Plenty of Nothing

Porch Ceiling Delays Continue

The long postponed repainting of the porch ceiling suffered another setback Saturday as housepainter Douglas declared both his arm and his patience for the job worn out.

"Obviously my upper arm is not used to this much overhead motion," said Douglas, 47.

Turpentine fumes were also a factor.

"My lungs are full of them.  And are you supposed to put it on your skin?" asked the tired and disoriented homeowner.  "I should have used [water-soluble] latex."

Rainy conditions Sunday caused porch painting to be called off for the remainder of the weekend, though critics point out that the porch ceiling is sheltered from the rain.

"Sounds like a sorry excuse to me," said Heather.

The porch ceiling project has been subject to repeated delays and procrastination.   Records show that the can of paint was purchased in 2005.  Eyewitnesses say that it had to be stirred thoroughly when opened this August.

Something More Than Physical Location

The Nova Scotia Archives has a decent online presence and has a variety on online displays of photographs in it's holdings. I find some of the photographs in its most recent display--The Royal Engineers in Halifax: Photographing the Garrison City, 1870-1885--oddly compelling.

Photos like this one are, no doubt, valuable for the historical information they provide. The architectural details are interesting enough and make sense given the occupations of the picture-takers. What strikes me first in it is the ladder and the jerry-rigged fence at the side of the road. People work in the urban spaces captured on these glass plates but the workers themselves are invisible. (Photo original here.)

In contrast this photograph of the quarry in Point Pleasant is occupied but it takes close looking to see the two figures. The pond itself is an artifact of the city-building. (Original photo here.)

The notes identifying the photographs are historical artifacts as well, written by one of the early provincial archivists. In most cases the notes are as practical as the photographs themselves. But every once in a while, the notes hint at something more than physical location.

Point Pleasant Park: Quarry Pond (near present Sir W. Young Gates), with Military Cottage of ironstone (just west of present Park Keeper's Lodge) in which Garrety, an old Engineer soldier, lived; in or about 1875. Looking North-northwest. Judge Bliss's large house, near Fort Massey Church, can just be detected in extreme distance to right of tree. A good many years ago, perhaps in the 60's, a boy named Maitland, whose father had the farm just southward of the Old Penitentiary, Northwest Arm, was drowned in this pond. About 1894 the wife of George Harvey, artist, drowned herself in the pond.

Heather

Sealed With a Kiss

Yesterday the bus was held up by downtown construction, so the bus driver sang "Sealed With a Kiss".  I'd never realized what a sad song it is.  Of course, this being Ottawa, nobody applauded at the end.  It was like a moment from that German film Wings of Desire.

Douglas

More Signs of Fall

The leaves in a handful of trees in the neighbourhood have started to turn orange.

Halloween decorations are in the store. Already.

Hangover Review: Hockley Dark

Hockley Dark is a tasty Ontario dark ale that comes in 500 ml cans, so if you drink five of them like I did last night that's 2.5 litres.  Somehow I always seem to lose count just when I should be stopping.

This morning I didn't come to until ten, about three hours later than the median waking hour.  The headache ran from one temple through both eyeballs to the other temple.  My muscles exhibited a general lassitude.  I felt no desire to eat.  Aspirin and another two hours sleep seem to have done the trick, though.  Good thing Sunday comes after Saturday.

Overall, worse hangover than good scotch, better than bad mussels.

Douglas

Chinese Figurines

There's a magazine magasin in the Byward Market that sells little painted figurines, mostly military, but there is this one shelf laid out as a traditional Chinese town scene.  Unexpected!

BTW if you're wondering which direction byward is, it's away from diagonally.

