This page was born of Kari's desire to fill in the blanks while waiting for Brenda to produce her first batch of recipes.  It really consists only of Kari's random thoughts.  In the beginning, the random thoughts were all about food, but Kari now seems to be moving away from food and towards Life, the Universe, and Everything.  However...if you like blog-like documents about nothing in particular, keep reading.

The page will be updated whenever Kari feels like it.  She may feel like it every Monday, but she's not really sure about that yet.


Monday, December 28, 2009:  Goodbye, Decade, According to Some

Okay, first off:  yes, the decade does actually have one more year to run.  The problem is that I keep having to stop myself from mentioning this in a whiny, pedantic voice every time I notice some newspaper going on about how since the decade is over, lists are necessary.  I accept the fact that no one is ever going to get this right, and I hereby join those I cannot beat in celebrating the end of...well...the years that end in "zero something."  Let's just say that the Long Turn of the Century is now officially over.

I'm not entirely convinced that lists are useful or necessary, but what the hell.  Here's mine:

Ten Things That Should Have Happened This Decade but Ultimately Didn't

10)  Something should have been built on the moon.

It has been observed many times since the first moon landing that something would eventually need to be built on the moon, if only in order to prove that humans haven't just forgotten about this whole conquering-space thing and gone flittering away after lesser concerns.*  Seeing as this has been the decade including the year 2001, which is also the title of a famous novel/movie combo about moon prospecting leading to a discovery of...something important that possibly has something to do with non-human sentience,** it stands to reason that we should really be getting our butts in gear so that we can eventually discover an ominous monolith buried beneath the moon's surface and have adventures with a psychotic computer and stuff.  Alas, no one has built anything on the moon...not even a circus or a McDonald's outlet.

9)  Someone should have made a mainstream film featuring two female protagonists who didn't spend the entire freaking running time talking about men.

The fact that I can't name a single one makes me very sad.

8)  An enterprising thief should have stolen the only available print of Beverly Hills Chihuahua, set it on fire, and thrown it out of a helicopter passing over an active volcano.

I think this one is probably a no-brainer, actually.

7)  Wyld Stallyns should have released its first album, thereby saving the environment and causing instant world peace.

We're still waiting, Bill and Ted.  We're still waiting.

6)  Hovercrafts should have been invented.

I don't care about the logistics.  Hovercrafts really should have been invented by now.  I mean, even Northrop Frye thought they would have been, but no.  What are we waiting for, the end of the world?

5)  The end of the world should have happened.

I'm not saying I want it to have happened; I'm saying that what with all the predictions from various sources (including but not limited to the science-fiction films of the later twentieth century), it's really quite astounding that we're not all scuttling around a post-apocalyptic landscape at this point.

4)  Bill Gates should have been kidnapped and removed to a remote island in the Bermuda Triangle before he could impose becursed Windows Vista upon us all.

I know a lot of people say it isn't that bad, but the bloody furrows frustration has caused me to carve in the tender flesh of my cheeks indicates otherwise.

3)  Low-fat pizza that tastes exactly like high-fat pizza should have become widely available.

Another no-brainer.

2)  J. K. Rowling should have quit while she was ahead.

In particular, she should have quit just before writing that damned epilogue.

1)  The first alien contact with earth should have involved a ship touching down in 2001 and kidnapping Douglas Adams, leaving in his place a simulacrum that would subsequently appear to die of a heart attack.  The real Adams should then have spent eight years or so hitchhiking through the galaxy in quest of the perfect cup of tea.

For all we know, this actually happened, and he's at it still.

Happy New Year,
Kari.

*Such as, just for instance, global warming and world hunger.
**The novel makes it all much more explicit.  The film just flashes pretty colours at you and implies that you should probably be tripping right now.


Monday, December 21, 2009:  I'm Really Quite Surprised That I Haven't Noticed Anyone Make the Blindingly Obvious "And They All Lived Hoppily Ever After" Pun Yet

My tantrum over my scanner last week made me forget about another subject on which I wished to comment:  the new Disney film The Princess and the Frog.  Those who haven't seen it yet may want to note that this Rant will be absolutely drowing in spoilers.  Skip the Rant if you still intend to see the movie.

The Princess and the Frog has been a controversial project from the start, and there was never any way it was going to please everybody.  Bombarded by accusations of both racism and political correctness, not to mention sexism and feminist propaganda, before anyone had seen a single frame, the film couldn't win, no matter what it did.  Fortunately, what it does do works out pretty well.  People are still complaining, but, well, let them.

The movie isn't revolutionary; it isn't going to change the world or pull Disney that far away from its Default Princess Mode.  However, there are some great little things about it, and it actually stands with Enchanted as proof that Disney isn't afraid of deconstructing its own formula from time to time.

It must be said that it is a damned princess movie, probably primarily meant to add another princess to the gag-inducing Disney Princesses line of merchandising.  However, bizarrely, the main character isn't actually a princess; as she says to the Patented Love Interest, she is a waitress.  (To be fair, several other "Disney princesses" don't start out or even end up as princesses either, but this film is unique in including the discrepancy in the title).  Tiana is an appealing character, not least because she almost immediately subverts the Disney formula by looking upon "wishing on a star" from a jaded point of view and believing in achieving one's dreams through hard work, not magic.  Even the predictable advent of the prince, for whom Tiana predictably falls, doesn't sway her from her course; there are several times Tiana is offered an easy way out of her various predicaments, and she always takes the more difficult path.  There is a star that plays a major role in the story (it is actually the love interest of one of the characters...don't ask), but Tiana's wishes are always more like "Please let me think of a way to achieve my dream of owning my own restaurant" than they are "Please just make all my problems go away."  Characters also treat the star as a confidante (again, don't ask, but yes, it's actually hilarious and touching all at once), but the one character--Tiana's spoiled friend Charlotte--who does wish on the star in the traditional fashion is saddled with a wickedly predictable result:  her "dreams come true" to the letter, but only on the surface.  Charlotte is, by the way, a character with layers and not the villain she at first seems set up to be; she is rich and needy, but she is perfectly willing to sacrifice her rather shallow dream in order to make her friend happy.  She is a deconstruction of the traditional Golden Age Disney princess, both in the silliness of her behaviour and in the fact that she actually does have a personality beyond her desperate need for a man.

Tiana's practicality is offset by the happy-go-lucky nature of the philandering Prince Naveen, a ladykiller turned into a frog because he just isn't paying close enough attention at a crucial moment.  When Tiana reluctuantly kisses Naveen, who mistakes her for a princess, and turns into a frog herself, the two go through a typical Hollywood courting scenario:  they hate each other on sight but are forced to depend on each other and see each other's good qualities.  Refreshingly, Tiana isn't forced to sacrifice her dream for love, and Naveen's moral transformation is portrayed less as him being changed by the love of a good woman and more as him being prompted by circumstances to recognise an aspect of his personality that has been there all along.  Both characters are allowed to retain their independence, and both--harking back to Beauty and the Beast--are round characters.

