View of the marching fishes

Once More into the Valley of Death

2012-01-04T05:00:00.000-08:00

Do you guys remember when I went to Death Valley? Amynahdid. Having been intrigued by my ravings about its beauty (a sample of whichare here) she suggested that we take a couple of days over our break to bring ourselvesand our two children to a scrap of desert in which the animals are poisonous sothat they are able to kill you before you’re too dehydrated to be edible.

Sana counting flowers on our lunch break in Shoshone: "...seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.... eight!"

Given the nighttime temperatures are below zero in the park,we had no intention of camping out, and so I had to make a reservation in ahotel across the state border, in Pahrump, Nevada.

The number I called to do so connected me to achaotic-sounding call center in what I believe was the Phillipines. The youngwoman on the other end of the phone was, as far as I could tell, as new to herjob as she was to speaking English. What she lacked in assurance andefficiency, she made up for in diligence: booking my room with her took 45minutes where normally it would have taken five, largely because she repeatedevery piece of information at her disposal several times, at arbitrary pointsin our conversation.

She asked me to spell my name: “M-A-R-K-R-E-Y-N-O-L-D-S” Isaid.

“So that is ‘M’ as in ‘Mike,’ ‘A’ as in ‘Alpha’ ‘R’ as in….”she would repeat back to me, inform me they had a continental breakfast, andthen ask me my email.

“M-A-R-K-R-E-Y-N-O-L-D-S, the number 3 at etc…” I said.

“So that is ‘M’ as in Mike, 'A' as in 'Alpha'….” she doggedly started again, before repeatingfor the third time that there were two beds and a crib. Then she asked me thename on my credit card.

“M-A-R-K-R-E-Y…..”

“So that is ‘M’ as in ‘Mike’…” she commenced the grim march through the 12 letters of my name, finishing once more with a triumphal flourish of the continental breakfast reminder.

It was a painfully slow process, but I was nonethelessconfident that my reservation had been well and truly taken, and that if nothing else in this fallen world could be counted upon, I could be certain of breakfast. Imagine my surprise, after a long day’s drive and wander aroundthe more southern wonders of Death Valley, to find on my arrival at thereservations desk of my hotel that they did not, in fact, have any record of mefor that night.

Given that my careful Filipina friend had checked andreconfirmed every last detail, this was surprising to say the least. Until themanager was called in, who reminded me of the one piece of information I hadneither clarified nor had confirmed: my reservation, it turns out, had beenmade for December 30, 2012.

From this, I learned two things: it pays to be careful, andthat before I book another hotel I must change my name to Mike.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-26T00:39:00.000-08:00

I got a fancy new camera for Christmas. Incidentally, the three Muslims with whom I live went to prayers today. I tried getting a picture of Sana for the occasion, as she was dressed in a elaborate salwar kameez. It took an expensive camera, a carefully decorated tree and some exotically beautiful clothing to prove that absolutely nothing can make my nose-picking daughter look classy.

Joshua Tree and the Horrors of the Hamster Tube

2011-11-27T17:55:00.001-08:00

As part of our ongoing efforts toresist the easy path of using our weekends to recover from the chaos of therest of our week, yesterday we got up at 5:30 AM in order to go to Joshua TreeNational Park, with our friend Anna.

Joshua Tree is located on the cuspof the Mojave and Colorado deserts, and contains features from both (crazyrocks, cacti, wild-eyed desert hermits that’ll use your bones for patiofurniture). It’s only three hoursdrive from Los Angeles, so I’m somewhat embarrassed we’d never managed to makeit out there prior to this weekend, but it was worth the wait.

Amynah strapped Inara to herfront in a baby carrier, and I strapped Sana to my back in another, and wehiked through the relative crowds of “Hidden” Valley and to the if-you-squint-it-looks-kind-of-like-aSkull Rock.

As night fell, I realized I had failed to take a picture of any of Joshua's Trees.

This, and my trip to Death Valleyearlier this year made me realize how conditioned we are by the nature we grewup in – the first time Sana was in a Canadian/Eastern North American forest ona trip back to Canada, she was clearly freaked out by the density of trees closing in on her with oppressive verdancy.On the other hand, she was delighted to stomp her way through the desert sandsof Joshua Tree, and examine the thorns and brambles of the various types ofcacti. For my part, I couldn’t help but be unnerved by the wide-open spaces andthe knowledge that there were poisonous snakes of uncertain temperament lurkingabout the rocks. Not for the first time, I realize that Sana is going to grow up in a different world than did I.

This being the first trip of thissort that I’d attempted with the babies, I was also left to reflect on how muchless I learn from trips like these than I used to: I’m a compulsive reader of plaques, but Ihad to pass by all of the helpful explanations the National Parks people hadposted at strategic points identifying the local fauna and flora, as well ashistorical tidbits (I managed to read on one that Hidden Valley had somethingto do with cattle rustlers, but got no further than that before having to stopSana from leaping off a boulder five times her height).

Skull Rock (official name)

Bum Rock (not official name)

Post Script: Scarier than my paranoia of rattlesnakes and Sana's non-comprehension of gravity was our dinner: we went to a McDonald's with a play room for children, the centerpiece of which was a three-dimensional pipe maze, complete with netting, ladders and slides. Sana saw the bigger kids playing on it and wanted to go. Because I am both a sucker and a terrible parent, I let her. Of course, I went in with her. Never have I made a bigger mistake: the inside was cramped and redolent of children's hamburger breath and Dr Pepper-scented urine. Kids were appearing and disappearing around the corners like the creature from Alien that was terrorizing Sigourney Weaver in the air ducts. They were shouting at each other constantly, but the sound bounced around such that it seemed we were surrounded by a million of them. Sana freaked out and clung to me the whole way while I tried to navigate the maze on two aching knees and one arm to find the twisty slide of salvation. I had nightmares about it all last night).

You Win or You Cry.

2011-11-11T21:04:00.001-08:00

Normally on Remembrance Day, I would try to dig up some bit of Canadian military history to use for the purposes of making some sanctimonious point about the horrors of war and/or the callowness of the politicians who pursue it.* Maybe later. At the moment, I'm on day one of three on my own with Sana, while Amynah is out of town with Inara. Neither Sana nor I are feeling well at the moment, so I will be sacking out early. However, I couldn't resist sharing further photoshop foolishness.

* I'm thinking either the behind-the-scenes diplomatic machinations that set the only Nazi war criminal in Canadian custody free, or the 19th century crusade against an Islamic insurgent in the Sudan that saw Canadian civilian volunteers dying for less than nothing in Egypt. Votes?

This is what I Ment

2011-11-08T21:32:00.000-08:00

I appear to have developed a habit of inventing holidays. Those who know me on Facebook are probably already aware of "Mark Reynolds Awareness Month," in which I make up facts about myself and post one every day for the month of September (a sample: Mark Reynolds has the power to marry people with his mind.")

My latest is "Ment." I have lunch with various colleagues and floor-neighbours of Amynah's - unsurprisingly, there are a lot of Type-A personalities. A few days ago, I was eating with a crew of women that had two PhDs completed, two PhDs in progress and three marathons completed between them (although, that's really two marathons and two half-marathons).

Everyone needs a running coach

For some reason the subject of Lent came up - one of the girls had, despite not being Christian, given up sugar for the last Lent. This led to a discussion of other diets, fasts and personal sacrifices we had made.

Being the type who takes great pleasure in undermining the decisions of others when they make me feel bad about MY decisions or lack-thereof, I pointed out that giving up something you like is much easier than forcing yourself to do something you hate. At that point, I had one of those flashes of personal insight I have learned to dread.

"Of course, it's not like I've ever really given up anything I like. I don't even know what I would give up," I said.

"Peanut butter!" said Amynah, sending a chill to my soul.

Now, I am not hooked on peanut butter, by any stretch.* But it is my go-to thing to make my breakfast carbohydrates palatable, and I will often rely on it when I don't feel like cooking. To put that in context, I feel like cooking maybe twice a year.

All right, challenge accepted. Only, I am contrary, and so I cannot have Ment (Mark-Lent) be the same length as Lent. Having it be shorter wasn't unacceptable either. And so, I will be abstaining from all peanut products until the New Year.

It gets worse: having somehow talked myself into a peanut diet that I did not want, I then pointed out I still needed the "thing I hated" to make it a fast/self-compelled personal growth that would be acceptable to the standards that I was quite happy to hypocritically apply to other people.

There were ridiculous and strict rules attached to this. The "thing I hate" has to be something from which I do not derive a benefit that I care about, and is far outside my comfort zone (i.e. reading classic novels instead of spy novels does not count, writing more does not count). Anything that would benefit me professionally or financially was also out. Whatever this was, it had to be as pointless as it was unpleasant.

Yeah. So now I'm getting up at 6 AM, three times a week, and running. Dear Lord, I hate running. If God/evolution had intended us to run, God/Evolution would not have given us the ability to throw spears at the things we were running from.

The problem with this is that the human mind rationalizes: as such, I am already turning what was supposed to be character-building suffering for its own sake (like self-flagellation or a hair-shirt) into a health crusade, and my peanut-butter fast into a semi-diet in which I've cut out most snacking and desserts.

I worry, if this trend continues, that I'll be one of those spandex clad health nuts measuring out their days according to their mileage and caloric inputs, or that I'll have to find something even more pointless and painful to make up the second part of Ment. Where does one buy a hair-shirt anyway?

* Anyone who knows about the several hundred dollars that were spent shipping peanut butter to Strasbourg is encouraged to not talk about that right now.

Older and smarter, but not quite as mature, as a two year old

2011-11-06T22:27:00.000-08:00

Guess who finally sprung for Photoshop? Guess who isn't very good at it?

I don't work on Fridays, and last week Amynah was invited to give a lecture out of town. Thus, I was left with Sana and Inara entirely on my own. Of course, Friday happened to be one of the three days a year it rained in Los Angeles, so we were trapped inside.

I was fully expecting to be overwhelmed, but I went remarkably smoothly.* Sana was respectful of Inara's allotted crying times, and vice versa, so I never had to cope with a simultaneous melt-down, which is of course the closest thing we on Earth have to a self-perpetuating energy source, albeit one too hazardous to human health and hearing to harness for good.

We played games. We ate lunch. I read stories to Sana. Sana "read" stories to Inara. Inara and I caught up on some bonding time while Sana had her nap. It was all very peaceful. The only moment of drama came when I was putting Inara in her swing, and Sana somehow managed to fall headfirst into a toy chest and get stuck. At the sound of her shrieking, I turned to see a black box with legs flailing wildly in the air.

That story has an unhappy ending - my reflexes kicked in before my brain did, and I pulled her out within two seconds instead of grabbing my camera and taking a picture of the hilarious sight with which to embarrass her once she reaches her adolescence, as a responsible parent would have. Fingers crossed for next time!

(In case anyone is curious, the background in the photo above is the view turned 180 degrees from the chapel pictured in this post while Sana took flight in early July, at Inara's "Welcome to Earth" Barbecue).

Don't touch that dial!

2011-11-03T23:07:00.000-07:00

I'm probably not the first to observe this, but something I've noticed about parenting is that when it comes to your child's development, you are in a perpetual state of being nostalgic for the easier past ("the past" being anything from 1 week to 1 month ago - one's memory doesn't stretch back further than that) while simultaneously looking forward to an easier future. You can't wait for your baby to learn how to crawl, and once she does, you immediately yearn for the days when you didn't have to inspect the carpet at a micro-level to make sure there's nothing nays and swallowable down there. You eagerly await their first steps, and then freak out because all of the furniture has to be wrapped in cotton lest they bump their heads. And finally, you yearn for them to talk, because then you get a peak into the soul that has been co-habitating with you for the last year or so.

Sana has been learning to talk these last few months, and for the most part, it's great. She's funny, not too demanding, and as reasonable as a two year old can be - she seems to accept our explanations of why she can't have OBJECT X right now, but she can have it later. Which is great, especially as often, when later comes, she's forgotten she wanted it.The drawback is that while we have been enjoying making ourselves understood, we can no longer pretend that we don't understand what she wants.

For a long time, the only way Sana was able to express that she wanted to listen to music was to yell "Yay! Yay!!! YAY!!!!!" at increasing volume until we gave her something to Yay about (the cheer became synonymous with music from the weekly live bands at our local farmer's market, where Sana learned that one applauds at the end of a song. She makes no distinction between pre-recorded and live music when according this courtesy).When in the car, "Yay!" means Raffi (a Canadian children's singer). I am deeply, violently, sick of Raffi. So, after a certain point I started interpreting "Yay!" as a request for music in general, not her music in particular. In this way, I was able to avoid having to listen to "The Numbers Rumba" or any songs in which duck sounds were a key element for weeks at a time, bringing them out only when Sana was in a particularly foul mood.

Unfortunately, Sana somehow learned Raffi's name. God knows, I've never said it, but somehow she must have got on the Internet while I was sleeping and figured it out. So, the other day, she started yelling "Yay!" and I put on some commercial rock station, and she said: "No Dada! No radio! Raffi! No radio! Bad girl Dada!" That was a message as clear as day, sadly, however confusing it was for my gender identity. Feigning ignorance of her wishes cannot save me now.

While I'm desperately trying to turn her into a hipster (Arcade Fire - that's happy music, right? Adele?) I fear that my own car is going to become a roving sanctuary for Justin Bieber, just as I remember my Dad grimacing through my older sister's affection for Michael Jackson and Boy George. The only way to save her is to encourage her to become as near as possible to the pop-culture illiterate I was.

I'm not much of a car guy, but perhaps someone can tell me - is there any currently manufactured model in which there is no radio or CD player at all?

The Mark-tricks: Resolutions

2011-11-02T21:15:00.000-07:00

When I first started this blog, it had a clear purpose: to keep the friends and family I'd left behind in Canada up-to-date on my new life in France. And, incidentally, to make people jealous about all the adventures I was having in France.

In the last few months of my time in Strasbourg, it turned into something else - an attempt, to capture everything I loved about my life there: the history, the architecture, the lifestyle and, of course, our new friends, French or otherwise. If I could write it all down, I thought, at some point in the future I could look at those posts and capture an incredible time in my life.

The flurry of writing I did on this blog reached a fever pitch in the spring and summer of 2006, and then... pretty much stopped. Without Strasbourg and my imminent departure therefrom* to inspire me, all I had to write about was pollution, traffic, and urban sprawl.

What about Sana? I hear you ask: well, of course I had Sana. I also had another site that was paying me to write about her. Not wanting to scoop or repeat myself, I didn't write about my family here. And besides, the world does not need another "Daddy Blogger" (I cringe, even as I type the words) inviting people to fawn over his sensitivity and/or adorable children? Not in my view. The world also It also doesn't need another politics blogger, or entertainment blogger. It does need another Canadian history blogger, but I'm not exactly well placed to write about that from here, am I?

My professional blogging obligations ended with that site. And so I ask myself, why do I care what the world needs? I have been allowing cobwebs to gather on my writing. Why not become a Daddy blogger? There's no better way to record my daughter's lives. Why not write about politics? Everyone likes a good debate, right?

Writing more here might help me keep up on some other goals as well. In the last few weeks I have undertaken to: start exercising three times a week during the only hour available to me (i.e. 6-7 AM). I have undertaken to abstain from the greatest source of joy and spiritual sustenance in my life - yes, I'm quitting peanut butter, in all its forms, until January. I'm going to put in more effort into my freelance writing. AND, I've been harassed into writing a novel. Which is, uh, being thought about very hard.

I might write about those things. I might write about other things. But I need to keep writing about something, lest what skills I have atrophy entirely.

Please bear with me while I get my mojo back.

NEXT UP: Anything! Anything at all! Idunno... Hallowe'en, maybe?

* I was totally expecting spellcheck to tell me I'd made that word up. Apparently I did not.

Hallowe'en post: Yarmouth's first murder

2011-10-31T22:49:00.000-07:00

I have erratically tried to post something Hallowe'en themed for each year of this blog (poo-pirates and Canadian cannibals being some of my previous efforts). This year, it didn't occur to me until the waning hours of the in the last continental time zone, so chances are no one will see it until All Saints Day. That said, a good murder tale always warms the heart, right?

In any case, the following is one of my earliest professional writing efforts, for the local paper in my former hometown. There is much in there I would not have written had I done it today, but the story itself was pretty interesting.

