June 30, 2008

Fun With Dick and Jane

Dick and Jane are not their real names. They eat in our restaurant every Sunday, always sit at the most wheelchair accessible front table, and always leave a tip. When they were young, Dick played professional lacrosse and Jane did home childcare. I believe Jane still loves kids. They both seem a little shy, but where Dick is soft spoken and staid, Jane is effervescent and engaging. Like it’s an effort for him to joke around, and for her not to. Though he sometimes does, and she sometimes doesn’t. I believe Jane was popular in high school, was once a prom queen and a flirt, and Dick, even though I’ve never once seen him miffed, was not the sort of guy you wanted to mess with.

Jane has advanced MS. I believe they’re both a little self-conscious about it. Sometimes they seem sheepish when I’m out bussing tables, like they’re in my way or something. Dick is still in good shape. He has to be to spend every hour of every day looking after Jane, like helping her use the special, high toilet they bought to replace the old one in our women’s washroom so they could still go out together. It’s so ergonomic and comfortable that sometimes I use it even though I’m not a woman. In the summer, they encourage others to enjoy their backyard swimming pool. I believe Jane sometimes watches from her kitchen window.

MS is thought to be caused by the immune system’s attacking nerves in the brain and spinal chord. There’s muscle pain and weakness, dizziness and nausea, sexual dysfunction and disinterest, incontinence and, of course, depression. And there is no known cure.

I don’t know how I know, but I know Dick’s never had an affair or even entertained the idea of an affair, and never will. MS’s ‘girdle’ of pain around the torso is said to be excruciating, like endless, childless labor. I believe if I had it I’d kill myself before it got too out of hand. I don’t know how I know, but I know Jane minds having to be looked after more than Dick minds having to look after her. In fact I don’t believe he minds at all. I believe he’d be bereft without her. So while I can see some huge losses are being taken here, I’m not sure who’s taking them.

June 16, 2008

Review of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Got an e-mail from my friend Co’s camera cell last week after Obama nailed the Democratic nomination. There's a picture of him looking very presidential and victorious. Co’s all optimistic and happy now that the healing can begin. Cynically, I replied back saying I hope he walks the walk a tenth as well as he talks the talk if by some miracle he gets past our rigged elections and love of brain damaged seniors to score the egg-shaped office in the big house in the bad neighborhood (resulting in two days worth of ‘undeliverable’ bounce-back notifications via google mail servers). But really, I’m rooting for Obama too. Hillary kind of put me off with her idiot-speak and who-do-I-have-to-fuck-to-get-this-job type campaigning much the way hubby Bill put me off with his long-ass autobiography¹ and who’ll-blow-me-now-that-I’m-boss type philandering after he won. ²

But this is not what I want to discuss.

When I heard on the radio the other day that Captain Jonathan Snyder had become Canada’s 85th casualty of the war in Afghanistan by falling into a well during a night patrol, I wondered how the Toronto Sun would handle it. Since they’re not supposed to use words like ‘dead’ in headlining these stories, they usually go with ‘fallen.’ Like, ‘Fallen soldier glad to be home’ or ‘Fallen soldier reunites with fallen comrades.’ But Snyder had already fallen—into a well. So you see the problem. Then, thumbing through the paper this morning, I was uplifted to see, ‘Captain makes his solemn return.’ It’s nice he can still do things. According to the Globe and Mail, his father, a former reservist, has become the first parent of a Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan to condemn the war, calling it ‘stupid.’ If my son were killed falling into a well in a stupid war, I don’t think ‘solemn’ would describe my mood very accurately either, but then I’ve never been stoic that way.

But this also is not what I want to discuss. I want to discuss The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I just keep getting off topic. When Obama is President of North America and the healing has begun, these essays will get a lot shorter and stay more focused. I promise.

Step-daugher-in-law Jillian’s new stepfather loaned her the book, and she loaned it to me. Strange this book’s bloodlessly passing from father to father in this way, fathering being such a potent theme in it.

The Kite Runner is the epic fictional memoir of the narrator’s³ privileged childhood in Afghanistan, his escape to America where he marries and becomes a writer, and then his return to Afghanistan to rescue his orphaned nephew from the evil Taliban. I’m not going to summarize the plot much further. Not because I don’t want to spoil it, but just because I’m lazy—you can’t spoil a good story. One of the many cool insights into Afghan culture presented in the book is their love of endings. Apparently to ‘Spoil the Ending’ is a sort of uniquely American concept (maybe because our fictional journeys themselves are so often uninspired, all we’ve left are endings). Afghans love knowing what’s going to happen. Even the book itself employs beautiful, blatant foretelling. Like how right after his loyal servant and boyhood friend (and, as it turns out, half brother) smiles and says, ‘For you, a thousand times,’ and happily races off to run down the kite he’s just cut from the sky to win some big winter kite-fighting competition and finally make his (their) father proud, he then writes he won’t see that same smile again until twenty years later on a man in an old black-and-white photograph. So you know something bad is about to happen. I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to find it hard to put a book down.

One of my favorite scenes is when he, as a young man in America, knowing it violates honor and the rules of courtship, gives his future wife one of his short stories. He’s proud of his writing. But her father (an ex Afghan general on social assistance because he’s too proud to work) catches him and places it in the garbage, explaining, ‘Here everyone is a story teller.’

It’s a first novel. No surprise there. First novels are almost always the best. They have to make it on writing alone. I was halfway through Turow’s latest, Limitations, when Jillian loaned me the book. I’ll probably not return to it. Even though Turow’s one of my favorite lawyer-cum-writers, this is just more of the same only less. I bought William Gibson’s, Spook County, at Cherry Hill Video a couple weeks ago, and have just begun reading it. I think I’d be finding it an utter disappointment even without Hosseini’s novel fresh in my mind. Hosseini is a medical doctor in California. Medical specifics add credibility, such as in his father’s death from ‘oat cell’ lung cancer, but in no way distract or overpower. I hope he stays a medical doctor. I hope he does not become a writer. I think when you become a writer, you become less of one.

Apparently Afghan Muslims have Mullah Nasruddin jokes, kind of way Americans have Pollock jokes, Canadians have Newfie jokes, and George W. Bush is a joke. It’s risky to tell a joke in a novel, especially since the internet. So stop me if you’ve heard the one where Mullah Nasruddin’s daughter comes to him all battered and bruised and says, ‘Father, my husband has beaten me,’ to which the Mullah beats her himself and says, ‘Go tell your husband that if he is going to beat my daughter, then I am going to beat his wife.’ Later, in his hotel room, the narrator listens to two mullahs field call-in questions on an Islamic talk show. A woman wants to know if her son will have to go to hell for wearing baggy pants so low you can see the waistband of his underwear. The two mullahs confer over some holy text and decide that he will. To me, and probably to Hosseini, this is a lot funnier than any Mullah Nasruddin joke.