Because I am a bit of a folk-tale buff, one aspect of the film that made me very happy was how the enchantment was broken.  "The Frog Prince," the folk tale on which the film is loosely based (via a novel called The Frog Princess, actually), is extremely widespread, but these days, people tend to know only the bowdlerised "kiss" version (princess kisses frog...frog becomes prince...the end).  Much more usual, especially in older texts, is a version in which the frog does the girl (who is not always or even often a princess) a favour and asks in return only that she obey him for a day.  She agrees, but she becomes more and more disconcerted when the frog asks her to let him into her house, lift him onto her table, feed him from her plate, and....well...take him to bed with her.  At this point, one transcriber writes something to the effect of, "And over this scene let us now draw a veil."  The frog's last request is that she cut off his head, which she does, breaking the enchantment.  The Brothers Grimm  have the enchantment being broken when the girl flings the frog at a wall in a fit of temper, but it could be that this version is a toning down of the beheading version.  Beheading is, incidentally, a fairly common way to break at enchantment in a fairy tale.

The thing is...the kiss is probably just a sanitised combination of the bed scene and the beheading.  The idea of "true love's kiss," which Disney likes maybe a bit too much, becomes a bit squickier if you consider older versions of "The Frog Prince," "Sleeping Beauty" (in Boccaccio's medieval version, the prince rapes the princess, and she awakens because the babies she bears while she is asleep suck the magical splinter out from under her fingernail), and "Little Red Riding Hood" (especially fun are the variants in which the wolf has Little Red undress one piece of clothing at a time).  Disney has, in many of its films, moralised the kiss, making it a symbol of the Power of Love instead of what, in many fairy tales, it is:  a ritual meant to break a spell, more or less analogous to the beheading.  One great thing about The Princess and the Frog is that it restores the kiss to its original status.  There is no indication that love has anything to do with the kiss's power.  In fact, the movie is full of technicalities (Naveen has to kiss a princess if he wants to become human again; Charlotte is technically a princess because her father is Mardi Gras King for a day; if she kisses Naveen before midnight, he will be restored; she is off by about a second, so the spell remains unbroken; Tiana finally breaks the spell accidentally by marrying Naveen and thus becoming a princess herself).  The kiss has no moral meaning; it's simply a magical key.  Magic and love are not connected, and the theme of hard work being the only way to get ahead holds firm.

Okay, yes, technically, Tiana probably realises her dream because her husband's parents fund her restaurant, but there's no real indication that this is so; she seems to be getting by on her own money and with Naveen's actual physical help.  And all right, fine, it's another damned princess movie in which Girl Meets Boy and Lives Happily Ever After.  Yet there's something different about this one.  Marriage, here, is not a solution or an ultimate goal; it's a welcome surprise that happens on the way to a more important destination.  Neither prince nor "princess" is a prize for the other; in fact, both ultimately reject the idea of prizes.  The star is not just a star, but what it is is what the characters make of it; it doesn't give them anything they don't take for themselves.

The Princess and the Frog is not perfect, and I still vote for Lilo of Lilo and Stitch as the Best Female Disney Protagonist Ever, but over all, the film treats fairy tales right.  Even though its theme devalues magic, it is still essentially magical.


Monday, December 14, 2009:  I Swear the Machines are Out to Get Me

Well, I considered writing yet another open letter to Winter, but I think I've probably done enough damage on that front, so no, I'm giving that one a pass.  And I thought of going into another diatribe about Glee, but I figure I'll just let the Stereotype Gang be this week.  Instead, I must return yet again to one of my favourite themes:

Computers hate me.  Devices designed to be attached to computers hate me.  Drawings of computers hate me.  I do not get along well with computers.

It's partly that the DVD drive in my laptop no longer works at all, but it's mostly that my scanner died about an hour and a half ago, right in the middle of a scan.  Neither of my computers will acknowledge that the scanner is anything other than an "unknown advice."  They helpfully inform me that one of my USB devices has "malfunctioned," and they advise me cheerily that if unplugging and replugging it doesn't work, I should "replace it."  Ah, yes...I should "replace it" with that "hundred and fifty dollars" I just "happen" to have "lying around."  I am "a bit upset right now."

What have I done to piss off Our New Overlords, the machines?  Seriously...tell me what the problem is.  I'll fix it.  I'll bribe someone.  I don't care!  I'm just tired of things going wrong with every electronic device I own.

If my printer dies tomorrow, I'm going to start chucking stuff off my balcony.


Monday, December 7, 2009:  Another Open Letter to Winter

Dear Mr. Winter:

Your wilful misunderstanding of last week's request has not, sir, gone unnoticed.  We are baffled as to why you appear to feel that ignoring our company for weeks and then turning up and expelling Mr. Fall from your shared office without a word of explanation is acceptable behaviour.

Admittedly, we did recently chide you gently for your negligence, but we were certainly not suggesting that you come roaring in out of nowhere and freeze us all half to death without even allowing us the joy of snow.  As usual, you are ignoring the needs of the company, or even deliberately subverting them.  Please  be aware that your tenure actually does not officially begin for another two weeks.  Why, then, is everything frozen?

You have had a long history of employment with us, and it is possible that you have become a little too sure of yourself.  Make no mistake:  we shall fire you if you continue in this vein.  One of your fellow employees can easily do your job, which is little more than ceremonial.  Shape up.  Be consistent.  If you smile, the world will smile with you, or at least at you.

Please reply to this letter, Mr. Winter.  We get worried when we don't hear from you.

Sincerely yours,


Toronto


Monday, November 30, 2009:  An Open Letter to Winter

Dear Mr. Winter:

We are writing to you because of your unusual and, frankly, worrying failure to turn up a month early and bully Mr. Fall until he is forced to leave his position out of fear of the repercussions were he to stay.  By this time of year, you are generally nicely settled in and happily flinging snow every which way.  This year, however, Mr. Fall is still at work, and he says (with rather pathetic joy) that he has not heard from you.

Are you ill, Mr. Winter?  You are aware, we are sure, that our company has a generous sick-leave scheme; however, it is necessary for employees to demonstrate proof of illness and not simply vanish from the face of the earth.  If you would like to wait to come in until the official beginning of your term, we are happy to accommodate you, but we must know where you are right now.  We have to admit that your absence is beginning to make us a little nervous.

We are pleased that there has not, so far, been a repeat of last year, when you descended wrathfully upon us and went mad with power for months, but we are rather worried that you are planning something even more diabolical than usual.  Please reassure us that you are not going to introduce multiple blizzards simultaneously or play cavalierly with ice storms.

We look forward to seeing you next month, and we hope you will go easy on Christmas this time around.

