Up in Ontario

A Leap Year

I just noticed that it's a leap year. February 29th is the date today and the next February 29th won't be for another four years. So what? Well, just this: it started me thinking about time and how it passes.

What if you were born today? Would you grow old at 1/4 the pace of everyone else? That may sound like a silly question, but we measure our life in years and we measure our years in anniversaries of our birth (birthdays) and our birthdays fall on a single day. So sticking to those rules, someone born on February 29th would only grow old at 1/4 the rate as someone born on any other day of the year.

Am I being pedantic here? Pointing out the obvious in a boring way just to amuse myself? I don't think so. At least, I don't think so now. I thought so at first, then I thought about it more and found that a real sense of mystery and discovery did exist around leap years, that leap years are like lifting the veil of our preconceptions, preconceptions that allow us to function in our quotidian lives, and revealing the messiness and arbitrariness of the world around us.

We humans are fastidious time managers. We measure time in increments smaller than any of us can actually discern without the aid of tools designed specifically for such a purpose. We celebrate timing in our races. We grow frustrated by timing when it does not suit our purposes, when it slips away never to return again. We think we know time because we pay so much attention to it everyday: when we go to bed, when we get up, when we leave, how long we work, how long we exercise, how long until the potatoes are cooked. But then along comes a leap year and we're faced with extra time, unaccounted for, outside of the regular boundaries of our calendar, an extra day tacked on every four years to balance out the structure we have created around the complex interplay of planets and gravity and the star we depend on for life.

Most people I know or have heard of, if born on February 29th, celebrate their birthdays on February 28th. It seems as if their real birthday collapsed and shunted them backward a day, except in a leap year when they celebrate on February 29th. But they do not age any differently (that I know of) from anyone else. They still grow up at the same rate, gain weight beyond when they want to, lose the tone and elasticity of their skin, wrinkle and begin to shrink like anyone else.

So what is the purpose of measuring our age? To gain a sense of control over the passing of time? To be able to account for events? To have a framework around which we can structure our memories? To control the privileges and responsibilities we have: drinking, driving, voting, retiring. To have a universal way of saying, "at that time in my life, when I was n years old." To have something to measure before we die? I don't know, I'm wondering. Probably because we rely on habit and ritual to create and reinforce our identities, we need time.

We also use time to personify the things we don't want to acknowledge. How many times have you heard "I don't have time" used as a replacement for saying "I am not willing to do that" or "I cannot make that a priority so I cannot do it?" Or how about "time to go" in lieu of "I want to go?" Or how about "time to get cracking" instead of "I want you to start doing this now?" How people treat time often serves as a surrogate for how they treat other people and themselves. Time becomes the deciding factor in decisions they don't want to make. But time is only what we make it.

Think of all the instances of the word time in our daily lives. We are time obsessed yet we think very little about time, apart from how to manage it better. We organize our lives around times and timing but time exists beyond the confines of our control. You can never have back the time that has passed. You can never actually lengthen the time you have. Yet it seems that we can. Some days time stands still. Some days time flies past. A duality exists in how I understand time. On one hand, the passage of time seems tyrannical and unfair; we are born, we live, maybe we procreate, we create, maybe we leave something behind, we all die. On the other hand, the passage of time is a great comfort; time marches on, heals all wounds, acts as the great equalizer.

I am 28 years old now and if I were born on a leap year I would be only 7.

Best Ever Banana Bread Recipe

This recipe alone may make you friends if you ever move to a new city and know no one. The smell will draw them in. The key aspects are: the rottener the bananas, the better (let them get good and dark then freeze them), the darker the sugar, the better (once I considered using molasses), the closest you can remain to underdone without serving batter, the better (moistness is just short of godliness).

Best Ever Banana Bread

1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
3 ripe bananas
2 eggs
1 1/4 cup flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp sea salt

In a sturdy heat-resistant bowl, melt butter. With a mixer, cream butter and sugar together until they get gooey. On a plate with raised edges, mash bananas with the back of a fork until they have no lumps. Add bananas and eggs to bowl and beat until well mixed. Blend dry ingredients together and gradually stir them into the mixture. Do not overmix.

Pour batter into a lightly greased or non-stick loaf pan. Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour at 350 F. Test for doneness with the toothpick method. When cooked through, flip out of loaf pan onto rack (will require oven mitts) and let cool for 10 minutes.