The antagonist is a bullying, murderous, child molesting, Taliban junkie, who, as a boy, raped his loyal kite-fetching servant and friend, and, as an adult, becomes evil leader of the hated ‘Talib’ who slaughter the Hazzra, ban kite flying, leave bodies hanging in the street, force soccer players to wear long pants for games, beat spectators with rifle butts for cheering too enthusiastically, and stone allegedly adulterous couples to death as halftime entertainment—the quintessential evildoer. Other than his boyish good looks and ingenuous charisma, a total villain, a very ‘Lollywood’ villain. But I don’t think North American readers have rallied behind this book for its popular stereotyping of our enemies and ‘Lollywood’ action sequences without which I might have believed it autobiographical. These are its least credible aspect. I groaned inwardly a little at the part where his wicked nemesis challenges him to a fight for the little boy he’s holding captive as a sex slave, commanding his guards to leave and let them go free if he survives. How convenient. And of course he’s going to take the brass-knuckle beating of his life, the one he should have taken twenty years earlier when he ran away instead of intervening when this psycho raped his friend, the boy’s father. And of course the son is going to shoot this evil goliath in the eye with his slingshot just as his father had once threatened to in rescuing the narrator from another encounter, because this very bad man is still too stupid to put his head down or cover his face when someone points a slingshot at him. So I don’t think the book’s become a deserved best seller for its kowtowing to popular hatreds, but for its accessibility, honesty, sensitivity and poetry, and through this, its revelation of Afghanistan and of ourselves.

¹ It’s nice to see I’m not the only one who writes fiction when he should be working.

² It’s rare to find a relationship in which neither party seems good enough for the other.

3 I’m a little embarrassed to admit I’ve forgotten the narrator’s name. Sure I could google it, but so could you. I’d recognize it if I saw it. It looks a bit like the sound you’d make if someone goosed you, not too hard, just kind of surprised you, and not all in a bad way.

June 2, 2008

Noss

So we all went over to Arn’s for the first time since Sue left. He had some picture books for little Izzy, who came along to swallow marbles and throw things. Izzy has a pretty decent arm for eighteen months. Everything he picks up is a potential projectile.

Even though Arn lives in an upscale subdivision in a new high-end house that he designed and built himself, and I, after my divorce, lived on the Grand River flood plane in an old leaky low-end one further dilapidated through a combination of neglect and stoned renovations, visiting brought back memories. Arn’s erstwhile sod is now mostly dirt and scrub. Clearly he’s cornered the lucrative dandelion market in his affluent neighborhood. Yard work’s not so much a guy thing as a husband thing. I remember a letter from the City of Kitchener once informing me that the small patch of ‘noxious weeds’ serving as my lawn would have to go.

Housework’s not a guy thing either. Though Arn’s standard’s higher than mine ever was. Even in his large finished basement where his dirt-bike-jumping, Junior-C-hockey-playing teenager dwells and is rumored to throw righteous parties, the bed is made and only one couch has been destroyed. But still, throughout his estate, there’s the gray, cluttered ambiance of a single man raising three boys. The youngest’s TV’s screen’s been pocked thrice by a pellet gun. He shows us his new slingshot. A remote-control, gas-powered Jeep’s parked in the sky-lit, open concept downstairs’ hallway. It’s almost big enough for Izzy to ride on. Another vehicle’s been disassembled, its parts and chassis strewn across carpet, hardwood and ceramic tile. Suburban rednecks. Electronics, leather furniture and auto parts—these are not cheap toys. The little remote-controlled jeep can go 73 miles-per-hour. My first car, a Ford Falcon, could not go 73 miles-per-hour, just to put this in perspective. It runs on a mixture of gasoline and ‘noss’ I’m told. This is how you get such screaming performance from a little single-stroke engine. It has an electric starter even.

‘Noss?’ I ask. ‘Would that be nitrous oxide?’

‘It’s thirty dollars a liter,’ I’m told. ‘You buy it at the hobby store.’

I got into it just after the Canadian Government changed its recreational status from quasi-legal the way pot and mushrooms are in Amsterdam, to basically illegal after some dumb-ass in Quebec froze his lips to a medical tank’s valve. Toronto head shops had to stop selling their ‘big party balloon’ refill canisters. And users had to spend about thirty dollars a two-four for whipped cream propellant cartridges at Conway Restaurant Supply, who could not keep up with the sudden upsurge of enrollment in Conestoga College’s cake decorating program. Whippets charges are the same size as the C02 cartridges used to pressurize seltzer bottles and pellet guns. It’s easier to inhale out of a seltzer bottle. But you could probably use them to shoot your TV if you wanted. Though the muzzle velocity might be a little less. Two cartridges are all that load into a seltzer bottle, and produce a lucid dream which lasts about thirty seconds. Sometimes scary, but usually insanely funny. Hence the sobriquet, laughing gas.

‘So what’s everyone up to tonight?’ Arn asks.

No one is up to anything. My wife’s tired from schlepping tables in the restaurant, then babysitting Izzy. I’m tired from writing, then playing squash with Mike, and haven’t eaten all day. Jillian’s at a ‘Dirty Dancing’ performance in Toronto, some tribute to Swaze’s cancer, and Mike wants to get home before she does and clean up. Izzy’s crashing from attention overload and getting crabby. Still Arn’s boys love him. They say to drop him off anytime, just leave him with them. They’ll take care of him. Anytime.

‘Anyone want a drink?’ Arn offers.

No one does. I’d take some some noss though if there’s any. Arn laughs. His boys laugh. (My wife frowns.) Everyone knows noss is for motors. Arn is a great dad.

May 19, 2008

Complications

Our friends Kristin and Sandy are having marriage problems. I wish there was something we could do to help them. They’re such great people with such a long history of togetherness. Their hearts really are in the right place. It’s just Sandy’s gotten too wrapped up in this big hospital project and sort of pawed the line in a few ethical instances, making it a little hard to tell where his philanthropy ends and business interests take over. I think because of how much the project means to the community and how close he is to it, he’s having trouble seeing where the end no longer justifies the means. And this is stressing Kristin out. See, her father, Caleb, who married her best friend, Julie, has recently passed away. And it used to be his business. He ran the company, though it was on the ropes when he died. And he was involved in some pretty shady business dealings too. He even screwed Sandy and Julie’s first husband, Jimmie, once by having his connections refuse their restaurant that they’d both worked so hard on a liquor license so he could buy it out from under them, cheap. So now Kristin feels like she’s married to her father, who was not a nice man. Though his fatal heart attack in his big swimming pool during a romantic evening with Julie, who’d been planning to murder him with his heart medication and collect his (nonexistent) fortune before he could divorce her but then changed her mind at the last minute and actually tried to save him and who’s now engaged to Sandy and Kristin’s son Seth’s girlfriend’s rich cosmetic surgeon of a dad, has softened his (Caleb’s) legacy a bit, as death is often wont to do. Plus, their adopted son Ryan has just broken up with his latest girlfriend and returned home from college because Kristin, contrary to Sandy’s advice, told him over the phone she’d seen his old girlfriend from like season 1 or 2 with a little kid who, even though she didn’t say, you know thinks might be his. Although Ryan has just reconnected with his estranged, alcoholic, real mom after having had sex with the golden-hearted waitress who works in the diner with her; and his ex girlfriend Marissa, who’s Julie and Jimmie’s daughter, is back with her sleazy, druggie, biker boyfriend, Kevin, because he’s just made his first romantic gesture ever by renting ‘The Sound of Music’—which are good things. But it’s still a lot. And it’s a lot more complicated than just that. So you can imagine how stressed Kristin is. Last night she had her first drink since getting out of rehab.