Sincerely yours,


Toronto


Monday, November 23, 2009:  The Problem with Glee

This week, I shall take a break from screaming and ranting about my computers (last week's problem was solved by me turning my router off for ten seconds, and no, I do not understand this at all) and do a bit of grouching about a new TV show that I watch when I should be marking essays.

Glee, which airs every Wednesday evening, is sometimes a drama, sometimes a comedy, frequently a musical, ostensibly a parody, and always on the verge of driving me up the freaking wall.  I can't really say what it is about the programme that makes me crazy.  There may be a number of factors conspiring together to invoke my frustration and rage.  At any rate, I keep watching.

The show follows the adventures of the students and teachers of McKinley High School, especially those involved in the glee club.*  The students are basically a rainbow of stereotypes:  Obnoxious Jewish Diva, Sassy Black Girl, Unbelievably Obvious Closeted Gay Kid, Dumb Jock, Bitchy Cheerleader, Really Stupid Cheerleader, Wheelchair Guy, Stuttering Asian, Other Asian,** Guy from the Wrong Side of the Tracks, and a Chorus of Intolerant Jocks and Cheerleaders.  Amongst the adults, we have Passionate Teacher, Ridiculously Manipulative Wife, Evil Teacher from Hell, Comic Indian Principal, Obsessive-Compulsive Counsellor, and Burly but Sensitive Coach.  It is fairly evident that the stereotypes are meant to push the show over into parody; each character is taken just a little bit too far for verisimilitude.

The problem is that the show simply can't decide what it is.  It claims to be parodic but keeps coming out with "serious" storylines, none of which makes much sense.  Every serious moment is undercut by the stereotypical nature of the characters, but not in a parodic way; the stereotyping seems to be interfering with the drama instead of turning it into something clever or insightful.  The show does often seem to be trying for realism, but this realism is jarring when seen in light of some of the more outrageous lines, not to mention the rehearsal scenes.  In a more obviously parodic work, it wouldn't be so odd to see a bunch of sixteen-year-olds pick up sheet music for the first time and instantly come out with flawless harmonies (with choreography to match).

The realism/parody divide is possibly also responsible for making the characters so damned unlikable.  In a parody, you expect unlikable characters; here, I just want to smack everybody very, very hard with a ruler.  The Passionate Teacher, Will, mostly just comes across as an incredibly annoying milksop, and all the students are idiots.  It is worth noting that every male character in the show is a put-upon woobie,*** whereas every female character (plus, arguably, the Unbelievably Obvious Closeted Gay Kid) is a scheming, manipulative bitch who lies to and cheats on the men in her life and then unfairly harps at them because they aren't slaving to keep her in the Manner to Which She is Accustomed.  In fact, the only character in the show I do not despise is the openly diabolical Sue (the cheerleaders' coach), who is no less morally dubious than the other women but is at least relatively honest about it.

Again, I do know that this is meant to be a parody.  If it were a successful parody, I wouldn't say a word against it, but in my opinion, it's not.  It encroaches too far on Saved By the Bell's territory for that.  As a result, the stereotypes it presents start to look less like hilarious send-ups of American culture and more like a celebration of the stereotypes themselves.

Glee, you have potential, but you squander it.  I'd like to hear you sing a song on that theme.

*A "glee club" is described at some point in the programme as a "show choir."  I was baffled when I saw the first episode; in my high school, we had choirs, but we didn't have choirs that did choreographed hip-hop mash-ups.  Go figure.
**So named by Stuttering Asian, actually.
***Here is the obligatory TV Tropes link.


Monday, November 16, 2009:  On Computers

Ahem.

I SHALL SCREAM AND POUND MY HEAD ON WALLS!  WHY DO I HAVE NO INTERNET CONNECTION?  ALL RIGHT, THAT'S INACCURATE.  WHY DO I HAVE AN INTERNET CONNECTION THAT IS UNBELIEVABLY SLOW AND WILL LET ME DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING BUT CHECK MY E-MAIL ACCOUNT ABOUT ONCE AN HOUR?  WHY CAN I GO TO NO SITE EXCEPT GMAIL, AND TO GMAIL ONLY SOMETIMES?  HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO POST MY COMIC?  HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO POST THIS RANT?  WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

I normally loathe all-caps diatribes, but this deserves one.  Why do computers hate me?  Why do I own two relatively new and almost completely dysfunctional computers, as well, apparently, as one entirely dysfunctional modem?  Why do some people never have a single problem with their computers, whereas I am continually wasting my time trying to fix problems that make no sense and force me to spend hours on activities that should take minutes?  What is the point of a "time-saving" machine that does not save time?  I shall not only scream and pound my head on walls; I shall also shake my fists impotently at the heavens,  jump excitedly up and down, and burn things.  Oh, look...Windows Live Messenger is back!  It will run for forty seconds, then go down again for an hour and a half.  I am speaking from experience here.

I don't think it's my computer per se that's the main problem, but you never do know.  I've complained about this computer before.  It's got worse since then.  It will now play roughly half of my DVDs roughly half of the time.  The other half it won't play at all.  I'm not convinced that it will ever be clear why.

Messenger is down again.  My e-mail has reappeared.  It will be gone soon.  Every time I try to navigate to a page, I am sent to Bing.com.  WHY AM I SENT TO BING.COM?  Everything keeps freezing, and nothing makes sense.  Anger!  Fury!  Rage!  Impotence!

I hope your computers are all behaving.  I hope I'll eventually be able to post this Rant.  I am going to go punch things now.  Goodbye.


Monday, November 9, 2009:  I Need to Budget My Time Better

Once again, it is 2:15 a.m., and I haven't finished tomorrow's lectures, not to mention the job application I have due on Tuesday or the course planner I need to finish by Wednesday.  Oh, yes:  starting tomorrow, I shall have forty-six essays to mark in place of the twenty I just finished.  Those twenty were short.  These forty-six will not be short.

In other news, have you ever lectured to the accompaniment of a jackhammer?  I can now say that I have.  On Mondays, I teach in a horrible classroom right next to Church Street.  It's alway noisy, but last week, workers were busy tearing up the street to repair the pipes under it, and I got to spend an hour screaming into a microphone and still, somehow, ending up completely inaudible.  That little adventure set our class back nearly a full hour.  I'm not entirely sure how we're going to make this time up.  I shall shake my fist at the universe, I shall.

Unfortunately, I'm too tired to Rant any more.  I'll try to do a real Rant next week.  Stupid deadlines.


Monday, November 2, 2009:  I Promised I Would Write This, For Some Reason

I missed last week's rant without even realising it; I was just that busy.  This week, I am still busy, but I can pause in my busyness to bring you an ode to the absolute idiot who cut in front of us on the freeway this Saturday as four of us returned from a trip to the Stratford Festival.  Incidentally, if you have a chance to see West Side Story before it closes on November 8th, go.  It's an amazing production with a brilliant Tony and Maria who do not at all resemble the milksops of the 1961 film version.  More musicals should be produced on thrust stages; the openness of the space allows for a freedom of movement you don't get in a more traditional setup.