Yarmouth murder transfixed province
Mark Reynolds
"Murder, most foul! Murder in its cruellest and most hideous form," screamed the lead sentence of the February 28 1921 dispatch in the Halifax Morning Herald. It was to be the opening line of what would be one of Nova Scotia's most sensational murder trials, a case that would grip the attention of the province for the next six months.
"Yarmouth Captain Murdered as he enters home" was the headline. For a long time - though rumours, speculation and malicious gossip were to spread rapidly throughout the town - that one fact is practically all that was really known.
Captain George Henry Perry, 66, was a retired sea captain who had settled in Yarmouth to make a quieter living as a farming equipment agent. He was apparently well known and respected throughout Yarmouth, and lived with his wife Clara, and Eleanor, one of his four daughters.
The facts of this murder were clear enough. After eating a quiet dinner with his wife, daughter, and her friend Mansfield Ross on Saturday February 26, Captain Perry went out, without saying where he was going. Ross and Eleanor departed shortly thereafter to attend a movie, while Mrs Perry went to her room.
Ross and Eleanor returned at around 11 pm, only to discover Captain Perry was still not home. As it was his habit to smoke his pipe out in his barn, Mrs Perry asked Ross to go out back and check for him there. He discovered Captain Perry just outside the back porch, bleeding from three blows to the head, breathing his last. Ross immediately called a doctor, and summoned two neighbours for help. It was too late however. The doctor arrived at the Argyle street home an hour later, only to see the Captain die, too badly wounded to name his assailant.
It was very clear that this was a murder - the question was who? Robbery was initially suggested, but Captain Perry was not known to carry large amounts of money on him, nor did he have many valuables on his person.
As there was no sign of forced entry, it was determined that the murderer had lain in wait for the Captain in the back porch, which was usually locked.
The Yarmouth police force was not equipped to handle a case like this, and so Detective Horace Kennedy - who was something of a star sleuth with the Halifax police - was immediately sent to Yarmouth to lend his expertise. The Halifax Herald sent F.B. Edwards, one of their senior reporters, whose knowledgeable dispatches were as detailed and well informed as they were colourfully composed.
Upon his arrival four days after the murder, Edwards wrote in the Herald that Yarmouth was awash in rumour, and that, while he cautions that such rumour had no weight as evidence, "it is, nevertheless, interesting as displaying a vivid white light the intimate acquaintance with one's neighbors' affairs."
One's neighbours, in this case, were the Perrys. The inquest into the Captain's death revealed quite a lot of interesting detail that was to come out in trial. Most sensational was the revelation that Captain Perry had claimed that someone was trying to kill him months before his death. He told one friend that someone had left a poisoned cake out for him and that on another occasion, he had discovered that the steps leading to his basement had been loosened in such a way that would cause the unwary to fall to their death.
Much of the gossip centered on the conduct of Eleanor, Clara, and Mansfield Ross upon discovering the Captain. Clara apparently, refused to go out to see her husband, and remained upstairs in her room. Shockingly, Eleanor remained inside doing the dishes while the neighbours tried to help her father.
Most damning of all, Ross told the neighbours that the doctor, when called, had ordered them to leave Captain Perry in the icy yard until he arrived. The doctor later said that he gave no such order.
Another key piece of evidence was the supposed murder weapon - an iron bar which Captain Perry kept in the back porch for the purpose of fixing his shoes. An initial search of the house by Yarmouth police Chief Babin upon his arrival yielded no weapon - yet the next morning it was in a washtub near the back door. It had been apparently put through a fire, as if to cleanse it of all traced of blood or hair.
It came out that the Perry's had been separated some years before, and Mrs Perry returned to the Captain because he had not given her enough of an allowance to survive upon. The Captain's will left everything to his widow, a fact she admitted she knew.
Pressure in Yarmouth was rapidly building on the police to make an arrest quickly. Everyone knew who the guilty party was - or so they thought. When the time came for Captain Perry's funeral, the church was surrounded by onlookers, waiting for the arrival of the widow and her daughter. The two women had to be escorted into the church through a back entrance.
Weeks went by, and there were no developments. Mrs Perry's clothes were sent to Halifax for examination, which yielded no results. Captain Perry's body was exhumed, and examined by a Halifax coroner, but he came to no new conclusions.
Chief Babin tendered his resignation about a month after the murder, and a new man was brought in from Bridgewater. The implication was that new eyes may be able to solve this heinous crime.
Finally, more than six weeks after the murder, on the very day that Babin's resignation was to take effect, he and detective Kennedy arrested Mrs Clara Perry for the murder of her husband. Arrested with her was Mansfield Ross, her daughter's new fiancee, who was charged with being an accessory after the fact. Mrs Perry's trial was to start June 29, 1921.
Because the Yarmouth courthouse had recently been damaged by fire, and because of the intense public interest in the case, a court was set up in a curling rink. The Herald estimated over a thousand people were in attendance.
None of the facts presented at the case were new - only the testimony of William Messente of Montreal, a representative of the company of which Captain Perry was an agent in Yarmouth. He testified that Mrs. Perry had asked him what policy would be due her were "the Captain to pass away suddenly." For its part, the defense made much of a mysterious man who had been seen outside the Perry home at around 8 o'clock the night of the murder
Despite public opinion, Judge Mellish delivered a verdict of not guilty, which elicited "a long drawn out "Ah" over the huge enclosure of the curling rink," as the Herald described it. The judge said that the evidence, though reflecting poorly on Mrs Perry and Ross, was in the final analysis, only circumstantial.
Four days after the trial, a brief item in the Herald announced that Mansfield Ross and Eleanor Perry were married in a small ceremony attended only by family.
Mrs Perry meanwhile, in an oath that would be echoed some seventy five years later by a certain football player, vowed that "She would make it her life endeavor to discover the true slayer of her husband."

It's been too long

2011-10-31T22:45:00.000-07:00

Ten signs I've been away from my blog for too long

10) I type in "str" into my browser, and the autocomplete supplies "strollers" rather than "Strasmark."

9) My chops are so rusty, I can't think of anything better than a tacky top ten list to write.

8) Worse, I can't fill it out with another 7.

I have much on my plate these days. But the cobwebs gather, and clever Facebook status updates aren't shaking them off. Watch this space. But not too closely.

Surprise!

2011-07-21T22:36:00.000-07:00

I've been so bad at a keeping up on this blog that I managed to produce an entirely new human being without mentioning it here. Though, I guess Amynah's condition was apparently in my last post.

In any case, here is Inara Fatima, born July 20, weighing in at 5 lbs 13 oz, whatever those are. One day I'll do the calculation to determine what she weighs in Canada.

All are well.

Horsehoes and Ham grenades.

2011-07-04T22:08:00.001-07:00

_{That is a pig in front of that man. It was delicious, and I apologize for nothing. (Photos by Michelle Cabassut)}

This weekend was our second July 4th weekend in the U.S., but the first for which we were actually invited to anything. Amynah’s co-worker and friend Monique was kind enough to invite us to her extended family’s annual horseshoe tournament and cookout. Monique and her relatives being exceedingly generous people, the invitation was flexible enough to include us, and three friends from France (via San Francisco and Duarte, CA, respectively).

The tournament was in what the French might call “La Californie profonde”, and is known locally as “Inland Empire.” This is not the California of San Francisco or Los Angeles. This is farm country. The tournament was a local tradition, for which a good portion of the town turned out, to bolster the friends and family that returned from all over the country for the occasion.

We weren’t quite sure what to expect out in the white spaces of the map in which Murietta is found, but when we arrived in mid-afternoon, the heat was scorching, the beer was flowing, and the horseshoes were darkening the sky.

I immediately noticed certain things about the locals. While it was not, evidently a law that the womenfolk be blond, if they did choose to be blond, it seemed to be a requirement that the shade of blond they be should blind onlookers if seen in direct sunlight. As for the men, the total acreage of torso covered by shirts was roughly equal to that covered by tattoos. (When I later pointed this out to Amynah she said “Yeah, there was a lot of eye-candy,” as if that is what I had meant).

I had not played horseshoes since I was about seven (a game in which I seem to recall I was allowed to stand 10 feet from the stake instead of the regulation 40), while Michelle, Manu and Qi had never encountered the game at all in their respective home countries of France and China.

_{Qi in competitive form, managing to be undistracted by the man-meat in the background}

Monique kindly let us internationals represent her team, and gave us a quick tutorial. We just as quickly disqualified ourselves with two losses in a row. I managed to score 3 points to my teammate Anna’s 8. I used the same girly-wrists excuse I attempted when shooting guns in Vegas – she used the excuse of being distracted by the shirtless tattooed guy playing next to her. My friend Qi meanwhile, scored 4 points even though she had never heard of the game before, while her teammate Manu – who also had never played before - managed 10.

_{Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when she comes for you?}

While this was going on, Sana was having a grand old time. She inspected the friendly horses and pronounced them dirty, and then freaked out when one breathed on her. She then commandeered a toy push police car which she used as a prop with which to act out her own action movie: leaping into it, riding maniacally for ten feet, dramatically kicking the door open and leaping out as if in pursuit of a bank robber. This was causing great amusement in Monique’s friends and various other people who I’d never seen before that seemed to be taking care of my daughter while Amynah held court in the shade and I watched the games.

We left soon after eating the food, the centerpiece of which was a pig that had been slow-roasted underground and delivered to the picnic area via a backhoe. All in all, it was a highly enjoyable time and we were treated like very welcome, if completely athletically inept guests. I can't help but wonder if we were welcome in part because we were inept: horseshoes is a very serious business out there, and I don't know how we would have been received if we'd been any threat to the locals' dominance. As it is, I was happy to have left with the souvenir t-shirt, though I hope one day to win the first prize belt buckle.

That is, if I’m invited back next year. If it helps my case, I know just the tattoo I want to get in place of my shirt.

It's like, the ultimate, man

2011-05-15T13:38:00.000-07:00

I am to athletics what antelopes are to coal mines.

And yet, through some means of mind-control against which I am apparently powerless to resist, Amynah’s lab colleagues have convinced me to join them on a weekly basis as part of a pick-up Ultimate Frisbee league.

It was actually another Canadian who is the driving force behind the games, but that did not stop me from deriding the whole exercise as be-dreadlocked SoCal hippie nonsense. Which, initially, it was.

I’d never played before, so my first few times out I played largely how I approached soccer when I was 8 years old: that is, I took the term “position” very literally. Generally I’d amble over to a promising spot on the field and plant myself there, waiting for someone to throw me the disk, waving at my more ambulatory teammates as they zoomed by hither and thither. Occasionally, one would notice me and loft the disk in my direction, and – if I caught it – I’d throw it to someone else. Sometimes, it even landed somewhere near my target.

It was all very low energy and low passion: the first few games, I didn’t even notice if my team won or lost.

But, eventually, I started getting more confident. I moved a little more, threw a little more, scored a little more…. cared a little more. I even earned myself a nick-name of which I am moderately proud (Marktopus – I’m apparently really irritating on defense. It's much better than "Ladypants," which is the nickname of the guy who gave it to me).

I realized that I had gone from humouring the “hippies” to being “an Ultimate player” when I actually bought a new pair of sneakers in which to play, as my old ones were destroying my knees. I started coming home and boring Amynah with tales of my heroic exploits (a flying behind the head catch which I made while colliding with another player in mid-air, despite which I stuck the landing while he crashed around my heels. It was awesome). Our games are now competitive enough that we scared off one of our newer players, who thought we were too rough (if you don't want your glasses knocked off kid, don't put your face between Monique's elbow and the ground).

All of this is going to come to an end – or at least, a long hiatus – once the new baby comes along (have I mentioned that on this blog yet?) but in the interim, I’m getting good exercise, discovering a competitive streak I never knew I had, and apparently becoming just a little bit Californian.

I think I’d look ok in tie-dye, don’t you?

Death Valley IV: Surprise!

2011-05-04T22:57:00.000-07:00

When planning our trip, Jon and I had intended that our crowning achievement of our sojourn in Death Valley would be at two nights backcountry camping, preferably two. Our delay to pump hot lead into (or rather, in the general vicinity of) paper targets at a gun range in Vegas rather threw off our schedule, so we were left with only one night.

We followed Jay Stone, Death Valley Park Ranger’s advice and decided to do our greenhorn best to make it in and out of Surprise Canyon, the opening to which was actually outside the park on Bureau of Lands Management territory. We would drive up an old mining access road, park the car, and hike six miles into the Panamint Mountains, and hopefully make camp in the ruins of Panamint City, a gold mining ghost town.

Sounds simple, right? Surprise! It was not.

First, getting to the trailhead required driving up 3 miles of what was marked as a road on the map, but was a seemingly unending series of three-foot craters guarded by menacing rings of razor-sharp stones. I’m fairly certain some of those craters were miniature ecosystems hosting Rock Monsters, as every once in a while one would scrape their prettified claws along the chassis of my poor Civic, or terrify us all by suddenly punching the muffler in their rage at having been disturbed.

After whiteknuckling our way though what seemed like an eternity of shrieking, banging metal, we found ourselves at the trailhead, marked by an abandoned and fire-destroyed mill. Since we were only out for one night, we agreed to lighten our pack of absolutely everything that we could, leaving it in the car. Sadly, this included my camera, which had died the day before on the sand dunes.

There were a few things that we had read about Surprise Canyon that did not, apparently, register with us. It was located in the Panamint Mountains, for instance. It apparently boasted several springs. It lead to the Surprise Pass.

All of that sounds pretty innocuous, unless the logic part of your brain is working. If a canyon is in a mountain range, and leads to a pass, that means there will be hills – large ones, much like mountains - and they will trend in the up direction, requiring you to climb.

The presence of springs meant water, of course, but for some reason Jon and I both had the frankly bizarre idea, probably imprinted on our youthful brains by Road Runner cartoons, that these springs would behave something like city fountains: the water would be squirting merrily into the air, landing in a pool or something, in which it would stay. That is not how springs work: while you are working your way up the mountain, the water will be making its way down, burbling and chortling at you, the idiot in wet boots and carrying 8-kilos of bottled water on his back.

_{Natural Bridge Canyon, not Surprise Canyon}

Within 20 minutes or so of starting our hike, we were confronted by our first obstacle: a small waterfall, about six feet high. Not impossible to climb, but slippery and not offering much of a handhold. The real challenge had been carved by some condescending wag across the rock face: “There is no limit to human stupidity.” Jon and I looked at each other. “Oh yeah? We’ll show you the limits of human stupidity, buddy.” We then proceeded to do so by scrambling up a waterfall rather than investigating for the 10 seconds it would have taken us to find the perfectly servicable footpath going around it.

Onward we hiked. Because the canyon had hosted many a mining operation over the years, and those mining operations were, from time to time, wiped out in cataclysmic flashfloods, there was some interesting debris along the way. We passed a couple of heavy trucks modified to serve some inscrutable ends of heavy industry, and lunched by a rusted out, bullet ridden pick-up dating from the late 60s, I think. Near that were the gnawed over remains of one of the canyon’s wild burros. What had gnawed it, I do not know, and we did not linger to find out.

Another unsurprising surprise of Surprise Canyon was how lush it was: it was positively choked with vegetation in the early going, thanks to the aforementioned springs. It was full of what I assume were Pinyon trees, sagebrush and cacti. None of them were tall enough to provide any shade, but they did provide plenty of resistance as we made our way higher.

Did I say higher? Because I didn’t realize it at the time. The thing about climbing a canyon is you lose your perspective: you’re walking up a giant hallway, keeping your eyes on the step in front of you. We only realized that we’d been climbing when we cleared the vegetation level and looked back, only to realize we were halfway up a mountain range (again, what did we think hiking in the mountains would lead to if not massive elevation gains?)

In any case, due to a late start caused a failed attempt to buy batteries in a ghost town in the Valley (they had some, but they were all dead. Ha! Ghost town… dead batteries… hey! Come back!) it was now approaching sunset and preliminary scouting further up the canyon revealed no Panamint City within a ten minute walk. And we were tired. And it was hot. So, we set up our tent next to what we later figured must have been a trash dump for a later mining camp (it boasted a large pile of rusty cans and a smashed television).

_{This photo is near Golden Canyon, not Surprise Canyon}

Now, here is the real wonder of this trip. Men the world over are gearheads – we’re just gearheads about different things. Some of us love cameras, some cars, some tools. My friends Jon is a gearhead for camping stuff. When we were younger, his gear fixation served him well; he always had spacious, superlight tents, sleeping bags that could be compressed to fit into a woman’s change purse, a backpack of such unfathomable capaciousness that I am convinced that Jimmy Hoffa may yet be found in it.

Now Jonathan has a family. A lovely, hardy, adventuresome family, but a family nonetheless, and thus containing members with interests and ideas of their own, and whose interests and ideas are not as unquestioningly fond of outdoor life as is Jon. Given that Jon wants to share his passion with his family, he tries to make camping as comfortable as possible for them. He has therefore upgraded from a set of battered tin pots like what I use, into a fully equipped camp kitchen: boasting a full set of cutlery, several pots and pans, A PORTABLE KITCHEN SINK, and a cutting board.

