Secret weapon

My favourite store in Ottawa is the T&T; Supermarket, which opened about a year and a half ago. It's just 2 miles south of us, and I walk there and back at least once a week for exercise, and to shop for Asian groceries. James Lileks did a post awhile back about the strange things you can find on grocery shelves, like Grass Jelly, and you can certainly find all that and more at T&T.; I got a can of Rambutan on Friday, because I wanted a tropical fruit for my Indian fruit salad. The recipe calls for guava, which is okay but not my favourite, and I'd already tried lychees, and this looked interesting. It turned out to be very nice - very like lychees, just a bit sweeter and smoother.

Well, up at the front they have a place where you can buy ready-cooked food to eat there or take home. Every now and then for a treat I buy a barbecued duck, because you just can't make that sort of thing in your own kitchen. They also have some packaged cooked food, and it changes every day - salted chicken, barbecued beef tendons, duck feet, you name it.

Last time I went there I wandered through this section, and my attention was caught by some packages of sliced meat strips. The label read "Pork Bungholes". I looked again; the meat DID have a sort of bullseye in the middle of the slices, but I thought this can't be what I think it is. When in doubt, consult the French - when I studied translation I learned that French is a much more precise language than English, and it's harder to conceal the truth in French. For once our bilingual labelling laws came to my rescue, and I checked the French version on the label. Sure enough, there it was: "Rectum du porc".

Well, now we have the ultimate weapon to defeat the jihadis. Attack them with volleys of Pork Bungholes. It's just wrong on SO many levels, even to me, that I think the mere thought that such a thing exists is likely to make jihadis spontaneously combust. The Chinese will save the world; maybe "Firefly" was prescient in foreseeing a future in which America and China have melded to run the universe.

And now for some good news

March wasn't all disasters. For the last few weeks, I've been working on a new project. Years ago, we had an interesting bookcase probably from the 30s, with sliding glass doors. James tipped it over and it broke (yeah, I can't entirely keep out the scarlet thread of James's destructiveness). One of the glass panes shattered, and the whole top of the bookcase broke off as well as part of the base. We didn't know what to do with it, so we pushed it into the cold cellar and left it lying on its side. I finally decided it was uselessly occupying space down there, and I'd like to build a potato bin in its place.

I pulled it out and figured that maybe it wouldn't be that difficult to fix myself. The foot was easily put back on, and then top fitted back on top, except that a few fragments of wood had been lost. Unfortunately, during its years in the non-climate controlled cold cellar, it had warped slightly, so the sides are not perfectly perpendicular anymore - I could tell when I put the sliding glass doors back and realized that when they overlap, they don't entirely line up straight. It's not a big deal, though.

While I was regluing the pieces, I figured that perhaps I could strip and refinish it as well, so that's been the job for the last week. Stripping was quite easy, and I put a maple stain on it. I'm not sure what the wood is, but it's some sort of hardwood; could be maple or pine. I'd post pictures, except that I need the Mac for photos, and, well...you know what happened to that.

I've now got the final coat of sealant applied, and it's just got to dry before we try to haul it upstairs again. Oddly enough, the small windows gave me much more trouble than the actual bookcase. The varnish seems to dry oddly in places, leaving a sort of whitish bloom - I may have to do an extra coat to get it to look quite smooth and even. I think I'll get the glass replaced on all of them; the old glass feels sort of thin and cheap, and now we have safety glass which would be much more sensible for our family.

The other thing I've been working on is losing weight. Of course it's for health reasons, but the immediate cause was because I need new clothes and I hate having to shop for fat clothes. They're always such dull colours and so styleless. I still have perfectly nice things that no longer fit, and I figured I'd rather try to wear my old clothes than invest in new ones I won't like.

I'm glad to say it's going quite well. I did Weight Watchers about 10 years ago when we lived in Boston, and was very successful - I lost about 70 lbs. I'm following the same program, but I'm not doing it officially - I've tried once or twice since we moved back to Ottawa, but I don't like the WW program up here. In Boston, the meetings were great - everyone was very supportive and enthusiastic - just the American character, I think, very generous and happy for other people's success. Here the directors are rather cool and brusque, and the people who attend are usually claques of middle-aged ladies who do this as a sort of social event, and have no interest in anyone outside their own set. It felt more like checking in with one's parole officer than going to a support meeting.

Anyway, since the beginning of February, I've lost over 20 lbs, so I'm thrilled with the way things are going. I hope to lost another 30, but that will probably take the better part of a year. Twenty pounds in 2 months is very creditable, but it certainly can't continue at that rate.