Additions you might enjoy in various combinations:

Great Literary Drunks

Many years ago, the Duck related to me a story that a professor of English told her class about how every American writer who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature had died of alcoholism or of complications related to alcoholism, often suicide. The professor, who himself was an American, took great pride in cataloguing the conditions and circumstances of each author's demise. Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald: all winners in Swedish standing and all well-recognized drunks. And those are just the first few that come to mind.

Maisonneuve magazine has published a list of great literary drunks with a brief history of their drinking. It makes for some interesting reading and some cautionary tales. It also suggests a drink dedicated to the demise of each author.

So what connects authors and alcoholism so intimately?

Playing Defense at the Rink

I drove to play hockey tonight with my rec-league team and realized as I passed along the dark highway that I have played for 24 years, I have skated for 27 years and I am not yet ready to not play any more. My body sometimes aches the morning after playing and my forearms and wrists show bruises and cuts when I wear short-sleeved shirts, but I still love to play.

We played tonight and beat the top team in our division. This feat may sound innocuous, trite, inconsequential, maybe a little precious, and to watch us play may provide the same experience to the casual observer, but when we return to the dressing room after playing and we know we have surpassed the level that we had previously contented ourselves with and we had learned new ways to make the rhythms, speed, and yes, violence, of the game work to our favour, there are few better feelings in sport.

In the opposition's dressing room the sounds of complaints would have been heard. I know, I have been there. As a French teacher of mine used to say, "les pleures et les grincements des dents." And I know I will be there again. But tonight, we won: 5-4. The team I play on has a name that sounds more to me like a Quebecois biker gang (Vipers) but it's a good group of guys who play hard for each other, and that is the most important thing.

Hockey to me is an incredible blend of rhythmic beauty and flurries of violence scrambled together in a limited playing space and sped up as fast as possible. As a player, progression through the levels of the game remains determined by your ability to adjust to the increased speed and violence. Largely, the patterns remain the same. The higher the level at which you play, the more magnified each small detail becomes - the way you hold your stick, how you move in the corners, your ability to react to the play and see the opening as it begins to develop, your ability to position your body to shoot from awkward angles, your ability to understand the stages of the game and your opportunism and resilience with pressure. These are the key elements of the game.

I play defense and I like playing defense. I may be the only one on our team, or on any of the teams I've played on since I quit playing competitively who likes to play defense. Everyone wants to score the highlight reel goals, no one wants to sprint back to retrieve the dumped-in puck. But to me, defense is where the game still lives. I can watch plays develop, see the openings and pick and choose my spots to rush or pinch. Tonight we played the whole game with 3 defensemen (which is 1 short from a minimum number that will allow for one full shift of players so eveyone can rest) and we played one of our best defensive games of the season.

Which brings me to the other thing I really like about hockey: on any night one team can beat another. Talent, while important, does not guarantee a win. Over and over, teams that play together, teams that play systems, teams that are opportunistic when presented with opportunity and resilient when at a disadvantage are the ones that win. These may all sound like clichés, tired phrases worn out by post-game interviews and coaches filling air time with sound bites without revealing their thoughts, but they are nonetheless true. They endure because every season of every team exemplifies them. Don't lose a third period. The 5-foot rule around each blueline (at your own blueline get it out or keep it out, at the offensive blueline get it in or keep it in). Special teams and goaltending win close games. Shoot early and often. Win the battle along the boards. Be first to the puck.

So while much cry and hullabaloo (speaking of les pleures et les grincements des dents) has filled the pages of newspapers and the airwaves of sports talk radio recently about the state of hockey at the professional level, it will pass and shift to another topic soon enough. Rule changes have been suggested by everyone with a soapbox to shout from, and some will be installed with various degrees of success. But I have heard very little to convince me that the proposed changes will make much difference in the game.

As a counterpoint, I think the current game is played at an astonishingly high level, a level so high that a basement-dwelling team in today's NHL could compete with the greatest teams of the 50s and 60s, the Flying Frenchmen and the last Leafs team to win the cup. Players are bigger, better and faster. The key elements of the game - speed, smarts and violence - consistently are practiced at the highest level they have ever been practiced at in regular league play, even by the Minnesota Wild. So why not just call the game by the rule book and see what happens? If you want to get radical, take out the red line and institute no-touch icing. Don't commodify goals and aspire to professional lacrosse scores: 15-9.

