Is It Really Possible...

      ... that today this blog will reach the 25,000-hit marker?    Wow.    Sure, compared to some blogs, that's not much, but it's still a buttload more of a readership than I'd ever imagined when I first started this blasted thing.    And considering the interests of this blog tend to be a bit, well, shall we say, removed from the more typical interests of people, I can't help but be surprised. So, thanks to those of you that actually bother to check out this discombobulated mess of a journal. Cheers and best, all.

      (Hmmm, and reaching this marker just before Canada Day: how appropriate.)

How Can You Tell There's Not Much To Do In Saskatoon?

      Here's how.    (Okay, the study's testing was done in Cairo, but....)

      Mind you, the odds of such a study being issued by the University of Regina are, well, pretty long....

Mercer, Mercer Me....

         Zelda alerted me to this potentially-interesting new blog ostensibly (and I think genuinely, for now, anyway) by Canuckistani satirist Rick Mercer.    Looks like he's just getting started with it, but Mercer could run into trouble if he ends up in the unfortunate situation of-- you know it's coming-- blogging to Americans.

      EXPLANATION FOR MY NON-CANUCKISTANI READERS:    Mercer, beyond his years on This Hour Has 22 Minutes, developed a significant following with his specials "Talking To Americans," in which he would get Americans to demonstrate their utter ignorance of all things Canadian.    The two prizes of his career: catching both Al Gore and Dubya with their heads up their respective arses.

The Pluck Of The Irish

      Thomas Friedman's column (requires free subscription) in today's NYT is about the stunning economic recovery that has taken place in Ireland over the past decade and change.    And really, as Friedman posits, the method is so simple-- and so obvious-- one wonders why other European nations (and, indeed, Canada) have not adopted similar strategies:

Ireland's advice is very simple: Make high school and college education free; make your corporate taxes low, simple and transparent; actively seek out global companies; open your economy to competition; speak English; keep your fiscal house in order; and build a consensus around the whole package with labor and management - then hang in there, because there will be bumps in the road - and you, too, can become one of the richest countries in Europe.

Makes sense to me, particularly the part about keeping education free or close to it.    Those that treat education as an expense rather than an investment are doing more injury that realize.

And Justice For All

      Last night, the House of Commons made Canada just the third country in the world (after Holland and Belgium) to legalize same-sex marriage.    Dollars to doughnuts, I think this genuinely was a civil rights issue, which I'm glad to see resolved, however tentatively: after all, gays and lesbians are entitled to condemn their lives to slogs of domestic misery just as much as the rest of the population, non?

Come Shoot My Windows

      Well.    Well, not well.

      In installing a certain programme that currently Controls The World, I've not only spent the past several hours on the verge of ripping out my hair, but it seems too that I've lost all of my emails and email addresses.    As you can imagine, the Not-So-Good Doctor is not a particularly happy camper right now. So, those of you that would like back into my address book, for whatever reason, just send me an email so I can rebuild what I've lost, or at least as much of it as I can.    Most of you know my address, but if not, here's a clue: it is the Doctor's real last name+his first initial (as in "simpsonh") AT 3web.net.    I am being a bit circumspect about this merely because I don't want to get inundated with emails encouraging me to buy penis pumps and Nigerian stock options.    (Yeah, yeah, yeah, keep your penis pump jokes to yourselves, people....)    But thanks for your patience with all this.    Gawd knows, I think I've lost mine-- and not my penis-pump, or the jokes one should mercilessly make thereto.    Uggidy ugh ugh ugh.    I'm too old for this shit.

      Interesting bit of trivia: checking SiteMeter today, I noticed a curious referral, from someone looking through Google for "aftermaths of quitting smoking."    In a way, this is funnier than the oddball types that arrive here looking for "Whoopi Goldberg nude."    I'll let you surmise why.    Cheers.

I Have Witnesses

      I do, I really do; I haven't been anywhere near Holland.    Hell, I don't even have a passport.    Truly.    Seriously.    Hey, stop looking at me like that!!!!   

      Bastards....

      Besides, there's no way I could pass for 19 or 20 anymore, so there.    And if you think I'm telling any of you the "kissing bandit" story, you're kidding yourselves.

Scotch On The Rocks

      Somewhere in Toronto, or wherever else he might now be, my old mentor Dick Ewen's spine just went cold.    Right, RK?

Plaster of Paris

      In case you're really, really, really, really, really bored today.