My next job is to try to sync the subtitles I did for 'Marguerite de la nuit' to the dvd version of it - I think I may have figured out a way to do it, but it's long and complicated and I have to have a lot of uninterrupted time to work on it.

Meanwhile, the snow is retreating, Canada geese are returning, and the first tips of rhubarb are starting to poke above the ground. In a few more weeks, I'll be doing garden cleanup and starting to think about planting peas.

March Madness

Well, March is over at last, and a mad month it certainly was. Sorry I've been so dilatory in posting, but things have been a bit hairy around here. Just as March break was starting, Emma dropped out of college. The program was just overwhelming her, and now she wants to change to a different one. We have to think carefully about this; I'm afraid that it might be the same story with ANY program - OK the first year, then it gets progressively harder until it's too much for her. It took a week or two, but I'm finally over the shock, and now we can use our heads coolly. I keep telling myself that there are thousands of people in Japan who would trade problems with me, and it's not that bad, but it still threw me for a loop.

Then last week, James struck with his typical criminal brilliance. He took a pair of scissors and cut the electric cord of the iMac computer! Fortunately the cord is removable and I guess I can get a new one, but there's no way of telling if the computer itself was damaged until I can reconnect it and examine it. I first realized what had happened when he came upstairs carrying the iMac and I saw what had happened to the cord - obviously he wanted an audience. When I went downstairs, I found that he had also cut the cords of the keyboard and the mouse, so those will have to be replaced. He had also shorted out all the lights and outlets on that circuit; I tried to fix it, but it was too dark in the garage, and all the switches on the fusebox seemed to be in in the ON position. Finally I gave up and told Dean we'd have to call an electrician the next day.

The electrician found the fuse - it WAS off, but it wasn't visible. But while they were here we got them to fix another outlet that had never worked, so it wasn't a wasted call.

The followup to the Mac destruction came the next day. James came up to me with a piece of paper on which he'd written in very large letters: DELL. Dell? Dell? So that's what all this was about? He didn't want to use the Mac, so he figured if he sabotaged it I'd have to buy him a Dell instead? That little &$#@**@@!! Just for that, I decided I'd leave him without ANY computer for a week, so he'd appreciate it more, but he doesn't seem repentant. He's very tranquilly gone over to watching his "101 Dalmations" tape, and still wants a Dell. Now I'm afraid to bring back the Mac - what if he throws it out the window to REALLY finish it off? Perhaps I should just wait until he's asking for it to come back again. It's weird, because he used the Mac like an expert, and never betrayed any hint that he didn't like it. I don't know where he gets his ideas.

Oh, and he's also clogged up one of our toilets, and even the mighty auger can't free it. I suspect that he flushed a towel down there, because I managed to extract a tiny fragment of terrycloth. It's probably time to replace that toilet with an uber-toilet like the one we have on the ground floor. They'll all go that way eventually, I suppose.

Finally, the clothes dryer has reached the end of the line. It's the last appliance in the house that was here when we moved in. Over the winter, it was getting feebler and feebler - over an hour to dry underwear? Ridiculous. Then a few days ago, this odd, scary smell started coming from it - a kind of oily smell, so I think the wires are overheating. It's time for a new one, so on Thursday I went to the Maytag store, where we'd bought our washer several years ago. The new dryer will arrive Wednesday night. Meanwhile, it's warm and sunny out, so we can dry clothes outside, which I prefer anyway.

So that's my recitation of woes for the past month.

The horror in Japan

This has been such a terrible week in Japan. I've got CNN on all the time, just watching those endless repeats of that unstoppable black tide sweeping over farmland. Salt water, too - imagine what that will do to the soil, even when the debris is cleared away.

One of the most uncanny things is the absence of dead bodies. We keep reading reports about whole towns swept away, 10,000 missing from a population of 17,000, but where are the bodies? It's like 9/11, when the hospitals in Manhattan were braced for a wave of casualties that never came - the bodies were just incinerated and never seen again. Weeks and months of homemade "Missing" posters on plywood barriers, growing faded and tattered, as people had to accept that they'd never really know what happened to their family members.

This reminds me a bit of the Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania in 1888 - not in scale of course, but the descriptions are eerily similar. The tidal wave of water that crashed down the mountain was not a pure, white-topped wave like off the beaches of Hawaii - what we all think of when we hear the words "tidal wave". It was also cluttered with dirt and debris, and looked more like a liquified mountain churning towards the city.

The wall of debris and water came on not steadily but in an irregular series of thunderous checks and rushes.