The Endurance Expedition

"Persons wanted: for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success."

SIR ERNEST SHACKLETON, January 13, 1914; The Endurance Expedition

Rap Culture: A Diet Tribe

Listen to the words, hearing the beat
Got that money on my mind
And the steel at my neck
Got the trappings and guilt
Got the lifestyle vest
To borrow from this
A lick from that
What you really selling
Separating dis from dat?

Mythologies: created everyday
Credibility of words
That lets you play
I came from here and went through a lot
Just to get me some respect
My own piece of this rock
Some of my own rocks
To test my stock
To get me some
Of what I been missing

What I gotta do to make an impression here?
The world is what I see
Ain't nothing more
Don't tell me off
Disrupt my view

What are you really selling?
This is penance that I'm dealing
This experience of grandiose
Of poverty chic
This life I used to live
Before I hit the dream
Before I hit it big
I still live it every day
Talking, talking about people
We know, brands, you know, cash, you know
Set an example for believers
In the holy church, our capital
It's international
Right through the glass door
Struggle against the boogie man
Against the cracker there
And miss when our brightest leave
When at their peak
One Black Album and out
No question, remorse

It's just business
The business that I'm in
In deep, my next theme
Filchers and pawns and hangers on
Attack that scarecrow
Make enemies of the world
All us against him
Breaking barries and busting heads
Now thank the lord and saviour
For his mercy
For his humility

Live at the Lake Report

From the CFO

As of yesterday, all accounts had been tallied and all outstanding payments made to the appropriate parties. I am happy to announce that Live at the Lake raised almost dead on $2,000, which will be split in the following ways.

Plausible Deniability

I listened to more Cross-Country Checkup yesterday than I have ever listened to before, almost an entire show. Now, I have a little trouble with Rex Murphy. For me, as soon as a media character has been lampooned better than their real persona, it's hard to continue to take them seriously. See Colin Mochrie as Max Pointy and Dean Allen as Russell Smith for examples (also, Colin Mochrie's I'm Sorry [RealPlayer Video] just for old times). But I listened to Cross Country Checkup for most of yesterday afternoon to hear the Right Honourable Paul Martin, Prime Minister of Canada, carping to callers. This is the man who has not been elected, yet is our leader. After a few hours I felt compelled to respond and so I wrote the following email to checkup@cbc.ca.

I have been listening to the interview with Prime Minister Paul Martin all afternoon and have been fascinated to hear his answers to questions. I commend him for making himself open to Canadians by appearing on Cross Country Checkup, and I have a question for him resulting from his answers.

The majority of the actions he is suggesting as solutions for the problems that contributed and led to the GroupAction/sponsorship scandal are meant to address structural problems in the bureaucracy: the friendly Quebec political cronyism, the lack of accountability for civil servants, the secrecy and concentration of power in the PMO's office. But aren't these the same mechanisms that he has been using for the past few years to recreate himself and thrust himself into the position of Prime Minister? Isn't he implicated by association? I believe this is why people are disbelieving of Mr. Martin's assertions. What motivation does he really have to change things when he is the one who has benefited most of all from the current structures?

Best regards,
James Sherrett

What I didn't write is this: Paul Martin is twichy. His style in interviews comes across as aggressive, self-righteous, perfectionist and ambitious. When I hear him speak I can hear the mechanisms of his brain constantly working at finding the best (read: least offensive, safest, most on-message) way of saying what he wants to say. As a result, he stutters and speaks in staccato bursts of sharp words that set his listeners on edge. We can hear him engineering his message, calculating response before delivery. We can also tell when he comes back to one of the pat phrases he has practiced in preparation for an interview. Those phrases come out easily and in contrast with the rest of his answers.

Hearing Mr. Martin on Cross-Country Checkup was like hearing an upstart trying to fill the shoes of his mentor. The student had become the teacher but without the rites of passage that would have prepared him for the spotlight. Mr. Martin tied himself up in his own words. He worked so hard to answer each question that he came off sounding disingenuous when he could have slipped through some of the rhetorical nooses by not answering the questions, by answering the questions he wants to have asked, as Jean Chrétien was so adept at doing.