The Old Mahon And The Sea

      Glancing through Derek Mahon's Lives (1972) this morning, I stumbled upon this surprisingly good poem, a response to Wallace Stevens' wonderful "The Idea of Order at Key West." Strangely, though, when I went to look for the poem online to offer it here, I discovered this version of it, which is quite different than the one offered in Lives and features some key errors ("diest" should be "diet," for example).   Mahon probably altered it between journal and chapbook release, as poets are often wont to do, but the Lives version is so much better.   Here it is:

Rage for Order

Somewhere beyond
The scorched gable end
And the burnt-out
Buses there is a poet indulging his
Wretched rage for order--

Or not as the
Case may be, for his
Is a dying art,
An eddy of semantic scruple
In an unstructurable sea.

He is far
From his people,
And the fitful glare
Of his high window is as
Nothing to our scattered glass.

His posture is
Grandiloquent and
Deprecating, like this,
His diet ashes,
His talk of justice and his mother

The rhetorical device of a Claudian emperor--
Nero if you prefer,
No mother there;
And this in the face of love, death, and the wages of the poor.

If he is silent
It is the silence
Of enforced humility,
If anxious to be heard
It is the anxiety of a last word

When the drums start--
For his is a dying art.
Now watch me
As I make history,
Watch as I tear down

To build up
With a desperate love,
Knowing it cannot be
Long now till I have need of his
Germinal ironies.

Okay, well it's not a great poem, but it is better than most of the semi-recent poetry I see.   I think Mahon's irregular rhythms are a bit awkward, and I think his interpretation of Stevens is a little flimsy, such that the poem when held in comparison with (or in contrast with) Stevens' poem, it does seem very jejeune, and not a little inelegant.   ("Now watch me / As I make history" strikes me as very weak, a statement more prone to be uttered by young poets than more experienced ones.)   It is, however, worth the read, and it reminds me of something I am all too prone to forget in relation to my own writing, that all of us have to suffer through our juvenalia. Few of us hit out strides on the first bolt out of the gate.   "Instructurable sea," however, is a fine phrase, one I think Stevens would have appreciated.

He Shall Be Released (Exclusively)

      Coming soon: Gordon Lightfoot at every Tim Horton's.   Okay, all together now:

           There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
           Businessmen, they drink my mocha, plowmen dig my earth,
           None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.

      Managed, by the way, to dig up, finally, an online-edition of Bono's 1984 interview with The Bob and The Man from Hot Press.   You can find it here.   Hard to believe there was a time when Bono didn't act like an authority on everything.

Utterly Cynical and Very Stupid

      Welcome to Tony Blair's Britain. (See also here.)

Nevermore, Nevermore, Please Sir, Nevermore

      This blog directs you to this only if you're curious enough to lick a metal pole in winter time: yes, it's Christopher Walken reading Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" as if here were grooving along in a coffeshop in Baha.   Gee, suddenly those "Hey, Pepto Bismol!" commercials don't seem so bad after all.  

      (And, yes, not just phoning it in, he's literally, like that pocket-watch in Pulp Fiction, pulling something right out of his ass.

      (link courtesy Fazed, and, yes, I know, it needs more cowbell....)

      UPDATE: The original link seems to have exceeded its bandwidth limits. Check out this site for an alternate location.

'Twould Set Your Heart A-Bubblin'

      So, here it is, Sunday morning, and though my Sunday mornings are never as Stevensian as I might wish (no complacencies of any peignoirs here), it's surprisingly nice.   For the first time in goodness-only-knows how long, I have my own computer again, that is, one entirely to myself.   Oh bliss, oh joy.   I think I had forgotten the feeling of having my own machine, and not having to accommodate space.   Oddly enough, this coincides with the recent discovery of an old CD packet that contained some discs I had long since assumed lost forever, so I'm listening to the Chieftains' The Long Black Veil (cover pictured at right, or the North American one, anyway).   The album's ten years old now, and far from perfect, but it has some enchanting moments, particularly those where the guest vocalists fit in so much than one would expect.   Mark Knopfler's version of "The Lily of the West" is looming away, Knopfler's voice sounding oddly at ease with the material.   Ry Cooder's vocals on "Coast of Malabar" remind me that he did (does) have a hell of a voice when he want to let it sing.   And then there's Marianne Faithfull, as withered and cigarette-haunted as ever, who brings a peculiar but undeniable authority to "Love Is Teasin'."   The less said about Tom Jones' "Tennessee Waltz," the better, though.

