.

2008-05-10T10:40:00.000-06:00

May 12 test

2007-05-22T14:41:00.000-06:00

Google docs test.

Stop callin' me an icehole, you fargin' bastages!

2007-05-13T08:58:00.001-06:00

Some amusing slang etymology, courtesy of the online Urban Dictionary:

bastage -- n.: bastard

"Originally used in the 1984 movie Johnny Dangerously. This PG flick introduced bastage, fargin', and icehole as PG terms for similar sounding words."

Mr. Sandman

2007-05-12T16:11:00.001-06:00

Today's iTunes purchase: "Mr. Sandman" (1954), written by Pat Ballard and performed by The Chordettes. The song is a toe-tapping melange of scat, pop, big band, jazz, and barbershop quartette (and a guaranteed two-minute cure for melancholy). Contains the immortal rhyme:

Give him a lonely heart like Pagliacci
And lots of wavy hair like Liberace

Some light reading

2007-04-12T14:48:00.001-06:00

Two lists of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. Some strange ones in the "reader's list." Ron L. Hubbard at # 3, # 9, and # 10? WTF?

Australians curse the coming darkness

2007-03-20T08:15:00.000-06:00

People of the north, the sun will soon be ours. At precisely, 00:07 UTC (6:07 p.m., Regina time), that fickle orb will cross the equator, bringing "spring" (and a related drop in cases of seasonal affective disorder) to our beloved hemisphere.

2007-01-12T06:35:00.000-06:00

Up before 5 a.m. today, the coldest day of the new year (-43 windchill), battling the forces of entropy.

The Rocky of Canlit?

2006-12-21T10:40:00.000-06:00

I'm thinking of starting a new writing regimen to try and get my novel finished. Getting up at 4 a.m. every day and writing for 3.5 hours before leaving for work. The glass of raw eggs will be optional.

Winter solstice

2006-12-21T10:38:00.000-06:00

... today at 6.20 pm local.

You

2006-05-22T17:47:00.000-06:00

Victoria Day, 2006. I should be doing yardwork or taxes (dandelions are going to seed and I'm way past Revenue Canada's deadline), but spent most of the day completing the first draft of my first ever story in the "second person." If first person is ideal for confession, then second person ("you you you") seems best suited to accusation. Which is perfect because the story is about political and celebrity assassins (Oswald, Chapman, Hinckley etc.).

Got a case of the strangles?

2006-03-07T11:17:00.000-06:00

While researching the etymology of "distemper" (don't ask), I came across a related ailment -- "the strangles" (also known as "colt distemper") -- an "infectious febrile disease of horses" marked by inflammation and congestion of mucous membranes and swelling and suppuration of the lymph nodes of the jaw and neck. Next time I'm too flu-ridden to go into work, I'll now be tempted to wheeze into the phone, "can't come in, got a case of the strangles." Not to be confused with "bastard strangles" (I'm not making this up), defined as "atypical strangles in which abscess formation occurs elsewhere than in the lymph glands of the neck." Now that's gotta hurt.

A list of the 100 "most important" Canadian books ever ...

2005-11-19T12:09:00.000-06:00

... has just been published by the Literary Review of Canada. The LRC emphasizes that this is NOT a list of "favourite" books, but rather, a list of works that have had lasting significance in Canada's evolution as a nation. "We wanted books that have changed our country's psychic landscape," explains LRC editor Bronwyn Drainie in a media release.

The books are listed in chronological order, starting with Jacques Cartier's optimistic Account of the Second Voyage of the Navigation of 1535 and 1536 (1545) and ending with Jane Jacobs' pessimistic Dark Age Ahead (2004).

Notable fiction titles on the list include Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1947) and Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989), Timothy Findley's The Wars (1977), William Gibson's sci-fi classic Neuromancer (1984), Margaret Atwood's distopian The Handmaid's Tale (1985), and Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries (1993). The most recent fiction title on the list is Wayne Johnston's The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998).

Notable fiction omissions include Yann Martel's The Life of Pi and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (both were Booker winners). The most notable non-fiction omission is possibly Margaret Trudeau's autobiographical Beyond Reason. I mean, really, if smoking hash with the Rolling Stones and writing about it doesn't get you on a list, what will? Maggie may fare better in the LRC's upcoming "Cheesiest 100 books in Canadian history."

Another celebrity children's book? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2005-11-13T12:42:00.000-06:00

Paul McCartney has become the latest washed-up celebrity to pen a children’s book, joining the likes of Madonna, Sarah Ferguson (the Duchess of York), Jamie Lee Curtis, and former supermodel Paulina Porizkova— all of whom used name recognition rather than literary talent to get published.

McCartney co-wrote High in the Clouds (surely not an ode to cannibis?) with author Philip Ardagh "who was brought in after a first draft to ‘finesse’ the book," reports the Associated Press. Translation: the first draft sucked and McCartney needed a hired gun to make him look good.