At times, eyewitnesses said later, the debris would even clog the path enough to bring the whole thing to a momentary standstill. All the crushed and tangled sweepings from the dam down would lock clear across the valley, seeming almost more than the millions of tons of pressure from behind could budge.

But the then whole seething mass would burst apart, with trees and telegraph poles flying into the air, as though blasted by dynamite, and the water would rush forward again, even faster. And as it moved on, the water kept on tossing logs and roots above its surface, as though the whole mass were full of life.

The friction set up by the terrain and the debris also caused the bottom of the mass of water to move much slower than the top. As a result the top was continually sliding over the bottom and down the front of the advancing wall, like a cake of ice across a slick board. The water, in other words, was rolling over itself all the time it was pressing forward, and this caused a violent downward smashing, like a monstrous surf falling on a beach, that could crush almost anything in its path. A man caught under it had no chance at ll. In fact, one of the major problems later on would be finding the bodies that had been pounded deep down into the mud.

The last human remains were recovered in 1904, I think.

A lot of people must have been swept back into the sea when the tsunami waters receded, and there's a hope their bodies might be found. Very soon, I expect, they'll find them floating on the surface. But I fear that many may have been crushed into the earth the way the people at Johnstown were, and the Japanese may be finding fragments of them for years.

Anglicanism's rich musical heritage

Stand Firm and MCJ posted this incredible addition to Anglicanism's rich musical heritage:

I guess Dudley Moore's estate wouldn't grant them the rights to "Jump":
(DNPAW - Do Not Play At Work)

Flushed with success

One thing I will probably never succeed in doing is conveying adequately to other people how very dominated by unlikely things our home life is. And one of the most dominant features is the toilet. A lot of our life revolves - one might even say, "swirls" - around the toilet. Getting kids to the toilet on time and coping with the times when we don't make up a big part of every day. And apart from normal use, we also have to deal with James's very innovative approach, which involves flushing things down as entertainment.

Clogs were such a frequent occurrence, that when we had to call the plumber two weeks in a row to unclog the same toilet, he finally took pity on us and recommended we invest in a super-toilet. After a few more experiences, we did, and this is the monster we now have in the main floor bathroom:

It is the American Standard Champion 4, and believe me, it's a brute. But plumber calls have dropped dramatically since we installed it some 6 months ago. When we eventually have to replace the normal toilets upstairs, we're going to get these, but we did the ground floor because that's the one James and Thomas tend to use the most.

Not that things are entirely problem-free now. We don't have so many clogs, because this toilet is so powerful and the pipe is wider, so things can actually make it down the bend. I'm pretty sure James flushed my car keys down the toilet, because I've searched the whole house and there's no sign of them. He also sometimes tries to flush his Thomas the Tank Engine toys down the toilet, and those can get wedged in strange angles, which makes them hard to dislodge.

That's why I also bought a drain snake last year, to try to get some of this stuff out myself. First I got a little one, and it worked well, fully justifying the $15 or so it cost. After that experiment succeeded, I decided it was worth investing in a big 6' long industrial-size one for $75 to cope with bigger problems.

I have to say, it's a marvellous tool, and has paid for itself several times over. The best experience I had was when I put it down the toilet several times, and managed to bring up one of the train toys - it had caught the tiny little plastic coupling tab between the coils of the head, and pulled it out that way! This thing has worked on at least 3 occasions, saving us about $100 each time for a call to a plumber, so I have every reason to recommend it.

Last week, however, something went down the toilet and nothing would dislodge it. The event started with me at the computer, and James standing at the door to the bathroom, looking over to me and saying several times "Uh-oh." Foolishly, I ignored him because I wanted to finish what I was reading. After these attempts to get my attention failed, I heard the fatal FLUSH - the flush that didn't finish with a big roar, meaning that the drain was blocked. Too late, I leaped to my feet and hurried to the toilet, but it was too late. Nothing was visible, but a few flushes proved that water could only slowly filter down. Ten sweaty minutes with the plunger produced nothing. Finally I pulled out the big snake, but this time even that failed me. I couldn't get the wire coil to go in even one foot, and twisting the handle did nothing. This time, I figured we'd HAVE to call a plumber, and I was steaming.