      The real highlight here is the album's last track, the rollicking "The Rocky Road to Dublin," which proceeds through enough movements to make the constipated jealous.   One movement sounds gay and tripping, another ominous, another rousing, and so on and so forth, thanks to the strange complement of the Chieftains in the form of the Rolling Stones (and Colin James on guitar and mandolin). It's a marvelous conundrum of sound, obviously improvised, guitars and fiddles flying about everywhere, with flutes and pipes and Charlie Watts' drums bouncing about in-between.   It's also one of the few songs for which the album credits Irish dancing, the percussive sounds of so much stomping obviously informing the rhythm, and mercifully not in one of those Riverdance fashions.   Clocking in at just over five minutes, it's one of those rare performances one wishes went another five, or even ten, minutes longer.   Absolutely spiriting, it's better for me than church, and almost incentive to think with more energy of the possibilities of those dreary things called Sundays.   One, two, three, four, five...

Shakin' All Over

      Reading this review of Antony Wild's Coffee: A Dark History, I was reminded of an old episode of James Burke's Connections in which Professor Burke managed to connect the development of modern technology to-- wait for it-- the ever-growing market for Scotch.   (The connection, by the way, was James Watt, a Scot Quaker trying to make a profit on his country's national imbibement).   I'm also remined of my own debts to coffee, especially in my undergraduate days when it was not uncommon for me to go through several pots of coffee in an essay-writing day.   Note, though, this paragraph, that explains so much:

Wild argues that the creative output of the movement's greatest artists and thinkers might have been significantly less if they'd been fans of sloth-inducing ale instead of energizing coffee. The Royal Society, for example, a group of pals who gathered to slurp coffee and discuss alchemy at an Oxford café named Tillyard's, was later responsible for publishing the works of its chairman, Isaac Newton. The Coffee Club of Rota met in Westminster at the Turk's Head, where luminaries such as Andrew Marvell and Samuel Pepys discussed and promoted new political concepts, including the early adoption of the modern ballot box. In France, meanwhile, Voltaire was reputedly downing between 50 and 72 cups of coffee a day, a habit that many link to the brevity and mania of Candide.

Whoa.... Even I in my more desperate days couldn't have done that much in a day, and I was raised on coffee as if it was mother's milk.   (In Hamilton, it moreorless is.)   It would hardly surprise me, though, if coffee really did have the broad cultural impact that Wild thinks it did.   After all, beer and whisky have already had their impacts assessed.   Now maybe it's time to look into the legacy of Irish Mist?

Just Your Average Horny Little Devils

      Probably the less I say about these pieces, the better, right?

Bowled-Over and Free-Falling

      A rare brilliant image from Worth1000, a site I seldom bother to check simply because my dialup connection makes going there far too much like a trip to Pork Spew, more frustrating than rewarding.   But I can just imagine people reacting to this in some sort of (were it possible) real-life situation (do people still have real-life situations anymore?); oh, the fun that could be had....

A Query For My Readers (All Four Of You)

      In thinking about various changes I may or may not make to this blog, I'm debating whether or not to switch from Enetation's comment hosting to Blogger's.   There are some things I do very much prefer about Enetation, as frustrating as it can sometimes be: it does allow for smilies, and it's customizable, which is always a bonus for someone like me that would rather have things his own way rather than being stuck with someone else's.   That said, Enetation's irregularity has me wondering if I should make the switch.   And, beyond being a real pain in the arse to do so, it would also mean losing all of the comments that have accumulated since this blog began over two years ago.  

      So, here's my query for you: what do you think I should do?   Leave things (at least in terms of the comments) the way they are, or make the switch?   Let me know what you think.

Tout La Meme Chose

      It seems Zelda has tagged me to do one of those memes that have been making the rounds, this one asking me to name five things I miss most about my childhood.   Considering that I have forgotten most of my childhood (seriously, not glibly), I don't really have much in the way of childhood nostalgia.   Not that anything traumatic happened to cause this kind of pseudo-amnesia, but where most people can remember nursery rhymes and stories and outings and such, I remember next-to-nothing.   'Tis just the way it is.   But here goes, five things I miss most from my childhood, such as it was:

• My great-grandparents:   My father's grandparents, to be specific, as I had at one point in my childhood five great-grandmothers and one great-grandfather.   My great-grandfather taught me how to fish, and he was probably closer to me than any of my other relatives.   To this day, everytime I think about fishing, or walk past Copps Coliseum (which he used to take me by as it was being built, all those years ago), I think of him.   My grandmother, his wife, was one of the sweetest women I've ever known, and, sadly, she had to endure not just the unbearable symptoms of Parkinson's disease, but she wound up very ill to the point that she had to live in hospital for over a year after my grandfather's death, and we didn't want to tell her the truth for fear she would have just given up.   Eventually, of course, we had to tell her.   She died not long after.



