Up in Ontario

Sacha Baron Cohen strikes the white house

Upon first seeing Da Ali G Show a few years ago I found that Ali G. hisself was funny for bits at a time - if you ever see the Donald Trump ice cream cone glove episode, savour that moment - but it was Borat who I thought had the greater potential.

Who is Borat? A creation of UK comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat is a character. He's not a real person but that doesn't mean people don't mistake him for a real person. Cohen's creation is so fully realized that once you see him as Borat it's hard to recognize him as other characters, such as Jean Girard in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

Borat is, to my mind, some of the best satire to be found anywhere at the moment. Along with Steven Colbert, Borat has become a fully realized straight character that illuminates the insanity of the world by staying in character and playing the role to the extreme that the reality demands. The satire works because of his straightness. The rest of the world seems so loony in contrast.

Now Borat has a movie coming out. For promotions or just for kicks, Borat has been on the town. As CBC reports, Borat visits Kazakh Embassy, White House. Here's a taste of the controversy and the comedy.

Kazakh officials have been trying to improve the profile of their country, an oil-rich former Soviet republic, through television spots and advertisements in major newspapers.

However, they have also been furiously countering the popular comedian's portrayals of their nation, which is depicted by the character Borat as bizarre, drunken, mysogynistic and anti-Semitic.

"I would like [to] make a comment on the recent advertisements on television and media about my nation of Kazakhstan, saying that women are treated equally and all religions are tolerated," Cohen, dressed in Borat's trademark light-coloured suit and bushy moustache, told a crush of media Thursday.

"These are disgusting fabrications," he quipped.

Soon, security officials escorted Cohen away from the embassy.

Can't wait for the movie!

Some Indugences in Road Food

That is to say, indulgences in food that is eaten whilst on the road, in transit, on road trips, and that would never be eaten in the course of one's regular, humdrum life. Because it's not really food to be proud of. There's an element of unsavouryness to it. You really don't want to know any more about it other than it's there and good at the time.

Here's my list of favourites, or habitual dependecies:

• McDonald's breakfast. Specifically, the sausage mcmuffin and the hash brown maxi slip. Somehow this still tastes good when eaten. The problem is the gut rot for the rest of the day. I personally ate 3 one morning back in the university years at the McDonald's in Banff after a particularly taxing night on the town, in preparation for a big day skiing at Lake Louise. Lordy, I'll never do that again.
• Hawkins Cheezies. Something about their radioactive orange colour and salty, cheeziness taste totally has hooked most of the members of my family and we'll buy a bag anytime we're on the road from to to fro. So of course, I blame my mother.
• Dr. Pepper. I may have kicked this one for the most part but whenever I reach into the soda pop cooler for something, it tends to be this Doctor. Something about the sweet, caramel flavour makes it better than any cola product.
• Spitz. One of the biggest enemies on the road trip is the sleepies. It's not likely the driver has been sleeping well. So that long stretch of road between Medicine Hat and Calgary, for instance, becomes a major obstacle. The best cure I've discovered for the sleepies is sunflower seeds. Though I always regret it later when I have a canker sore in my mouth from the salt. That said, if you're falling asleep, eat Spitz, seasoned flavour, please.

Okay, now what am I missing from your lives?

Crabbing with Darren

I'm more than a little late posting about this, but what they hey, it was fun.

Two weekends ago Darren and I went crabbing. By crabbing I mean we went and caught some crabs. We put on wetsuits, masks, snorkels and flippers and grabbed them with our hands. It was great fun.

Darren wrote up the experience of crabbing and took some great photos of the crabs.

I think I have one more day of crabbing in me this year. Anyone want to go?

Canucks Legends at Word on the Street

This coming Sunday, September 24, is the annual Word on the Street festival here in Vancouver, along with 4 other cities across Canada.

Word on the Street is a celebration of writing and reading that takes place in and around Library Square, the block surrounding our downtown library. Publishers and keen readers will gather for the event and there's always lots of interesting things to do and see.

In particular this coming weekend, Word on the Street Vancouver has some great features on hockey. Roch Carrier will read his classic children's book, The Hockey Sweater, in English and French. Raincoast Books, with the help of Trevor Linden, will be raising money for the Canucks Family Education Centre.

CALLING ALL SERIOUS HOCKEY FANS

Canucks Legends: Vancouver Hockey Heroes chronicles the team’s first four decades through 75 player profiles and more than 300 photos. This book (retailing for $50) won’t hit bookstores until November, and we’re offering a one-time opportunity to get one of only 25 special advance copies, featuring a bookplate signed by Trevor Linden! These books will be sold by donation with all proceeds going to the Canucks Family Education Centre. What’s more, Raincoast Books has pledged to match all donations.

Finding Neil Young in Japan

My friend Sarah Marchildon (the Sarah I worked with last national election) has up and moved on her own to small Japanese town to teach English. For the past few weeks she has documented her culture shocks and discoveries - typhoons, Japanese clothing sizing and a typical day - and it has made for some wonderful reading.

Today I read her posts on starting to love Japanese recreational volleyball. And while that's cool and all, what really got me was her story of the welcome party her volleyball team threw in her honour and the length they went to make her feel welcome.

Halfway through the night, two of the guys pulled out a pair of guitars and announced they had spent the past three weeks practicing a Canadian song to welcome me. They sat down at the front of the room, plugged in a mike, set up a sheet of music and started playing Neil Young’s Harvest Moon.

Here were two guys who could barely speak English and yet they had gone to all the trouble to learn how to play (and sing) Harvest Moon. Just for me. It was such a kind and thoughtful gesture I wanted to cry. How could I hate volleyball after that?