Back at the car, while I was jettisoning the unneeded weight of my spare under-roos, Jon was bus rifling through his pack. I thought he was ridding himself of his superfluous crockery, but no – he quite literally, brought everything but the kitchen sink. Meaning that as we were preparing the only dinner we’d brought: canned beans, Jon looked sadly at his kitchen kit and observed “I guess I didn’t have to bring the cutting board, did I?” Given as how we had absolutely nothing to cut, no. Of course, this snarky observation is coming from a guy who insisted on wearing his fancy hunting knife on his belt for the entire time, even though the only time it ever came out of its sheath was when it snagged on a cactus (it's a nice knife, and I didn't want to get it dirty).

We watched the sun set in the west, painting the canyon walls every hue between gold and red, until night marched up the ravine and overcame us. Exhausted, counted the stars, and waited for a moon that never appeared, probably because it was afraid of being crushed under the stars, of which there are approximately 2.5 billion more visible to the naked eye in Surprise Canyon than elsewhere. We heard animals of some sort – burros maybe, maybe coyotes, it didn’t matter. We’d done Death Valley. Surprise!

Death Valley III: In which I finally arrive in Death Valley

2011-04-29T16:03:00.001-07:00

Roughly half an hour before arriving in the main visitor’s center for Death Valley, just outside the boundaries of the National Park, is a side road off the main highway leading to one of the region’s many ghost towns. Rhyolite was a gold mining town that flickered in and out of existence between 1905-1911, boasting a train station, banks, several newspapers, a hospital, fifty saloons and 3,500 presumably inebriated souls.

Today very little of that is in evidence – there’s a shell of a bank, a fenced off hotel and few other minor buildings, including a house made entirely of bottles (I was going to say inexplicably, but with fifty saloons about, both the building material and the decision making behind choosing it is all too explicable).

Speaking of inexplicability, the most visually arresting element of Rhyolite is not the evocative ruins, but rather the giant pink naked Lego lady Jon and I dubbed “The Cubist Nudist” but is apparently actually called “Lady Desert: The Venus of Nevada.” The Cubist Nudist is the most prominent exhibit of the Goldwell Open Air Museum which is pretty much what the name implies: a bunch of art, outside.

As with the ruins of Rhyolite, and Rhhyolite itself, there was no signs, plaques or pamphlets on obvious offer by way of explanation for any of this (other than a “no shooting” sign – one wouldn’t wish to alarm the ghosts, after all), so Jon and snapped our pictures and moved on, not entirely sure that we hadn’t just experienced our first desert hallucination.

We made Death Valley about half an hour later. Our intention had been to camp out in Texas Spring, per the drawling recommendation of Jay Stone, Death Valley Park Ranger, but we were road weary and hungry on arrival, so we simply checked into the Stovepipe Wells Resort for the evening. After a lamb kebab (just like the cowboys would have eaten!) we retired to our private cabin, drank whiskey, and lost money to each other playing poker (and by “each other” I mean “I” lost money to “Jon.”

Our first full day in Death Valley, we intended to explore the park much as our forefathers would have: by car, with the air conditioning on (let’s face it: you have to go back three generations now to find a forefather that didn’t have access to a car).

The important thing to understand about Death Valley is that while today it is a desert of considerable aridity, it used to be an inland sea of considerable humidity. I’m not entirely clear on where the water went, but it did leave a calling card. At the Devil’s Golf Course, the retreating waters left an enormous field of giant lumps of crystallized salt. Walking across them is a risky proposition: the spiky lumps make the less-than-sure-footed pay dearly for missteps. Scrape yourself on one and you instantly learn why the phrase “salt in the wound” is never meant as a positive.

Next we headed to Badwater Springs, which is the lowest spot in North America (being a few hundred feet below sea level). It too is a vast, salt covered plain, but instead of brownish lumps, the eye is confronted with an expanse of brilliant white across the valley, apparently reaching to the Panamint Mountains on the other side.

Jon and I took a stroll out in it, and it was very disorienting. All of our Canadian-honed sensory cues were telling us that we were walking across snow - white flakes, crunching under our feet - except it was hot. Also, we could feel the moisture fleeing our bodies just standing out there.

As the sun continued to climb, we hit a couple of the shorter day-hike suggestions we’d gleaned from the visitor’s center – Natural Bridge Canyon and Golden Canyon. The weird dislocating sensation continued: the canyons looked exactly like a million others I’d seen in cowboy movies on afternoon t.v. It was much the same sensation as when I first visited Paris or New York: you see a place a million times on t.v. or in the movies, and it feels familiar to you, even when you’ve never been there before.

Of course, in those movies no cowboy enters a canyon without getting shot at by some rifle totin’ bandit hiding behind the ledge. That’s what canyons are for, in my mind, so it was rather unnerving strolling up one, given that the entirety of my subconscious could almost feel some black-hatted ne’er do well drawing a bead on my back.

Also, canyons are frickin’ HOT. The temperature that day wasn’t too high, by Death Valley standards, but in Golden Canyon, at around noon, there was no shade anywhere, and the sun was reflecting off the pale yellow rock of the cliffsides in all directions. It was like being in an EZ-Bake oven outfitted with a Krieg light. We decided, fairly early on in our Golden Canyon hike to not do the six mile loop and content ourselves with the less than 2 mile walk up to the Cathedral rock. Sadly, we arrived at those rocks to find that while they resembled a Cathedral in shape, they did not in terms of shelter or shade from the sun.

The last place on our first day’s itinerary were the sand dunes near the northern end of the park. These were fascinating, in that they looked exactly like I’d picture the Sahara or Arabian deserts to look: endless undulating hills of sand. They were a disappointment though, in that there was an information plaque warning that scorpions and rattlesnakes used to the dunes as a place to burrow away from the relentless daytime heat. This wasn’t disappointing the sense that it prevented us from wandering around in the dunes – but it was in the sense that we did not, in fact, see any. This was probably better for our health in the long run, but our inner-ten-year olds were sorely disappointed.

NEXT: The Final Installment – Surprise!

Death Valley II: Is that a gun in your pocket or... oh, it is?

2011-03-25T11:14:00.000-07:00

Finally, the day arrived for my departure. Leaving Amynah with Sana and her uncle’s baby-blue minivan, I swapped the baby seat for my backpack, booted Raffi out of the CD player and replaced him with some AC/DC and hit the highway for Las Vegas, where Jon and I were to rendez vous.

Our plans for our one night were pretty mild, given that we were far more anxious to enjoy Death Valley to its fullest than we were to

SECTION REDACTED TO PROTECT THE INNOCENT

…and then I fell asleep, head spinning, clutching the twenty five cents I’d won like it was a teddy bear.

The next morning, after an excellent breakfast at a shady off-strip casino that apparently had a Western Buckaroo theme, yet had decorated its main dining room with paintings depicting the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie between British and American naval vessels. Those martial scenes got us in the mood for the last activity we had on our Vegas itinerary before heading to Death Valley.

That’s right, boys and girls, Jon and I shot some guns.

This was entirely Jon’s idea, but I won’t pretend I wasn’t happy to go along with it. Jon had spent some time in Canada’s military reserves in an artillery unit, and apparently had a hankering to revisit the glory days of pretending to blow things up. Vegas has a sin for every taste, and so we made our way to the imaginatively names “Gun Store.” After parking my Honda Civic between a jacked-up pickup truck and another jacked-up pickup truck, we made our way to the entrance, passing a couple of enormous gentlemen whose stetsons and sideburns were locked in mortal combat over which would earn the honor of being their hosts’ dominant head furniture. They in turn, were gawking at a Las Vegas city cab pulling up to the front of the store.

“That’s a cab” one observed. “What the hell?”

“Who the f*** takes a taxi to a gun store?” said the other, clearly affronted.

Always curious about the social mores of different cultures, I was going to turn and ask why one wouldn’t take a cab to a gun store, but was saved from a probably embarrassing faux pas by a female voice.

“You boys looking to shoot today?”

“Uh, yeah,” said Jon. I turned from my investigation of Gun Store transportation etiquette to behold a pair of pulchritudinous young women in extremely tight t-shirts manning the welcome booth outside the store. They beckoned us over, and leaned over their table to show us their guns.

Pointing to the helpful diagrams on the counter, they explained that the store had a large variety of weaponry one could rent, ranging from modern combat weapons to “The Dirty Harry.” You could also rent “packages” – the “Coalition Package” of three or four assault weapons from different NATO countries, or the “U.S. Military Package” of their army’s weapons (one of which looked like it should have been mounted atop a tank).

“There’s also the World War II Package, of historical weapons,” the blonde girl said, adding non-judgmentally “if you’re into the Nazi thing.”

Jon, being into the whole HOLY CRAP DEFINITELY NOT A NAZI thing, rented a vintage gun from the British Army (also used by Canadian troops in WWII and, for all I know, still is today).

I stepped up to the booth, looked the blonde straight in the eye (not easy) and said, “Look, I’ve never fired a gun in my life. I’m looking for something really simple. Also, you should know I have girly wrists,” flapping my hands by way of illustration.

“Uh…” said our hostess while Jon stifled a laugh. Behind me, I heard a sideburn bristle menacingly.

Recovering, blondie recommended a gun whose name I forget but contained a bunch of the more macho consonants (in case you’re wondering: X, T and K are macho. L, H, F are not. Y was for a while until it was outed as a closet vowel, which are totally not macho).

Our menu selections complete, we entered the store, at which point we were signed our release forms (In signing this document, I recognize that guns are dangerous, as are the fumes, the noise, the bullets emanating from them, as are other Gun Store customers, and so I hereby release the proprietors and staff from any liability. I further affirm that I did not take a taxi to this Gun Store). We were then invited to pick our targets, which ranged from generic bulls-eyes, to images of Osama Bin Laden, to zombies. There was also a pair of brown guys holding handguns that I guess were supposed to be terrorists, but were dressed like average North American dudes, and were even depicted with friendly smiles on their faces. They could have been customers of the Gun Store, if the Gun Store existed in a parallel universe in whcih it had non-white customers. Maybe they were supposed to be taxi drivers? Slightly creeped out by the options, Jon and I selected generic targets without faces, and were handed our clips and told to wait.

Eventually, it was our turn to be ushered onto the range. We donned our ear covers and eye protection, and took our places. Jeff, our range instructor, started with Jon – loading the gun for him, placing each of his hands on the weapon, and telling him how long to squeeze the trigger.

Of course, Jon had only paid for fifty rounds, and the Tommie gun is an automatic rifle. It is designed to shoot quickly. Jon paid $70 bucks for this experience, and did not want to shoot quickly. Yes, he rented an automatic rifle in order to shoot slowly. This is why he is my friend.

Jeff: You have to hold the trigger down, for at least four rounds.

Jon: Ok (Rat-tat!)

Jeff: Ok, good – but you have to hold the trigger longer.

Jon: Sure! (Rat-tat!)

Jeff: Ok, aim a little lower, and really, hold the trigger longer. Four rounds.

Jon: Right! (Rat-tat!)

Jeff: You’re going to jam the gun.

Jon: (Rat-tat-tat).

Jeff: Harumph.

After Jon’s Tommie reluctantly expectorated the last of his rounds, I was up. I will be honest – I was nervous as all get out, and had been trembling slightly ever since we set foot in the store. Just holding a gun was getting my adrenaline pumping, which was not helped by the fact that I kept getting hit by hot shells waiting for Jon to finish mangling his paper target.

In any case, I had two clips of ten rounds to work my way through. My first shot came closer to the target adjacent to mine that what I was aiming at. I think my second shot hit the floor before reaching the target. My third shot probably alarmed the target quite a bit as it whistled by into the sand pile on the rear wall. The next few shots hit more or less on the paper, but never within a foot of where I thought I was pointing the gun. This I will blame on the aforementioned girly wrists.

For the second clip, Jeff explained how I was supposed to line up the sight. “You see the white dot? That should line up right in the center.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. That was a lie. I didn’t see a white dot. My heart was pounding so much, my vision had gone blurry, even with my glasses on. Nonetheless, I fired off the next ten shots with much greater accuracy, but I have to say, I cannot imagine being able to operate one of those things effectively if I was actually trying to hit something that could move, let alone shoot back at me. Of course, I was slightly distracted by the pair of sideburns firing an anti-aircraft gun in the booth next to mine.

We took our targets as souvenirs, and exited the store, passing a giddy woman with a pink M-16 and an Osama target on our way out. Suitably pumped up, we climbed back into the Civic (which had stayed nice and cool in the Vegas heat, thanks to the shade cast by the neighbouring monster-trucks), and hit the road for Death Valley.

Death Valley, Part I: I had to start this story in 1985? What?

2011-03-23T22:59:00.000-07:00

Death Valley is the most deadly and dangerous spot in the United States. It is a pit of horrors - the haunt of all that is grim and ghoulish. Such animal and reptile life as infests this pest-hole is of ghastly shape, rancorous nature and diabolically ugly. It breeds only noxious and venomous things. Its dead do not decompose, but are baked, blistered and embalmed by the scorching heat through countless ages. It is surely the nearest to a little hell upon earth that the whole wicked world can produce. New York World, September 16, 1894

My trip to Death Valley began 25 years ago, in my fifth-grade classroom in Nova Scotia. My teacher had – foolishly – assigned me a seat within easy reach of the in-class stash of books, which I would read indiscriminately and heedless of whatever lesson was happening around me.

The books ran the gamut – I read “The Hobbit” that year, the entire Narnia chronicles (twice), a number of Enid Blyton “Famous Five” books, Farley Mowat’s “The Dog that Wouldn’t Be.”

Other than Joan Clark’s “The Hand of Robin Squires” (which led to adventures of an entirely different kind) no book that I read under my desk sticks in my mind as much as… well, I don’t remember the title. It was some compendium of “Amazing Tales” drawn from the U.S. designed to get boys to read, and was filled with AMAZING TALES indeed: Escape from Alcatraz! Evel Knievel jumps Snake Canyon! Rocket Cars! The Sabre Tooth Tiger of the Tar Pits! The Corvette! And, of course, Death Valley!

The name alone would have got me, as is has many thousands of others, but there was more: It was below sea level? But dry? My ten-year-old mind couldn’t even understand how that worked. It was the hottest place in North America? Wow! The driest! Sure! It had scorpions! It had rattlesnakes! It had gold mines, and cowboys, and con-men and ne’er do wells of all sorts! Sweet Rabbi Jesus, I wanted to go there.

When we found out, two years ago, that we were moving to California, my first thought – I am not exaggerating, literally my first thought – was that I would be getting my chance to go to Death Valley. It was the only place in all of California I really wanted to see – not L.A., not San Francisco, not the beaches or the celebrities.

I had not had a chance to actually visit the place, despite it being a tantalizing three-hour drive from my home. I was waiting my moment, and my moment arrived when my friend Jon called from Ottawa. He wanted to come visit and
per established practice, bond over the experience of shared hardship, canned food, and non-existent plumbing. And what better place to re-capture our camping mojo than in a place that features mountains (in which we’d never before camped), desert (in which we’d never before camped) and a variety of poisonous animals (with which we had no familiarity). I mean, surely Death Valley is only called that to attract tourists, right?

Once we’d decided on the locale, and the method by which we’d get there, we decided to do some research (this goes against every camping principle I hold dear, but hey, I’m a Dad now). And so, I called up the Death Valley Park Rangers in order to get some advice on how one might go about camping there.

Before this phone call, I was interested in Death Valley. After the phone call, I was excited about Death Valley. The reason for the shift was the man I reached, Jay Stone. Is that not the perfect Death Valley Park Ranger name? Go on, say it out loud in a Clint Eastwood voice. Even better, he had just about the most agreeable horse ridin' tobacco chawin' cattle-drivin' drawl I ever did hear.

He told me that camp site we’d want on the first night, when we were driving in, was Texas Springs. “It's generator-free,” he explained. “Is it tent-only?” I asked. “I don’t reckon,” he reckoned. “But you’re not like to have much in the way of company that time a' year.”

For water, we should have 4 liters per person per day ("That's what I count on when I go canyoneering") Temperatures, he informed me, “get up to 80 easy, even in March.” I forgot to ask about the nighttime lows, such were my palpitations at his manliness.

For backpacking, he described Surprise Canyon, for which we were to park outside the park and hike in: “That’s what I’d do,” he said, in a tone that made it clear that this being America, land of the free, he wasn’t about to impose his will on our dreams by offering an endorsement stronger than that. All in all, he seemed amused by my tenderfoot apprehensions, and gave me his direct office number so "I don't have to walk all the way over here from my desk if you call again," which gave me a mental image of his office being at the far end of a converted cow barn or something, with an ole’ style telephony machine at the far end at which he would occasionally shoot with his Colt Revolver.

He also promised to mail me "Everything we've got" in terms of pamphlets as he held scant hope the dude-ranch posers and layabouts he worked with got my message requesting same from the week before.

I think I fell in love with Jay Stone, Death Valley Park Ranger, just a little bit.

IN THE NEXT POST: Mommas, don't let your sons take a taxi to the Gun Store!

So that's why Canadian Citizenship Applications take so long.