• Innocence:   Unfathomable, probably, but I do remember being much less jaded and pessimistic than I have become, and, in fact, I used to believe all kinds of silly stuff.   I used to be much more energetic and spirited and hopeful.   My, how times change.



• Writing:   I used to write constantly, very often using an old rickety typewriter, or in notebooks that I would take with me into a closet so I could get away from the rest of the distracting world.   I especially used to love writing murder-mysteries, in which I'd take great glee in killing off friends in the most creative ways I could imagine.   (Macabre as that sounds, believe it or not, my friends used to love reading how they would die.   Moreso than discovering how I'd figure out who killed them.)   Unfortunately, now writing is more painful than productive or liberating.



• My Old Commodore 64:   You remember the old days, when computers served you, rather than you serving them like adults to unruly children?   After my Vic 20, I got my 64, on which I played Sid Meier's Pirates and Impossible Mission and the like, for hours on end.   Computers seemed so much more magical then, though, of course, they were really just primitve.   But, for my mind, they were also just a lot more fun.



• The Cottage:   We still own our cottage (it was once my great-grandparents'), but I haven't been out there in years, probably since 1998 or so.   Besides fishing and swimming and all that, it used to be one of my favourite things, to drive down the hill, probably 60 feet and at a very sharp decline, on my old-- wait for it-- Big Wheel.   Yup.   Half the time I would drive the darned thing right into the river.   Same, too, rolling down that hill in an inner tube.   Also remember doing so many of the things I never do anymore: picking (and gorging myself on) strawberries down the road, hiking through the brush, playing lawn darts and horseshoes, whipping along in that inner tube when it was tied to a boat.   Fun stuff, when you're a kid.   Now, sadly, the cottage is more of an albatross than anything, and we're never out there, though apparently one of my uncles uses it a fair bit.   We moreorless stopped going out there in my teens.   Think the last time I was out there was just to help my uncle do some roofing, though it may have been with The One Of Whom I Do Not Speak.   Who knows anymore.   Memories, like childhood, all go into the dark.

Anyway, there you have them, again, such as they are.   So, who should I tag now?   Hmmm, the trick with these tags is to try to get some people you'd never expect to respond to play along, like Paul Wells' gleefully getting Governor-General Clarkson to name which books have most influenced her in a similar meme.   So, hmmm, I'll tag RK, cbeck, Jen, and, for aiming high, how about Macleans' own backpager Mr. Wells and, what the heck, the always-amusing Dave Barry.   Let's see if anyone runs with it.   Cheers.

A School of Guile, A Net Of Deep Deceit

      Interesting news this: Cate Blanchett will reprise her role as Elizabeth I, with Clive Owen to star as Sir Walter Raleigh.   The first film was quite good, and Blanchett, poor thing, has seemed stuck in a rutt of dull character parts since. It seems the second film will also feature Jeremy Irons as the Earl of Leicester, which-- though not as inspired a casting choice as Geoffrey Rush as Walsingham-- sounds promising. With this announcement, though, I figured I'd post one of Raleigh's more famous poems, "A Farewell to False Love." Here it is:

A Farewell to False Love

Farewell false love, the oracle of lies,
A mortal foe and enemy to rest,
An envious boy, from whom all cares arise,
A bastard vile, a beast with rage possessed,
A way of error, a temple full of treason,
In all effects contrary unto reason.

A poisoned serpent covered all with flowers,
Mother of sighs, and murderer of repose,
A sea of sorrows whence are drawn such showers
As moisture lend to every grief that grows;
A school of guile, a net of deep deceit,
A gilded hook that holds a poisoned bait.

A fortress foiled, which reason did defend,
A siren song, a fever of the mind,
A maze wherein affection finds no end,
A raging cloud that runs before the wind,
A substance like the shadow of the sun,
A goal of grief for which the wisest run.