And how’s this for a downer of a premise: the alleged kiddie book is reportedly about a squirrel named Wirral whose mother is splatted by a tree knocked down by evil developers.

McCartney advises parents of "very little kids" to skip over the opening death scene, adding: "My little one (two-year-old daughter Beatrice) is too little. She likes the pictures though." And what's not to like about pictures of squirrel guts, we ask?

No word on whether the book includes a recipe for squirrel soup.

Who’s the shit disturber that put Cheezies in my poutine?

2005-11-11T10:24:00.000-06:00

The latest edition of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary has more than 2,000 uniquely Canadian words and phrases, editor Katherine Barber tells CanWest News in an article published today.

The Canadianisms include: all dressed, bachelor apartment, butter tart, Cheezies, chesterfield, deke, dick all, double-double, eavestrough, girl guides, gravol, housecoat, parkade, pogey, poutine, seat sale, serviette, shit disturber, toboggan, toonie, tuque, and washroom.

According to Barber, shit disturbers are called “shit stirrers” in Britain and the United States. Personally, I prefer the broader Canadian term (there are more ways to disturb the shit than just stirring it, after all).

Link: Canadian Glossary, eh?

Word of the day: heresy

2005-11-10T10:28:00.000-06:00

Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.
—Graham Greene, novelist/journalist, 1904-1991

Quote

2005-11-08T09:21:00.000-06:00

What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.

—Logan Pearsall Smith, essayist (1865-1946)

Fiction freebie

2005-11-05T10:05:00.000-06:00

The O. Henry prizewinner of 2000 is readable online (not an excerpt, the whole piece!). The story is called "Weight" and was written by John Edgar Wideman. I rarely read a story twice, but I've read this one several times now. For more award-winning fiction freebies, visit the "freebies" section of my website.

Word of the day: puritanism

2005-11-03T15:42:00.000-06:00

The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.
—H.L.Mencken, writer/editor/critic, 1880-1956

Insight = eloquence

2005-10-30T11:36:00.000-06:00

Here's one of the best writing quotes I've yet stumbled across:

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.
—Cato the Elder, statesman/soldier/writer (234-149 BCE)

Quote

2005-10-18T09:41:00.000-06:00

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.
—Thomas Pynchon, author of Gravity's Rainbow

Quote

2005-09-20T13:58:00.000-06:00

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
—Mark Twain

Deep Throat fingers self

2005-05-31T12:37:00.000-06:00

Former FBI deputy director W. Mark Felt (now 91 years old and living in Santa Rosa, California) has apparently told Vanity Fair magazine that he was Deep Throat, the secret source who guided Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Washington Post investigation of Watergate that culminated in Richard Nixon's resignation as American president. Woodward and Bernstein gotta be choked that Felt decided to self-identify to another reporter, rather than letting them pull off the mask and relive their Watergate glories. Felt's confession would have been no revelation to the man who lost the most, Nixon, who had the G-man pegged as the snitch while he was still president. Which brings us to our quote of the day, courtesy of Tricky Dick:

"The informer is not wanted in our society. That's the one thing people do sort of line up against.... They say, 'Well, that son-of-a-bitch informed. I don't want him around.' We wouldn't want him around, would we?"
—President Richard Nixon, in a recorded White House conversation with Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman

Finally revealed: what "BD" stands for

2005-05-24T17:53:00.000-06:00

Someone from Janesville Wisconsin visited my website yesterday via Google, using the search terms "free BD stories." Perplexed, I replicated the search. Turns out, "BD" is an abbreviation for "bondage." Now, I've never written a bondage story (much less a free one), although someone does get roped into a chair in my play The Scarborough Four ;-).

CanLit's missing foundation?

2005-05-21T09:02:00.000-06:00

"A great literature needs, and in some sense depends upon, the co-presence of deep and passionate critical thought."
—Michael Keefer, paraphrasing Matthew Arnold (in a review of Barry Callaghan's Raise You Five), Globe & Mail, May 20, 2005

Dumb and dumber?

2005-05-20T15:51:00.000-06:00

They don't make politicians like John Diefenbaker anymore. Last of the great Canadian orators, his one-liners were usually better than Carson's. One of my first "political" memories is watching The Chief scold Pierre Trudeau for using the F-word ('fuddle duddle') in the House of Commons. Here's another of my favourite Diefenbaker anecdotes, as revisited in a recent newspaper column on the history of "Tory turncoats":

Back in 1976, the ultra-rightwing Jack Horner couldn't persuade Tory delegates that he should succeed Robert Stanfield as leader (Horner came fourth in a field of 11 candidates). What did he do? Why, he switched to the Liberals and became Pierre Trudeau's minister of industry. When Horner crossed the floor, that marvellous, vitriolic renegade John Diefenbaker quipped that the IQ in both parties had suddenly risen.
—Peter Worthington, Toronto Sun, May 20, 2005