Then I lost a game of cribbage by 49 points, costing me four-dollars-and-ninety-cents since we’re playing for ten cents a point now just to keep it interesting. But then I won the next one by 70 points. A record! My wife, now also bummed, said she hadn’t tried because of how grouchy I was, and to show me how negativity affects outcome. I said negativity had nothing to do with my loss. I just got bad cards. Whereas she got two 16-point hands, one in her crib even, and then a 24-point hand. I don’t see how my negativity would make her get good cards. Aside from maybe one knee-jerk, semi-pissed-off-at-myself pegging mistake, I’d played my best. But she still insisted she hadn’t tried, effectively neutering my big win. And it’s a lot more complicated than just that.

May 5, 2008

Find All the Asses¹

My wife keeps magazines in a basket beside the toilet. Because I’m a vegetarian, I never read past the top one’s front cover.² Last week’s Star’s big glossy headline read “Jess’ Ass Goes Flat.” There’s a picture of Jess back when her ass was bountiful, and a more recent one where it is less bodacious. The “full story” behind this ass tragedy is promised “inside.” To me it looks like it’s just a matter of posture and camera angle. But again, because of how little time I spend on my own ass in the vicinity of the magazine basket, I’ve not had the chance to delve further into this mystery.

Had to use up some vacation days before the end of April. So spent a couple flattening my ass at Casino Niagara’s nickel³ blackjack table. Considered going down to a New York casino but didn’t want to support Bush’s war efforts more than I already am as a Canadian taxpayer even though you get much better comps down there.

I’ve got this sinking feeling McCain will be our next president. It’s like we enjoy shooting ourselves in the foot. I’ve no clue what his, or any candidate’s, pitch is. Canadian politics has sort of deadened me to campaign rhetoric. I don’t mind McCain’s being a little past his best before date. The odds of Obama’s getting waxed are probably better than McCain’s croaking naturally on the job (i.e. before he turns 76) which, according to Social Security’s actuarial tables, is only (78,023-70,337) / 78,023, or about one in ten, and which is almost twice as good as you get playing Russian Roulette. Sure I’d rather see someone whose name didn’t conjure up images of bad frozen foods, someone more vested in the future than the past get the job, but my biggest beef with McCain is that his voice just sounds too much like Bush’s. Yeah it irks. But also I’m afraid people in other countries might not realize corporate America has instantiated a new monkey.

Picked up a glossy pamphlet in the Brantford casino Monday. In it was a quiz you can take to see if you have a gambling problem. If you can answer one or more of the questions in the affirmative, then you do. The only one I remotely could went something like, “Do you gamble to avoid feelings of unhappiness?” But then what is fun if not something you engage in to avoid a state of less fun. Besides, it doesn’t work. So, no, I don’t have a gambling problem. But if you do, there’s a whole page full of stuff you can do to deal with it. Not one of which is to quit gambling. But practical suggestions like, not borrowing more on your credit card than you’d originally planned, or taking frequent breaks (i.e. gambling often), or not gambling when (i.e. only until) depressed.⁴

Around noon Monday, April 28, Casino Brantford enforced a minute of silence in memory of workers who’ve died in Ontario. It wasn’t made clear if it was to include just those who’d died on the clock, or those who’d died on the way to and from work in traffic accidents, or at home and in the hospital from work related stress conditions like heart attacks, alcoholism and suicide, or everyone who’s ever paid taxes and died in Ontario, or even those who die out of Province like say over in Afghanistan. The pit boss notified the tables it’d commence after the next hand. Then we all sat in nondenominational silence that still felt uncomfortably like prayer. Although it’s never that silent in a casino. The slots are always beckoning. Some old deaf guy continued to slap the play button on a machine that sounded like a fire truck until security tapped him on the shoulder. A copy of the "2008 Pocket Ontario OH&S⁵ Act & Regulations Consolidated Edition" lies by the Flavia hot drink dispenser in the staff kitchen. It’s almost 900 pages, but because of how small the font is, it could still conceivably fit in a large pocket. If we’d all just read and obey it, our casinos wouldn’t lose precious minutes.

¹The narrator is a given.

² In a pinch I can flush the toilet even before I undo my belt, and still beat the system.

³Five dollar minimum. The expression of dollars as pennies and denominations as colors in casino vernacular is probably to help disguise the fact that you’re playing with the kind of ‘real’ money that still buys groceries, pays rent, puts kids through school, etc., and so makes losing less not fun. “Just Plain More Fun!” being Casino Niagara’s motto for example.

⁴Dostoevsky’s roulette system involved staying happy—“When I was happy I was winning.” He lost everything.

⁵Ontario Health & Safety

April 21, 2008

The Rejection

I have just gotten a rejection from Weavings’ Upper Room which if you follow the link you will see is a devotional publication for diehard Christians. Today’s inspirational message, for example, is drawn from 1 Corinthians 10:24 – “Do not seek your own advantage, but that of the other.” Which to me kind of begs the question: Which other? But is beside the point. There follows then an inspirational, supposedly true anecdote by some English woman who after reading a book about ‘a homeless person’ saves on dump fees by donating a box of rubbish she no longer wears to some homeless shelter on her way to work, and muses, “…the warmth I felt must have been coming from my soul.”

Which reminded me of the debate I got into Tuesday morning with my dental hygienist who’s a fundamentalist Christian.¹ Between coughing fits (she thinks she has pneumonia again) she assured me with all the strength and conviction of her faith that machines will never attain the soul’s self awareness (i.e. remain forever stuck in 1 Corinthians 10:24 mode) and also that man did not descend from apes, for she does not ‘believe in evolution.’ To which I replied between scaling and spitting that only political orators like Barak Obama ‘believe in evolution.’ Because evolution, as a scientific theory, is not just open to and welcoming, but verily demanding, of our incredulity. That, as a scientific theory, it must be disbelieved and challenged until something less false and more explanatory presents. And that ‘creation’ is not a theory. The lesson and cleaning cost Great West Life, my insurer, 135 dollars.