2010-12-20T12:12:00.001-08:00

_{Canada House on Tafalgar Square. I should probably blog about that trip too, eh?}

Somewhere in the further reaches of a Scots-infested island in Eastern Canada, the decision was made. Using an ostentatious feather plume pen that was used by Chevallier de Drucour to sign the surrender of Louisbourg in 1758, the nameless functionary filled out the form in front of him using the words originally composed by a commitee of Robert Service, Leonard Cohen and Margaret Laurence. He signed the paper in front of him with an ink made from material from the Sydney Tar ponds and juice from Joey Smallwood's greenhouse cucumbers.

The sheet of paper was then put aboard the fastest transport available, the original Bluenose, which had been recovered and from its resting place under the seas near Bermuda for just this purpose. Under full sail, it raced past Prince Edward Island, docking in Charlottetown only long enough to bind the paper in the remains of the ribbon that was cut to open the Confederation Bridge.

On arrival in Montreal, the paper was embossed with its official seal, which was made not of wax but of maple syrup and ashes from one of Réné Lesvesque's cigarettes. This was stamped with an embossed hockey puck still bearing the mark from Rocket Richard’s shot that won the Stanley Cup for the Habs in 1952.

From Montreal, the document was sent on to Ottawa, where it rested for three days in the foyer of the Parliament Building, under the gaze of portraits of Baldwin, Lafontaine and all of the Prime Ministers. After being photographed for posterity with the same camera Youssuf Karsh used to capture the image of a scowling Winston Churchill, it was sealed in the very envelope that carried the original British North America Act from Westminster to Canada.

Onward on its journey: the envelope and document arrived in Thunder Bay, Ontario, by the statue of Terry Fox. A smidgen of snow was taken from his curly bronzed hair and melted, and used to wet a small brush made from a beaver fur and the bone of a moose consecrated by a Cree medicine man. With that brush, the the glue was wetted and the envelope sealed.

Across the Prairies the journey continued, over rails laid by abused and fearful Chinese and past fields planted by hopeful Dukhobours, over the Rockies to British Columbia, where the stamp was applied using the very hammer that drove the last spike. Finally, it was put in the regular post, with a salute from a corps made up of drummers from Rush, the Tragically Hip, the Guess Who and Blue Rodeo. It has now arrived at the Canadian Consulate in Los Angeles, which has sent me a letter to let me know: Sana is now a Canadian Citizen. Huzzah!

Remembrance Day: They who question also serve

2010-11-09T22:58:00.000-08:00

Every year I try to write a Remembrance Day post (or Veteran’s Day, as it is called here, which I feel gives the whole thing a rather different flavour). They’re generally pompous, except when they’re about buying new baby-manglers , but I’m going to go with informative this time (well, informative and pompous).

I can’t claim to be an expert on the military, nor do I feel comfortable saying Remembrance Day is “about” one thing or another. But I have always felt the emphasis that is placed on honouring those who are “willing to die for their country” is misplaced: it is far more horrifying to me that we ask our soldiers to kill for their countries. Especially if, inevitably, they should end up killing the wrong people, for the wrong reasons.

I’ve only written a couple of articles for ~~The Beaver~~ Canada’s History that touch on military history, but in both I was struck by the essential seriousness of senior military men about what they do, as contrasted with the sometimes flippant way politicians treat their responsibility for the lives of their citizens and of other countries.

For instance, there once was what amounted to a civil war in a country very far away. Canada had no interest there at all, but we were told by allies, who we thought were in a position to know, that our help was needed to combat an internationally coordinated threat that stood in opposition to every freedom we in the West held dear.

Our allies had bad intelligence. We sent our soldiers to a hostile environment, unprepared, under equipped, and essentially asked them to take sides in a conflict in which we did not understand either of the combatants. As a result, we ended up propping up an illegitimate and oppressive government, and contributed to the deaths of untold civilians. The threat, in the end, was less part of an international, anti-Western movement as it was an indigenous uprising.

The threat I am talking about was not terrorism, the country was not Afghanistan. Our troops were not called on to call in airstrikes on weddings. But in 1932, because of a panicky British ambassador in El Salvador who saw Communists behind every lamp-post, the Canadian navy was ended up providing support to a military dictator who took Mussolini as an inspiration, had come to power in a coup only three months before, and was recognized as legitimate nowhere (except, oddly, Norway).

The two Canadian ships had been sent by Canadian politicians who weren’t entirely sure where El Salvador was, and didn’t care to find out. They had been told the country was being overrun by Communists, and they believed it. They were told good English speaking plantation owners – Brits, Americans – were being murdered in their beds, and they believed it. They were told lies.

Victor Brodeur, the Captain with a conscience
Image from: http://www.journal.forces.gc.ca/vo9/no4/23-book5-livre5-eng.asp

The Captain of those ships – a French Canadian called Victor Brodeur – was able to tell them the truth after the fact. He told them the vicious dictator of El Salvador was able, because Canadian vessels were securing his western port, to free up his own troops. Those soldiers were able to massacre 40,000 Pipil natives, essentially wiping out a group that formed the labour force of the British and American owned plantations and that were treated worse than dirt in the country. Venturing out into the countryside (something British ambassador that had demanded military intervention had never done) Brodeur saw that the uprising had consisted of burning some farm buildings – no plantation owners were killed, no infrastructure damaged. Shown the massacre site by some proud and preening Salvadoran generals a few days later, it was revealed that exactly one Communist party membership card was found among the corpses – many of whom were wearing white sheets, now splattered in blood, in the vain hope they would be spared death as non-combatants.

Brodeur, conscious of what his country’s actions had wrought, wrote all of this in his report to Ottawa on his return. There was no follow-up from the politicians that had sent him there, no complaints to Britain, no international censure for El Salvador. However, in an example of the high seriousness of Canadian Parliamentary Democracy that has sadly only been matched since, one far-sighted and noble MP did bravely rise in the House of Commons to complain about the cost of the fuel the ships consumed to get there.

Kool Aid? Don't mind if I do.

2010-11-01T21:57:00.000-07:00

I’m not very familiar with Feng Shui, nor do I believe the little I know, but Amynah and I have noticed that certain apartments seem to have effects on how we live and socialize entirely independent of their size, location, and layout.

We’d noticed it in Montreal: in one apartment in the Outremont neighbourhood, Amynah would socialize constantly, and we would frequently go out for evening walks. In another larger apartment one block further away, she never invited anyone over at all.

Of course, we don’t realize the effect our apartment is having on until we leave. Our first apartment in Los Angeles was wonderful: one block from the local park, awesome neighbours in the building, two large bedrooms, hardwood floors, lots of light, close to all sorts of amenities.

While still a lovely place, our new apartment has almost none of those advantages. As an added disincentive to socializing, it comes with free cable.

Yet for some reason, we’ve already had more people over for dinner here in a month than we managed in a year in our previous place, and we’ve resumed our evening walks that had been a part of our routine everywhere else we lived. My theory is that we're trying to maintain a connection with the outside world.

Overall the new place is… nice. It’s run by UCLA for the benefit of those students and post-docs with families, meaning everyone here has the same employer, is in the same life circumstances, and have children roughly the same age. It’s called the University Village but, as it is a controlled access facility surrounded by iron gates and cement walls, I call it the compound. In essence, here we're fish in a heated aquarium, trying not to forget the taste of the ocean.

Behind the metal bars, we all live in a series identical adjoining apartment buildings, distinguished only by the differences in their communal playgrounds. There, children frolic happily throughout the day while parents chat and use the shared barbecues. The numerous flower beds are watered every morning, and everyone smiles and nods at one another as we negotiate our strollers past each other on the well swept walkways.

Many of the residents are internationals, and most of these are Indian or Chinese, most of whom appear to have their grandparents tending the children. In the playground closest to us, there appears to be an informal deal in which the Indian families occupy the facilities for one hour, then the Chinese grannies will arrive and sit and gossip while their descendants play. I’ve not quite figured out where Sana fits into all of this, but all camps seem fairly friendly to us both.

It’s also extremely well organized – there are occasional parties for the kids, there are English lessons for international students, there’s a hard-to-get-into daycare. They look after the details too: for Hallowe’en the residents' committee even circulated signs to every apartment that you could hang by your door to indicate whether you were participating or not.

All of this is so perfectly idyllic that it pushes into creepy territory, leaving us no other conclusion other than that there must be something darker going on under the surface. Amynah is convinced it's a façade masking a pulsating mosrass of sexual tension as in Melrose Place, although the most likely candidates for such hijinks are the various visiting grandparents. For my part, I keep looking around for piles of stones with which the residents express their darker urges a la "The Lottery." As such, I have been very careful not to buy the residents' committee’s raffle tickets.

If there's a bustle in your hedgerow...

2010-10-26T22:11:00.000-07:00

Be alarmed now:

Los Angeles loves Hallowe'en. The above was relatively understated by neighbourhood standards, but my favourite by far. Makes my efforts look pretty week by comparison.

Proof I am not crazy.

2010-10-18T14:30:00.000-07:00

Long time readers of this blog might remember way back in the day when I lived in France, I biked 160 km (100 miles) motivated largely by the prospect of eating a Burger King Whopper? And then, thanks to train schedule disruptions, failed to eat said burger?

I find out (thanks to the very funny Penelope Jolicouer ) that to go to such lengths is not unusual for the Whopper bereft French (watch to the end):

No, YORE a hoser.

2010-09-15T22:09:00.000-07:00

_{A Canadian Navy destroyer, at dock in Halifax}

I’m not sure how it happened, but I have apparently developed a strong “Canadian” (sub-set: “Maritime”) accent.

It’s highly unusual, I believe, to develop an accent late in life like this, but I am fairly certain I never had an accent before. In all the twenty-odd years I lived in Nova Scotia, I didn't have one, right? Six years in Montreal, no mention at all - surely someone would have told me if i had an accent right?

In France a few people mentioned my accent, but I think most of them thought I was speaking strangely when compared to our mutual British friend who clearly does talk with a funny accent, one of the many disadvantages of learning English on that isolated island.

On arrival in California, one or two people, upon learning that I was Canadian would raise an eyebrow, as if to say “that explains it” but I just thought it was in reaction to my overwhelming politeness, bewilderment at Fahrenheit, or smugness in the face of the local “cold.”

Then I was hired at UCLA. Once more, I find myself giving regular interviews, and hearing myself on tape as I transcribe them. Of course hearing myself on tape while speaking to French people revealed nothing to me about my accent. But in a direct comparison against Americans, who almost speak real English, (despite their aversion to the letter “U”) I realized (realised?) that I sound like I hail from Ecum Secum

For instance: where the locals pronounce the contraction of “we are” are “weer” I am only able to pronounce it as “whirr.” Similarly, the people here pronounce “your” more-or-less like “yoor” while my pronunciation is closer to “yore.”

Those are only the words that jump out at me, and jump out they do: it’s an odd phenomenon to suddenly realize that what I thought was my completely neutral manner of speech now sounds makes me sound to my own ear like I should be yelling at my crew to be pulling in the nets because a Nor’easter’s blowin’ in.

Not to comment troll or anything, but how many of you that have spoken to me have noticed my accent before? How many of you ever hear your own?

Remember me?

2010-08-28T14:52:00.000-07:00

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

When Sana was born I made a vow to myself that I wasn’t going to let this blog be taken over by all the cutesy adorable things that she does, both because a) I believe the View of the Marching Fishes brand, such as it is, appeals to a sophisticated audience that wants to read about my falling off of bikes and failing to find Vicious Wild Hamsters and b) I’m already doing the Daddy-blogging thing over here (or at least someone leading my life but with differently-named wife and daughter is writing over there).

Given that almost nothing in my life occurs without Sana, it’s hard to find things to write about that meet my fairly strict criteria (I saw Inception though! Highlight of the year so far! Anyone want to talk about it?) I also went to Nova Scotia, and I’m sorry I missed pretty much everyone I know there.

So, why am I writing now? Well, a sufficient number of hilariously bad things have happened to me this week, but I think the baby’s stirring, so I can only list them point form:

1) My work visa expires next week, so I will be out of a job, until it is renewed.

2) It might not be renewed until October.

3) I am way behind on the newsletter I need to finish before I am out of my job, and so, need to work all weekend.

4) My work computer (with the entire newsletter on it) died last night, and is now in the shop. I don’t think this is going to help my “please re-hire me” case.

5) This means I had to go to the nearest Apple store and get service at their “Genius Bar.” I’m still trying to get the smell of smug out of my cloths.

6) We renewed our lease here just before leaving. On our return, we discovered we’ve been accepted into subsidized post-doc housing at UCLA, meaning we have to break said lease.

7) It also means we have to get out of here by September 1. We can’t move into the new place until September 10.

8) We have no friends to help us move.

9) Sana is teething, and appears to either have a cold, or a tributary to the Mississippi in her nose. She’s been an adorable crawling ball of tears and mucus all week.

At some point, I’m going to write a proper post (though lord knows on what. One potential topic: Did anyone know I have a Canadian accent? Why did no one tell me before?)

Leonard Cohen, Children's entertainer

2010-06-11T18:12:00.000-07:00

This last week, Amynah’s been working like a maniac on a grant, and so I’ve had more Sana duty than usual. Sana seems to require a lot of stimulation to keep her not-bored and therefore not-cranky, and I’ve run out of ideas to keep her distracted: she figured out “peek-a-boo” for the scam it is a while ago, and is no longer inclined to humour us on the issue.

This morning, in desperation, I took out my guitar, and sang her some songs. Sadly, I don’t know very many songs all the way through, and those that I do are not exactly baby friendly. Here is my version of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire,” performed reggae-style, with improvised melodic commentary to make it child friendly in parentheses.

Like a bird, on a wire (birdy!)
Like a drunk, in a midnight choir (he’s drunk on life!)
I have tried, in my way, to be free (yay!)

Like a worm, on a hook (he’s hanging around!)
Like a knight, in an old fashioned book (horsey!)
I have saved all my ribbons for thee (that means you!)

If I, if I have been unkind (I haven’t! Don’t cry!)
I hope that you will just let it go by (Really, don’t cry!)
If I, if I have been untrue (he means lying. Really!)
I hope you know that it wasn’t to you (Lying's bad!)

Like a babe, (new) born (not disturbing at all!)
Like a beast, with his horn (like a rhino!)
I have torn everyone that reached out for me (by accident, and he’s sorry!)

But I swear, by this song (singing! Yay!)
And all the things I’ve done wrong (like choosing this song to sing!)
I will make it, all up to thee (ice cream!)

Saw a beggar, leaning on his wooden crutch (he’ll get better!)
He said to me, you must not ask for so much (Listen to the beggar man!)
I saw a lady, leaning, in her darkened door (she's not a hooker!)
She said to me, why not ask for more (don’t listen to the hooker!)

At that point, I figured that I’d better quit before launching into “House of the Rising Sun.”

A Soldier in the Pooh Army

2010-05-20T18:39:00.000-07:00

_{The soldier in uniform, reflecting}

I recently had the opportunity to interview a former volunteer in the notorious Pooh Army, and a veteran of the Battle of the Hundred Acre Wood during the bloody Honey Wars. This is her story, verbatim. Posts about local hikes and L.A.'s subterranean lizard people will follow, eventually)

You’ve heard of people like me. You might even think you know me. You might even think you understand me. You don’t. You don’t understand nothing, unless you’ve worn this uniform. To know me, you have be like me. You have to be a soldier in the Pooh Army.

Once, I was like you. I saw the Pooh shows, the Pooh posters, I didn’t think much of them. But one day – I dunno what went through my head. I was just a baby damnit – it was an impulse, maybe I was out of my mind of mashed peas – one day, I signed up.

And here’s something they don’t tell you about the Pooh Army: one minute, you’re a baby, rolling around in a puddle of your own drool but the next, they put you in that jumpsuit, and damnit: you’re expected to be ruthless, brutal, cold. A warrior.

My squad was a small one. We all came through the same training together… roll right. Roll left. Yell. It all seemed like a game. But one day, it all came to an end. The perfessor came. Yeah, he was an owl, sure, but we knew he had the smarts, and he was General Pooh's right-hand man. Respect.

He fluttered down in front of us, told us that we were ready. Told us about how we were not in this to be proud of ourselves, or even each other. He walked up to each of us, poking each of us in the chest with his bristly wings, looking at us with those raptor eyes, and saying we were to bring honour to the uniform we wore. Then he gave us the caps.

“You see those eyes one these caps! You see those ears?” he hollered. “You think those are just something that your Mommy will think is cute? No! Those are Pooh’s eyes! Those are Pooh’s ears! And when you go out there, he will SEE what you do! He will HEAR what you say! And you had better do him proud soldier!”

And that was it. We were soldiers in the Pooh Army, the fiercest fighting force in the world.

We were led by the Rabbit. He was scared. We laughed at him behind his back, but we should have been scared too. He’d been out before. He was a survivor, and was not happy to go out with a bunch of raw recruits like us. He told us what the owl said about the eyes was a load of crap.