But what does this have to do with the price of head cheese? Well, setting aside the question of how business is done in Quebec (with familiarity, jocularity, cronyism and an incestuous blending of social and business relations, deals having replaced the church in the bedroom), what Mr. Martin has been trying to do for the past five days ends up well described by the veteran Globe and Mail correspondent, Jeffrey Simpson, in his column from Saturday's Globe, Uncle Fred Gets a Seven-Second-Delay Gadget. Framed in the form of a explanatory conversation, Mr. Simpson puts forward the theory of "plausible deniability," which simply states that Mr. Martin knew something was porky with the sponsorship program and therefore didn't want to know any more: "...Martin knew the programs' aims and knew some, if not all, of the players involved. He suspected a bad odour, and therefore didn't want to know too much. Plausible deniability, in other words."

And I think it's interesting to see public figures trying to find their way, wrestling like the rest of us do every day with being human and reconciling the pull and pressure of institutional mechanisms with our own personal value judgements (part of this fascination may also be the train-wreck factor: you can't look away). Mr. Martin has proven himself a superior technocrat, able to manage the processes, tools and mechanics of the political process. Those skills have propelled him to the highest government office in the country. But he still finds himself paralyzed in his professional capacity to act. Which of us has not been in the same position? Able to see how wrong something around us was playing out, whether criminally or not, and been faced with the dilemma of saying something or not? To me, the options seem to be:

Popcorns of Vancouver Theatres

Updates:

• Apr. 10/06: Ridge Theatre review corrected, Dunbar Theatre added.

First of all, a short explanation of my relationship with popcorn. I love popcorn. I have come by my appreciation for popcorn honestly, I inherited it from my father. I remember he used to have two bowls on the go at once when we watched a hockey game: one to be eaten at and the other poised to be refilled. He burned out the little electric motor on a series of hot air popcorn makers. My favourite popcorn maker of all time, The Poppery, is now in the possession of my brother. As the last child to leave our home, he raided the place and acquired furniture, dishes, tools and The Poppery, all items I had wanted to pinch for myself when I moved out years prior. The lesson in this: the last to leave the nest makes out like a bandit.

A good friend on mine, the LD, also has an enthusiasm for popcorn and made some of the best bowls around. We used to gather over at his place to watch important sports events on his home theatre setup. In fact, the LD missed one of the greatest athletic demonstrations of genius for popcorn, Canada's first goal of the 2002 winter olympics gold medal game, the goal where Lemieux made the non-play decoy movement as the puck slid through his legs to a wide open Paul Kariya who snapped it into the yawning net and then circled back to the congratulations circle with an incredulous look on his face, as if to say, "I can't believe I just was a part of that play." That goal happened while the LD beavered about in the kitchen making popcorn for the rest of us, and he had to watch the genius on replay with all of us hooting about it. We wouldn't describe the play to him before they replayed it, "You just have to see it," we said.

So you can see that I have high popcorn expectations. The kernals must be crisp and rich when chewed, the mixture of salt and butter must be close to just right in concentration and distribution. When I hit upon fine popcorn I make note of it. If I were to pick the best popcorn being made right now I would have to choose the popcorn that comes from The Poppery at my brother's apartment. It may just be nostalgia on my part, for I cannot say that emotion doesn't cloud my judgement sometimes, but I believe that his combination of kernal-popping temperature, serving bowl and butter-salt mixture wins my vote. And when he's popped a bowl and added the bang-on butter-salt ratio, he then tosses the kernals in the air like a fine chef manipulating a frying pan. Only rarely does he lose a kernal.

But if you don't get an invitation to my brother's place, you'll likely be stuck with popcorn at the movies. Below, I have summarized my findings from the theatre scene here in Vancouver. All opinions are completely subjective and based on nothing but my personal taste. Objectivity in reviews is a game for mugs.

