Plenty of Nothing

Squeegee Kid

I drew this picture using the Microsoft Windows 95 Paint program ten years and two or three computers ago.  In 1996 the corner of Rideau and Colonel By was permanently staffed by punky kids with squeegees.  Drivers hated them and eventually the province passed a law against their activities.  But they were my heroes.  This one is the fictional Cathy Deirdre Zinck, aka Zinck, or Jen if there are cops around.  She got the receipt for her squeegee laminated in case someone claimed it was stolen from the gas station at Rideau and King Edward.  Zinck lived in a tent on LeBreton Flats with her friend Dana Louise, aka Jan.  They used to hit me up for beer money.

Douglas

It Wasn't That Odd. Really.

H, picks up phone and dials his work number.
D, answers: "Hello Fragrant WorkPlace."
H: "Do we have a hacksaw?"
D: silence.
H: "So, do we have a hacksaw?"
D: "Yeeessss. It's in the toolbox."
H: "Ok, bye."
D: "Wait. Wait. "
H: silence.
D: "What do you need the hack saw for?"
H: "To hack something."
D: "Can't it wait till I get home?"
H: "Nope. Gotta do it now."
D: "Do what?"
H: "Hack off that rusty-shower-thing. I got a new one."
D: "Use the red-handled wire cutters."
H: "Didn't work. Gonna use that hack saw. Gotta go. Bye"
D: "Wait. Wa. . ."
Click.

It's a crap excuse for a hack saw. Blade doesn't stay in place. But it was better than the pruning saw, the wire strippers, the exacto knife, and the wire cutters. I have defeated the rusting-shower-thing.

There's the phone.

H: picking up the phone but saying nothing as an attempt to foil the telemarketers
D: "Hello. Hello. Hello."
H: "Oh hi"
D: "So how many fingers do you have?"
H: "Enough. Why?"
D: "Weeelll. The line was busy. And I thought maybe you'd had to call emergency and then left the phone off the hook."
H: "But why."
D: "The hack saw. You. Teetering on the edge of the tub. Whack. Slip. Blood."
H: "I used a chair."
D: "Okaaaay."
H: "That's a crap hack saw. And you need a new blade."
D: "Okaaay. I'll see you later."
H: "Yup. Bye."

You know, since he's already imagining blood-spattered bathrooms, this may not be a good time to recommend Haddon's Spot of Bother which I finished yesterday even though I did have to close my eyes for a bit in the middle.

Heather

Good Screen | Bad Screen

So yesterday was "No Screens" day chez nous. I spend most of my work week staring at computer screens and a lamentable part of my free time staring at more screens. And as the season of increased irritation rolled round, I snapped.

The No Screens Measure was invoked householdwide. No vetos allowed. No computers and no televison and no dvds. Householders had to fall back on old-fangled amusements.

Much paper was used. Drawing pencils and beading needles were seen in action. Naps were had. Three and a half books were read. Actual conversations took place.

Verdict on No Screens: Some twitchiness observed at usual-podcast-listening time. Additional twitchiness observed at Google/Wikipedia withdrawal. Less inner twitchiness reported by all householders.

Heather

Mark Marsters, Wellington Street

Table of Content

1.  Puns, Happiness Caused by

I don't know why some people hate puns.  Puns make me happy.

2.  Puns as Happy Accidents

Chinese-speakers sometimes have difficulty with number in English grammar, i.e., when to make a noun singular or plural.  Long ago when I was trying to scratch a living by typing for students, I got a handwritten manuscript from a group of Chinese students who had designed a business plan for a Chinese bakery.  At the top of the contents page they had written TABLE OF CONTENT.  That would have made a nice name for their bakery, but they didn't go for it.

3.  Puns in Art

The words for "bat" and "happiness" are the same in Chinese, and a bat is often used to represent happiness in art.

Douglas

Mark Marsters, Budapest Deli

NWHL

As advertised, here's the first of probably a semi-regular series of digressions on women's hockey, boiled down from the best internet sources and blemished by my own insights.

NWHL.  The National Women's Hockey League is the top senior women's league in the world, and would be the hockey equivalent of the WNBA if somebody'd put some money behind it.  It's all about the marketing, folks.*  The league draws together teams from a variety of local traditions with differing organizational cultures, and as a result has had a pretty fractious history.  The western and eastern wings only just got back together after splitting into rival leagues a couple of years ago.  The truce may have been prompted by the embarrassment of having no agreed-on method of awarding the new Clarkson Cup, donated by the Governor-General to represent women's hockey supremacy.  Sounds a bit like the early history of the Stanley Cup.