“The eyes on the cap are there to confuse… him. That way, he won’t know where you’re looking. Not that it will matter.”

“What do you mean?” asked Piglet – jeez, Piglet. Poor guy never knew any better. The Donkey shushed him –Ian, or Igor or something, I think his name was – a whiny guy, but hard working.

We rolled out. The target was some place called the Hundred Acre Wood. We were to retrieve as much of the honey – liquid gold, we called it – as we could. But it wouldn’t come for free. The enemy was somewhere in there, we knew: a semi-mythical man beast, idiotic and relentless. Legend had it that he traveled by boucing on his tail – all the better to keep all four of his slashing claws free.

We were on the road for what seemed like forever, poor Piglet chattering the whole way like we were on a picnic. The donkey never said much, except to mutter that he didn’t want his number to come up fighting over some honey pipeline in a godforsaken tree farm. Rabbit was in the lead, ears jumping around like t.v. aerials in a hurricane. Suddenly, he stopped, ears rigid.

“I think…”

Suddenly, we heard a blood freezing chortle, echoing in the trees, all around us. If I had any hair, it would have stood on end. And then, there was a flash – orange, black and “whoosh” – rabbit was gone.

Yeah… gone. Just like that – one minute, he’s in front of, scrawny little thing with bugged out eyes, next…. He was air.

What happened after that, I can’t say. I hit the ground – we all did. What else could we do? All we heard was this sound… over and over again, a sickening mechanical springing sound that no biological creature should ever make, and a thump of a tail hitting the ground like a fleshy pogo stick.

I swear to god, for the rest of my life, I’ll be hearing that sound in my nightmares.

After Rabbit disappeared, Piglet was next to go. Sproing, squeal, silence. Poor kid never did grow up to a full fledged hog like his Momma wanted. Then, that same orange and black flash in the corner of my eye – “Oh well,” said the donkey, resigned, like. Then a thump, and silence.

It was just me. I lay alone, trembling. That godawful sproinging sound drew closer, and closer. Finally, I felt a shadow over me. I felt something nudge my foot.

“Hey kid. Kid! Pay attention!”

I opened my eye.

“You know what most wonderful thing about Tiggers is? I said, DO YOU KNOW?”

I could only whimper.

“You listen, and listen good. It’s that I. AM. THE. ONLY. ONE.” he said. “You go back and tell General Pooh that. Make sure he gets the message.”

And with that, he disappeared. I looked around the clearing – my comrades were gone. Just… not there anymore. I won’t lie to you – I was damn glad I was wearing a diaper. Our supplies were all over the place, but I couldn’t bring myself to clean up – the bees were already swooping in on the broken jars. I fled – it took me days, let me tell you, living off whatever I could scrounge from the forest floor, but I had to get out of there, any way I could.

I quit the Pooh Army that day, but let me tell you, I will never forget the horror of what I saw in that clearing – Rabbit… Piglet… the donkey. My brothers. I can never forget them. But I want to… god, I would love to wipe my mind clean. Because let me tell you, to this day, whenever I close my eyes, and images of that terrible day in the Hundred Acre wood come to me, I can smell it like I was there.

Honey and sawdust. Honey and sawdust everywhere.

Naw, I'm just kidding.

Shaved baby

2010-05-16T20:20:00.000-07:00

When I first moved to Montreal, many years ago, I moved into an apartment building that boasted a very attractive rent, which the proprietors kept low by running an extremely unattractive building. As such, it was filled with students, people on social assistance, and new immigrants (and roaches, but that has nothing to do with this story).

The apartment next to my greasy studio space was occupied by a family from Bangladesh – husband, wife (pregnant) and their toddler son. We didn’t speak often – partially because of the language barrier, partially because their son fell down a flight of stairs because of my stupidity (he was fine, though I’m convinced he’s been plotting to kill me ever since) and I don’t remember their names.

However, I do remember that one day, I noticed their son had gone from being the proud owner of a luxuriant mop of jet black hair, to completely bald. I didn’t have a chance to ask them why, but I mentioned it to Amynah. She explained that it was the custom, amongst South Asians, to shave their babies’ heads, in order to promote a thicker, fuller, second growth of hair.

I pointed out that I’d never had me head shaved and that, if anything, I (and most of the hairdressers that have suffered handcramps trying to deforest my scalp) wished my hair was somewhat less thick and luxurious. “Imagine how much thicker it would be if your mother had shaved it!” she replied. To that, I had no answer.

I bring this up by way of explaining that when I married Amynah several years later, I was fully-apprised that if and when we had kids, this was going to be an argument that we were going to have, and it was going to be an argument that I was going to lose. And today, the day arrived.

Through her community’s grapevine, Amynah found Rahima, a hairdresser that was willing to shave baby heads, and we made an appointment for today at noon (after first walking in unannounced two days ago, and gaining "what? are you monsters?" looks from all the other clientele when we said what we wanted). Sana was not in the best mood, but always behaves well around strangers. We stripped her down to her diaper, and Amynah put on a hairdressing robe. And Rahima set to work.

Sana was remarkably good humoured throughout – which is to say she was upset, but not the “Help! I’m being murdered” levels of upset she can reach when we’re giving her a bath, for instance.

It helped that one of the other hairdressers was there with her husband and three year old son, who was fascinated by the process and therefore willing to distract Sana by dancing and clapping for her amusement.

In any case, in twenty minutes it was all over, and we brought home our newly glabrous baby. I think she looks like Natalie Portman in “V for Vendetta.” What do you think?

Nobody asked

2010-04-26T20:37:00.000-07:00

Amynah and Sana are in Edmonton right now. I am not. This state of affairs, already three days old, will continue to this Friday. This is both the first time I’ve been alone in Los Angeles, and the first time I’ve spent any time away from Sana since she was born.

In their absence, I’ve made certain discoveries. This apartment apparently functions like an ecosystem, in which every niche must be filled for it to function. Amynah, Sana and I all fill specific niches.

Ordinairily, when Amynah is away, I need only fill her niche and mine. I didn’t think filling Sana’s would be so important: she’s only been around for .01 percent of my life, so how crucial could her role be?

Apparently, very crucial. Someone, it appears, has to be the one that doesn’t feed or dress themselves and sleeps at weird hours, and only when forced too. And that someone is now me.

Accordingly, I been spending too much time on the Internet, thinking about things that are not the least bit important or original. So, does anyone care what I think of the whole South Park thing? No? Here goes anyway. In response to a couple of extremists threatening the creators of the South Park cartoon for implying that they had drawn Mohammed in a bear suit (important note: it was actually Santa Claus in there), the Comedy Central Network censored the episode.

Predictably, in response to that, a few Facebook geniuses have decided to make some kind of point by creating an “everyone draw Mohammed day” and encouraging people to post images of the Islamic Prophet on their profile pages.

This is very, very, stupid.

There are three parties involved in this dispute: the South Park guys, the network, and the crazies. Posting offensive cartoons does not help the South Park guys. Nor does it send any cogent message to the network. It does, presumably, anger the crazies, but only in the course of offending millions of other, non-crazy Muslims.

On the surface, that might still be appealing, but it doesn’t really make any sense.

Take the Don Imus scandal from a few years back. A jack-ass radio announcer, he called a college women’s basketball team a bunch of “nappy-headed hoes” on air. There was an outcry, and eventually his broadcaster fired him. His defenders yelled themselves hoarse over censorship, to no avail.

Now, at that point, would it have made any sense to defend Imus’ right to say what he wanted by repeating his words? Of course not – all that would have done would be to repeatedly insult a group of women that had almost nothing to do with his firing.

The same holds here: repeating South Park’s [non] offence, won’t have any effect on the ultimate censors – the network. And it won’t have any effect on the crazies either - the only thing, at this point, that would deflate them would be if Comedy Central reversed its decision. But posting a Mohammed cartoon because of this tempest in a teapot will serve as a middle finger upthrust in the face of every Muslim who believes both in their faith, and in not murdering people (which I am confident is the vast majority – especially on Facebook).

That, in the end, is what is at issue here: the crazies are not in the wrong because they’re Muslim. They’re not even in the wrong because they’re offended. They’re in the wrong because they threatened to kill people. The response effectively subjects anyone who peacefully belongs in the first two categories to a punishment that should rightfully be restricted to those in the third.

Of course, while such distinctions should matter to the “draw Mohammed” crowd, they don’t, because the middle finger approach requires far less thought. But reactionary contempt has noxious follow-on effects. To deliberately insult all Muslims for the offence of a very few is to agree on some level with the crazies that they speak for their coreligionists, when they most assuredly do not (I know at least one Muslim group actually accused them of being a front organization to make real Muslims look bad). Striking back at the crazies in such a broad fashion is to grant them an authority they do not deserve.

Beyond the pat-yourself-on-the-back feeling from having made “a statement,” (however meaningless it be) who other than the crazies themselves, does it serve to afford them such credibility?

(Incidentally, if you want to make fun of religious crazies, there are much more targeted and clever ways to do so).

Meryl Streep's star was the next one over.

2010-04-09T22:44:00.000-07:00

_{Mann's Chinese Theatre}

Hollywood is famous for many things, but reverence for the written word is not one of them. Its entertainments are, by definition literal, without being literary: most brutally, in a recent case, by removing the Wonder from Alice in Wonderland by making it “underland.” Because it’s underground you see, and Hollywood wouldn’t want you to be confused or, heaven forfend, be left wondering.

It’s strange then, that two of the most visited sites in Hollywood aren’t just word based, they’re literally just words – the Hollywood sign, and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. As someone who works with words for a living, I don’t want to discourage this, but I couldn’t help but be curious about the appeal. The sign is not particularly distinguished – an unadorned font, plain white, running across the crest of some unspectacular mountains, it looks like what it originally was: a real-estate billboard.

As to the Walk, what precisely is the difference between seeing the words “Harrison Ford” on gum-encrusted brass plaque on the sidewalk upon which the multimillionaire actor may never have trod, and seeing it on the credits of one of his movies which he actually had something to do with or, say, dropped arbitrarily in a curmudgeonly blog post?

My experience of the Walk didn’t illuminate matters for me. There were a lot of names – not all of which I recognized, and none of which got my blood pumping. Some that I observed weren’t even real people: like Big Bird, The Simpsons, or John Tesh.

Yet, the sidewalks were crowded with people taking photos of people’s names, squealing with excitement when they happened upon a particularly famous one. I wondered if there was a market in simply charging people five bucks for their people their favorite celebrity’s name printed on a Post-It note – it would be somewhat more tangible, after all.

As I cynically pondered this, the experience, suddenly, though perhaps inevitably, became what the cool kids might call meta-textual, when I stumbled across this star:

Anne Shirley is, as my Canadian readers will know, the heroine of the Lucy Maude Mongomery “Anne of Green Gables” novels. The first book was made into a film in 1934 and a rising young actress, born Dawn Paris.* was cast in the part. Apparently unafraid of being typecast, she adopted Montgomery’s creation’s name as her own, and spent the rest of her career as Anne Shirley. And here I was, taking a photo of the not-name of a starlet who'd been in a movie that had taken its story from a book – whose main character would have been preferred have been called Cordelia.

We’re through the rabbit hole people. Into ~~Under~~Wonderland.

* _{Before adopting Anne Shirley as a stage name, Dawn Paris performed under thoroughly awesome stage name of “Dawn O’Day."}

The big cheese

2010-04-05T16:59:00.000-07:00

I was going to do a big post on visiting the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but my beloved daughter has been possessed by a shrieking goblin that will only be exorcised by being held and cuddled, non-stop.

Instead, I will present you with, courtesy of Brian Busby at
"The Dusty Bookcase," a poem from Canada's history, singing the glories of a 7,000 pound cheese made for a 19th century World's Fair that I would look up if I didn't have my apoplectic offspring attempting to revenge herself upon me for not predicting and catering to her infantile whim to not sleep in any of the sleep-dedicated infrastructure we have cluttering up the apartment.

Vegas. Baby.

2010-04-02T10:39:00.000-07:00

I’m not superstitious, but I should have known our Vegas trip was not going to end in riches when our hotel booked us into rooms on the thirteenth floor.

While we were looking forward to our first road trip with Yann and Felicie since Provence there were omens that luck was not with us: the enjoyment of our night gawking at the Strip was considerably reduced by Earth Hour, during which most of the major casinos turned off their ridiculously garish light displays in the spirit of environmentally sustainability. Who the hell goes to Vegas to be reminded about the needless excesses of consumer society?

The untimely restraint meant that the hour Amynah spent waiting for the famous Bellagio fountain show was wasted* – we gave up our primo viewing spots five minutes before it started, meaning we only caught a glimpse of it over a bunch of frat boys heads. (*Not entirely wasted - she found people's reactions to the gang of pamphleteers with their "Jesus Saves You... FROM HELL!" t-shirts to be pretty entertaining).

_{Strip with the lights on. Upon reflection, a less clichéed photo would have been the Strip with the lights off. Maybe next year.}

As long as Sana was with us we were a little reluctant to enter the casinos either. Regretfully, the abundant smoking, drinking, and scantily-clad go-go dancers (not to mention the surfeit of Tea-Party types in town for a protest) didn’t seem conducive to creating and atmosphere for responsible parenting.

Of course, bare flesh was hard to avoid: every corner on the strip was populated by half a dozen guys handing out calling-cards for “professional companions.” At one point, Felicie complained that no one was trying to give her one, so I – chivralrous gentleman that I am – took one for her.

This was a big mistake: as soon as the rest saw that they had a willing taker, I was swarmed by half a dozen card snapping prostitute-proselytizers, shoving pictures of naked ladies in my face, into my hands, even directly into my pockets. For those keeping score at home: Susan, Veronica [the lone brunette], Kimberly, Mariah, Tina, and Victoria and Tiffany, who appear to be package-deal twins. To my disappointment, there wasn't a Honus Wagner in the bunch. It occurred to me that Vegas would be a very strange city in which to go through puberty.

_{Felicie awaiting her Philly Cheese steak. That tower on the table behind her? Beer.}

That’s not to say we avoided sin entirely. On our first night, we inadvertently enjoyed quite possibly the most American – or least French, anyway – dinner of our lives. It was at a NASCAR-themed restaurant, with filled with March-maddened college basketball fans yelling at the half-dozen large screen TVs. Felicie and I had Philly cheese steak sandwiches, Yann had a pound-of-beef burger, and Amynah – eating light – had a Southern-style chicken sandwich with what appeared to be a hectare of fries. Though we were tempted, we refrained from ordering the two-foot long burrito that was the restaurant’s “challenge dish” – finish it, and you eat for free. “Bathroom breaks are monitored - vomiting voids the competition” said the announcer, drily.

_{Yann and his pound-of-beef burger}

When Yann and I finally managed to hit the tables, we were a little tired and overwhelmed. Our practice games of Blackjack had only left us certain that we wanted to be the house. Nonetheless, (once Amynah had retired with Sana) we found a table with a sympathetic looking dealer, close to a lucky-looking go-go dancer, and bought some chips. Felicie went upstairs to change, but promised to return.

Somehow, despite our attempts to look worldly and Euro-sophisticated, the dealer, and our fellow players, spotted us for the hopeless rubes we were immediately. Every second hand, when one or the other of us would tap for another card, the dealer would look us, puzzled:

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” we’d reply, full of machismo. And then we’d lose.

At one point, Yann was up nearly one hundred bucks, while I was down to fifteen – the minimum stake for the table. Then he drew a pair and –with considerable guidance from an exceptionally inebriated man with horn-rimmed glasses – split it. I had no idea what was happening, and I’m pretty sure Yann didn’t either, but between Friendly McDrunkerson and the helpful dealer, Yann basically had his hand played for him. He lost. Then he lost a few more times, and pretty soon he was out.

Me, I went up as much as $45 dollars, but mostly floated between $15 and $30 – winning a little, immediately losing it, then winning it back. I never had as much as Yann did at the dizzying heights of his success, but I played longer. In the end though, I lost just as much, burning through my stake.

And while I tried to play it cool, Yann and I were both itching to get back on the tables: Yann’s goal was to win enough to pay off a parking ticket he’d incurred the day before, while I wanted to show that I could walk away even with “only” a fifteen dollar win (which, incidentally, would have required winning back my initial stake as well). We were both convinced – all evidence to the contrary – that we were on the verge of a breakthrough. We headed out of the casino, towards a bank machine. On the way there, we ran in to Felicie, on her way to join us.

“You’re done already?” she asked, incredulously.

“Errr…” we said, suddenly realizing we’d blown through our stated limit in less time than it had taken for her to change her pants. Perhaps, we decided, it would be better to simply have a drink, watch the go-go dancers without the distractions of babies or cards, and then turn in for the night.

However, if there’s a next time, I’m requesting a room on a different floor.