At any rate, here is my Ode to the Absolute Idiot Who Cut in Front of Us on the Freeway This Saturday:*

O Moron!  You should know
that in front of you
near your steering wheel
is something called a "turn signal."
It is not difficult to use.

You should try it out
the next time you decide to slip
between car and car so
that you may arrive home fifteen seconds
earlier than you otherwise would.

Perhaps if you use it
instead of assuming that other drivers have
psychic powers
you will not cause a terrible accident
or make me want to punch you.

Poor Moron.  You don't know
how many times you
caused me to say unacceptable words
as I rolled merrily away
from a different kind of drama.

*With less swearing than it had when I spontaneously recited the first few lines in the car.  This is a family Rants page.

Monday, October 19, 2009:  Damn It, I've Run Out of Time Again

How do I always do this?  How do I always end up sitting there on the night before I have to finish way too many things, not finishing them?  I spent all weekend reading and writing, and I'm still  not done.  I read over four hundred pages of material in a day and a half.  Yet here I am, ridiculously far behind.

I'm also hungry.  What do I do?  Do I eat the apple I bought from the Cub Scouts because they were adorable?  Why did I buy an apple?  I'm allergic to apples.  Why am I allergic to everything healthy?  I'm not allergic to my other option, a piece of bread with Nutella on it.  Why did I buy Nutella?  There must be something wrong with me.  Why am I not allergic to Nutella?  I think I may be allergic to getting things done on time.  I need a new plan.  It has to be a very fast-working plan.

Also, I spent the weekend thinking I was getting the flu again because I had a sore throat on Friday and joint pain on Saturday.  Now I'm fine except for some lingering joint pain, and all I can think is, "Why the hell am I having joint pain?"  This weekend is not a good weekend.  It is a bad weekend.  It is a weekend that should never have happened, and yet here it is.  It will soon be over, but that won't be a good thing either.

I think I must now stop Ranting and start doing one of the fifteen thousand things I need to finish doing in the next three hours.  Gosh, but I'm having fun right now.


Monday, October 12, 2009:  This Rant is Not About Thanksgiving

On this highly symbolic day that represents giving thanks and/or the history of European imperialism in North America (you pick), I am going to ignore all related topics and quite randomly go off on a tangent regarding Disney movies.  A friend of mine recently mentioned that he had always been annoyed by the message of Beauty and the Beast.  He saw the film as informing little girls that it was all right if they developed crushes on physically and emotionally abusive men because they would be able to change them.  In the personality of the Beast, the prince who is apparently unkind to a disguised fairy at the age of eleven,* my friend sees a violent criminal, whereas Belle is borderline delusional in her belief that he has good in him.

This implication, unfortunate as it may be, can certainly be seen in the story; it is present in the extraordinarily long French original (most people read the short version, which isn't quite so densely descriptive), in which the Beast starts off a jerk and ends up manipulative ("I died because you left, you ingrate, but now you're back, so hurrah!").  In the film, however, I kind of take to the Beast...not because of the love story, which is all rather sudden and developes almost entirely during a montage, but because I feel that the Beast is an essentially decent person who simply can't control his temper.

As I pointed out to my friend the other day, the prince "earns" his punishment by doing something at least 90% of people would do:  uncharitably turning an old woman away from his door.  From then on, his actions are motivated mostly by fear.  Yoda tells us that fear leads to anger, etc., and the little green guy does sort of have a point here.  The Beast lashes out because he has completely lost control of his life.  He doesn't particularly seem to like himself when he is screaming through the door at Belle, though it is worth noting that he never touches her; with the exception of her father at the beginning of the film and Gaston at the end, no one is physically harmed by the Beast.  His servants seem to fear him because he is capable of yelling really, really loudly.  Yes, he's emotionally abusive and a bully, but again, fear seems to have a lot to do with this.  He knows that his time to break the enchantment is nearly up, and his desperation almost leads him to drive away the one person equipped to help him.

I don't see Belle as "changing" him so much as helping him deal with the fear that is setting off his temper and masking who he really is.  She takes him enough out of himself that he forgets he is afraid.  Okay, she also leads him to become less self-centred, but let's face it:  anyone who has spent ten years lording it over a bunch of terrified talking cutlery whose lives revolve around him is going to turn out a bit selfish.  Besides, most love stories are about the protagonists becoming less self-centred as each learns to put to other before him- or herself.  Belle and the Beast both make sacrifices in the course of the film.  The Beast actually doesn't change all that much; he simply manages to overcome his fear, channel his temper in useful directions, and, eventually, rein his temper in when it threatens to escape his control.  There is no real indication that he's going to spend the rest of his life laughing and tripping giddily in various meadows.

To see him as the vessel of an obnoxious message that girls should accept their men dark and then manipulate them into sweetness and light--and to imply that the film runs entirely counter to the "fact" that extreme anger is never explicable and always a marker of an unchangeably terrible person--is maybe just a little unfair to those of us with terrible tempers, who are thus automatically doomed to lives as inherent abusers.  I would rather see Beauty and the Beast as the story of someone with a crippling personality trait who, due to his interaction with a person who doesn't fear or patronise him, finally--and simply--grows up.

All right.  Go back to the turkey now.  I'll go create ridiculously overblown arguments about Disney films off by myself in a corner.

*No, seriously.  He's eleven.  That relatively masculine-looking guy** in the damaged painting on the wall?  Eleven.  At various times in the film, we learn that 1) the castle has been enchanted for ten years and 2) the prince has until his twenty-first birthday to make things right.  I mean, it's no wonder he acted aggressively towards the fairy.  Even as a pre-pubescent boy, he must have been brimming with testosterone.
**Some would argue that the prince is actually rather girly.  I don't disagree.  However, even an eleven-year-old who looks like that is way more masculine than an eleven-year-old who looks like an eleven-year-old.

Monday, October 5, 2009:  I've Lost That Productive Feeling

Since Thursday, I have written sixty-four pages of a novel.  The only way I can excuse this behaviour is to say that if I hadn't been writing the novel, I wouldn't actually have been doing anything productive instead.  This stupid, bloody, pointlessly hellish flu has sucked out all my energy and left me eternally sniffling and unable to drag together the motivation to work on the stuff I am being paid to work on.  Not even the deadline looming this Thursday is helping to send me into panic mode.  Everything is just sort of blah.

Teeming masses, I charge you:  do not catch this flu.  It's not that bad on a day-to-day basis, but it just keeps going and going and going like the freaking Evil De-energiser Bunny.  I have lost count of the number of boxes of Kleenex I have had to buy in the last twelve days.  I'm guessing something like forty.