But before abandoning all hope, I reasoned that if the snake couldn't get down at all, it meant that the clog was really close to the opening. Maybe I could poke something down there and reach it. My hand was too big, so I unravelled a wire hanger and tried pushing the two ends in, rather like a pair of forceps. Once, twice, then hurrah! Something moved and I was able to pull it towards me. I couldn't believe it - James had managed to flush an entire electric shaver down the toilet! I mean one of those chunky Phillips shavers, with the triangular head with 3 round shaving blades. It came out in 2 pieces, the main body and the detachable shaver head. We lost the plastic guard that fitted over the top. And most amazing of all, the battery still worked! I figure it was only because the toilet was as powerful as it is that the shaver got down even part way; in a normal toilet, it would have just lain at the bottom of the bowl, but this managed to suck it down until it wedged in the drain.

My Magnum Opus

I think I've done it - the best subtitles I've ever done or ever will do. I translated and created subtitles for Claude Autant-Lara's 1955 film "Marguerite de la nuit" (Marguerite of the Night), a wonderful movie almost completely forgotten today. It stars Yves Montand and Michele Morgan, and is a modern version of Faust. (I can never see or hear those words without thinking of The Bandwagon, and the disastrous stage show Jeffrey Cordova put on with just that theme.)

The sets are incredibly weird - very artificial, almost Expressionist in appearance, though not in theme. There's very little on this movie online - just a few clips, and they don't show the sets at their best. Here are some still photos:






This one has a very Caligariesque feel to it, as does the entire scene - it shows old Dr. Faust, in his tall hat and black cape, walking home from the opera, past the unrealistic walls and pavements of this fantasy Paris.


That is Yves Montand, as Mr. Léon, aka Mephistopheles. Note the date on the wall above his head: April 30, Walpurgis Night. I wonder if his name isn't a little Biblical allusion too: "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour."

Now look at the weird scene with the church and the graveyard:


Some people complain that the movie is too long at 2 hrs. 5 mins., but how can you possibly have too much time on your hands when you can fill it looking at visuals like these?

The movie was quite a flop when it came out, but I don't think there was anything wrong with the film. I think it was just created at the wrong time; the New Wave of French cinema was on the verge of arriving, and people just weren't in the mood for a stylized fantasy like this. I wish it could be released on dvd in North America - now that I've done the subtitles, it should be a cinch! It came out on dvd in Germany, in an Yves Montand collection - it wasn't subtitled, they provided a German dubbed version along with the original. What a shame to dub Montand's wonderful baritone voice, though! He doesn't sing, Michele Morgan does, but it's delightful just listening to his voice speaking the lines in that deeply ironical way he has. Maybe I can teach myself dvd authoring and figure out a way to build my subtitle file into the dvd; I've seen other people do it, but I've never tried.

Well, as I say, this is my best project so far. Now I don't know just what to do - it'll take me a while to find another movie I'll enjoy as much.

Bizarre weather

It's been over freezing today - +3 C and raining if you can believe it! And now we're waiting for a very scary reversal; there's a Flash Freeze Warning on right now, and they're predicting it to happen at 3:00, just the time I'll be bussing kids home! Actually, that's an hour from now, and I think it may be arriving ahead of schedule: it's getting bright out, and the wind is really picking up. Here's hoping that the wind can dry some of the water on the roads before the temperature drops to -7. Flash freezes are really scary, right up there with whiteouts, and I hope I can get out to the school and back again without encountering any disasters.

But the weirdness doesn't stop there; it's going to be -9 tomorrow, and then the temperature is going to go back up as we head into the weekend, all the way to +9 and raining on Friday! This is so strange for February, and it's going to play havoc with the second week of Winterlude that's already underway down at the Canal.

Ear worms

There's no hope for me now, because I have an ear worm - that's one of those tunes that gets stuck in your mind and plays over and over.

This one is particularly bad: it's the opening theme to Rocket Robin Hood, a cartoon I used to watch when I was little.

When I looked it up on YouTube, I was astonished to discover that it was a CANADIAN cartoon - produced by Trillium Productions, which should have told me all I need to know (the trillium is Ontario's official flower). This is why the only Americans who know of it are those who grew up along the U.S.-Canada border, and were able to receive Canadian TV signals. Apparently it also was shown in the U.K. - one of the advantages of belonging to the Commonwealth, I suppose!) This cartoon was typically shown on Sundays - Saturdays were for the lavish American cartoons. It's odd, but I can't remember any actual episodes of Rocket Robin Hood; I clearly remember the little "intervals", where characters like Prince John and Friar Tuck were introduced, but the episodes themselves have vanished from my memory completely.

When I mentioned this to Dean, we got into a dispute over which cartoon was worse, Rocket Robin Hood or another Canadian cartoon, The Mighty Hercules:

This also has a catchy opening tune, though the lyrics sound a little funny today. It's bad enough to have to listen to "Softness in his eyes,/Iron in his thighs," but I had to convince Dean that an earlier line was "With the strength of ten/Ordinary men" not "the length".