The Mammoth Murder

2010-03-29T19:04:00.001-07:00

Had you asked me what the coolest thing in California was when I was in grade five ~~number redacted~~ years ago, I would have not hesitated: tar pits. Pits of tar, laden like Chunky Soup with the remains of such wondrous creatures as sabre-tooth tigers and wooly mammoths.

It took a visit from our French friends, Yann and Félicie, to finally induce us to make the trip out to the pits. It was pretty awesome: there were a lot of animals that fell into those pits. The fact that the first few dozen to go in didn’t serve as an object lesson to the dozens more that followed probably goes a long way to explain why they didn’t survive to the present day. The Ice Age was a stupider age.

_{Sabre toothed freakin' tiger!}

As visitors enter the museum grounds, they see the largest pit, fenced of for safety. Within the fencing is an educative, if horrifying tableau:

How can you look at this and not be shocked? Look at the mother mammoth, crying uselessly for help, as it sinks, panicked, into the relentless, sucking void? Look at her baby – reaching it’s tiny trunk out for his mother, watching the very source of his existence sink, with tortuous slowness, into oblivion, while his father, stands by, helpless and knowing he can do nothing to help. It rends the heart.

But it got worse. Unnoticed, on the other side of the lake, we spot another mammoth, concealed behind a bluff, watching the terminal paroxysms of the female.

Creepy. What is he doing there? Why is he watching, offering neither assistance nor comfort? Why is he hiding? Did he have a hand in events? Could it be that our perpetually dying mammoth did not fall, but was in fact pushed?

Still alive

2010-03-22T10:26:00.000-07:00

_{Proof I leave the house occasionally}

Boy, it’s been a while since I’ve been around here, eh?

A blog like this will go dry for one of three reasons: there’s nothing going on, and therefore nothing to write about, or there’s too much going on, and therefore I’ve no time to write about it, or I’m suffering some sort of blogging/writing ennui and therefore don’t want to write at all.

Or option number four: All of the above.

Most of our life over the last few months has been exactly what you would expect life with a new baby to be like: feeding, crying, sleeping, and dealing with the baby’s feeding, crying and sleeping. And while I find absolutely everything Sana does to be enthralling, I recognize that not everyone else is tuning into this frequency of the Internet to read about me babbling on about how absolutely brilliant, beautiful and awe-inspiring my daughter is.

Even if I wanted to write about that (which I do, believe me) I didn’t have the time because my ~~Guardian Angel~~ Mom has been here for the last month, ~~keeping us alive~~ helping us out and ~~spoiling~~ spending time with her newest grandchild. During that month my sister and her family of four, as well as friends from both Canada and France have arrived for visits. It’s been a madhouse, and Sana probably believes she’s being raised in a Bed and Breakfast.

In addition to that, Sana has started at daycare (breaking my fragile heart) and I have started a new job.

So, there’s plenty of material to write about, and I hope to do so soonish, but I am now splitting my writing efforts between here, my job, and my semi-pseudonymous blogging gig at Goodkin, a family lifestyle site at which I am now semi-professionally blogging. This means some stuff that might have appeared here will appear there: check ‘em out.

So this isn't a post so much as it is a ~~promise~~ statement of intent to eventually post here again, soon. My apologies to both my readers.

Perhaps we can reach them by carrier pigeon?

2010-02-15T11:36:00.000-08:00

Given that it's very name is a byword for enormous and slow moving, you'd think it wouldn't be very difficult for me to get a decent picture of the blimp that skulks around my neighbourhood in the evenings.

For those of you asking why, precisely, my corner of LA is a haven for antiquated aviation devices, I must disappoint - I have no idea. I like to believe that it's manned by a gang of Prussian centenarians who never got word of the Armistice in 1918.

Who says science can't be ridiculous?

2010-02-10T17:30:00.000-08:00

Despite Monday's debacle, Sana and I returned to the baby lab today. This is the video they played.

Next time, we're putting her in a giant maze with cheese.

2010-02-09T14:48:00.000-08:00

With Amynah being a scientist, and me having a professionally symbiotic relationship with science, we decided early on that we would enroll Sana in pretty much any baby-development study on offer at UCLA. We didn’t have long to wait – we received a card seeking the use of our baby in the mail from “The Baby Lab” when Sana was five weeks old. A week after we sent it in, we got a call asking us to bring her in.

So yesterday, I tramped up to the UCLA campus, pushing Sana in The Mangler through the drifting crowds of cooing undergraduates. We got into the lab, where the professor in charge was in the midst of a meeting with his undergraduates. I was handed a great sheaf of papers to read and sign (“I understand that there are no risks associated with these experiments beyond those associated with everyday life” - I was going to mention that I had, in the course of my everyday life earlier that morning, been training Sana as my apprentice in my new career as a bullfighting skydiver, but thought it prudent to just sign the form). Despite the new environment and her approaching lunchtime, Sana was pretty quiet. I quickly changed her diaper, and we went in for the experiment.

The idea, I was told, was to test infant’s understanding of the continuity of form – whether they understood that if a box passes over a rod, that the rod will still be intact afterward. To do this, they track baby’s pupils – the longer the baby stares at an object, the more likely they are surprised by what they see.

We were say in front of a tv screen outfitted with a special camera designed to track Sana’s eye movements. To get set it up, they played a video of singing muppets, then a series of beeping shapes and video snippets. After that, the test would begin.

This was the muppet video:

Here’s how it went.

“Ba na ma na”

Happy baby

“Shapes and beeps” – crying. Perhaps she was startled by the sudden change? The technicians were understanding, and started over.

“Ba na ma na”

Happy baby

“Shapes and beeps” – crying.

I informed Sana that she was being unreasonable, and setting back the forward march of human knowledge. She seemed chastened. We resumed our place by the screen, determined to do better.

“Ba na ma na” started again, and Sana watched, calmly, perhaps even bobbing her head along a little.

The shapes and beeps started. Sana watched as they moved, corner to corner, beeping and bopping. Her brow wrinkled. What was this – some sort of avant garde cinema? Where was the music, the characters, the great themes? This was just abstract posturing. She started to squirm, then her face reddened. She started to holler.

“That’s uh, two thumbs down,” I said, as I bundled her out of the lab.

She won’t make it as a scientist perhaps, but she might have a future as a movie critic.

Stay at home parenting: Day 0.5

2010-02-01T15:52:00.001-08:00

5:55 AM – Sana hollers me awake. Today’s the day when Amynah goes back to work, albeit for only half the day. Amynah’s convinced Sana knows it, and thus has been particularly needy throughout the night: “She woke up at 2:30, and didn’t really go back to sleep,” said Amynah, wearily. I try to look sympathetic, while inwardly congratulating myself for my foresight in not developing breasts. Reading my mind, Amynah vindictively demands that I change Sana’s diaper.

7:00 After a quick nap, I wander downstairs to prepare breakfast, while Amynah puts Sana down to sleep again. Amynah comes down, thanks me profusely for my labours. The enthusiasm of her gratitude makes me think that her sleep deprivation has made the act of toasting a bagel seem to her a work of culinary genius.

7:45 I hop in the shower. After five minutes, Amynah pops her head in the door: “Bye!” I then here her run downstairs. The front door slams. I wait for it to open again and for her to yell “Just kidding!”

7:51: Still waiting.

7:52: It appears that she meant it when she said, almost every day since December 10, that she was going back to work. It’s just the baby and I, and I have no breasts with which to defend myself.

8:00: I peek my head into the room where the baby is sleeping, a transistor radio playing static to keep her calm. As I look at her face, her eyes open a crack. I yelp and run away.

8:30: Attempting to write. Have run upstairs to check on her three times so far. She’s fine, but I think I pulled a muscle in my leg.

9:09: Writing. Email arrives from Amynah “Hey sweetie, I miss you and Sana very much.” Me and who?

9:14: Baby crying! I plug her noise hole with a soother, and bring her downstairs. Now she’s sucking away, and looking at me like I’m an idiot. Clearly, something else needs to be done.

9:20: Baby crying, slowly, clearly and emphatically, so that Idiot Parent understands. I investigate the diaper, to find much treasure therein. By my calculation, she has gone through roughly 7,000 Pampers since making her appearance in this world. Really, it shouldn’t still be this upsetting for her.

9:35: Have spent ten minutes trying, and failing to capture her smiling as she lies in her favourite place in the world – the Poop Deck. I don’t want to upset her with the flash, and my stupid camera’s too slow with the flash off.

_{Actually, that came out ok}

9:36: On to the play mat, where she stares at the various hanging rattles, mirrors and noisemakers without having the faintest clue what to do with them. I try to write with one hand while shaking a bead-filled plastic doughnut for her amusement.

9:38: She is not amused. The crying starts again. Time to feed.

9:40: I’m set up on the couch. Magazine – check. Cloth to wipe spilt milk – check. Agitated baby – check. Milk – Damnit! Out of reach in the kitchen.

9:41: Milk retrieved, she’s sucking on the bottle as if she hadn’t been fed in three days, instead of three hours. I realize that with one arm holding her, and one holding the bottle, I can basically only enjoy the magazine by pulling it close on the table with my feet and reading the page it happened to be open to over, and over, and over again. It’s an ad for a European investment bank.

10:25 – Bottle’s empty! Not sure if she’s done, but it should hold her until Amynah comes home at lunch. I put her in the swing, and immediately get on the phone to open an account with Banco Santander.

10:26 – It is deeply unnerving to have a baby stare at you when you’re trying to work.

10:27 – Still staring.

10:28 – I turn the swing around so she’s looking out the balcony window.

10:29 – She spots me reflected in the glass. She stares.

10:30 – I might be going slightly mad.

10:45 – I peek over the kitchen counter, behind which I am hiding with my laptop. Sana’s eyes are closed, so it’s safe to return to my desk.

11:30 - She’s starting to fuss again. It could be a rebellion against the MIDI versions of classical music beeping through her swing’s sound system or it could be a signal for a diaper change.

11:31 – Diaper change.

11:38 – she’s calm, if somewhat too active, while I struggle to introduce her to clean underpants, but as soon as I get her pajamas back on, she starts to fuss. Then cry. Then shriek like she’s being tortured. Of course, this is when the phone rings.

11:39 - It’s Amynah, on her way home. Just in time! I put Sana in her stroller and make a mad dash for the bus stop. As soon as we’re rolling, the crying stops – she’s awake, eyes wide open, with an expression on her face that says “I’m calm now, but you better know you’re on thin ice, buddy.” I pass three other Dads out pushing their kids around the neighbourhood. Doesn’t anyone in this city have a job?

11:50 – Amynah! Sana’s visibly relieved. Day one as a stay-at-home Dad, and we both survived. I’m feeling pretty proud of myself.

11:52 – Amynah informs me she’s working a full day tomorrow. Sana immediately starts to cry.

Baby boxing: Nano-weight division

2010-01-28T17:39:00.000-08:00

In this corner, hailing from Canada and Los Angeles, wearing the brown onesie, weighing in at 8 pounds or thereabouts, Sana "Mommy's Little Monster". In the other corner, hailing from France and San Diego, wearing the white pajamas, Leon "Teddy Bear's Pique-nique."

Round one:

"Though smaller than her opponent, Sana is clearly at ease on home turf, refusing to even look in her opponent's direction. Additionally, at nearly twice Leon's age, Sana is counting on her experience and better gross motor control to dominate this match. Leon, understandably keeps his distance in the early going, but, eventually squirms to within flailing distance. Big mistake! Sana starts the hostilities with a straight jab to the face. It's on!"

"Leon isn't hurt - he shakes it off, with his Mom cheering from the ringside. He attempts to close the distance, and retaliates with a sucker punch to the back of Sana's head."

"Sana's unfazed, and doesn't even notice the blow. But... Oh! She changes tactics, and surprises Leon again with a shot to the gut."

"Hoping to use his superior size to his advantage, Leon's presses the attack, and attempts to disorient Sana with a ringing jab on the ear,"

"If Sana's shaken, she doesn't show it. Her retaliation is quick, and brutal - she ends the contest with a sharp uppercut to the jaw. It's over!"

_{All photos from our friend Candice. Her son and Sana actually got on very well, as far as we could tell.}

A shady tale.

2010-01-23T21:12:00.001-08:00

_{Yes, we're on a West Coast beach. No, it isn't California. I will compose a limerick in honour of the person who guesses where we are}

See those sunglasses I’m wearing? They're prescription I’ve had those things for years – bought them in Montreal, at the urging of a fabulous salesman who assured they made me look “edgy.” I’m fairly certain he was simply trying to unload his stock from the 1970s and pegged me – accurately – as the kind of guy who would be flattered to be seen as possessing any quality that could remotely be described as edge-like.

While I do quite like them – you don’t often see glasses like this outside of seventies cop shows – they’ve always been a little loose on my face. Over the years, the arms have become particularly floppy, meaning that they are constantly falling off my shirt or head when I need to bend over.

Today, Amynah, my brother-in-law and I were running some errands around town. As we were pulling out of the parking garage and into the sunlight, I went to grab the glasses that had been, I thought, hanging from my shirt. They weren’t there.

I pulled out into traffic, reaching around my immediate area the driver’s seat, my various jacket pockets, on the floor. Nothing. I pulled over, and searched Sana’s car seat, the trunk, the grocery bags. No luck (well, in finding them - it probably was lucky I didn't have an accident doing this while driving without being able to see.

Finally, Amynah convinced me to return to the store where we’d just been. WE pulled back into the parking garage, and slowly cruised by the spot where we’d parked, now occupied by a SUV. Behind it’s rear wheel, Amynah spotted a twisted metal object, roughly where I’d been standing when folding Sana’s stroller.

“I think that’s them!” she said, excitedly. My stomach dropped – it looked like this was going to be worse than not finding them all. I stopped the car and dashed out, grabbing the glasses and handed them to Amynah, not even looking at them.

“Oh…” she said, solemnly. “I don’t know if they’re going to make it.”

I pulled the car into an empty spot. Sure, my glasses had been run over by two tons of Lexus, but I knew we’d been through too much, in too many places, for this to be the end.

“No! No! I can fix them,” I said. Gently, lovingly, I bent the arms back into position, aligned the frame, and pushed the lens – both, miraculously undamaged - back into place. I put them on: they fit better than they had in years.

I have another pair of regular glasses that have feeling a little loose lately. I think I’ll go leave them in the driveway for a while, see if that helps.

A rose by any other name would probably be something dirty

2010-01-11T22:05:00.001-08:00

The very first article I ever sold was a description of a trans-Canada foot race that captivated the country in 1921.* I’d originally written it for my local paper, to be published roughly to coincide with the anniversary of the race’s finish.

They were interested, but in the end passed, as they’d already filled that spot in that week’s paper. I, having having already written the piece, and not wanting all those hours in the Nova Scotia Archives to have gone to waste, decided to see if there were any magazines that might take it. As it happens, I found a magazine that specialized in Canadian history. I mailed it to them, and promptly forgot about it.

At this point, I knew I was moving to Montreal to be with Amynah, but was living in a humid basement apartment with my friends Jon and Sue. One day, a letter arrived, bearing the letterhead of the magazine to which I’d sent my article. Jon had picked up the mail that day, and he passed me the thin envelope with a sympathetic expression on his face – if I’d got the commission, surely the envelope would have a contract in it?

Reluctantly, I took it from him, and opened it. I scanned the first few lines – then scanned them again. Then I let out a girlish shriek of delight: not only did they want the article, but they were going to pay me roughly three times what the newspaper would have.** I immediately called Amynah who – for reasons I cannot recall – was entertaining my friend Tim, passing through Montreal at the time. And thus I got to share with some of my best friends in the world, at the very moment when I set upon my career: I was going to be a writer. For real.

The magazine that took my commission changed my life: not only did it confirm to me that I had the chops to be a professional, but it also lit a passion in me for Canadian history. And it earned my loyalty: I went on to write several stories on odd corners of Canada’s past – Nazi librarians, forgotten Portuguese settlements on Cape Breton, draft dodgers hiding in seminaries, cannibals in Quebec , abstract artists in Saskatchewan… to name a few.***

And yet, without fail, whenever I told anyone the name of the magazine, they would titter, giggle, guffaw, and smirk. Because yes, the second-oldest magazine in Canada, and the only general interest publication solely devoted to our nation’s history is named for our national animal. The Beaver.

It is with great sorrow that I find that The Beaver is changing its name to… ergh… “Canada’s History.” A little on the nose, no? It's a little like calling "The Wizard of Oz" "Girl gets bonked on the head and has allegorical dream about the gold standard." In any case, it doesn't do justice to a magazine that's been going from strength to strength for the past decade or so.

More than being left utterly cold by the new name, I'm saddened to learn that our national rodent – the foundation of the fur trade that played such and important role in creating the country – was cast aside because, thanks to the wonders of this connected age, a few thousand dirty minded people kept washing up in the wrong place. I mean, in my mind, part of the whole point of a magazine about Canada’s history is to be above that sort of thing, and hold true to, well, Canada’s history. Most especially a magazine originally founded by the Hudson’s Bay Company which made it’s fortune selling the pelts of that proud and noble animal.