Growing up at Reba Place Fellowship, my father used to read Upper Room’s daily chicken-soupy devotional inspiration every morning before breakfast. So I submitted Larry and Wanda to them, an epistolary short I wrote two-and-a-half years ago when my cousin Larry and his new (and now deceased and previous) wife, Wanda, were in the same Charlottesville hospital, she undergoing a double colostomy for colon cancer and he two floors down in neurological services pursuant to a suspected series of transient ischemic attacks or mini-strokes probably caused by stress. I knew it was a long shot, maybe even retribution. That my piece was at best thematically and stylistically utterly inappropriate to Upper Room’s demographic’s Christian sensibilities. Consider for example its third paragraph:

I guess I should explain that I’m the only person in my entire extended ancestral family on either side that I can say for sure is not religious, per se. That is to say, I don’t love Jesus, and I don’t feel He loves me, never has and never will. But that even if He did love me somehow in spite of being dead for 2000 years, that even if I thought He loved me to pieces, it still wouldn’t make me feel all hopeful and special or anything because it’d be like this shit-faced drunk wobbling around spilling drinks on everyone at some huge party telling everyone he bumps into, “I love you man. I really love you to pieces.” Same for His dad, God. Maybe because when I look around, I don’t see a plan. I see an accident, or at best an experiment, like the one I saw in this Psych video where they dropped rats in buckets of water to study how long they’d tread before drowning and in which they determined that not only are rats excellent swimmers but that they have like this really strong desire to stay alive as it were because they’d tread for practically a week before finally glugging, only with us I think it’s more of an experiment to see how long we can sit in front of a television or do the same stupid job or stay married to the same person before finally glugging.

Speaking of which, I got shit-faced drunk at a Neil Diamond tribute concert at the Elora Legion last Saturday and told every one of my wife’s siblings and their spouses, who were all mostly similarly blotto, repeatedly how much I loved each of them amidst considerable hand clasping and hugging and, in the case of her three sisters and one sister-in-law, groping and fondling. I would never have imagined the most fun I’d have this millennia would be during two hours of gay Neil Diamond karaoke in a legion hall.

There’s a little prayer near the end of my devotional piece:

And so I pray to You, God, even though I’m pretty sure you aren’t there and that even if you are there you don’t give a shit and that even if you do give a shit there’s probably nothing you can do, help Larry and Wanda. Don’t let them glug. Glug someone who wouldn’t call out an old folk’s square dance unless his nuts were in a vice, someone who isn’t that interested in You or your dead kid, someone like me. Glug me instead. I fucking dare You! Amen.

And here's the rejection I received from the kind folk at Upper Room:

Thank you for sending us your article entitled ‘Larry and Wanda.’ We have had the opportunity to review and consider your work² for our upcoming issues of Weavings, but, regrettably, the material we have selected does not include your submission.

This does not mean that your writing has no merit, however, and we would encourage you to send it to some other inspirational magazines. We hope you will find a publishing home for your article and thank you for your interest in Weavings.

Hattie Walker
Editorial Assistant
Weavings
Nashville, Tennessee
Www.upperroom.org

Permit me to translate:

No one here read it.

Pester some other publication with it.

¹ It’s difficult and probably ill advised to argue with sharp tools in one’s mouth.

²But apparently not the ninth commandment.

April 7, 2008

Open rebuttal to Fantasy and Science Fiction’s Why we don’t accept electronic submissions

Dear Editor,

The only statement in your essay that I understand and agree with is your opening: “Electronic submissions are very convenient for writers.” I can only assume then that you are not a writer and that you don’t care about writers.

Let me enumerate and consider your excuses for not accepting electronic submissions.

1. “On average, it would take us approximately two hours each day just to download submissions.”

You later say you receive, “400 - 600 submissions each month,” which is 30 a day at most. Even a 10,000 word .rtf rings in at only around 200K. Are you suggesting it takes your system two hours to download six megabytes? Can one sill buy 8K baud serial modems? I suggest that instead of forcing your writers to spend two thousand dollars a month on postage and mailers, you invest thirty dollars a month on a high-speed DSL line. Your 300 submissions should download in about 5 seconds.

2. The risk of computer viruses is higher if we accept attached files.”

Consider that text can be pasted into the body of an email. Consider disabling Word macros. Consider antivirus software. Consider talking to an IT professional. Consider accepting submissions though a simple web interface. Consider that many larger publications than yours accept only electronic submissions.

3. “I hate reading on screen.”

Because you have clearly not upgraded your hardware since 1980, I will assume you are using one of the old cathode ray tubes that causes cataracts and burns holes in your retina. Wonderful news! The technology has vastly improved since the days of 8K modems and flickering green screens. If you cannot afford a laptop, at least invest in a 17-inch, high-resolution flat screen such as can be picked up for about what your writers are wasting on stamps each day. More good news! You don’t have to read every submission all the way through. You should be able to separate the wheat from the chaff in a paragraph or two at the most. So if paper cuts must remain an integral part of your reading enjoyment, just print out the pieces that show potential. Use cheap paper. Invest in a printer that can print on both sides of the page. And print single space. This is of course exactly the opposite of how publications such as yours that accept only print manuscripts want us to do it: quality paper; wide margins; large non proportional fonts like Courier; single sided; double spaced. It’s like you hate trees.

But I did follow your website’s link to this article by Roger MacBride Allen on Professional Manuscript Submission, which you yourself might enjoy reading once you’ve managed to print it out. It begins,

“Many writers have learned that there is no longer any point to writing well. Today's modern, now, a-go-go editors have no time for reading prose. Form has not only become content, it has overwhelmed content altogether. Remember that every moment wasted in thinking about meaning, every second expended in consideration of the words on the page, is a moment that you can't squander worrying about how the page looks.”

4. “In our office, it's very inconvenient to pass around an electronic submission from one reader to another.”

Ah, I think I see the problem. Your office needs computers that are somehow networked together. You do know that in addition to 5.25 floppy disks there are other electronic media now?—like 3.5s, CDs and DVDs, as well as little doodads that fit in USB ports for those that have them. Any of which could save you schlepping your old 286 and green screen about the office.

5. “Printing out submissions would use up a ream or more of paper each day.”

A ream? That’s what, 500 pages? Okay, somewhat less than the six megabytes I calculated earlier. Assuming you’re printing to your own specs, you could reduce this to about 100 pages by using sane margins, printing both sides of the paper and single spacing. And you could further reduce this to about 10-20 pages by just printing those pieces that engage you with the first few paragraphs, as in aren’t obviously a stoned adolescent’s midnight homage to some TV or videogame, or baby’s first story.

6. “I have found it much easier to lose electronic submissions than it is to lose manuscripts.”

This is because you are obviously not particularly technologically up-to-date or savvy, which, given that you are the editor of a science fiction magazine, makes a perverse kind of sense.

Sincerely,

Chris

March 24, 2008

How to Say No

But first I need to correct an error in my previous entry. My co-op friend did not say forty trillion had been invested in commodities on a given day. He said two-hundred-and-forty trillion. I checked with him. And he checked with his co-op colleagues. They all agreed: it was two-forty. But I don’t see how that figure can be right. The US national debt is only a war or so over nine trillion. I watched it go up just another measly million on a site that tracks such things. It took over thirty seconds. So no worries there. And only less than a sixth of this nine trillion is owed to China. So it’s pretty unlikely the Chinese or anyone else dumped a quarter of a quadrillion into commodities. A quadrillion comes right after a trillion and is a 1 followed by only 15 zeroes. It’ll be a long time until the US is even one quadrillion in debt. A centillion has 288 more zeroes than a quadrillion. So again, no worries. There’s lots more money to be borrowed. I apologize for any upset my misreporting might have caused various world markets and economies. I will endeavor to listen more carefully and less credulously in the future.