The league has three geographical divisions: West, Central and East.  Much of the league play is divisional to keep the travel expenses down.  The West Division is the recently independent WWHL, probably the better of the two rival leagues.  The Edmonton Chimos have a long tradition, though the Calgary Oval X-Treme, with their Olympic facilities and wealth of national team players, have in recent years been the best club.

The Central division is a group of Toronto area clubs, the most successful of which has been the Aeros, Angela James' old team.  This group of clubs used to be the Central Ontario Women's Hockey League, and was the driving force behind the organization of a national league, partly I think to escape their unfortunate acronym.  The East Division is basically a Quebec league, plus Ottawa.

Many of the NWHL clubs are clubs in the real sense, in that they develop their own players through the midget and junior levels.  The league does play second fiddle to the national programme, and teams must do without their top players during international tournaments and Olympic years.  Their rosters also usually show a shortage of university-age players.  A player might start in the NWHL as  a highschooler, go off to university or the national programme, then come back and play well into her thirties.

This is a non-Olympic year, so the clubs favoured by Canadian national team members are cleaning up.  Which is to say the Ottawa Raiders are struggling.  I hope to get to an upcoming Ottawa game against Brampton.

Next time, CIS.

*Hockey cards in the Quaker Oats legitimized both the NHL and WHA.

Douglas

Dave Bidini, Collected Works, November 17, 2006

Dave Bidini read from his new Five Hole Stories tonight at Collected Works in Ottawa.  This was his fourth appearance there, a house record, and the third to feature a hockey book.  Five Hole Stories may be his last hockey offering for a while, he said, until such time as he can come at it fresh again.  Not that this book isn't fresh, mixing sex and hockey in five illustrated short stories.  The reading was quick, and padded out with a piece from another book, and prompted fewer questions than last year's The Best Game You Can Name.  A fun book, but definitely a spinoff, like one of those little books Margaret Atwood comes out with between novels.

Last year I lent Collected Works a table hockey set for the show and he signed it!  The player in red is Bidini, copied from the dustjacket of The Best Game You Can Name.  Come over to my basement and I'll play you.

Douglas

One Thing Leads to Another

I saw this in St. Vinnie's and I had to have it. Told myself it would be a gift for someone else. We don't have a dog; not likely to ever have a dog. But for $2 I have a book full of pictures of dogs and fedoraed men with trousers hoicked up to their armpits.

And as a bonus, I have learned of and now covet Crow Shooting, a book which my father could have used when he wasn't concentrating on porcupines or beer cans. It covers: "individual and flock habit, sets eight crow calls to music, tells how to locate and recognize roosts, build blinds and employ cover, and use various decoys."

Must now find Popowski on crows.

Heather

A Five Alarm History of Mount Allison

I'm just finishing up John Reid's estimable two-volume history of Mount Allison University.  Three related themes spring out: one, the gradual but apparently unstoppable accumulation of debt through the first century of the institution (I'm only up to the 1940s, so I'm still waiting to see if and when government money comes to the rescue); two, the willingness of faculty members to forgo market value salaries or even retirement to help keep the place functioning; and three, fire.  Fire has done more to shape Mount Allison (and drive up debt) than any other force of change.  Here's an incendiary summary:

1866: the academy building burnt down.

1882: the second academy building burnt down.

1899: the men's university residence burnt down.

1912: the gymnasium burnt down during a football celebration.

1921: another gymnasium burnt down, with it a captured German Fokker aircraft.

1933: the third academy building burnt down; a month later the science building and Centennial Hall were both burnt in one night by an arsonist.

1941: another men's residence burnt down, killing four residents.

Though it falls beyond the end of volume two, I seem to recall the economics department building burnt down in the early 1970s.  And poet John Thompson's house burnt down in 1974.  To a degree fire is beneficial to an institution, as to a forest, forcing renewal.  Each year the Sackville farmers burn the stubble off their  fields.  (Puts index finger to temple and thinks, Hmm.)  Still, you'd imagine the university might value its surviving heritage buildings.  But no.

Douglas