A quenchless fire, a nurse of trembling fear,
A path that leads to peril and mishap,
A true retreat of sorrow and despair,
An idle boy that sleeps in pleasure's lap,
A deep mistrust of that which certain seems,
A hope of that which reason doubtful deems.

Sith* then thy trains my younger years betrayed,          [since]
And for my faith ingratitude I find;
And sith repentance hath my wrongs bewrayed*,           [revealed]
Whose course was ever contrary to kind*:          [nature]
False love, desire, and beauty frail, adieu.
Dead is the root whence all these fancies grew.

The Turtle And The Turtleneck

      In a word: yikes.   Key quote: "He realised what it was that was attacking him when the turtle latched onto his finger, leaving a deep wound that needed several stitches."   Hmmm....

This Blog Will Mull It Over

      It seems Dave Barry-- aside from waging war with his Research Department over yearbook photos-- has decided to launch his second annual poetry competition.   You can check out the rules, such as they are, here.   As for Dave's yearbook picture, well, hmmm, we'll let you decide, even if he does look like Drew Carey after too many Slim Fasts.

      (Mercifully, the Not-So-Good Doctor doesn't have any old yearbooks, and I managed to avoid, I think completely, the terrifying gaze of roving cameras way back when.   I vaguely remember hiding my face anytime the yearbook crew was in the vicinity.)

Why Do You Have To Let It Finger...

      Is it possible, that The Onion has published something funny again?   Just when I had given up hope.   Key quote: "I'm not asking that we draft a law to prevent robots from manually stimulating with owner consent. If people want their wives fingered by their bots, that's fine. I wasn't born yesterday. To each his own. I'm not asking you to forbid robots from fingering every wife, just mine."

Run For The Border

      Well, tomorrow, the Not-So-Good Doctor is shuffling off to Buffalo for a day-trip to watch the Bisons play a few innings.   The trip is through one of my local haunts-- and the afternoon will no doubt be spent drinking obscene amounts of alcohol.   Who am I kidding?   So will the morning, as there will surely be enough alcohol on the bus to fell a rhinocerous.   I've been on one of these trips before, and all the drink and food will be, as they say, "comped." (Insert requisite quote from William Blake here.)   Ergo, tomorrow should be a good day, even if it's a good possibility I'll be coming back in a body-bag.   Food, drinks, and baseball, what more could one ask for?   Well, that, I guess, but that never comes free, and one always ends up paying too much for it....

A Shiver Runs Through Him

      Yes, it's official; the academi world has just proven, beyond all doubt, its craven desperation for relevance.   Gawd help me:

Why Brad Pitt? As one of this generation's most popular actors, Pitt has explored many of the cultural tensions of our emerging postmodern era. Depicting masculine American whiteness in various states of crisis, his characters generally enact complex postmodern agencies; they are never wholly coherent, they are often self-destructive, and they generally rely on a certain amount of play -- between stability and instability, between life and death, between autonomy and alter-dependency, between control and abandon. Simultaneously reifying and challenging hegemonic codes of race, class, gender, and regional or national identity, his characters explore the complex and changing postmodern cultural landscape.

What's next, Lindsay Lohan and the recreation of angst?   Proof positive that gobbledygook can be used to make anything sound "academic."   Pffft.

Sausage and Drippings

      Lord help me, I really, really, really, really (really) wish I had not read this....   ***shudder***   Excuse me while I apply some industrial-strength detergent to my brain to try to get rid of this from my mind....

The Moustache Before The Beard

      As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.   Now if only the pranksters had used milk, internet pornographers would be splitting their sides (and other things?) with glee.

      (And, yes, I know, I posted just yesterday that I didn't want to hear another word about any of this Cruising.   But, c'mon-- in what way is that picture resistable to a heckler like me?   I rest my permanently-addled case.)

      For the record, this piece from The Independent sums matters up very tidily:

The moral of the story? From a financial point of view, at least, Tom Cruise shouldn't feel too upset about his public drenching. He was, at the end of the day, just taking one for the team.

Indeed.  

Sack of Woe

      Somewhere, Ben Affleck is mourning the death of liberty.

      Liberté, egalité, obscurité!!!!

Because It's Crucially Important Information

      And this blog is always glad to perform a public service.   Key quote:   "But I wanted to appeal to this generation."