Silvercity Riverport
(Famous Players - first-run, special events)

In our house we affectionately call this theatre/sports/mind candy complex "The Googleplex." 20 theatres, a waterslide park, an IMAX theatre and a few rinks make this architectural ADHD experiment a hub of hobbies in the middle of what used to be a farmer's field. All the latest releases show here and if you want to see the newest phenomena movie you can see it here since it will be playing every 30 minutes. But for all the hullabaloo of the assaulting decor, sound, visuals and smells, the popcorn is only mediocre. It's like too much attention was doled out to too many things and the designers of the Googleplex experience forgot the essential elements of going to the movies. Free refills do nothing to improve the quality of the popcorn. The dispensing system and the overall process of seeing a movie at the Googleplex reminds me of industrial farming practices: drive the largest volume possible through the infrastructure. Repeat.

• 6 out of 10 kernels

Granville 7 Cinemas
(Cineplex Odeon Theatres - first-run, festival)

The experience of going to this theatre is basically the same as above save that its design is 20 years late and you can be offered pot ("Weed?" the scruffy kid in the hoodie will say to you if you look at him too long) while you stand in line on Granville Street. The theatres are also smaller, so they have been retrofitted to compete with the suburban stadium seating and booming digital sound system. But the carpet has aged and the speakers used to speak back and forth to the attendants in the ticket wickets crackle. The popcorn tastes inoffensive, and that is the best that can be said for it. Cineplex Odeon has entered in a co-branding deal with a microwave popcorn company, though the theatres don't use microwaves, and the quality of the popcorn would make me shun the brand if I chose a microwave popcorn. The best thing this popcorn has to recommend it is that it reminds me why it is worthwhile to carry on my popcorn snobbery.

• 6 out of 10 kernels

Tinseltown
Cinemark Cinemas (first-run, second-run)

Something clearly has happened to the popcorn in this theatre. Everyone I have mentioned Tinseltown popcorn to has scowled. I remember I tried their popcorn the first time I saw a movie there. I walked away from the counter, popped the first few kernels into my mouth and stopped. Jesus there was a terrible taste happening. A burning, acrid flavour filled my nose. I spit the mushed kernels into a napkin and returned to the counter. As I waited I searched behind the counter for an old oil drum; that surely was what they had used to pop the crap I had bought. They must have dragged it up from the alley in the night, stolen it from the hobos warming themselves around it. A residue of some terrible simulated butter flavour coated the inside of my cheeks. I sucked back some of my drink and handed the bag back to the clerk. When he asked me why I wanted my money back I asked him if he had tasted the popcorn. "No," he said. "I never touch this stuff."

• 0 out of 10 kernels

Fifth Avenue Cinemas
(Alliance Atlantis - first-run, festival)

I would like to say this popcorn is good, since the movies that screen at this theatre often suit my taste, but it falls short in a too many ways. To begin with, when served, the popcorn is lukewarm, and popcorn should be hot. The topping could scald the calous off a seamstress, but the kernels remain at room temperature. As a result, when the topping is pumped onto the bag of popcorn, it melts the kernels and causes a cavity in the middle of the bag. The oily glop that congeals in there reminds me that the topping could only be a petroleum by-product, and that may be the last thing I want to think of as I try to enjoy my movie. If you ask for a bag without topping the popcorn tastes passable. But is that a recommendation? I think not. To sum up: good movies, marginal popcorn.

• 7 out of 10 kernels

Ridge Theatre
(Independent - repetoire, festivals, second-run)

Halleluliah, saviour! This popcorn is the best yet. Portions available for purchase are sensible and it tastes wonderful. They use real butter (!) as a topping. The kernels are crisp and small, not flavoured with that yellow powder that can only bring urine to mind. When you arrive at the bottom of your portion a few half-popped kernal remain, the kind that are split but not fully popped, the ones my brother and I called the crunchies and used to squabbled over. Add salt to this popcorn and it sings. Add sugar and it delights. My only complaint is that the hulls of the kernals can be prominent towards the end of a portion, so good dental floss is mandatory for full enjoyment.

• 9 out of 10 kernels 3 out of 10 kernels (-3 extra for heartache)

Update: Scratch everything. Since changing hands in late 2005 / early 2006, the Ridge Theatre has seriously gone downhill. I mean this is free fall. Everything that made it a great place to go to see a movie has flipped and now rogers the dog.

Cost: Although this is a post about popcorn, you can't get the corn if you don't get in to the show. So here's a little info about getting in to the show.