Last year Jillian got a call from a Police Association rep. He wanted money to help the police maintain law and order… or maybe send an underprivileged child to the circus… one of those. (China sends its underprivileged children to work in its factories. The US sends theirs to jail.) But the Police Association’s phone solicitor didn’t just outright ask Jillian if she would give him some money. Instead he asked, in a purely stochastic way, if she felt that the public in general and as a whole should assume some responsibility for helping the police fill our jails and increase our insurance rates… or send impoverished waifs to see animals mistreated… one of those. Because she is young, sensitive and emotionally malleable, Jillian did not hang up after perhaps suggesting he get bent, but instead answered in the lazy affirmative, as in to academically agree, we should all pull together to make society more viable and functional. Then, somehow, in the course of the ensuing chat, either she misspoke or the rep misunderstood that she was still only speaking hypothetically and philosophically whereas specifically and practically she had no intention whatsoever of giving money to help the police meet their ticket quotas or expose needy kids to scary clowns or whatever. Nonetheless, convinced that Jillian had tangibly promised, committed and obliged herself to forking over twenty dollars, he began to remind her, in the importunate manner collection agencies tend to adopt, on an almost daily basis. She asked me if this could hurt her credit rating. I advised her, next time the Police Association rep called, to call the police, who, amazingly, still work for taxes.

I got a call Sunday from a girl who told me that a particular lawn care company’s lawn care professionals would be performing lawn care services in my neighborhood the following week. I told her that advertisers typically sponsor some sort of service or entertainment in exchange for exposure to their promotional material. So that, for example, in thumbing from the Toronto Sun’s front page story¹ about a new Taurus manufactured revolver nicknamed The Judge capable of firing shotgun shells² now making its way into our criminal factions’ itchy-trigger-fingered hands to the back page’s scantily clad, somewhat underage looking Sunshine girl who hopes someday to become a model and seeks a confident, spiritual man with lots of money and a good sense of humor, I might have to flip past an advertisement promoting some zillionaire’s high-priced seminar on how to make fortunes in tax lien sales and deed auctions, any number of used car spreads and at least one miracle product to extend my sex drive and/or sexual prowess beyond the age any woman would consider me without remuneration. And, unlike with promotional or advertising phone calls such as for example the one in progress, which always make me feel a little rude to just hang up on as I did on another representative of this selfsame lawn care company just the previous night when he interrupted an episode of OC because, let’s face it, almost no one sits around waiting for the phone to ring and you don’t want to talk to those that do, you can just ignore them, skim or even skip right over them without feeling mean or impolite at all. Or how in exchange for Google’s giving me 6G of free disk storage and a free webmail account, it reads all my emails and tries to post appealing sponsored links to the side which if I click on will cost the sponsor anywhere from a dime to about a hundred dollars, and so which I sometimes do if they piss me off enough, or just seem daft. Or how on radio, in exchange for snippets of news, lame contests and social commentary and the odd bit of retro (a.k.a. classic) rock I can possibly stand to hear yet one more time, I will entertain one commercial after another, each jingle, skit or soliloquy less hebetudinous than the next³ to the point that I’m literally cursing and screaming so I can’t hear another imbecilic word or bullshit claim… so maybe radio’s not such a good example. But the thing is, and the reason a telemarketer’s job sucks so bad—and at this point she either snorted or sobbed—is that with telemarketing, the most intrusive and hard to ignore type of advertising, you get absolutely nothing in return. You get the pitch, the pressure—and nothing more. People resent that. They feel ripped off. Abused. At this point, I asked if she was paid by the hour or commission, to which she said, both, but don’t worry about it, and even admitted when prompted that she had no clue if the lawn care company would really be in my neighborhood the following week because she was just working from a by-address phone listing out of Cambridge. And I confessed that just as I, as a matter of principle, never buy anything advertised on pop-behinds and am considering never buying anything advertised on radio, I never buy any product or service promoted via telephone. So that even if I had a lawn I cared about and no one to look after it, and her employer was the last lawn care service provider on the planet, I’d just let it go all to hell. Which I basically do, come to think of it. And that in the future, when I get advertisements disguised as personal calls, I am going to insist, before I entertain any canned promotional spiel, that the caller edify or amuse me with a story. Because I like stories. Or let me ramble for a while on some topic of my choosing. Because I like to ramble.

¹ Intended to keep us on our toes during a slow murder day.

² Really it only fires .410 shotgun shells, the smallest, and given the choice between getting shot by a short barrel .410 or a .45 slug, which the gun also fires, I’d take the .410 any day. I mean even the long barrel shotgun VP Dick Cheney pointblank peppered millionaire Republican party donor attorney Harry Whittington’s face and neck with back in February of 2006 was a 28 gauge.

³ “We can’t hardly [sic] keep them [some truck accessory] on the shelf.” Good beer is better than okay beer. McDonald’s hamburgers are two parts bun to two parts beef. A family in some sort of existentialist hell spends eternity driving to Airport Hyundai fussing about which new vehicle to buy…

March 10, 2008

Personality

Seemingly without pasquinade, Vatican official Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti has announced in the Osservatore Romano that the “individualistic” classic “sins of yesteryear” are to be augmented with a handful of more global or corporate deadly sins, the first of which is “accumulating obscene wealth.” I wonder if there’s a grandfather clause, so that if you are already obscenely wealthy like say Warren Buffett, Bill Gates or the Catholic Church, then you get a pass.

The land of the free’s new home of the brave is jail. It’s just set an all time world’s record for per capita incarceration with 2.3 million, one in ninety-nine of its citizens, now behind bars. A friend who advises farmers for a local co-op told me yesterday that some fund just moved 40 trillion into North American commodities, and that whenever he sees “trillion” bandied about like this, he thinks, “Chinese.” China mostly summarily executes its alleged suspected felons.