Apparently, Ryerson is anticipating an epidemic bad enough to shut down the university and has been issuing dire warnings for weeks now.  It is profoundly unfair that I am getting the blasted flu now, while the university is still running and I have to do things such as write lectures and mark.  I do hope I didn't infect anyone, though.  That would be very bad.  Admittedly, on the evening before my symptoms began (and therefore on the first day of infectiousness), I had two friends over, and we made pizza, with me actually working the dough with my hands.  I also fed 'em cookies I had just baked.  It is probable that all this food was germ-ridden, and yet both friends have remained healthy.  Maybe I didn't infect anyone after all.

I have just written a lecture on apartheid, and I need to come up with something else on essay-writing techniques.  I'm missing a fun Taboo night for this.  Damn you, you evil, heartless flu.  Damn you, damn you, damn you.

Next week, I hope to write on something besides the flu.  I am crossing my fingers now.


Monday, September 28, 2009:  Here, Piggy, Piggy, Piggy

I have spent the last several days enduring what I keep claiming is H1N1 (though it could easily just be the ordinary flu, since, as hasn't been entirely apparent lately due to the misguided general feeling that we are all going to catch the plague and die, the symptoms of the "pandemic" and those of the regular seasonal flu are pretty well indistinguishable in most otherwise healthy adults).  As usual, it is an ill-timed flu, destroying my weekend and making it very difficult for me to work on the two lectures that I will undoubtedly be well enough to give tomorrow.  It is, admittedly, not as bad as the flu I had nearly ten years ago; that one made me hallucinate, lasted for two weeks, and took up the entirety of Reading Week, as well as following directly upon the three weeks I had spent incapacited with a badly sprained ankle.  That was not a good winter.

Today has served as a demonstration of the flu's most frustrating habit:  its way of making you think you are almost well until you do something incredibly stupid like go to Word on the Street and, as a consequence, find yourself experiencing dizzy spells and feeling generally weak and lethargic.  You will not, of course, admit that you are being an absolute idiot when you take the subway downtown and spend over an hour walking all over Queen's Park, even though you still can't breathe through your nose.  Curse you, you stupid flu.  I simply cannot let you get in the way of my voracious need for more books.

I am now trying to write the lectures I am somehow going to have to give tomorrow.  Gosh, but I hope that no one has caught this disease from me.


Monday, September 21, 2009:  The Less Time I Have, the More Projects I Want to Take On

Some friends and I started a writing group a couple of weeks ago.  We did not actually have time to start a writing group, but we did so nonetheless.  Why?  It is highly probably that we are insane.

I have also recently begun to learn to play the Xaphoon, a strange little instrument that looks like a recorder and sounds like the bastard love-child of a saxophone and a clarinet.*  Today, I bought a cookie sheet so that I will eventually be able to bake cookies.**

I think I may be losing my mind.  I have a frighteningly large amount of work to do, and I am thinking about baking cookies (while writing a novel and trying to bend notes properly on "Georgia on my Mind," obviously).  Why can't I just write my damn lectures right the hell now?

Seeing as it is almost nine p.m. on a Sunday, I had better stop stalling and begin work on my two (count 'em:  two) lectures for tomorrow.  Yep.  I'll get right on that.  Right now.

But I have this great idea for a story...

*Technically, when I play it, it sounds like a duck, but people with more experience with reed instruments can coax some surprisingly lovely music out of it.
**One thing that most people don't know about me is that I am actually not bad at cooking and baking.  I'm just so lazy that I hardly ever do either.


Monday, September 14, 2009:  The Tortoise and the Hares

The tortoise left her modest one-bedroom apartment that morning
and said:
I hate being behind on everything.
I hate that feeling of dread you get
way down deep under your stomach somewhere
when you know you have twelve things to do and you've only
managed to get through three.
That was what the tortoise said.

There were hares on the four-lane one-way street outside zipping
up and down and leaping tall deadlines with a single bound
so the tortoise stayed mostly on the sidewalk,
which was moving slowly backward of its own volition.
One of the hares had
painted racing stripes on his ears and was
zooming down the leftmost lane so fast that
he almost missed waving to the tortoise.
She felt rather lonely.

There is a story of a tortoise and a hare
with some sort of moral in it at some point,
and the tortoise remembers about half of it and would
look up the rest if that didn't
make yet another thing she would inevitably
be behind on.
She thinks she may catch up
to the hare with the racing stripes
next Tuesday or shortly thereafter.
In the meantime, she moves
backward down a one-way street
and hopes it will be better in the morning.


Monday, September 7, 2009:  Revisiting the Bikes-Vs.-Cars Debate

Though it is a bit of a large and scary can of worms to open, the whole issue of cyclists and drivers clashing on the streets of Toronto may merit comment at this point.  The death of Darcy Allan Sheppard (if you don't know what I'm talking about, google his name, and have fun sifting through the resulting contradictory reports) has opened the debate again, though the issues are really not as connected as many have implied; Sheppard was certainly a cyclist when he and Michael Bryant collided, but he became a pedestrian once he left his bike and was subsequently dragged down the street and slammed against a mailbox.  Though the existence of bike lanes on Bloor Street may have prevented the initial accident, the details of which are still unclear, we can't really know for sure.  The case really seems to be one of mutual road rage that went south because at least one of the participants--we cannot possibly be certain which one--was behaving like an ass.

What we can know is that Sheppard's death has polarised "drivers" and "cyclists" (two groups that actually overlap quite a bit of the time) as never before.  The filter-free nature of the Internet is allowing the debate to get a little frightening, with the wingnuts from both sides in full operatic scream; rabid cyclists have called down the wrath of Murphy on the very existence of the car, while rabid drivers have ranted about Sheppard deserving his death for being a drunken, abusive, impoverished bike courier who was clearly out of control in daring to assault an upstanding, tax-paying citizen (this characterisation of Sheppard is an extremely creative interpretation of the few known facts).*  Bryant's use of a PR firm to influence the media in his favour is not exactly helping matters.  The whole issue has been turned by the media into a virtual class war in which the "driver" is a hardworking taxpayer who is constantly being inconvenienced by the "cyclist," a near-criminal who is is too lazy to get a real job and buy a car and is driven by a sense of entitlement in his or her maniacal desire to claim every road in Toronto for his or her lawless self.

This needs to be said:

Yes, Toronto's roads are, to put it lightly, problematic.  Everybody wants them:  drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians.  There is simply not enough road space to go around.  Creating new bike lanes takes driving and parking space away from cars.  Not creating new bike lanes leaves cyclists in constant danger.  Putting in more stop signs and lights inconveniences drivers and cyclists for the sake of the safety of pedestrians.  No matter what designers do, someone is going to be unhappy, and two of the three groups are probably going to be risking their lives on a daily basis.