The cost of entry has grown from $6 to $12, That $6 used to get you in to see a double bill. The $12 gets you one movie. So they've doubled the price for one movie and quadrupled the price for two movies. Nice move. The frequent-buyer pass I had purchased (Buy 5 or the price of 6!) was initially rebuked at the ticket window. I had to argue with the guy behind the glass that it didn't matter to me that the theatre had changed ownership, or that they would theoretically lose money on my entry, I had bought entry to this many shows.

Popcorn: What used to be the best popcorn in the city, bar none, is now a shadow of its former self. I don't know what happened, but the corn that used to be worth seeing a mediocre move for, now comes out stale, lukewarm and generic. I've had better handfulls from a Silver City. Okay, maybe not. But it's about on par. Gawd, what have they done?

Somebody might argue with me that the Ridge replaced their seats with fancy new cushy ones, so they ought to up the price. To those arguers, if there are any, I say bollocks. No one asked for new seats. The old ones numbed my butt just fine. It was the low price, interesting movies and popcorn that made me love the place and they're screwed each of those distinguishing characteristics. In business those characteristics are the competitive advantage. This is equal to McDonald's choosing to serve expensive, slow food. All of it makes me sick.

Dunbar Theatre

A new king has ascended, all hail the new king! The popcorn of the Dunbar is the best in town, without exception. I don't even know if I could make a better bowl at home, which makes it all the more satisfying. The kernals are large and fluffy, always served hot and always popped for the show you're about to see. They use real butter, they layer it into the large and they have a discreet salt shaker off to the side for a little added touch. They do it all right. They'll even refill your bag for you if asked, though they don't advertise this and they sensibly have to charge for the reload of butter.

The Dunbar is also family-owned and operated goodness. I always see the same guy behind the counter and he knows how to serve up the good corn. I told him that his popcorn was the best in town and (I swear) he beamed. "We use coconut oil," he said, though the meaning of this was completely lost on me. All I know if that this is the mother lode. This keeps me coming back. This overcomes whatever reservations I have about what they're playing. I'll go and see movies that I would otherwise never go and see just to get me some of that Dunbar popcorn.

• 9 out of 10 kernels

If you have anything to add to my reviews above, please add your thoughts in the comments section below. Disputes will be treated fairly and deleted if offensive. I may have missed a particular theatre or I may have caught one of the theatres reviewed above on a good or bad night; these are the vagarities of the review. Straighten me out if I'm wrong.

Ethical Philosophy Selector

Here is the Ethical Philosophy Selector, a curious little engine, indicative of our times. Answer a few multiple-choice questions about human nature, moratility and your view of universal truth and an algorithm runs and matches you up, by percentages of agreement, to philosophers in the Selector database. Get your world view on.

As an exercise in fun, it's okay. As an exercise in enlightenment, where is that panic button? If you're interested in finding out more about philosophers, what they said, the theories they contributed to our understand of the world and ourselves, then check out the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and browse through the table of contents.

If you're actually interested in remembering the things you learned and read in the one philosophy course you took as an undergrad, then revisit your text books, or buy new ones, or check out this handy little number, Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. At least it'll make you sound smart when you pull out the philosopher credited with the most misquoted line of all time - "Those who do not remember the past are destined to repeat it." - over crantinis and pints. Of course no one will appreciate it and your genius will be wasted on the boors, but isn't that the point?

Popular Words, Overpopular Words

Popular Words

Another year has come and gone and the data hounds over at Google have collected the annual Google Zeitgeist, a listing of what people were searching for in 2003. It comes as no surprise that the list is topped by the navel seen round the world, Britney Spears:

1. britney spears
2. harry potter
3. matrix
4. shakira
5. david beckham
6. 50 cent
7. iraq
8. lord of the rings
9. kobe bryant
10. tour de france

Other categories on interest include Popular Fictional Characters (no WMD?), Popular Brands (couldn't Britney fit in here too?) and the most popular searches from countries such as Canada (topped by an animated fish movie and a exhibitionist celebutante). What can we glean from this information? Who's to say.

Overpopular Words

At the end of every year the good folks up at Lake Superior State University make headlines when they announce their banished words list. Basically they cite all the crap words our mediascape has beaten to death over the past year and ask that those words cease being used.