Last week I picked up a hitchhiker. Some kid traveling from Elora to Fergus. Tossed my plastic Tim Hortons cup, an ice scraper, a few ceramic mugs bearing my employer’s company logo, a hair brush and some rolled up squash sweats into the back seat as he got in. Turned down the radio and apologized for the station which was supposed to playing the “world’s greatest rock” but instead was playing some old Stones tune I used to listen to back in high school on transistor… I think the one where Jagger sings about his generation and hopes to die before he gets old… or maybe the one where Springsteen rips off the tune to Froggy Went a Courtin’… no, Springsteen’s mushy jingoism and insipid melodies always see me weaving to and fro scanning madly for any other station on the Hyundai’s radio’s microscopic button controls that I, a “career” systems programmer, after seven years, have still not figured out... so yeah, probably the Stones tune with Jagger whining about people always trying to put him down. Is the term “classic rock” not an oxymoron? The hitchhiker suggested a Hamilton station way up the FM scanner that plays more new stuff. I told him that I almost stopped listening to the one now playing either ancient Stones or insipid Springsteen after they hired their new morning celebrity but that now it’s become a kind of audio disaster I can’t take my ears off. That after months of listening to reiterative Arctic Cat sponsored solicitations and auditions for their “next big radio star” I kind of expected something more than a pretty voice tripping and stumbling through sports, traffic and weather like it was breaking news and the news like it was… well, like it was news too.¹ Because, as I further exposited to my captive hitchhiking audience, after all the hype, all those early morning interviewees, some quite articulate and witty, after all the listener votes were cast, they went and hired what I have to assume was the best looking candidate. That aside from once having heard her say “I agree” during a discussion on the decriminalization of marijuana, and on another occasion opining that child molesters should be punished, I’ve yet to hear her express a thought. Mostly she tends to douse her editorial opportunities, her lead-ins and setups, with an empty-headedly dismissive “anyway…” that’s just shy of your paradigmatic adolescent “whatever” before launching into bobbling script in what surely cannot be even her second highest gear and that would be much better handled by text-to-speech software, anyway. And they must have seen this coming. The entire hiring competition culminated in a face-off between her and a young man with a black belt in karate when each was invited to give a short spiel on the large sinkhole caused by a recent water main break in one of London’s downtown thoroughfares. His remarks, if I recall, combined well researched insights into London’s crumbling infrastructure with droll suggestions on how this gaping new orifice might be incorporated into the cityscape. And hers, after they’d found her enjoying an impromptu washroom break, was the pleonastic, “I agree with him. That’s what I think too.” And later, just before the big immutable foredestined announcement, when asked how they each felt, and he parodied, “I was nervous up until a minute ago, but am now focused in a strange calm,” she said, “That’s how I feel too.” Then they picked her. On the outskirts of Fergus I finally confessed to sour grapes possibly tainting my commentary on this new radio personality in that I’d fantasized applying for the position myself. I have opinions. Obviously. I like offending people. I can talk. And the promotion was launched right after I’d blogged a review of the program which led me to surmise in a way that yes I recognize as paranoid that the whole campaign might’ve somehow been directed at me. That the morning show’s host’s diffidence pursuant to my aforementioned adroit blogged review of his work and his lengthy and complimentary reply to said blogged review prevented his making a direct invitation or offer for me to come sit in the booth with him and his sidekick and become myself a star, forcing them to instead concoct this huge sham of an on air promotion to try to save face by enticing me to apply. But that now I was glad I never bothered. Then the kid, as he was getting out of the car by the Fergus post office, said that he actually had applied for the job, but never got called. I was impressed, seriously impressed. Sad too.

But there are yet other opportunities for us. North American Trade Schools proclaims to have “spent decades helping real people get real jobs.” And all last week Northrop Grumman aired ads for their local job fair trying to entice people to go service light armored vehicles in Vinnell, which, according to their website, is “the market leader in U.S. military doctrine-based training, logistics, and support services within Saudi Arabia.” Is “light armored vehicle” not also an oxymoron?

Speaking of oxymora, yesterday my step-daughter told me that her husband had told her that someone at the Goofy Newfie where he sometimes bounces had told him that you can be charged with “attempted manslaughter” for selling Ecstasy now.

I think I’ve figured out things as far as I can. I think there’s only one personality, but that it got so bored and lonely and unhappy that it fragmented into a zillion disparate ones the way abused psyches like Sibyl’s sometimes do. So, when I encourage you/myself/us/God/Northrop Grumman/radio personalities/real people with real jobs, real people with pretend jobs and real people dealing ecstasy/the obscenely rich/hitchhikers/prisoners/Chinese fund managers and executioners/everyone and everything everywhere to go fuck itself, I mean it in a nice way, a philosophical way. A healing way.

¹ Although she’s improving. This morning she said “microwavable bowls” without incident and laughed deliciously over some snide crack about the size of Paris Hilton’s snatch, once she got it.

February 25, 2008

A Review of Two Restaurants

Last Tuesday my wife picked up The Cell by Stephen King at the Op Shop along with a giant cribbage board on which I’ve yet to win a game. About 36 years ago a friend dared me to smell the bagful of McDonald’s I’d just purchased, to shove my nose right in the sack and give it a good whiff as though huffing glue or gasoline. So I did. It smelled like rotten socks¹ and I’ve not eaten at MacDonald’s since. I did read the title though.²

I’m rereading Mobius Dick3 by Andrew Crumey. Last month my boss gave me a 50$ gift card for Wildcraft, a new restaurant he’s invested in. We (my wife, not Andrew Crumey or my boss, and I) used it the following Sunday. The dining area was full, so we were seated in the lounge. Our waitress’s timing was uninspired. I didn’t get the feeling it gave her great pleasure to be serving us or that she would remember me forever. Also, her calves were a bit on the sturdy side. I had to determine for myself which pieces of the complementary bread arrangement were edible, and was never fully convinced about the large, extremely crunchy, purple, sail-like thing standing in the middle. Several of the dozen or so huge flat screen TVs above the bar were tuned to the same satellite channel (a streaming montage of sports moments) which made me feel like I was missing something. There was only one TV in the men’s washroom (though I never checked the stalls), and that was not within eyeshot of the urinals unless you were prepared to turn your head which is poor etiquette. The circular arrangement of sumptuous leather couches and loveseats just outside the washrooms was a little creepy for reasons I’m having trouble expressing. The waitress smiled at my suggestion that the menus come with little reading lights, compensating⁴ for her calves. My trout special, though enthusiastically presented in an almost pubic nest of finely shredded vegetables, lacked culinary imagination to the extent that I found myself scanning for salt and pepper shakers. The dessert, from what I could make out holding the dessert menu near the candle and squinting, contained a variety of expensive sounding liqueurs, pastries and crèmes, but also lacked focus or clarity of composition and might best be described as chocolaty sweet mud that would not have seemed particularly out of context in a soldier’s holiday field ration tin. My coffee was not refilled. But no more captious nitpicking. Wildcraft’s fine dining experience is clearly the result of considerable effort, expertise and investment. On Tuesday, which was Ontario’s newly legislated Family Day, we used our Brantford Casino winnings to take Mike, Jillian and no-longer-baby-but-still-very cute, Isaiah, there for dinner. The waitress, who was perfect in every way, laughed and touched my shoulder when I pretended that her, “Oh, isn’t he adorable!” had been directed at me, making me feel very droll and attractive and not at all old and pathetic. My North Atlantic cod was perfectly prepared and didn’t need salt or anything. The big purple sail thing was definitely edible. I didn’t watch TV or pee. The tropical fruit cup we all shared was delicious. Later Jillian said it was the nicest place she’d ever eaten. I’m kind of at the point now where I’ll only finish novels that I feel warrant at least a second read.

¹I do not allege, claim, assert, state or in any way suggest that any of McDonald’s ostensibly ingestible products bear any olfactory similarity to a person with possible foot odor issues’ socks. Just relating a wholly subjective and very old memory not to be confused with the statistically meaningful results of a controlled test or study that others can reproduce.

²Though I did google up a Wikipedia review that I also couldn’t be bothered to read or comment further on.