Because the magazine has such an important role in my own life, I will admit I feel the name change is a bit of a personal betrayal, and am thus probably more than a little biased. Lord knows, I was heartily sick of explaining that I was not, in fact, a pornographer when I wrote for them – I can only imagine what the full-time employees put up with.

But surely, isn’t there some chance that some sweaty-palmed 14 year old looking for nude pictures of Samantha Steele instead find an article on Canada’s most famous Mountie and realize, like I did, that there’s more to Canadian history than drunken Scots politicians and (probably also drunk) voyageurs ? Couldn’t the world use a few more educated perverts?

--
_{* The race was won by the only woman participating and – technically – her husband.
** I resold the piece a few years later to the same newspaper, so – yay me!
*** And I will name a few more, at great length, if anyone asks.}

Fire proof

2010-01-03T18:36:00.001-08:00

I like to think that, in the three years I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve developed certain standards, and a particular tone that you, my readers have hopefully come to enjoy. Namely, aside from one or two forays into Canadian politics, the topics here have usually consisted of a) odd historical tidbits or b) me doing something stupid and hurting myself.

The latter are, understandably, much funnier than the former. What I don’t do, for the most part, is make fun of other people, except in the mildest and most affectionate of ways.

All of this is by way of a prelude to a post that is somewhat out of character for me, so I apologize in advance.

As most of you know, Amynah is an Ismaili Muslim. We agreed, long before she was a glimmer in her Daddy’s eye, that Sana would be as well (“informed indifferentism” not being a viable alternative). And so, once the bulk of Amynah’s immediate family had arrived in Los Angeles, we had her “Baiyat” – basically a baptism – in the library of the local Ismaili prayer hall.

I won’t go into the details of the ceremony, first because it was pretty much exactly like a Catholic baptism, and second because the relevant prayers were all in Gujurati so I didn’t fully understand what was happening. It was an emotionally moving moment though, and I was proud to be there.

After the ceremony, we had Amynah’s relatives and the few lab-mates that were in town over to help us dispose of the barrels of curry Amynah’s Mom had rustled up for the occasion.

Among the attendees was a girl I will call Azin. She was, technically, a former volunteer in Amynah’s lab. She was originally from Iran, where she apparently trained as a medical professional of some sort.

She had joined Amynah’s lab a few months before Amynah as a paid assistant, hired by Amynah’s generous boss, who hoped to help her in her planned application for grad school.

Sadly, it didn’t really work out: as Amynah explained it to me, Azin’s English comprehension made it impossible to keep up with her boss’s scattershot management style, and he grasp of the business of the lab meant she needed a lot of guidance: ”A lot” emphasized Amynah.

Amynah’s boss wasn’t willing to just kick the girl to the curb, and so he agreed to keep her on as a volunteer. Except that she still didn’t have anything to do, and no one in the lab wanted to be saddled with hammering through the language barrier to help her out. In the end, her presence was a hindrance to the business of the lab, and so, regretfully, her boss had to tell her she was no longer welcome. She was fired, as a volunteer.

Except, she came back. And she still comes back. Every week, wandering amongst the beakers and microscopes of the lab like a perfectly coiffed automaton, just waiting for someone to take pity on her and tell her to do something. No one ever does.

When Azin showed up at the party, I was delighted: I desperately wanted to meet the only person I’d ever heard of who’d been fired from volunteering – and somehow been impervious too it.

She was the strangest person I’d ever seen.

First, she was beautiful – there’s no arguing that. But speaking to her was deeply unsettling – her eyes, always somewhat glazed, were pointed just slightly to the side of your face, as if her home planet was instructing via a holograph over one’s shoulder. Her posture was ramrod straight, and she did not walk so much as glide. She was like a porcelain doll, and about as lively.

The most basic interactions escaped her. At one point, Amynah’s Mom approached her, and said “Please, have some food,” pointing at the groaning table and giving her a plate.

“Yes, thank you, I am having a lovely time,” replied Azin, uncomprehendingly, plate dangling uselessly from her hand.

Amynah’s Mom was flummoxed: “No… food! Eat!” she said, pushing her unresisting guest to the table. I didn’t watch the rest of the interaction, but I wouldn’t have been the least surprised if my mother-in-law had to then explain to our guest what Earthling food was for.

Later, seeing her conversationally stranded, I went over to speak to her, asking where in Iran she was from. Tehran, it turned out. Making polite small talk, I said I’d like to visit her country someday.

Her eyes snapped into focus: “Where?”

“Umm…” I said, flailing for some Iranian geography beyond Tehran, “Well… I hear the mountains are nice.” (I figured if Iran has a nuclear facility in a mountain, they probably have a few more peaks, and hey… mountains are nice everywhere).

“Yes! We have mountains. They are in the north and the west. We also have deserts. These are in the center. We also have beaches, both north and in the south, but the ones in the southwest are nicest,” she said, gazing into the middle distance, as if reciting from a cue card.

“Oh… that’s nice. So… ummm…” I was completely unnerved. Was she going to tell me Iran’s GDP next? But she had already moved on.

“Tell me. Why is there a pretzel on your tree? What does this mean?” she asked suddenly, pointing to an Alsatian novelty ornament on the tree.

Relieved, I replied “Oh, that’s from where Amynah and I used to live in France. It’s a common food there, so that was kind of a souvenir.”

Azin locked eyes with me, unblinkingly: “Yes, but what does it mean?”

“It’s… I don’t know… from Alsace… food… pretzel… friendship?” I stammered.

“Friendship?” she inquired, relentlessly.

“Yeah… you know, you have the two arms… linking together…..” I offered, making it up as I went along. “Like a handshake!” I finished lamely.

She nodded, as if I’d confirmed something for her, and then wandered off to peer at a section of our kitchen wall.

It turns out that I had been the last person at the party to try to speak to her, and everyone else had had similarly unsettling experiences. Soon after our interaction, Azin decided that she had observed enough of our planet’s customs and made to leave. One by one, ramrod straight, she glided over to Amynah, then Amynah’s Mom and Dad, then her Uncle, graciously and formally informing them that she had had a lovely time, thank you for inviting her, and congratulations on the beautiful new addition to your family.

However rote these formalities, so strange and otherworldly was her manner, a hush fell over the room, and every eye on her as if she was an albino tiger or equally exotic and unpredictable creature. Anyone else would have been self-conscious in the silence – but she was completely unruffled by the scrutiny. When she walked out the door, it was as if a spell had been broken. There was a titter of nervous laughter as the tension broke.

Bewildered, Amynah’s Uncle glared at me: “What the hell was wrong with her?”

I replied, looking at the door through which Azin had departed, yet somehow failed to close properly: “That, Habib, is a living legend. That was the girl who could not be fired.”

A letter to Santa

2009-12-22T22:16:00.000-08:00

Dear Santa,

I first must start with an apology: I know that no one who lives on the thinning ice of the North Pole needs to be lectured on the importance of climate change by me. And Lord knows, I am well aware of the sacrifices you’ve made for the planet already: your transportation fleet is famously carbon neutral, your delivery system remarkably efficient, your workforce – though not unionized – appears to be content and well-remunerated in cookies and egg nog. You don’t even appear to have a heater in your sled: for someone traveling in an open-top vehicle in December, that bespeaks an admirable commitment to the cause.

So it grieves me greatly, to point out that there is an enormous blind spot in your ecological practices. Santa, you have to stop with the lumps of coal.

Now, this isn’t just my revenge for the Christmas of ’83 – I was horrible to my little sister that year, and I know I deserved that carboniferous rebuke. I’m over it, really. I’ve changed, and it’s time for you to change too, Santa.

According to the census data, there are roughly 2.2 billion nominal Christians on Earth, all of whom I’m assuming mark Christmas in some way. Slightly less than a third of them are children under 14 years of age. I don’t know exactly how you calculate your bell curve to decide who is “naughty” or “nice” in any given year, but using a formula devised by calculating the number of disruptive, bullying, or potentially criminal kids I remember from my grade five class (yeah Trevor Vowell, I’m looking at you), I’m going to say one in ten.

That means one in ten children will receive a lump of coal. Now, I’m not sure how your elves calculate a “lump” precisely, but I’m going to assume that you’re old school and haven’t converted to metric yet. Is one pound reasonable?

So, we have roughly 61,600,000 kids on your list, of which one tenth is “naughty.” If each one of them gets a pound-sized lump of coal in their stocking, that works out to 30,800 tons of coal. Of course, individual coalmines extract millions of tons of the black stuff from Appalachia’s mountains, so your contribution barely ranks as a molehill. But it’s only by each of us taking small steps, and making small sacrifices, that we can make big changes. And lets face it, as small steps go, 30,800 tons of coal is bigger than most.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not suggesting dropping what the coal represented. While simply not putting anything at all in the stocking might seem to be the simplest solution, we both know the psychology you were employing: leave nothing, and the miscreants could simply convince themselves that you’d forgotten them. Putting a big old lump of something so un-fun in the stocking is the equivalent of Uncle Travis leaving me one Canadian dollar in his will: a middle finger, notarized.

So you have to give them something. And, though it breaks my heart to say it, you also have generations of coal-pushing to make up for. While it’s tempting to stay in the energy line, the virtuous alternatives – wind turbines, solar panels – won’t fit in a stocking. Unpleasant as they would be, some sort of methane-based fuel source would probably be a little too vindictive (though not to Trevor Vowell, that rock-throwing SOB). Also, I assume you don’t want to overburden Donner, Blitzen and the crew, so we’ll stick with a one-pound-per-brat limit.

Might I suggest a tree-seedling? They’re small, after all. And they will grow, sucking up carbon and storing it away for decades. You could make up for your centuries of coal-profligacy in a few decades. Plus, if you give away pine seedlings, you’re even providing Tannenbaum’s for Christmases future. Not to mention, by giving away seedlings that kids will have to water and nurture, you’re providing them with a responsibility, and a lesson about the fragility of life on Earth. In short, it’s earnest, boring, and a chore they’ll be stuck with for years: much nastier than a rock they can throw out and forget.

And if they’re still on your naughty list the following year? Give ‘em cabbage seeds. Trevor Vowell hated cabbage.

Sincerely,
Mark

Don't worry, the car was fine.

2009-12-20T18:56:00.001-08:00

When you’re within a week or so of the predicted due date of your first child, it should not come as a surprise if you’re nudged awake at some ungodly hour with the news that the moment of truth has arrived. I had convinced myself that some part of my brain – the automatic bits that function in my sleep that stop me from falling out of bed – would remain alert to the possibility. I believed – subconsciously so prepared – that when the day ultimately came, and Sana was going to make her appearance, that I would be calm, smooth, efficient, and on top of things.

Let me set the scene. It is 4:30 in the morning, Thursday before last. It is a tradition of mine, religiously observed, to be asleep at 4:30 AM. So I perhaps did not initially respond so well when Amynah tried to interrupt my devotions.

“Mark” (nothing). “Mark!” (Thump! as her elbow connects with my back)

“Fwah! Whuh fah?!!” I said, pleasantly.

“I think my water broke.”

“Huh?”

“But I’m not sure.”

Slowly, the message sank in. There was something wrong with the bathroom sink, and it was Amynah’s fault, but I was supposed to fix it. Damnit… there was probably WAIT! WATER! BROKE! IT IS TIME FOR ACTION MAN!

I leapt (well, stumbled) out of bed, and fumbled for my wallet, where I kept the number for the maternity ward of the Ronald Friggin’ Reagan Memorial Hospital. I then spent five minutes attempting to locate my cell phone, which was on the lower floor in my jacket pocket… no, my desk… the kitchen counter?… another part of the desk??…. the living room?… my OTHER jacket pocket!! Phew. I ran upstairs, and dialed the number, pausing to catch my breath. Amynah was lying in bed, eyes half closed, in the middle of a contraction.

A nurse answered.

“Hi,” I said, calmly, coolly, in control of the situation, “My water’s wife just broke.”

“Excuse me?” said the bewildered nurse.

“My water thinks her wife just broke, but she’s not sure. We’re due in a couple of days,” I clarified, though confused by her reaction – surely they get calls like this all the time?

“Maybe I should speak to her,” said the nurse gently, sounding strangely amused.

I handed the phone to Amynah, who was holding back her giggles - not easy for someone in the middle of a contraction.

They told her to wait a few hours and, if it became more clear that the contractions were real and the ~~wife~~ water had indeed broken, we should come in. And so we went back to bed, lying awake and wide-eyed, pondering the momentous and awe-inspiring change that was about to occur in our lives… for about three minutes. Then we fell asleep until about 8 AM.

By 11 it became clear that this was the real deal, and so we grabbed the hospital bag with the needful items: diapers, baby clothes, clothes for Amynah, pajamas for Amynah, snack food for Amynah, water for Amynah… “Should we bring the car seat to bring the baby home?” Naw… (why I concluded this, I do not know). I remembered to bring the camera at the last minute, though I forgot any pajamas, changes of clothes, or toothbrushes for me. We piled into the car, throwing our small and insufficient pile of luggage into the trunk.

The Ronald Friggin’ Reagan Memorial Hospital is only a half hour walk from where we live – ten minutes by car. There is very little scope for something to go wrong in that distance. And yet….

Because I had, somehow, never managed to figure out where the parking for the hospital was, despite having nearly accidentally turned into it at least a dozen times, we elected to drive to the Emergency entrance and use the valet parking there. We pulled up, parked, and I popped the trunk. We hopped out, I grabbed the bag and slammed the trunk closed.

It bounced open.

I slammed it closed.

It bounced open.

I slammed it closed. It bounced open.

The valet looked at me, questioningly. “Sir?”

“This happened before… I can fix it,” I said, vaguely remembering an incident in Manitoba where my Dad had… reached in here… pulled that thing… yanked a cable…. Jiggled a latch… and slammed it closed!

It bounced open. I eyed the car angrily.

“I can figure this out… just a second…” I said, rolling my sleeves up like a proctologist.

“Umm, Mark? Maybe…. Ungh,” said Amynah, contractively.

“Right! Ummm… here’s the key. Look after it, will you?” I said the valet.

We went up the fourth floor of the Ronald Friggin’ Reagan Memorial Hospital, where Amynah was promptly, and with some urgency, draped in unflattering gowns, plopped on a bed, stuck with an IV, and covered with enough monitor patches that she rather resembled a medically-sponsored NASCAR driver.

And then we waited. And waited some more. We were visited by a host of medical professionals – nurses, charge nurses, residents, orderlies, specialists, nurses’ assistants, technicians… they all took pains to introduce themselves, but after the twentieth, I gave up trying to keep track of who was who, and instead identified them, like exotic syringe-wielding birds, by their plumage: blue gowns were nurses, purple were residents, a different shade of purple was a specialist, and our regular doctor – the doyenne of the delivery room – wore her own sweater and jeans, thank you very much.

To make a long story short, when we had gone to bed the night before, we thought we had five days to go. When we showed up at the hospital, they said we’d be parents within 14 hours.

We were still absorbing the implications of that timeline when a Purple-plumed Resident (Docotoris hospitalis violetus) appeared at the foot of Amynah’s bed. She had a serious, yet reassuring expression of her face, a mixture so self-contradicting and finely balanced that I can only assume she spent hours practicing it in her bedroom mirror.

She explained that Sana’s heartbeat was not responding well to Amynah’s contractions – it dropped considerably, though not dangerously, during the stronger ones. Our Doctor was recommending a C-Section. If we agreed, we’d be in the operating room in an hour, and parents within an hour and ten minutes. Things were moving fast.

After she left, Amynah looked at me, somewhat shocked: “This is a bit overwhelming,” she said, shakily.

“I know!” I said, “It looks like my betting-pool average came out almost exactly right. That’s amazing!”

More doctors and nurses came in to explain what was going to happen. Basically, Amynah’s head would be on one side of a curtain – the doctors and their scalpels would be on the other side.

“You’ll be able to watch what they’re doing if you want,” said a nurse to me. “How are you with blood and things like that? It can be pretty disturbing for some people. We need to know if you’re going to faint.”

“Honestly, I don’t know. I’m a writer - I’ve managed to lead a pretty sheltered life when it comes to stuff like that,” I said, “But I don’t really need to find out. I’ll keep my head down.”

I made a few phone calls to let our parents know what was happening, and before I knew it, they were wheeling Amynah away to be prepped. Shortly thereafter, a – nurse? orderly? friendly passerby? – told me to put on a space-suit they’d left for me and wait out in the hall, pining for the good old days when I was born and expectant Dads were free to smoke nervously in a waiting room, instead of worrying about fainting in front of a flock of giggling nurses.

Soon, I was asked to join the party in the operating theatre. As promised, there was a curtain separating the guest of honour from the festivities. I was given a chair. On our side of the curtain, there was just Amynah’s disembodied head, me, and a chatty anesthesiologist.