The Ottawa Senators are Doomed

This must be the worst hockey season for Ottawa since the franchise first started in the early 90s. It's surely the worst since we came back from Boston. The season's only half over, and the Sens are already out of the playoffs!

Yesterday's paper had an article by Pat Hickey of the Montreal Gazette, on the many injured players the Montreal Canadiens will have to do without for tonight's game against Ottawa. (I can't find a link to it online, unfortunately.) The headline read "Habs likely down three for game in Ottawa". Dean glanced at the headline and said, "Oh, great! Now the Senators are so bad, they're being given a 3-point handicap going into Friday night's game!" Well, it works in golf, why not hockey?

The sad thing is, even if it were true, it wouldn't have saved them from last night's 6-2 defeat in Philadelphia. They stink.

Vanderleun's Law

Oh, by the way, see those people over there? Yes, the ones who had nothing to do with it. They did it.

Let's call it Vanderleun's Law: the principle that every stinking blossom and rotten fruit that comes forth from the tree of Liberal Socialism is to be blamed on Conservatism.

Thus, 2 weeks ago, we had the Left's itchy trigger fingers letting fly on the Right within minutes after a dope-addled schizophrenic shot up a Congresswoman 's meet 'n greet in Tucson. The Right and Sarah Palin had been allowed to release toxic emissions - ideas - into the atmosphere, and this invisible but deadly cloud had enveloped one Jared Loughner and caused him to go berserk. To their surprise, this "argument" was not allowed to stand unchallenged, and today the Left has seen its victory crumble before it could be grasped, and must console itself with mere sullen refusal to apologize. They should be thanking us: we stopped them before they could follow their insane reasoning to its logical conclusion and declare that Loughner himself is a "victim".

Now another atrocity has occurred: on his way to canonization in the Episcopal Church, an saintly abortionist has been caught running an abattoir

In a nearly 300-page grand jury report filled with ghastly, stomach-turning detail, prosecutors said Pennsylvania regulators ignored complaints of barbaric conditions at Gosnell's clinic, which catered to poor, immigrant and minority women in the city's impoverished West Philadelphia section.

Chris Johnson has collected a good number of examples of Vanderleun's Law, as pro-abortion writers immediately try to blame this abomination on the people who were systematically frozen out of all opportunities to get in the way of the Slaughterhouse Doctor's multi-million dollar empire: the Right. The Pennsylvania Department of Health chose sides: the abortionists were on the side of the angels, and could not be permitted to be inconvenienced in any way. Just complaining about conditions was evidence of "anti-abortion" heresy, and so complaints were to be ignored, and the path made smooth and easy for anyone who provided this valuable public service. This is what you get when make Death your god: butchered and broken bodies piled on a blood-soaked altar.

Now the doctor's been outed, and for once even pro-abortionists can't keep up the smug act. This is actually a filthy horror, and so their first thoughts are to find a convenient conservative scapegoat to smear the blood on. Coming on the heels of the Tucson Debacle, they're facing an alert and prepared Right - they're not going to be taken by surprise by a sucker punch, and I trust the Right will hang this rotting albatross around the necks that own it.

Alien Tomatoes

My aunts have been sending me reports about their strange encounters with tomatoes over the past year. Last week they sent me a clipping from a gardening magazine where someone wrote in describing the same experience and furnishing me pictures. Auntie Kay asked me to put this up on the blog, because it's really weird and it's creeping them out.

It started last summer, when they bought fresh tomatoes from the grocery store. They were perfectly nice tomatoes, but after a while they started to notice something odd. The tomatoes started to develop strange bumps. What's more, the tomatoes themselves did not deteriorate as normal tomatoes do when they're not refrigerated. These looked bright red and shiny, with no sign of decay or wilting. The letter to the editor they sent me reported the same phenomenon; the tomato was put on a counter to ripen, but it seemed almost to have an "anti-aging" characteristic and ripened very slowly. Also

I noticed that the tomato had multiple little "pimple-like" bumps on its surface. Some of the bumps seemed to have a "tail-like" appendage which "travelled" under the skin surface of the tomato.

When my aunts finally cut open the tomato, they found that the seeds inside had actually sprouted and the inside of the tomato was a mass of sprouts! It was really disgusting - rather like the creature in "Alien" germinating inside the guy's stomach then bursting out.