Lolling About

      A typical pair of images of late, Jenny (first below) and Trouble (second below) watching the outside-world, particularly its birdies, go by. I had wanted to snap a pic of the two of them looking out the same window at the same time, but leave it to Trouble to thwart those plans.   Since Jenny arrived in December, Trouble-- once 20 pounds-- has thinned down to 12, a fact to which I am still not adjusted (and Jenny has now reached Trouble's onetime weight).   But there they are, he says, sounding so Jamesian: the Doctor's meowers, on a Tuesday morning, remarkably serene.  

Like I Love Fresca

      For those of you wondering what's up with the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes wedding, let this advance picture of the pending nuptials explain it to you.

Now, please, please, please, let us never have to read or to hear about this again.    Thank you.   End transmission.

So That's How It Felt

      Does this remind anyone of that old Kevin Costner film No Way Out?   (See also here.)

Merely This And Nothing More?

      WARNING:   LITERATURE GEEK ALERT:   Received via email this link to a 35+ year-old article on Tom Eliot's estimations of Edgar Allan Poe, and considering some of my -- admittedly tentative-- thinking on the matter over the past several years, I'm struggling with this conclusion:

Eliot's views of Poe are to be found in the scattered sources described above, sometimes with surface inconsistencies that need close comparison and attention to context. From these various comments it is evident that Eliot never really "liked" Poe, and felt superior to him in much the same way that Emerson and Henry James did. Eliot's interest in the French Symbolist poets, however, came as early as 1908, and their debt to Poe was inescapable (9).   Gradually Eliot worked out an intellectually acceptable explanation.   French views helped him to see Poe as an earlier colleague in his own attack on American— and English — provincialism.   Students of Poe, however, would have been better served if Eliot had summed up in one systematic essay his experience with Poe (10), so as to show his progress from the "horrifying" opinions of 1919 to his final judgments.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear....   Typical, isn't it, how much literary critics want to be able to pin down one poet's thinking on another, and how they long for the synoptic statement that does not exist.   (And, of course, depending solely on the prosaic statements rather than the poetic ones.)   True, Poe was never going to be of much use for Eliot in most ways, particularly for the longer works.   It seems to me, however, that Eliot does borrow from some of Poe's rhythms and melodic sensibilities in the lighter works, like "The Hippopotamus" and -- most evidently-- in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.   Compare, for example, the peculiarities of repetition and rhyme in "Macavity: The Mystery Cat" and Poe's "The Raven," and note that Eliot borrows-- but does not adhere to-- Poe's sestet structure.   I suspect Eliot had an appreciation for some of Poe's rhythmical sensibilities, especially in so far as they contrived dimensions of layered and highly-musical verbal play, a kind of play also to be found in poems of Lewis Carroll and even Kipling.   But of those three, only Carroll would be truly useful for Eliot's major works, and so only (really) in Four Quartets.   For Eliot, though, tinkering in his poetic workshop, I suspect Poe was more useful than one tends to think, even if more in the sense of a wordsmith puttering about with sounds and rhythms than with a capital-P poet diving fine language.   I don't much doubt that Eliot "never really 'liked' Poe," but I suspect he borrowed from him more than one tends to expect, particularly in terms of Poe's play with forms of poetic echo.   I've thought for some years that there was something to this tendinous connection, but I'm not sure what to do with it.   Hmmm, yet another ort of thought to deal with....

From Out Of Nowhere

      Strange, isn't it, how much one's mood can change within a few moments.   A step to the mailbox today revealed a stunning surprise, a gift from an old friend that comes from out of nowhere, and a gift one had wanted but figured impossible to locate, even in this Internet-driven age.   (Insert shivers here.)   What was it?, I can hear you asking, wondering what could cause such a reversal of mood, especially in the generally-cranky Doctor J.   Well, here it is, what dropped my jaw somewhere down around my ankles, an image you'll probably not be able to find anywhere else on The Net:


Wow....   As I write this, AG is reading in the background, and near the end of the magnificent "Little Gidding." The tapes include readings of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Hippopotamus" and "Sweeney Among The Nightingales," the readings themselves done for the BBC in the early seventies.   Positively delightful.   Thanks, old friend.   Many, many thanks.

      Later:   AG's reading of The Waste Land is a true tour de force, especially with Alec's capacity to perform a variety of voices in a way that Eliot in his own reading of the poem could never manage.   Wonderful.   Consider the Not-so-Good Doctor's day made.  