To submit a word for Banished Words 2005, head over to the Lake Superior State University website. As of now, my list looks like this:

Lockport Ice Fishing

On Monday, the CBC comedy show Monday Report aired a segment on ice fishing, taped on location in Lockport, Manitoba. I saw the end of the segment but missed the opening. Thanks to the archiving on the CBC website and the RealPlayer media player, you can now watch the segment without going out in the cold.

Please watch the Lockport Ice Fishing segment before reading on.

Now that you have seen the segment, I will tell you about being in Lockport.

Right behind the cluster of shacks stands the Lockport Bridge over the Red River. The locks are underneath it. I passed through those locks in a boat many years ago. I remember the experience well because the boat was a new boat, fresh from the showroom with a new 200-horse engine on the back, and we hardly ever travelled on the waterways around Winnipeg since our boats stayed out at Lake of the Woods.

Going through the locks remains a vivid experience: they enclose your boat from the front and back with gates then drain the water and open the front gates again so you can drive out to the lower water level. Lots of boats pass through at once in flotillas. A riverboat called the Paddlewheel Queen used to run nightly on a cruise from Winnipeg down the Red River to the Lockport locks and then back to Winnipeg. You could rent out the boat for private parties too. I remember going with a girl to a high-school grad dinner and dance on the boat. She was interested in another guy and I was a date of convenience and trust so I don't remember much about the dinner or the dancing. Later in the evening I ended up holding the back of a friend's jacket to keep him from falling into the river as he emptied his guts over the rail.

Beyond the Lockport Bridge is Skinners where they serve a foot-long weiner on a toasted bun. If you mention the Skinners foot-long to anyone who has been there they may turn to you and arrive at that misty look of reminiscence familiar to anyone who encounters a local myth.

The locks were installed so boaters could pass through the trecherous rapids at that stretch of the river. White water still pours through the dam at the opposite bank from the mechanism of the locks, and the catfish and pickerel gather in the current around the holes and bars to feed. Fishing shows travel from all over the world to film the cats they catch in that small stretch of water. I remember my dad drove our new boat out of the locks and we looped around to head into the current. He sped the boat up and pointed the nose into the white water. The bank next to us held still as we motored in place and felt the misty spray on our faces, and my dad steered the wheel slightly to hold us. The world seemed to stand still as he balanced us on the edge of the moving water beneath us. Then he turned the wheel a few degrees and the current caught us and pushed us off the main channel, into the calmer water where we swung away in an arc to the boat launch to trailer the boat and return to the city.

Horseshit

I read an article this morning about the social phenomena that the shopping website Amazon.com has become. The author of the article made the case that Amazon, along with Google for search, had become a de facto point of reference for anyone online. To use the web you had to know how to use Amazon. Publishers therefore had to list their books with Amazon to be seen. If you're not on Amazon, you don't exist.

Suffice to say, I found myself disagreeing with the writer. Amazon is a great shopping website where you can find all kinds of items and buy them quickly and cheaply (before factoring in the shipping), but really, let's not lose site of reality. Amazon is not your best friend who you swap books with and it is not the book reviewer at the newspaper you make a point of picking up every weekend to read at your favourite coffee shop.

So pardon my French, but let's play a game and find out a little about horseshit. For instance, search for horseshit on Amazon.com and all kinds of interesting results pop up due to their 'Search Inside the Book' scanning campaign:

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• Excerpt from page 71: "... news. Color peoples took enough horseshit already, and for twenty dollar ..."

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller
• Excerpt from page 14: "... stables, where it thrives on horseshit, cow dung, pilfered fertilizer intended ..."

The Corrections: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen
• Excerpt from page 52: "... just the kind of girl-as-object horseshit, Chip thought bit- terly, that ..."

Horseshit for elves: the university t-shirt poems by John Charles Rye

High Five by Janet Evanovich
• Excerpt from page 120: "... checkin' out." Oh boy. "That's horseshit," Bunchy said. "That smells like ..."

Shogun by James Clavell
• Excerpt from page 462: "... not worth a bowl of horseshit. So what's your answer? The ..."

The Eyre Affair: A Novel by Jasper Fforde
• Excerpt from page 167: "... "Hades is dead, Miss Next." "Horseshit, Schitt. You know as well ..."

Kiss the Girls by James Patterson
• Excerpt from page 90: "... lot of media hype and horseshit. So who's better at this ..."