They tried scooping out the mess inside and just eating the shell of the tomato (which still looked very shiny and appetizing) but Auntie said the tomato didn't taste like a tomato at all: it tasted like HAY.

This has happened to a couple of tomatoes they've bought recently, and when they brought the tomatoes back to the grocery store the people there were baffled. These aren't some rare variety, and they must have bought them from regular suppliers, but they're complete mutant tomatoes. I wonder if this might not be a case of genetic engineering, which we've been hearing so much about. The tomatoes do have a characteristic that would make them desirable: they're much less perishable than standard tomatoes. I can see why someone might want to breed for that trait, but this side effect is just bizarre (not to mention the tomatoes LOOK good but taste terrible)!

I've found very little online about this. A year ago there were a few posts on gardening boards from people who experienced the same thing, but it seems to be a rather rare occurrence (not for my Aunts, though; it's happened a few times to them). Has anyone else experienced anything like this?



UPDATE: I've tried to find more information on this sprouting tomato phenomenon, and I did find this plus a few other discussions on gardening boards. Opinion is divided on whether it's a question of genetics or chemical additive. Some say it's normal for seeds to germinate inside tomatoes, others say it should be impossible. But I can't help but notice that all of the incidents being discussed are recent - within the past 4 years, it seems. Surely, if this is normal behavior, people should be able to point to older incidents? I mean, think of the decades and decades of tomato-growing history that we can look back on, just in our own lifetimes; why wouldn't there be anecdotal evidence going back a century on this?

The best tundering muffins in the whole wide world!

Dean's wrestling club is hosting their annual tournament today. It's a big fundraiser for them, and they're expecting kids from all over the province to come, some driving through the night to make it here this morning (and I hope they didn't get caught in any bad snow on the way, because we've had about 5" since yesterday). One of the big moneymakers at this event is the concession stand, and I generally contribute some baking - this year 4 dozen Boiled Raisin Muffins. They are so good, Dean's devious strategy is to charge 25 cents for the first one, then $50 for the next, because nobody can eat just one!

Here is the recipe for the very best muffins in the world:

Boiled Raisin Muffins

TEMP: 375 F
TIME: 20-25 minutes
MAKES 12 large muffins

1.5 cups raisins
1.5 cups water
2/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup shortening
1 egg
1.5 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla

1. Boil raisins in water for 20 minutes.
2. Cream sugar, shortening and egg.
3. Add cooled, drained raisins, plus 1/2 cup raisin water to sugar mixture.
4. Add sifted dry ingredients to first mixture.
5. Add vanilla and stir until blended.
6. Fill muffin cups and bake.

UPDATE: They sold them ALL!

The King's Speech

We did go to see "The King's Speech" after all, at a nice theater out in the suburbs. The theater was about half full, which is a good sign, though Dean did notice that a lot of the audience was older - even older than us! It's the sort of story that I suppose would appeal to older people with a love for and interest in the Royal Family; I was more interested in it as a story of overcoming a handicap.

Colin Firth has been a favourite of mine ever since "Pride and Prejudice". He's STILL the definitive Darcy, and I don't even know why filmmakers keep trying to remake that story - I don't think there will ever be a better version than the 1995 miniseries. (A female journalist once wrote, "Like all women, I know exactly what Elizabeth Bennet looks like; she looks just like me!" ) Anyway, I suppose he's done a fair number of movies in the meantime, but I think this must be the best thing he's done since P&P;, and now everyone's talking about Oscar nominations and the like. I hope he does win - the sheer voice work on this movie alone is remarkable. As the Duke of York, he has a rather high-pitched, strangulated voice that makes you feel the character's exhaustion every time he tries to choke out a normal line of speech. He also does a good job portraying someone who's ALREADY isolated and cut off from ordinary life - it's not just that as a Prince he doesn't carry money on him (the running theme of the shilling he owes his voice teacher is quite amusing). He knows he doesn't know ordinary people or have any idea how they live, but the speech impediment makes it all but impossible for him to begin to break out of his tiny family-sized zone of safety. As Logue says to him at one point "What are friends for?" "I wouldn't know," answers Bertie bleakly.

There's one part that I really liked - the movie managed to take a cliched moment and make it surprising. When during their first meeting Logue 'tricks' the Prince into speaking fluently - he reads Hamlet's soliloquy while wearing earphones playing Beethoven, so he can't hear his own voice - Logue records the speech on a record and gives it to Bertie to take home as a souvenir. Months later, Bertie is listening to a jazz record at home and gets up, irritated, to change the record. I expected it to be that old chestnut: He's forgotten all about the record, and picks it off the pile and puts it on, expecting to hear music, and instead is astounded to hear his own voice speaking fluently! But no - the record plays, the speech fills the room, and we see Bertie sitting on the couch, listening intently. Then his wife comes into the room, and we see the look of astonishment on HER face. She didn't know all this time, but he did. He's listened to that record over and over, and it's familiar to him. It just takes him this long to get up the courage to go back to the teacher to try again.