A Kind Of An Update

      Sorry that it has been a while (a week, in fact) since I bothered to write anything on this blog, and now-- to boot-- it seems, at least on this end of things, that since those last postings this blasted blog is now as misshapen as David Merrick.   I blame Leeloo.   Why?   Just cuz I do.   Harrumph.   I may have to revamp the template again, a pain-in-the-arse task if ever there is one.

      For reasons not quite within my ken, I'm still not much on writing.   The various computer-related frustrations of late, combined with a nasty heat streak in Southern Contraryo, seem to have taken the ambition out of me.   Certainly any sense of creativity has evaporated for a bit.   But the fact remains that I haven't been much into blogging, or writing at all, for the past while, something perhaps just best chalked up to ennui and an extant sense of the pointlessness of the process.   That, and I'm in the process of putting together applications for two recently-announced positions, and that tends to exacerbate that sense of futility tinged with boredom.   Tinged?   Positively laced.   Like Jim Jones' Kool Aid.   Bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh, bleh.

      But there we are, or rather there I am.   Will post more when-- well, who knows when.   And please, please, no one write in the comments something to the effect of "Jer, what you need is a good woman."   If I had a dollar....  

      UPPITYDATE: It does seem that it was Leeloo's picture that was screwing things up, but I'll be damned if I can figure out why. Put on a percented weighting (i.e., of the screen size), it explodes the page; put on a hard limit (i.e., specific number of pixels), and things are fine. Go figure.

      EVEN-UPPITIERDATE: It seems Leeloo has risen to her own diabolical defence. Who me, indeed....

Further Apologies

      I apologize-- yet again-- that I haven't felt much like blogging-- or answering emails-- of late. I confess that I am in one of my less-than-communicative modes.  

In What Way Is This Not Adorable?

      This, by the way, is Leeloo, Zelda's adoptee.   Oh, and her sweets' (Matt's), too.   Sorry, Matt, to whom I can merely apologize and say that old habits die hard, hoping he understands. (Old minds get used to thinking in the singular.)

Real Real John

      I wonder what Nathaniel Hawthorne would have thought of this.   One begins to wonder why they don't just stick giant red Js on them and be done with it.   Horrifying, absolutely horrifying.   Unless, of course, you're Charlie Sheen.

Bouncing Back

      It's a small world, after all.  

A Scam Down Under

      Er, um, we'll let you make your own inferences about this....  

      Too many jokes, too little time....

Grewal Intentions

      The gob-smacking ludicrousness that is Canuckistani politics of late has reached a newer depth (oh so Miltonically!) with the claim by independent analysts that the famous tape made by Tory MP Gurmant Grewal of attempted bribery seems to have been edited.   The Tories, feeling about like blind men in a ladies' change room, are now caught with only the lamest excuses; according to the CBC:

In a press release, the party said that certain brief passages of the audio tapes were accidentally omitted in the transfer to a CD format.

Leave it to the Tories to muck up a charge of corruption against the Liberals, which is rather being unable to prove that two plus two equals four.   Beyond the obvious moral and ethical problems here, both the Tories and the Liberals seem to engaged in a pissing contest to prove which party is the most inept.   It reminds me all to well that one of the problems of parliamentary democracy is that when there's no one at the top (or, as in our case, the one at the top is acting like his underlings), there's no one to pull the children apart.   A new duty for the Governor-General, perhaps?   This blog, for one, would looooooooooove to see Adrienne Clarkson take a switch to the behinds of both Mr Harper and Mr Martin.   On public television.   And then be sent to their rooms without dinner.   For a year.   Let 'em see how they like those apples.

In Case You Were Wondering

      I'm sure some of you have been waiting, on pins and nipples no doubt, to have your confusion remedied:

Well, that's not all that they're for, but....

And Seventeen Seconds....

      For reasons that should not need explanation, let's just say that for most men the words "I'm late" will always have a very particular meaning....   **shudder**

A Kiss And A Cuddle

      They look like a happy couple, don't they?   (You may now release your collective awwwwws.)   You have to admire a hundred year-old woman who still likes her daily whisky.

      And, yes, this almost certainly the first and last time this blog will ever say, suggest, imply or otherwise evince a note of positiveness about marriage.   Even I, though, have to doff my hat to these two.   I don't think I could do eighty days anymore without wanting to tie a rope around a cinder block and hang myself with it.   I wonder what the appropriate gift for an 80th anniversary is, though.   Plutonium?  

      UPDATE:   Ah, another darling story of modern love.   This, as they say, would happen to me if I ever got roped into getting, er, well, you know, the M-word.