And just this morning I was singing 'Pocohontos' to myself as I walked to the coffee shop.

Aurora borealis
The icy sky at night
Paddles cut the water
In a long and hurried flight
From the white man to the fields of green
And the homeland we've never seen.

They killed us in our tepee
And they cut our women down
They might have left some babies
Cryin' on the ground
But the firesticks and the wagons come
And the night falls on the setting sun.

They massacred the buffalo
Kitty corner from the bank
The taxis run across my feet
And my eyes have turned to blanks
In my little box at the top of the stairs
With my indian rug and a pipe to share.

I wish a was a trapper
I would give thousand pelts
To sleep with pocahontas
And find out how she felt
In the morning on the fields of green
In the homeland weve never seen.

And maybe Marlon Brando
Will be there by the fire
We'll sit and talk of hollywood
And the good things there for hire
And the astrodome and the first tepee
Marlon Brando, pocahontas and me
Marlon Brando, pocahontas and me
Pocahontas.

24 best metaphors from high school

It's unclear to me what the source of this list is, apart from the email that arrived in my inbox this afternoon from my friend Steve. He writes that he just had to send the list along. He was compelled, like a man with Tourette's has ticks.

Every year, English teachers from across the country can submit their collections of actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the country. Here are last year's winners.....

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie,surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.
16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.
18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
20. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
21. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
22. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
23. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
24. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

Vancouver's globally warmed future

From my friend Lori's blog I found this great Google maps mash up of what Vancouver would look like if water levels rose due to global warming.

At an increase of 7m I have a waterfront apartment, the lobbies of those new buildings in Yaletown are sloshing at high tide and Richmond is almost entirely submerged.

Bolloxed, a review from a story geek

My interest in the Vancouver theatre scene is much like the life of a fruit fly: short, narrow, fleeting and entirely focused on self gratification.

So seeing Darren Barefoot's play Bolloxed last Thursday night was a real treat. It provided instant gratification, constant stimulation and even some depth if I chose to see it. The play is funny and fun. The cast of two is excellent, especially Mercedes as Aiofe, and twists and turns keep you surprised and delighted right to the end.

So, if that's what you need to know, stop reading now. Go and see the play along with a slough of other Vancouver Fringe Festival plays, because...

Warning! Nerdy writer talk ahead. You should be a little fluent in the ideas of mimesis and diegesis to hang with it. Although I may demonstrate that I am not. Okay, here goes.

Bolloxed opens with a monologue from the main character Jack. He provides the background story to the play, its context and setup. The play is clearly his story. We see some scenes through Aoife later during her monologues but I don't think there is any doubt that this is Jack's story. It's his ball on the line.

The monologue is almost pure diegesis. Jack tells the story. The play then goes through a series of scenes with both Aoife and Jack, or just one of them. Jack is the only one of the characters (I believe) who addresses the audience. Aoife, when she has a monologue, addresses a statue of Micheal Collins. The scenes, except for Jack's monologues, are mimesis, the story shown by the actions and words of the characters.

I'll stop here to mention that these two forms of story - diegesis and mimesis - work in concert. In prose like a novel or a short story it roughly breaks down that the diegesis is the dialogue and the mimesis is the narrative. The story almost always needs both elements to be told or it feels like a sustained party trick.

The two elements when present always have a tension between them too. And that tension can work in varying degrees for the story or against it. Some novels have great dialogue but terrible descriptions, and vice versa. Some plays feature only diegesis - monologues - and some only mimesis - Shakespeare (at least it's veiled diegensis).

In Bolloxed I found that the tension between the mimetic and the diagetic didn't connect as well as I wanted it to. Jack seems self conscious telling his story to the audience at the opening, as if he feels he needs to convince himself that it is his story as he's telling it. It doesn't come out of him with force, practically unbidden. It's a little hesitant. It's not quite enough to make you perfectly believe, as you must.

These monologue moments provide the only soft parts to an otherwise very strong production and tension between diegensis and mimesis. Compliments to Darren and the entire cast and production crew. They broke a leg.

And that's what this geek has to say.

Photos from the Pacific National Exhibition (PNE)

The Duck has posted a great set of photos from our adventures at the Pacific National Exhibition called PNE 2006. Oh yes, she's clever with her words.

Most importantly, we rode my favourite ride, the wooden coaster, twice - once in the front car and then in the second car. We also rode the ferris wheel and a bunch of whirly rides that almost made some of us sick. Then we ate mini donuts.

And yes, one of us is doing a much better job updating the photos we've taken this summer. I'm still posting photos backlogged from August.

Two ways the web could change the world

On this day when folks seem to be receptive to introspection, reflection and ideas, a question seems apt.

Q: How do you change the existing order of the world?

A: One small step, one micro loan at a time: Kiva.

Or, you buy a talking bible doll and pray to it to convince yourself you're alive.

Miriam Toews in the NY Times

Congratulations to Winnipeg writer Miriam Toews for the excellent review of her first two books, Summer of my Amazing Luck and A Boy of Good Breeding in the New York Times.

Both books are being released in the US for the first time. Thus the fanfare.

In the same Times issue, Thomas McGuane, a favourite of mine for his superb short stories, wonderful fishing writing and lovable, uneven novels, gets the retrospective-profile treatment in relation to his new collection of stories, Gallatin Canyon.

Learning what you can't say

Recommended reading for today: What you can't say by Paul Graham.

Not just listing out what you can't say today but searching for 'general recipes for discovering what you can't say, in any era.'