Douglas

Bon Cop Bad Cop

Bon Cop, Bad Cop scores as a parody of cop buddy movies, scores as a satire of English/French relations in Canada, and fails as a comedy about hockey.  I’ll dispense with the first two together.  In any cop buddy movie the buddies have to be opposites, and Colm Feore’s Ward and Patrick Huard’s Bouchard are as opposite as they come.  Ontario/Quebec, controlled/uncontrolled, drives a good car / drives a beater.  And there is some subtlety to their English/French polarity.  I like, for instance, that the Anglo Feore is the wine-drinker, and the Franco Huard the beer-drinker.  Wasn’t it Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau who said that Ontario has no culture?  We’ve got wineries in Ontario, baby, and you don’t!  The whole bilingual/subtitles thing works really well.  I was struggling to keep up with what was being said in the two languages a lot of the time, but that works in the context of a detective drama, where the detectives don’t know what’s going on either.  (Eventually I’ll write a review of The Big Sleep and how after all these years it still doesn’t add up.)  The running joke about swearing in French is wonderful, and Feore’s line at the end of the scene in which the car blows up is priceless.

Where the movie fails for me is in its use of hockey.  Obviously the writer saw hockey as a thing that both French and English audiences could agree on, but overall it is not handled quite well enough.  The hockey jokes are topical, so that actual events like the transfer of the Nordiques to Colorado are referred to, but the handling of the whole hockey thing seems ham-handed.  For starters the killer’s goalie masks don’t look like real goalie masks.  It would have been so much better if he’d worn real masks like Dryden’s or Cheevers’.  The bit with the mascot is cute, but only just.  Having a really short guy play Gary Bettman is cute, but just.  I did like that the cut-out hockey figures in the bad guy’s lair were based on actual Munro table hockey players, but there was just too much cheesiness overall.  If you’re going to sell a hockey comedy to a Canadian audience you have to take it seriously.  I did like Rick Mercer doing Don Cherry, though.  Hm, I seem to be undermining my argument with things I liked.  Okay, take Men With Brooms.  Great concept, poor execution.  Why?  Because they didn’t respect the curling.  Winning the match with an exploding rock doesn’t satisfy anyone with any knowledge of the sport.  Having a hockey-crazed killer murder owners and agents with hockey sticks and skates is just pure fromage.

Seems I’m arguing for sophisticated hockey comedy.  Yes, I am!  I want a sophisticated hockey comedy!

[Found one.  It's Rent-a-Goalie.]

Douglas

Proofs of the Existence of God

Mount Allison University is hosting a conference on the traditional proofs for the existence of God.  But I'll bet they don't have this one:

Have you ever looked at a large building site and wondered, How did they set up that huge crane?  Well, they used another crane.  Okay, but how did they set up that one?  They must have used another crane.  Which they must have set up with a crane.  And on and on and on into infinity.  Unless you posit God.  The primum mobile crane!

Douglas

Ottawa Lynx vs Buffalo Bisons, August 16, 2006

We went to the baseball game last night.  You know those people who decide the game is over at the seventh inning stretch and leave?  That's us!  Buffalo's Slocum was working on a no hitter, reason enough to stay, but after we left the reliever came in and lost them the game.  The stentorian fans in one of the luxury boxes rode the Buffalo players so long and loud that I'm pretty sure I'll never forget the names Dubois, Gautreau or Van Every.

Douglas

Zed: Twee It Ain't

I've been turning Zed over in my mind for the last couple of days. It's one of the books I picked up during our jaunt to Toronto--I chose it almost at random but not entirely. I picked it up because it was a first novel, because it was printed by a smaller press, and because it wasn't going to be twee.

And twee it ain't.

Reviews in the mainstream press in Canada have been mixed. The Globe and Mail liked it; Quill and Quire, not so much. I can't put my hand on my copy of Q&Q at the moment but what struck me on reading it was that the reviewer was, in part, applying the wrong lens in summing it up. He noted the dystopian aspects of Zed but expressed reservations about the novel's "failure" to end on an upbeat note. Kinda missed the point of dystopian.

Reading Zed for a happy ending is a mistake. It operates more in the realm of stories like Tank Girl or Cruddy. Bad things happen. People get hurt. The plot drives to a conclusion in which more bad things happen. I quite liked how McClung doesn't spend much time trying to explain the story's setting in reference to either realistic or science fiction conventions. The Towers simply are and this avoidance of exposition or back-story helps create the sense of dislocation that makes it possible to believe in the characterization of Zed and her hard-boiled, almost affectless reactions.

I've come to think of Zed as the anti-Pippi, harder, unhappier, more perverse, more self-sufficient, and damaged.

Heather