoires, or rather rambing them. He needs someone to write them down for him. I regretfully tell him that I'm fully booked this summer, but my husband might have some time free. He is disgusted to hear I have a husband. "Now you've broken my heart, ain't no fool like an old fool."

amen to that, brother.

Emotional Rescue

Can't get that song out of my head.

I took the last four days off from work 'cos I was feeling very close to burnout. A combination of end of term blues, exam marking that went on forever, and meeting after meeting as people try to get items cleared before everybody disappears for the summer. Woke up Friday morning and realised everything I had scheduled for the weekend would just have to go and do something carnal to itself (now that I am among so many fresh faced kids I have to watch the SWEARING, which is a shame becuase I do love a bit of imaginative and filthy cursing). This feeling carried over to today, so no school for me.

Instead, I gardened. All weekend I was going to garden centers and clearing up bag after bag of dead winter plant. And feeling so much better. I cannot recommend gardening highly enough as a stress beater.

So now I write this on my porch (see above for lovely view) while drinking a Ricard. All I need now is some quality chat.