Demonising one particular group is not the answer.  Lately, the demonised group is the smallest:  cyclists.  I have lost count of the number of articles and inflammatory comments I have seen and heard claiming that all cyclists are ruthless lawbreakers.  For instance, this rather pointless video posted online by the Toronto Sun goes on about the cyclists who break the law at one particular intersection and cuts off the pro-biking interviewee every time she starts to say something interesting.  Drivers grumble about cyclists taking up road space, slowing down traffic, running red lights, and so on.  Others mention the one pedestrian ever killed by a cyclist on a sidewalk in Toronto (note:  the cyclist was a fifteen-year-old boy who was legally, if recklessly, riding on the sidewalk).  Calls for more bike lanes are frequently shouted down with cries of, "Why do cyclists deserve to be safe?  They flaunt the rules of the road."

Yes, they do.  I have news for you:  so do drivers and pedestrians.  None of them are justified.  I obey the rules of the road when I am cycling, and I am unhappy when I see cyclists breezing through red lights.  However, I am equally unhappy when I see, as I frequently do, pedestrians crossing on red lights or drivers either tearing madly through red lights ("it was amber five seconds ago...I swear!") or turning left on reds (as a pedestrian, I have had to dodge many such drivers, who burn through the intersection without regard for the fact that the light has been red for a good long moment and people are walking across the damn road now).  Many (albeit not all) of the pedestrians who cross on red lights are not imperilling anyone but themselves; the same can, however, be said about the cyclists.  (Both groups, note, are still breaking the law and should stop doing so.  Yes, pedestrians, that includes you.)  Drivers also often--and without being criticised--pull a perfectly understandably illegal maneouvre with which cyclists are frequently taxed:  rolling slowly (after looking cautiously both ways) through stop signs on deserted roads at midnight.  No lives are in danger in this case.  Cyclists are demonised for the maneouvre; drivers are not.  (Again, please note:  both groups are breaking the law.)

You guys want to generalise, claiming that because some cyclists break the law, all of them are lowlifes who don't deserve a piece of the road?  Fine.  Some drivers and pedestrians are jerkwads, so no drivers or pedestrians should be allowed out on the streets.  Let us purge our precious roads of all traffic except buses and streetcars.  Oh, wait:  some bus drivers are maniacs, and some streetcars impede traffic.  We should ban them too.

Can we please just get along?  I am exceedingly tired of being bumped and doored and buzzed and cut off and yelled at; you may be tired of being flipped the bird and verbally abused and slowed down, or of being pushed aside and menaced on the sidewalk.  I promise to try to keep my temper if you promise to try to keep yours.  Bear in mind the fact that cyclists and pedestrians who don't blow up when they are hit or almost doored may, in fact, be exerting more self-control than drivers who don't blow up when cyclists sneak around them on the right or pedestrians run out in front of them.  A driver who hits a cyclist or pedestrian will probably not die.  Almost being killed does cause one's adrenaline to do strange and wonderful things to one's brain.

 Perhaps everybody should read this useful (and official) guide to cycling in Ontario; it outlines the rules of the road that cyclists should know and, not incidentally at all, that drivers should know about cyclists.  (For instance:  are you aware that cyclists are permitted by law to take up a full lane of traffic?  Common sense dictates that they rarely do so; however, when cycling on narrow streets or streets in which the curb lanes are filled with parked cars, cyclists are allowed to use as much as their lane as they need to stay safe.  They are also advised to stay about a metre away from curbs and parked cars, which is often impossible to do without getting in the way of moving cars.  Knowing these fun facts, O Drivers, may help to make you less angry the next time a cyclist dares to ride in "your" lane.  However, cyclists really, really need to learn and stick to these rules as well.)

We're all at fault here.  We're all being idiots about this issue.  It's just that pedestrians and cyclists are the ones whose lives are in danger.  Please, let's all be courteous, obey even the laws that seem unnecessary to us, and share the damn road.  Yes, Minority of Drivers Who Are Angry and Aggressive All the Time, that includes you.

*Don't believe me that people are saying such things?  Check out the comments section of this blog or any relevant Globe and Mail or Toronto Star article in which the comments have not been disabled.  I would normally steer right the hell clear of these comments sections, but believe it or not, I'm going to use this stuff in a class I'm teaching.  I'm being forced to read this garbage.  It is making my brain throb.


Monday, August 31, 2009:  Remenyi Breaks Guitars

Unlike Dave Carroll, whose completely justified indignation over United Airlines' treatment of his musical instrument is matched only by his good-humoured cleverness in writing two songs about it (with one more to come, apparently) and posting them on YouTube, I do not own an expensive and nigh-irreplaceable guitar.  Like him, however, I need to vent a certain amount of fury at a guitar-destroying company.  It is a little too bad that the people who broke my guitar also sell guitars, though I think the fact does exacerbate my anger somewhat.

Just over a month ago, a friend of mine who was borrowing my guitar for the summer (I was halfway across the country and rather focussed on the piano, on which I was about to spend a week performing, instead) went--with my permission--to get the strings changed.  Those strings had been on the guitar for a rather long time and really did need to be replaced, and the friend was preparing to play in a concert, so the move made a certain amount of sense.  She would normally have changed the strings herself, but I suspect that she decided to pay to have it done because the old strings had been on there so long and she was afraid she would do something wrong and harm the instrument (playing around with string tension on a wooden instrument can have consequences, especially if the instrument in question is not exactly top of the line).  She went to Remenyi, whose doors I shall never be darkening again.

The people at Remenyi managed to replace two of the strings before the guitar broke.

Now...as I mentioned above, this was not exactly the best guitar in the world.  It was at least fifteen years old and had originally been purchased for about $150.  I liked it because it was my guitar.  I had had it since I was a teenager.  I had learned to play on it.  It had come to Toronto with me.  My propensity to develop attachments to inanimate objects, especially musical instruments, was fully in play here.  Please keep all of this in mind.

The Remenyi people told my friend that the guitar had probably been on the verge of cracking anyway.  Well, yes, probably, though we have only their word for it.  What royally infuriates me is not that Remenyi broke the guitar but what happened next.

If I walk into a china shop and pick up a bowl that then cracks clear across, I'm expected to pay for the bowl.  Maybe it's not particularly fair that I should be held accountable for a seemingly random mishap, but hey...I broke the bowl.  I would expect this standard to apply to shop-owners as well.

The Remenyi people not only did not offer to pay for the damage (which, as they told my friend, probably would have cost $150 to fix), they charged her for the work they had already done on the strings.  That's right, folks:  my friend was asked to pay for Remenyi breaking my guitar.  As she is like me in not enjoying confrontation with people behind desks, she paid without complaint, then bought a new guitar from them at full price.  Yep.  They broke the guitar...charged her for doing so...and sold  her another guitar.

What.  The.  Hell?