Geoffrey Rush is excellent as Lionel Logue, the Prince's speech therapist, though I found his resemblance to Michael Hordern rather distracting. Bertie has a terrible moment when he discovers that Logue isn't a doctor after all (not that he ever claimed or pretended to be), but is rather an unsuccessful actor. I remembered later that George V at one point tells Bertie that the Royal Family have fallen to the level of the dregs of society, actors, which would explain why he feels so humiliated and crushed to find that his admired teacher is a member of this vile brood. Actually, it makes perfect sense that an actor would be very capable of teaching speech. Claude Rains started life with an atrocious stutter, as well as an almost indecipherable Cockney accent. When working as a gopher at a theatre, an actor took an interest in him and gave him books and techniques to teach him how to overcome his speech defects, which he did through incessant practice. He was really self-taught. Then he went to the trenches in WWI and was injured and gassed; he lost the sight in one eye, and what was worse, the gas paralysed his vocal cords and he couldn't speak! It must have been an incredible blow, but Rains relearned how to speak again - in fact, the gas damage was responsible for that very characteristic slight roughness in his voice ever after.

I've hardly any complaints about this movie, except that the actor playing Churchill didn't LOOK much like him. But he had the voice, and that's what really matters. Edward VIII certainly was a caddish loser, and they portrayed Mrs. Simpson as a real torn-down piece from Baltimore. Not that she was ever beautiful, but it sure was hard to see why David was so fascinated by her (must have been those 'techniques' she picked up in Shanghai after all) - they portrayed her as a brassy, pushy American cocktail-swiller. Probably pretty accurate.

The Royal Family comes across as quite dysfunctional - bullying males and frigid females, with Bertie trying very hard to create a different kind of atmosphere in his own home. It's always interesting to compare what people thought was important in those days with what prevails today. The typical reaction to Edward VIII Abdication Crisis seems to be "Oh, what a lot of fuss about nothing! Look, today the Prince of Wales can marry a divorcee and see? The sky doesn't fall. Nobody cares any more." I find it all a bit sad. I think of all the sacrifice people went through in the 30s, and don't think they're foolish - I feel embarrassed that their grandchildren just gave up the fight so completely and so quickly. I mean, we're not talking about the days of Henry VIII here, this is just 2 generations ago, and now who takes seriously the idea of sacrificing anything because of duty to God or to the people? Nobody. The present Queen will be the last who does.

Starting 2011

Christmas holidays almost over, and it's been quite nice the past two weeks. James was so insistent for holidays to start and Christmas to come, but now he's a little bored, and is already asking to go back to school. I won't argue with him - it'll be nice to have a quiet house again, and access to the computer from time to time. My holidays tend to start when the kids' end.

Dean gave me a delightful present this year: a LAMINATOR! Now I can not only laminate James's favourite pictures so they don't get lost or torn, but I can also plastic-coat my favourite recipes so they don't get stained and ragged. As usual, I had to cut the picture of the machine out of the paper a week before Christmas and give it to Dean; he never can do the "surprise" thing, and if I don't think of something myself in advance, he'll be asking me, "Uhhh, what would you like for Christmas?" on December 22. Once the kids go back to school I'll get busy laminating some of my favourite recipe cards; I've already tested the machine with my recipe for Texas Brownies and a new one I tried over the holidays: Pumpkin Cheesecake.

A few weeks ago I was in the drugstore waiting for a prescription to be filled, and wandered over to the newsstand where I spotted an entire magazine of cheesecake recipes. I shouldn't have, but they looked so good I bought the magazine, and since then I've been itching to try out some of the recipes. The pumpkin one was a great success, but I tried another one for peanut-butter cheesecake and it was too sweet. There's this rhubarb one I'll try in the spring, but now Dean is asking me to just make the plain old cheesecake I used to to make. I tried yesterday, but discovered I needed a lemon, and went out on a quest for one single lemon. Of course, being New Year's Day, my endeavours were fruitless (har har) so I think I might do it today.

Thomas and James have gone out for a day of respite with one of their teachers, and so Dean, Emma and I are planning to go see a movie - "The King's Speech", which I've read good things about. It must be having a very limited release in Canada, however, because I think it opened here just before Christmas and it's only at 3 theatres in town.