³I highly recommend this novel. An intelligent, thoughtful, poetic, witty, well researched, accessible and fun sci-fi by a theoretical physicist. Complementary period essays. Garnished generously with cutting edge quantum physics (and its inseparable philosophical musings), historical and literary references, and characters serious and silly, my favorite being this uproariously full of shit creative writing therapist lady who’s had seventeen short stories published and pushes my buttons much the way a certain penis sculpting, workshop mentoring, bubble-headed e-acquaintance of mine once did. Kick-ass ending too:

Forget them now. Unless all that was ever taught or written has life in some Platonic heaven, they are no more than pictures on a screen, shadows soon to fade. See: already the film is winding itself to an end, we count the final moments of the reel. Three, two, one… then nothing.

How vivid it all was. How soon the dream is finished.

⁴No, this is not a dangling participle. Though it kind of has that feel.

February 11, 2008

No Review of The Field by Lynne McTaggart or Explanation of Economics

The reason being that I haven’t read most of The Field yet, and know almost nothing about economics. Although I have gotten to the beginning of chapter three, entitled “Beings of Light,” including McTaggart’s new improved preface.¹ And I did take Economics 101 at the University of Waterloo and would’ve passed except for a bell curve’s bobtail (my mark being the solid 51 percent that sufficed for most of my other courses) which inspired me to drop out of school (despite the professor’s recommendation that I keep my “finger in the pie”) and work nights at Colonial Cookies’ cookie factory, which, from my present vantage, served as a much more interesting and broadening life experience anyway.

(According to me) according to McTaggart according to quantum physics, what we perceive as the material universe is just ghostly energy vibrating. And the real force of the universe, as in the bulk of the universe, as in as in ten to the fortieth times more of it, is in its vacuum’s zero-point field. Like (I say) McTaggart says Richard Feynman said, “There’s enough energy in one cubic meter of space to boil all the oceans of the Earth.” Zero-point vacuum energy’s apparently so amazingly powerful and full of potential, what with the possibility of anti-gravity/anti-inertia technologies and blowing up whole galaxies and whatnot, that the Pentagon has prioritized its research behind only that of stealth bombers.²

According to my ex, money made the world go round.³

Beneath the quivering sensitive skin of our physical reality flexes the dense muscle of zero-point energy. We are but a shimmering oily film on a nigh bottomless dark sea of it. Adolescent peach fuzz trembling on a manly jaw. Harmonics trilling tinnily in God’s stentorian deep voice. In trying to make string theory’s mathematical mumbo-jumbo accessible and meaningful to the average schmoe, McTaggart humps metaphor with the generous enthusiasm of a randy rabbit in a roomful of ankles. Because, as Parmenides philosophized 25 centuries ago, the really exciting thing is this: all is one! The religious nuts were right! Apparently a famous American astronaut returning from one of those alleged lunar landings intended to take our minds off losing the Viet Nam war experienced a profound “epiphany of connectedness” and, from two-hundred-thousand miles out in space, thought-projected to a group of his friends on Earth a random series of shapes which they then received and recorded with an accuracy that could occur by chance only one in three-thousand times! It’s right in the book! Proof that we are all one, all composing, all united, all connected, or, as my boss likes to say, all on the same page.

The other week a fellow squash club member’s Windows popup prompted him for his hotmail account password. Seconds after he entered it, every single one of his many address book acquaintances received from him an email notifying them that he was trapped in Nigeria with no money and no access to the outside world, and could they please each just send him 3000 dollars. Lynne Mctaggart and I also belong to this grand superunified collective everything, and so if she were to send me all her royalties it wouldn’t make a fig of difference to anything either. At most it’d be like barely stirring a pot of creamy delicious soup.

According to McTaggart, there’s some sort of conspiracy afoot to prevent our discovering there’s more to the universe than meets the supercollider’s mathematical eye. That science is trying desperately to keep God out of its equations. Much like modern medicine’s trying to keep us from learning the cure for cancer might be as simple as concerted wishing or steeping a sprig of wolfsbane in a gazillion gallons of water and then drinking a little every day. It has been suggested by leading economists that, after decades of bombing anything that chirps or twitters, funded by forests worth of baseless currency, the US might be heading into another recession or even another depression. The implication being of course that it will then head back out and that the setback is only a temporary blip on some economic curve and that Ward and June Cleaver will again sleep soundly in their single beds separated discretely by a nightstand.

Space is expanding at near the speed of light. So, every second, there’s approximately a jillion-and-a-half more cubic miles of it. So if each miniscule block of it contains such a humongous amount of energy, where is all this extra energy coming from I wonder. Like where was all this 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000 times more energy when the universe had no space or vacuum in it at all but was like the size of a ping-pong ball? Money, thanks to compound interest and other zero energy investment schemes, is expanding too. So, every second there’s more of it. I wonder where it’s all coming from too. I think the dream is starting to fray around the edges. The harder it tries to make sense of itself, the less sense it makes. I think I might be waking up. I think we might be waking up.

¹ There’s a high contrast, sticker-like circle on the book’s cover with “WITH A NEW PREFACE” centered in it in bold uppercase. Most products advertise some new improved aspect on their packaging, like how Fleet Oral Saline (monobasic sodium phosphate) Laxative and Nicorettes (nicotine) Gum both boast new minty flavors, and have for some time now. The rationale being that people are more inclined to purchase the products of companies who aren’t sitting on their asses but actively trying to make the world a better place, or at least recognize their old formulas left something to be desired.

² “Israeli fighter pilots may soon be receiving Viagra-style pills to help them to perform better at greater heights, according to a study by military officials…”—Times Online

³ “In a most delightful way.”

January 28, 2008

Dots Like Stars

About 150 spam emails had slipped past our company’s spam “filters” into my Inbox at “work” Monday. In deleting them I noticed one’s subject line asking if I would like to add 4 inches to my penis. I think it was supposed to be a rhetorical question.

For the last month I’ve been watching Grey’s Anatomy, each evening’s episodes an emotional roller coaster of medical and interpersonal crises, mostly of a romantic/sexual nature, which open me up, put me in touch with my insides. It took me almost two whole DVDs to realize it’s a soap, which is kind of embarrassing. But it’s teaching me things about myself. Like in this one scene a few days back where the only unattractive (i.e. overweight, bad complexion, bowl cut hairdo, etc.) female employee (including nurses, receptionists, cleaning staff and laundry) in the entire hospital (and consequently the only one not involved in an illicit affair of some sort) asks a guy who’s just come out of brain surgery what her name is to see if he’s okay. And happily, the guy remembers. He remembers her name. The amazing neurosurgeon Doctor McCreamy has performed another miracle. I wish he’d operated on my Uncle Bob, because my Uncle Bob came out of brain surgery pretty fucked up. I wish he’d operate on me. Because even after having watched every episode of every season up to I think season IV, in which this unattractive woman doctor has appeared in every single one including the one where she asks the guy with the excised brain tumor or aneurism or whatever it was (and who’s only met her maybe once or twice) what her name is, and he knows, I still don’t. I just know her nickname: The Nazi.

Then there’s another episode where Dr. McScreamy cuts some guy’s brain in half. Afterwards the guy can’t remember words for common things like the test he scored really high on to get into college (SAT) or the thing his coffee’s in (cup). But Doctor McWeenie assures him everything’s okay because eventually his (the patient’s) brain will connect it all back together. Which got me thinking: this is what the human brain does. It connects things together. Starved for meaning, it creates meaning.