Dear Remenyi:

Congratulations:  you just lost a regular customer.  Maybe you weren't actually obliged to pay for the damage you inadvertently did, but you were working on the guitar when it broke.  At the very least, you owed my friend a discount on repairs or on the purchase of a new instrument, and you should not have charged her for the two strings you managed to change before the instrument broke.  You took advantage of her politeness and her trust.  You should be pleased to know that in my personal List of Instances of Really Bad Customer Service, you have moved ahead of Budget Rent-A-Car (rented me a moving truck with a busted tail light, then refused to give me a discount until a friend yelled at the rental people for ten minutes) and Spring Rolls Restaurant (dumped two mango shakes on my head and took nothing off the bill).  Nicely done.


Monday, August 24, 2009:  A Richly Deserved Open Letter to Summer

Dear Mr. Summer:

It has come to our attention that once again, you are busy defying us with an almost obscene glee.  After spending much of the season keeping us wet and cold (while your counterpart on the west coast, from whom damp and chill are expected, sulked the province into a drought and then set it on fire), you have graced us with a week of excessive heat and humidity, culminating in a huge storm and several small tornadoes.  Clearly, you are completely out of control.

There is only a month left in your term.  We ask that you spend this month meditating on your foolish behaviour and perhaps finding something more productive than the systematic destruction of your environment in which to take an interest.  You are not stupid, Mr. Summer, and we urge you to use your considerable mental prowess to devise ways in which to alleviate our current towering rage.  There is absolutely no excuse for your initiation of the formation of funnel clouds over this city.  We are a little afraid that your may have gone insane.

Please get back to us as soon as possible about how you plan to spend the rest of your term.  We would be happy if you would, for once, stick to a predictable schedule.

Yours sincerely,


Toronto


Monday, August 17, 2009:  Fringiness

I am a bad person; I didn't post last week.  I blame the fact that last weekend was, time-wise, the weekend from hell; it started with a play performance, went on to include hiking and karaoke (both absolutely necessary), and ended on Monday with a plane trip back to Toronto.  Since then, I've been struggling to finish the work I really should have finished weeks ago so that my boss won't kill me.  (I met with her, and she didn't kill me, luckily.  In fact, she seemed to think I'd done well.  Huh.)

Belatedly, then, I proudly present:

What I Learned at the Calgary Fringe Festival

1)  If you store a $2,500 keyboard, an $800 amp, a nice bookcase, and a bunch of knickknacks backstage during a theatrical run, what is actually going to be stolen is a biscuit tin (returned the next day), a small black purse with nothing in it, a plastic dinosaur, and a pen.

2)  Musical murder mysteries attract a decidedly more aged demographic than one might expect.

3)  It is fun to discover this fact two days into the run of a play featuring the untimely demise of an impotent old man with hair in unsightly places.

4)  It is also fun to realise that for plot-related reasons, you have specified that this impotent old man is all of sixty-two.

5)  One never remembers what hilarious things one can do with a slide whistle until after such a memory would be useful.

6)  Theater-goers do not laugh in the right places. That is...their laughter is appreciated, but it is not always expected, and they tend not to laugh at the actual scripted jokes but instead at the lines you do not realise are jokes until five hours after the end of opening night, and then only because you are lying awake, trying to figure out what everyone was laughing at.

7)  When someone steals your biscuit tin, and you are forced to rely upon an emergency package of cookies from the corner store because the biscuits are essential to the play and cannot, even in such dire straits, be mimed, take the damn cookies out of the damn crinkly plastic wrapper and put them in someone's damn shoe or something so that the audience can hear the damn dialogue over the resulting deafening racket.

8)  There is little that cannot be accomplished with electrical tape and ingenuity, with an emphasis upon the former.

9)  That one actor is not going to remember that one line.  Let it go.  Leeeeet iiiiiiit gooooo...

10)  When everyone is screaming with laughter, even the sudden and disastrous implosion of an entire crucial song can apparently be forgiven.


Monday, August 3, 2009:  Calgary`s Transit System is Definitely the Devil

I know I did a Rant on Calgary transit last week, but damn, is this a terrible system.  I think it may actually be out to get everybody who has to use it.

Yesterday, a friend and I needed to get from Kensington to Inglewood, with a brief stop at Staples to photocopy some stuff.  The trip from Kensington to Staples is a 25-minute walk or a 3-minute journey on the C-Train (plus a 10-minute walk).  Then there was supposed to be another 10-minute walk and a 15-minute bus journey.

So.

We arrived at the C-Train station and waited for 15 minutes (unusual, even for a Saturday).  I would like to stress that there were no notices visible at this station.

The train turned up, and everyone got off.  We figured this was odd, but we got on anyway.  The train sat there for five minutes.  We probably should have noticed that things were already going wrong, but it was 30 degrees C outside, and we weren`t at our sharpest.

A voice announced that this train was going back towards Sait Station, not downtown.  We tried to get off the train.  The doors wouldn`t open.

We took at unscheduled journey to Sait, where we stood waiting for at least another fifteen minutes for the damn train to come back so we could return to Sunnyside Station.

We could have waited for the shuttle, but we were already running late.  We took the 25-minute walk to Staples.  The shuttle didn`t pass us, so it was probably a wise decision.  Afterwards, however, we realised that the street down which the trains and our bus normally ran was completely shut down, and we had no idea where else to catch the bus except way back in Kensington.  We walked back to Kensington.  Unbeknownst to us, if we had glanced slightly to the right at a certain intersection, we would have seen a stop at which we could have caught the bus.

The bus we were trying to catch passed us when we were a minute`s walk away from the stop.  We actually stood there on the wrong side of a red light and watched it idling at the intersection, mocking us.  We had to wait twenty more minutes for the bus.

About five minutes before we reached our destination on transfers that had actually already expired, though we didn`t realise it at the time, a guy who was even more angry at the Calgary transit system than we were stormed onto the bus and sat down just behind us.  He treated us to a loud, detailed monologue on how Calgary transit was the Worst Thing Ever.

We ran into a street festival just before we needed to get off the bus.  Though we requested a stop before we reached the detour, the bus just kept going, taking us about four blocks out of our way.

We arrived at our destination nearly two hours after we had left.

This afternoon, my friend found me a bike.


Monday, July 27, 2009:  Calgary's Transit System is Probably the Devil

I'm not sure what it is about buses in Calgary.  I honestly didn't think anyone would be able to top the forty-minutes-by-bus, ten-minutes-by-car antics of the public bus to Trent University, and I'm still not entirely convinced anyone has...but there's still a distinct possibility that the transit system here is genuinely evil.

Scenario A:  My friend and I needed to catch a bus that would take us to another bus that would, in its turn,  take us to a play rehearsal.  The first bus was three minutes late and ended up stuck in traffic for a further three minutes, making us two minutes late for our connection.  Since the next bus would not be turning up for half an hour, we decided to take the twenty-five-minute walk to the venue.  We found ourselves strolling through a completely empty industrial wasteland.  If we had caught the bus, we would have been ferried in eerie silence from abandoned stop to abandoned stop.  There were no people.  We did glimpse some briefly on a golf course, but the golf course seemed separate from the strange limbo into which we had been propelled.