Drop City by T. Coraghessan Boyle, Boyle T C.
• Excerpt from page 279: "... our breath-" He was talking horseshit and he knew it, 279 ..."

We Need to Talk About Kevin: A Novel by Lionel Shriver
• Excerpt from page 29: "... me, rolling onto your back. "Horseshit, Eva. You think about whether ..."

Pop Goes the Weasel by James Patterson
• Excerpt from page 68: "... "Do you agree with that horseshit, Detective?" "No, sin I don't ..."

Truth, Lies and Advertising: The Art of Account Planning by Jon Steel
• Excerpt from page 54: "... be doing good work. That's horseshit. Sorry, but it's the truth. ..."

How to Write a Selling Screenplay by Christopher Keane
• Excerpt from page 195: "... the hole. MAN # 2 Horseshit. I'll call. MAN #4 (sliding ..."

Snow in August by Pete Hamill
• Excerpt from page 367: "... you to the cops. "Don't horseshit me, you fuckin' punk." "I'm ..."

The Complete A**hole's Guide to Handling Chicks by Karl Marks, Dan Indante
• Excerpt from page 112: "... a rabbit, and avoid the horseshit in front of you. Try ..."

For each listing you can 'see more references to horseshit in this book.' Amazon also suggests to refine your search so that you can 'Find horseshit in these categories' and where 'Books' is listed with 1,217 instances of 'horseshit' awaiting.

The lesson here? Amazon is not God/god. Computers can never make jokes. They can list jokes and search jokes but they don't understand why something is funny. Let's not lose sight of this, okay?

Which reminds me, next time you see me, get me to tell you the chicken joke.

Sausage Party Apology

Because of Punditry and the Sound of My Own Voice, I generally avoid writing posts for this blog similar to the types of posts seen on many other blogs: posts about what is happening in the mediasphere at that particular moment. But here is an exceptions.

In the elaborate cover-our-assathon that commentary on the Super Bowl half time concert has become, has anyone else noticed that it's basically a bunch of old white guys appalled at the exposure of a black woman's breast? The apologia has reached quite a bleating pitch, each honkey trying to wag their wrinkled finger and shake their shaggy head harder than the last. What are they so worried about? It was her breast. Have they not seen the pole dancers with pom poms that grace the sidelines at every game?

NFL Commish Paul Tagliabue called the incident: "offensive, inappropriate and embarrassing to us and our fans. We will change our policy, our people and our processes for managing the halftime entertainment in the future in order to deal far more effectively with the quality of this aspect of the Super Bowl." How about not subjecting viewers to watching two fat men with oversized cuff links play out their school yard fantasies from wing-backed stadium seating? Football is trivial, tribal escapism. Don't confront us with the roman, gladatorial reality of its ownership structure. It's offensive, inappropriate and embarassing to be a fan.

FCC chairman Michael Powell: "Like millions of Americans, my family and I gathered around the television for a celebration. Instead, that celebration was tainted by a classless, crass and deplorable stunt. Our nation's children, parents and citizens deserve better." Um, okay, no argument here. So no more classless, crass an deplorable stunts on TV?

I'm sorry Miss Jackson, I just had to say it.

Of the three people in the room where I watched the Super Bowl, two missed the flash and the other wasn't sure exactly what they'd seen. We had to look on the Internet to find out what had happened. And in doing so, it struck me that the web has become a type of collective memory devoid of context and narrative; just a bunch of bits where you the reader/viewer have to put together your own story.

So what did you see?

Up in Ontario Newsletter - Volume 4

Just a quick note to point out that the latest edition of the Up in Ontario email newsletter - Volume 4: "What goes up always comes around" - is available now in the Newsletter archive. If you or anyone you know would like to subscribe to the newsletter, send an email from the address you would like subscribed to newsletter{at}upinontario.com and I'll sign you right up.

Any feedback you have about the newsletter is also always welcome. Route it through the Up in Ontario contact page and I'll get to it toute suite.

Rating Teachers by Web Pages

I came across a site called RateMyTeacher today. Anyone can point their web browser at the site and add a school, add a teacher, rate a teacher and/or make comments about that teacher. Anyone. No user name, password, login.

Thought 1: Somehow, this seems like an idea ripe for abuse.

Thought 2: Somewhere, an overreacting parent is just waiting to pop.