I saw in yesterday’s Toronto Sun that our latest “Fallen¹ Canuck had a ‘big heart.’” This is of course much sadder than if he’d had a little heart like the insurgents he was over there to help kill², or even only a normal sized heart like you or I who put him there. And sadder still, he’d just gotten a promotion from “sapper” (which I’d assumed was some sort of interrogation specialist, but turns out is a military construction worker) to corporal, and will now be missing out on all the festivities, jubilee and future perquisites.

Almost the entire 10th page of this same Sun is dedicated to Sheri Anderson, a 31 year old graphic artist who’s trying to raise funds for breast enlargement surgery which she believes will increase her sense of self worth and love, and therefore happiness and fulfillment. Like the guy in last night’s Grey’s Anatomy (with an aversion to dumbbell flys?) who got top-of-the-line pectoral implants to impress his girlfriend. So if Sheri is ever killed by a roadside bomb, then her headline can read, “Fallen Canuck had ‘big tits,’” instead of “Fallen Canuck had ‘perky tits’ but that were small compared to all her sisters’ tits, causing her no end of shame and humiliation.” There’s a picture of Sheri with her husband Timothy standing behind her and reaching around to cup where her possibly smaller than average tits but that have very nice nipples will hopefully someday come out to, either grinning or leering. If you would like to help Sheri “rise to the challenge of a C [cup]” and fulfill herself as a woman, you can go to her website. See her model a variety of revealing tank tops. There’s even a video clip of her in a skimpy leopard bra explaining the whole genetic tiny tits tragedy that woman all over the world suffer needlessly with for their entire lives that I stopped watching once I was sure she wasn’t going to take the top off. Drop off a few bucks via Paypal if you are so inspired. Sheri’s promised to give 5 percent of all funds raised to cancer research, but still the other 95 percent of your donation will be going to a good cause.

¹ “Fallen” being the standard journalistic euphemism for killed, waxed, slaughtered, knocked off, wasted and so on when referencing our fighters. In fact the only time I’ve ever seen the word “death” used in conjunction with a dead Canadian soldier was in an article back on 25 Nov after war amputee Fredrick Coture committed suicide (“took his own life”) resulting in a coroner’s “investigation” into his “death.”

² And “kill” being the standard journalistic dysphemism for fallen, lost, deceased, slaughtered, wasted and so on when referencing their fighters. In fact I’ve never seen any other word used to describe their demises.

³ Sharp readers will notice that this is a “dangling” footnote. Nowhere in the body of the essay is it referenced. But if you’re like me and just read them all when you get to the end, it doesn’t really matter, does it? I just wanted to add that I did see the word “killed” used in today’s Sun (not in the headline but somewhere in the middle and so might’ve been an oversight by some copyeditor who never got the memo) with respect to what happened to big-hearted sapper-cum-corporal Etienne Gonthier in Afghanistan, and which I no way want to trivialize or make light of, because I really do think it is very, very sad, his death—all the deaths. In today’s journalistic eulogy we learn he “loved his country.” Great. I wonder if he also loved Big Corporate America whom he was over there fighting for. And, is it just me, or do most of these fallen heroes come from Quebec?

January 14, 2008

Dangling Things

I’ve just learned what a dangling participle is! I see here it’s when a verb ending in “–ing” does not “agree” with its subject. The example provided is, “Rushing to finish the paper, Bob's printer broke.” The recommended fix is to add three simple words: specifically, to write instead, “While Bob was rushing to finish the paper, his printer broke.” I understand the reasoning, I really do. Ostensibly, the pseudo-implicit ushering qualifier “While” nails the ambiguous subordinate “rushing to finish the paper” clause as a temporal conditional clause (though it might still be parsed and interpreted as a concessive conditional clause in that the “While” might be construed as “Although” suggesting or implying that the printer broke in spite of Bob’s best “rushing” efforts and not as some comedic act of fate or God to thwart him, as obviously intended). The simple past tense conjugation of the generally to be avoided at all costs verb to be (i.e. “was”) is necessary to establish the tense of the participle “rushing” (and should therefore in this author’s opinion never be separated from said participle with another word such as an adverb like “madly” however tempting such adverbial sprucing up might be because this would then constitute conjugative participial splitting analogous to but even harder on the ear than the dreaded split infinitive, and a big reason adverbs in general get such a bad rap). Finally, the determiner pronoun “his” not only establishes printer ownership (although if the printer did in fact not belong to Bob but say his girlfriend, Mary, then the determiner “her” or the possessive form of the noun proper “Mary’s” or even the very flat determiner “the” might become necessary or have to suffice, causing no end of reader boredom and/or confusion) but also keeps the co-extensive matrix or superordinate “his printer broke” clause from reading like it was written in a second language, such as possibly by an American Indian or person of Slavic origins.

But I don’t think it fully solves the problem. Because personally, I don’t see how, unless Bob has just injected methedrine or heroin, or ingested Ecstasy (MMDA) within the preceding half hour, he could be “rushing” while his printer is printing. If he’s like me, he’s probably just gone for a pee or another cup of tea “while” it does its thing. Or maybe he’s standing there sort of catching the pages as they slide out, maybe perusing them for ink quality, numbering and other formatting issues and, if there are more than a few pages, squaring or aligning them by loosely holding them up vertically and gently tapping their bottom edges against a hard flat surface. Or possibly, if it is a laser printer, he’s pressing them against his cheek in an affection starved sort of warmth seeking way, or maybe smelling them to see if they have that creamy purple ink smell he associates with his early public school teachers’ copyright violations. I mean, he’s pretty obviously finished now, so what’s the rush? “While Bob was rushing to finish the [his] paper, India dropped a nuclear device on Pakistan,” would actually make more sense and be more interesting. So that’s how I’d fix it.

I noticed in Thursday’s Sun that as many as thirty members of Peel Region’s Hindu community have been “bilked” out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by a prestidigitator qua Swami who, by singing, dancing, praying and pulling lottery tickets out of eggs, was able to convince them that his special relationship with God could presage, augur or otherwise prognosticate their winning millions of dollars in one or another of our government’s myriad lottery rip-offs. But that they had to pay something up front, as in ahead of time, in cash. Maybe to show their faith. So now I’m a little embarrassed I ever converted to Hinduism. Not because of the Swami. I’m not even convinced what he did was illegal. Or even immoral. Really, it’s no different than what other religious institutions such as the Catholic Church purport and endeavor to do which is to offer liaison with and supplication to (and, in the case of Islam and Christian Fundamentalism, take dictation from) the Almighty in exchange for membership’s attendant financial expectations, adherence to ceremony and accedence of magical or miraculous possibilities and explanations. Or how our very own government operates these selfsame lotteries which is to multifariously collect and accrue and then redistribute monies as inequitably or disproportionately as possible through false hope’s aggressively advertised promotion and promise not only of instant easy riches, but that these riches will make us happy. No, I’m embarrassed for the suckers.