Admittedly, the landscape was not exactly the bus`s fault.  There was also, however...

Scenario B:  The same friend and I had to visit a certain costume shop.  We had a choice of catching a bus that would take us right there and catching the C-Train, then transferring to that bus.  We picked option A and arrived at the bus stop just as the bus was pulling away (again, it ran every half hour).  We then walked for fifteen minutes to get to the C-Train station, got ahead of the bus, got off the C-Train, and ran frantically around looking for a bus stop, which we did not find.  The bus passed us.  A ten-minute walk later, we found a stop.  (We arrived at the store to find that it had been closed for half an hour, but that`s a different story.)

My friend has learned that uttering the words, "This plan is foolproof; nothing could possibly go wrong" in relation to Calgary buses is a really bad idea.  I have learned that there is a form of transporation more frustrating than the Bathurst streetcar.


Monday, July 20, 2009:  Shoes, Glorious Shoes

So.

About a week ago, the back-strap on one of my sandals broke.  The sandals in question have been on their way out for a while; it's really only a matter of time before they are reduced to slabs of rubber with bits of leather flapping uselessly from them.  However, though I do realise that the broken strap is an indication that I should, you know, buy new sandals, I am finding it difficult to do so.

I tried the duct-tape solution first.  It worked...sort of.  Every few days since my first attempt, I have had to spend way too long cutting away the mangled and useless duct tape that has stopped binding the shoe together and replacing it with fresh duct tape.  The alternative, however, is finding size-11 sandals in Calgary at the tail end of the summer shoe season.*  Sandals are on sale right now.  That would be fantastic if any store carried a pair larger than size 9.

Tallcrest, a store that specialises in shoes for people with huge feet, may have some sandals in my size.  It's hard to tell.  Google Maps lists only two Tallcrest locations in Calgary, one of them an "unverified listing."  The "verified" Tallcrest is way out in Boonieland and will probably take me an hour to reach via transit.  The "unverified" Tallcrest doesn't seem to exist.  It is supposedly in a certain mall.  The mall contains many shoe stores, none of which carry sandals in my size.

I just want some bloody shoes!  I have heard that there are women out there who enjoy shoe shopping.  Hell...on Friday, I met some.  They were trying on shoes and deciding on them depending on whether or not they looked good!  Meanwhile, I visited about five different stores in ten minutes and couldn't even find a hideously ugly pair of sandals in my size.  It's not.  Freaking.  Fair.  All I want is not to have to get through the next month in shoes constructed entirely of duct tape.  Damn it.

Dear Women With Normal-Sized Feet:

Yeah, you be smug.  Go right ahead.  I hope one day you accidentally stumble into a speciality store and become painfully confused when the clerk looks at you condescendingly and sneers, "I'm afraid we've nothing in...your size, madam."  Perhaps you might also learn the pain of never having pant legs or shirt sleeves that are long enough and not being able to find shorts not made for ninety-pound teenagers with no butts.

I may just be in a slightly bad mood right now.  I wonder why that is...

*Why the bleeding hell does the summer shoe season end in mid-July?


Monday, July 13, 2009:  The Rain in Calgary Falls Mainly on the Everything

I've been in Calgary for over a week now, and I've noticed a decided lack of summerness here.  It doesn't particularly bother me; I don't deal well with heat.  However, it's a little odd.  I thought the weather in July was only like this in Vancouver.

It has rained just about every day, sometimes torrentially.  I think we're supposed to get a high of 16 C today.  Yesterday had a high of 25 C, but that's as warm as it's got so far.  Looking at the forecasts for Toronto and Vancouver, I notice that they're stuck in the low twenties as well.

Am I going to have to write a letter to Mr. Summer?  I like this weather, but it's kind of freaking me out.  It's almost as if summer has decided not to be diabolically evil for a change.  Something's going on.  It's a conspiracy, I tell you.

In other news:  I bet you don't know what a bad idea it is to try to carry a digital piano, a piano stand, and an amp six blocks, then drag them all onto the C-Train during the Calgary Stampede.  Until Saturday afternoon, I didn't either.  Okay, there were two of us, and the Stampede traffic wasn't too bad, but I'm not sure either of us will ever be able to use our arms again.  Er...does anyone in Calgary own a truck?  Could we have it?


Monday, July 6, 2009:  Bloody Put the Bloody "Shift" and "Enter" Keys in the Bloody Same Place on Every Bloody Keyboard, Bloody Computer Manufacturers!

Due to the fact that my three-year-old laptop now refuses to turn on for more than three seconds at once, I have acquired a new computer.  It is medium-sized and shiny and technically fairly okay, except for the fact that the "shift" and "enter" keys have been shoved aside to make way for two completely useless backslash keys.

Can I get used to the new arrangement?  No, I cannot.  I am constantly backslashing when I should be shifting or entering.  My documents become littered with extraneous backslashes.  Even when I remember to stretch way the hell over to the "shift" key, I often overcompensate and hit "caps lock" or "ctrl" instead.  My typing used to be really quite fast.  Now it's not.  Someone needs to stop me from throwing this computer violently at the wall.

The computer has other quirks as well.  For instance, the version of NVU I am typing this document in will not let me change the colour of my text.  I therefore cannot make the title of this Rant all green, as I usually do.  I do not know what the problem is.  The "Help" function does not help me.*

I would also like to note that Vista itself counts as a quirk.  Actually, it is beyond a quirk.  It is an absolute freaking disaster, and I hate it.  Nothing is where it should be.  Why the hell do I have to go to the desktop to access "My Computer" or the control panel?  Who thought this stupid operating system was a good idea?  Everything takes twice as long as it should, and I do believe that every program I own has frozen on me at least once.  I have had the computer for a week, please note.  And don't even get me started on the fact that I have to download new drivers for every.  Single.  Piece.  Of hardware.  I own.

Oh!  And then there's my USB headset.  The mic works; the headphones don't, even though the computer claims that they do.  What the hell?  Why do computers hate me?  Why does my computer tell me every goddamn time I boot up that Office Power Point has stopped working and will be shut down?  It hasn't been started up!  I'm not using Office Power Point!  Argh argh argh argh argh!

I think I shall spend a while inserting red-hot needles beneath my fingernails.  It will be more fun than using this computer.

*I have "fixed" this problem by abandoning NVU entirely and going with Kompozer, which is just like NVU, except that it actually works.  However, Vista is doing other horrible things to me today as well.  Specifically, it has decided that it will not let me upload files to this site from my Pictures folder.  I have had to put the relevant subfolder in a damned awkward place, just so that WinSCP will acknowledge its existence.  Computers hate me.


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