Article by Theodore Dalrymple

This article by Theodore Dalrymple is ostensibly about denial in the face of death (illustrated by a trip to an art exhibition) but halfway through you'll see what it's really about: dogs. Prepare to be crying by the end.

(Hat tip: The Skeptical Doctor)

Too funny not to share

At the Belmont Club, a discussion goes on about technology, and how kids today don't even know how to work a rotary phone, because they've become so unfamiliar. Someone comments:

I have one of those huge old rotary phones.

My granddaughter brought a friend over the other day for the first time.

When the friend saw the phone the first thing she said was – “It must be able to hold a lot of music.”

Thanks

I really appreciate all your nice messages. To be honest, I really didn't think anyone would notice if I left. It's true, I'm burned out, but it's not so much that I'm burned out with blogging. I'm just burned out in general. I'm rather depressed just now, to tell the truth. Partly it's because summer is ending, and maybe that change in the season is just having a bad effect on me. It's really been a lovely summer - so warm and pretty, and the garden has done great. Several time this last month, I've found myself consciously thinking, "I'm going to REMEMBER this summer," almost as if I'm afraid that something bad is about to happen, and I'll be happy someday to have these good memories. But I also had another birthday a few weeks ago, and I guess I'm starting to feel old - I'm 51 - and I'm becoming oppressed with fears about what will happen to the kids as Dean and I get older and less able to stand the constant burden of caring for them. People who don't have autistic kids don't realize how overwhilmingly REACTIVE your life is - it's barely possible to originate and carry out any plan, because all our time is taken up with responding to the incessant avalanche of demands. Anything you start is interrupted, usually with the sort of base needs a 2-year old would have: food, toilet, entertainment. Most people deal with a 2-year old for...well, a year or so; we've been dealing with them for over 15, and after a while it wears you down.

I don't usually talk much about the hard part of my life, but when I find myself frequently on the verge of tears, I think maybe I should ask some of you kind people to take the time to say a prayer for me. I don't ask for help much; hardly ever, actually,, but I'm feeling a bit low just now.

It's not that I disliked writing the blog; it's just that I've gotten into a pattern of thinking, "Oh, I really should write about that!... Well, I'm tired, I'll do it later...Drat it, now it's too late..." and I was simultaneously obsessing about my NOT writing, so I was both guilty about not doing it, and guilty about not doing it well.

But I don't want this all to be a downer; I had some pictures in my camera I'd been meaning for a long time to post, but as usual I just didn't have the energy, so here they are:


This was the corn earlier this summer. We had a big storm a few weeks ago, and I think a sort of microburst came through a gap in the trees on the right, and blew over a number of stalks on that side. But most of the corn was really good.


This year I tried something new: two butternut squash plants. I planted them in front of the corn, but they grew and grew, so finally I had to resort to winding the plants through the rows of corn. In so doing, I unwittingly adopted one of the practices of the early native Indians; they used to grow squash in the space between the corn rows. So far I see 6 squashes on the vines; they keep producing flowers, but I don't think any more will develop - I doubt they'd have time to mature in the time left before the weather turns cold.


Here are our tomatoes, with a tall beanpole at the back - I built it myself, out of bamboo sticks and a weird tough vine that grows over the trees behind our fence. It's like a grapevine, and it's always straggling over onto our side of the fence. This was the first time I ever thought of a use for it - it's rather tough and woody, but has quite attractive curly tendrils that help the beans grab on.

A VERY attractive dragonfly I found sitting on the netting covering the blueberries one morning. The picture doesn't do him justice; he was a very brilliant green velvet.

We've had other garden visitors this summer; I saw a small rabbit one morning, but they've pretty much left our garden alone this year. A few days ago there was a story in the paper about how Monarch Butterflies are no longer around in Ottawa, because so much of our wilderness area has been cut down, taking with it the plants they like best. One of those plants is Joe Pye Weed, which I've grown for years. Lo and behold, two days later, I saw Monarch Butterflies feeding on them, and they stayed around for several days; I saw one or two yesterday, as a matter of fact, but for a couple of days, they were having a regular party.


At one point, about 6 were out there, and when Dean and Emma and I went out to look at them, they left the Joe Pye Weed and began fluttering around over US! I said I thought they were actually trying to drive us away from their food supply! Just try to imagine half a dozen butterflies trying to look menacing! We also had a garter snake this summer, but he was so sneaky I was never ready with a camera to take a picture of him.