The anesthesiologist did not normally work deliveries, and she was thrilled - thrilled - to be here for our special moment.

“Wow, so December 10th. You know, that’s the day that property taxes are due in California. That’s what I spent my morning doing, meeting with my accountant.”

“Err… really? I didn’t know that,” I said as my mind screamed Why are you talking to me?

“Yeah! So you can tell your daughter that the day she was born, her anesthesiologist had to pay $5000 in taxes. That hurt!” she burbled on.

“Yeah, haha! We’ll do that,” I said, wondering how, exactly, I came to be forced to feign interest in someone’s taxes while at the same time clutching my wife’s shaking hand as she underwent major surgery to bring a new life into the world.

Fortunately, the conversation was interrupted by a nurse peeking around the corner – “The baby’s coming out now! Do you want to see, Daddy?” just as a sharp wail came from the other side of the fabric. Daddy?

“Umm, no that’s all right,” I said – I was perfectly content to wait until Sana was processed by the competent authorities, but my preferences didn’t matter – the excited anesthesiologist grabbed my arm and hauled me to my feet to witness Sana being rescued from the Lovecraftian spectacle of horror that the doctors’ art had made of Amynah’s lower abdomen.

_{"Lovecraftian spectacle of horror? You haven't even read any Lovecraft, you jerk!"}

I am proud to report that I didn’t faint – didn’t even come close – but I was right - wonder of birth or no, I didn’t want to see that.

A couple of minutes later, the same nurse returned: “Daddy – do want to cut the cord?”

“Ummm… do I have to?” I said (thinking I’m not your Daddy!), but again, I was pushed out from behind the protective shield of the curtain with a hearty “Go on! We’re fine here!” from the anesthesiologist, who I was frankly beginning to believe had it in for me for some reason. Carefully averting my eyes from the area where Amynah’s viscera were being aired, I made my way to where a team was checking Sana’s vitals. Someone in purple handed me a scissors-like device.

“Congratulations Daddy! Just cut here,” she said. “It’s kind of rubbery, so you have to cut hard.”

Isn’t this something a doctor should be doing? I thought, panicking. I don’t even know how to pick up a baby, let alone use sharp medical implements on one. And why do they keep calling me Daddy? They knew my name this afternoon!

“I’m left handed,” I said, in a last-ditch plea to get out of it. “I don’t know if these scissors will work for me.”

“It won’t be a problem,” someone said, guiding my hand. It wasn’t.

And it wasn’t a problem when they handed my daughter to me either – I carried her like I’d been doing it all my life. I wasn’t a problem when I brought her back to Amynah – there was no need to avert my gaze from the gore on the table this time, because I was too busy staring into Sana’s eyes, which were wide open, staring at my white-masked face, at this strange new world of colour-coded people, of tubular florescent stars and beeping boxes and finally, once I cleared the frontier of the curtain, her mother, The Disembodied Head.

And there we sat as a family – me, my wife, my daughter – for a precious moment, it was the three of us, in a tiny little world of our own, together for the first time. Except, of course….

“My God, she’s beautiful,” said the anesthesiologist, softly.

What a wise woman, thought Daddy.

Sana Myriam

2009-12-12T07:45:00.000-08:00

6 lbs, 19.5 inches, born Dec 10, 6:02 pm by C-section. She's sleeping in my arms as I type this one-handed.

Rudolph the sun burned reindeer

2009-12-08T15:21:00.000-08:00

One of the things that made us feel at home in Strasbourg was when we realized that the merchants in the Palais Rohan farmer’s market were recognizing us from week to week – just as they were a part of our lives, we had, through our patronage – become a part of theirs. It really made us feel that we were a part of the city.

So we were delighted to discover that Los Angeles has similar outdoor markets as well. There are four that we’ve been to so far, but our favourite is also the closest. It’s small: tucked into a parking lot of the local library, and there isn’t a lot of variety in the stalls.

The highlight, as far as I am concerned, is the “food court” area, where merchants sell crêpes, tamales and – my favourite – really excellent coffee. Though I’ve cut back considerably on my coffee intake, the West LA Farmers’ Market coffee-pusher sells the best brew I’ve ever had. Given his perpetual vibration, he clearly stands behind his product.

The market is a real neighbourhood hangout – there are activity tables for the kids, locals selling their handicrafts, and tables for people to enjoy their snacks. Best of all, there’s a stage, occupied every week by a resident DJ who keeps the mellow reggae tunes pumping.

There are also local bands that come to play as well. This week was a Hawaiin ensemble, strumming island-tinged Christmas tunes on their ukuleles for an appreciative crowd. Even better, the musicians were joined onstage by hulu-dancers in training, ranging from age 6 to 60.

I suppose this is what Christmas looks like in a place where the lyrics to “Let it snow” are purely theoretical.

Once in a lifetime

2009-12-04T13:38:00.000-08:00

Haven’t been blogging here much due to other writing obligations. Also, we’re sort of in hunker-down mode – we’re only 5-9 days away from our two due dates, and so making the most of our relative freedom from responsibility by… laying around watching TV and reading. On the other hand, we did take follow many of our friends’ advice and go out for one last “grown up dinner.” It was at Arby’s, sure, but we didn’t make off with any ketchup packets to stock our fridge. That was pretty grown up, right?

Moving on… A couple of years ago I did a post about music that I associated with the various cities I had lived in to that point.

That post was marking the anniversary of our move to Strasbourg. Of course, now we have another city to add to the list, but I don’t want to do a music post about it. Other than the Red Hot Chili Peppers “Under the Bridge” all the songs I can think of that are about LA seem to hate the place: Bran Van 3000 (“What am I doing drinking in LA?”) The Decemberists (“How I abhor this place/ Its sweet and bitter taste/Has left me wretched, retching on all fours/ Los Angeles, I'm yours”), Tom Petty (“It’s a long day, living in Reseda/There’s a freeway, running through the yard) even the Mama’s and Papa’s “California Dreamin’” was more about being unhappy with the East Coast winter than any specific love for LA.

Of course, all of that says less about L.A. than it does the temperament of musicians.

My brain connects music to people much more strongly than to cities anyway, and there’s something about road trips in particular that makes the association really stick. I’m always going to think of my friends Carol and Jocelyn when I here Len’s “Steal my sunshine,” as that song playing on the radio roughly five hundred times the day we shared a U-Haul to move from Halifax to Montreal (me) and Toronto (them). My friends Yann and Félicie will always spring to mind when I hear Kool and the Gang’s “Ladies Night,” thanks to Yann’s DJ-ing choices on our trip to Provence earlier this year. And I can’t ever hear Inuit throat singing without being transported to a rental car somewhere around Thunder Bay Ontario, en route to Winnipeg with my friend Jon.

In any case, the strongest association I have is for a road trip I took years ago with my friend Todd in the months before he went to London. A friend of his from McGill who I didn’t really know was down to visit him, but I had some time to kill and so we three hit the road to show her the sights: Peggy’s Cove, Mahone Bay, the Anapolis Valley and Lunenburg. At some point, as we pulled out of the visitors’ parking lot in Peggy’s Cove, a Talking Heads “Once in a lifetime” came on: “You find yourself in another part of the world… you may find yourself with a beautiful house, and a beautiful wife. And you might ask yourself, well, how did I get here?” And yes, I now know that the song is about alienation, but I’d always heard those first few lines as if they were sung with incredulous joy, like David Byrne couldn’t believe his good fortune.

“Hey, turn it up. I love this song,” I said from the back seat. In the front passenger seat, Amynah obliged me. I’ve associated this song with that day ever since.

But as Amynah and I move into yet another whipsaw change in our life (the last four years have, after all, seen us get married, quit our jobs and live in three different countries on two different continents), that song keeps returning to me: Once more, I find myself in yet another part of the world, wondering, precisely how I got here, but deeply glad that my beautiful wife’s favourite Talking Heads song didn’t play that day instead.

Place your bets!

2009-11-28T20:21:00.000-08:00

_{The video has nothing whatsoever to do with the post. But you people deserve some entertainment.}

This is for you readers who don't know me on Facebook (and why is that, anyway?)

I'm soliciting your best guess as to when the baby might arrive - the due dates are either December 9 is you believe our American doctor, or December 13 if you believe our French one. I'm running a bit of an experiment - I'm averaging all the guesses so far, and seeing how close our collective wisdom matches reality.

Closest guess wins a prize! But not a good one!

Comment away!

Be true to your school

2009-11-25T13:56:00.000-08:00

Most of the time, the culture in the U.S. is not so radically different from that in Canada. The friendliness of the people is more-or-less, the language more-or-less the same, the merchandise on the shelves more-or-less the same.

This weekend, I had probably one of the first “I’ve moved to another planet” moments. And that was when one of Amynah’s cousins invited us out to his part of the city to watch his high-school marching band in a parade.

Of course, I was familiar with the concept of a marching band, of course – my hometown is home to one of the world’s larger military tattoos, so I’ve seen a few drum lines in my time. Not to mention, I was in my high-school’s music programme, albeit as a percussionist, thus saving me the trouble of having to learn any music.

But the American high-school marching band… that is something else entirely. It’s a quasi-military spectacle, as interpreted by a Vegas Casino – all sequins, showmanship, and saxophones.

The parade, it turns out, was not a parade but a competition, with some fifty middle- and high school bands, plus their associated drum-lines, colour guards and cheerleaders, strutting their stuff in front of thousands of onlookers and a raised stage of stern-faced judges, whose eyes were unreadable under the shade of their Stetsons.

_{The colour guard introduces the next band}

Amynah’s cousin explained to me that the judges were scoring the musical platoon on a number of factors: music, obviously, but also the orderliness of their ranks, their stride, the choreography of their “colour guards” (these were basically cheerleaders carrying signs and banners of the school colours), the sparkliness of the uniforms, and “spirit.” This last was measured by the band shouting their school team’s name at top volume en masse.

Of course, each school had its own traditions, which were reflected in their remarkably elaborate uniforms. A number of the bands on parade came from schools that evidently had some Scottish connection, as they were in full Highland regalia: kilts all around, bearskin hats, a stepdancing colour guard, and – to my delight – bagpipes.

Now, being from Nova Scotia (New Scotland, for those of you not up on your Latin) I’ve seen more than one kilt and bagpipe consortium in my time. Most men I know – let alone high-school boys - cannot be induced to don a skirt unless they have some connection to the hills and lochs of Scotland, however generationally distant.

Not so here. The area where Amynah’s cousin lives has a very large population of Chinese immigrants, meaning that most of the kids suffering the full Scottish regimental first thing on a chilly late-fall morning were more likely to have descended from families that hailed from Dhezhou than Dunbar.

_{Give me an ach!}

When we first moved to the U.S., people who showed us around would frequently point out some local oddball – like a burly biker on a neon green Harley-Davidson – while saying “only in America.” They were usually wrong: in my experience, there’s no country that can’t boast its share of eccentrics and obsessives. But I really think that only in America would you find hundreds of East-Asian descended high-school kids marching in lockstep to the keening cadences of “Scotland the Brave” while their sequins glitter in the early Saturday morning light. It was strange, and kind of inspiring.

_{Yeah, I know I already posted on this in French. I’m not going to be twice as interesting just because I’m writing twice as much.}

Conan II: You really shouldn't have encouraged me

2009-11-18T20:40:00.000-08:00

Part One of this far-too-long post is over yonder. We return to the Late Night With Conan O’Brien taping, where our hero, battered, bruised, and cowed, sits near the back of the theatre. The taping is about to begin.…

Their raid into the audience complete, the Max Weinberg’s Psychological warfare unit returned to their glittery barracks to one side of the stage. Andy Ritcher lumbered to his booth off to the other side of the stage. And then a great hush fell over the studio… Ladies and gentlemen, Conan O’Brien!

APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! Aaaargh! I didn’t notice the sign, and I’m so dazed from the abuse, I forgot to clap. A glowering page glances at me, nudges his colleague – I start hammering my hands together with a vigor that could crush a golf ball, would security had let me through with one.

Meanwhile, the curtains in front of the stage have parted, and out bounded the star of the show, a gawky mess of dangling limbs, goofy hair and dead, soulless eyes.

The applause sign flickered madly, but it needn’t have – we knew what to do. We rose, five hundred quislings welcoming the tanks in Oslo, and gave him a standing ovation. Yet it wasn’t enough… the light kept flashing, demanding more APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! it went on far longer than the sight of a man walking into a room warranted. Finally, as Conan came forward, he raised his hands for quiet – we double checked with the sign to make sure it was ok, and slowly stopped clapping.

“Well, that’s all the time we have tonight,” he said, and we did laugh obediently, with a hint of hysteria. But wait, what was that? A flash of movement, by the camera. Is that guy holding cue cards? That was the first joke of the evening? You mean all of this – the abuse, the threats, the menacing stack of cattle-prods off to the side of the stage, all of it was in aid of using us for the set-up for a lame joke? I feel so used.

That moment would be one of the few in which Conan interacted with the audience at all. As the monologue continued, I was surprised – naïve me – to realize that he was not addressing his words to us in the studio at all, but rather to the camera now blocking the hallway through which we had entered. In the vague mental picture I’d had of late night television, I’d always believed that there were people sitting in the general vicinity of the camera, to whom the host was facing. Not so – the performance was for the camera – we were merely to act as prompts for the audience at home, creating an atmosphere of “excitement” – because after all, spontaneous applause sounds much the same as applause extracted under duress.

This was driven home for me when I watched the episode as it was broadcast later that night. At one point in the monologue, he started a joke “So, the 7/11 convenience store chain announced that they were going to start selling their own brand of wine [pause for laughter] they’re going to make it out of grapes that had been sitting in the store for three years.”

On the broadcast, this punchline got big laughs, while the set up only got a few titters. In fact, it was the other way around – the idea of 7/11 wine was funnier than the joke Conan’s writers spun from it. However, with the miracle of sound editing, the audience at home was convinced that Conan was knocking us dead.

Of course, we jumpy and gun-shy at this point, and so were inclined to make offerings to appease our sign-flashing overlords whether overtly demanded or not: other lines that inexplicably got applause, sans prompting, and before their accompanying punchlines were delivered: “President Obama is visiting China” (Yay! Clap clap! Woo!) “So, research shows that people are watching more TV” (Yay! Woo! Clap clap! Wait – is this a good thing?) “Stephen Tyler and Joe Perry have announced that Aerosmith is not breaking up,” (Yay! Woo! Clap clap clap! Yay! Wait – this is not a good thing).

On to the next joke! “There was a study done that proved that big breasted women…” at which point he was interrupted by a woman’s cry of “woo!” from somewhere behind me in the audience. I cringed: we aren’t allowed to independently “woo!” They specifically, and very emphatically told us that there was to be no “woo!” permitted outside of the context of general applause. Averting my eyes in anticipation of the crack of the Greyshirts’ pistol as she was summarily executed, but Conan was merciful: he waved them off, noting that she did possess very large breasts, which did pleaseth him.

The joke continued: large breasted women, according to this study, apparently have higher I.Q.’s than their less endowed sisters: he was interrupted again by applause from exactly half the women in the audience. I also heard some guy audibly remark behind me “but… that doesn’t make any sense.” I hope he wasn’t trying to impress his date, because in so doing he either called a buxom woman dumb or a smart girl flat. Either way, he proved that that people with no breasts are often the most intellectually handicapped of all.

Lost in this reverie, I missed the punchline (well, can’t be bothered to repeat it – it boiled down to “men are pigs”) but I was brought back to the studio through the insistent blare of the band starting up the recessional as Conan finished up his monologue.

You might remember from my previous post that I had come with Dylan, from Amynah’s lab, and his coworker Chris, and his wife. Now, here’s something about Chris that is important: he’s a Republican. A thinks-Sarah-Palin’s great, huntin’ fishin’ traditional-marriage-protecting healthcare=communism Rush Limbaugh-listening Republican. A Republican who disdained a ride to the studio in my Japanese-import Honda Civic, with it’s un-American fuel economy and conspiracy-of-the-One-World-government metric odometer, in favour of his patriotic SUV.* His kind is a rare bird in Los Angeles, and his views are alien to my worldview, but Amynah assures me he is a very nice, if somewhat argumentative guy. (*Though, granted, that might have been because he had to be somewhere else after the show).

His politics would be utterly irrelevant, except that Dylan had no idea who the guests were going to be when he made the reservations. I suspect, given that we’re heading into Oscar-movie season, that he had been hoping for a Hollywood star of some variety.

I invite you to imagine the general disappointment when Conan looked at the camera, and uttered the most bald-faced and nonsensical lie I’ve ever heard: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a very exciting show tonight – Al Gore’s here!”

The applause sign was flashing insistently, the band was wailing away, the audience was cheering. Dylan was clapping dejectedly. I hazarded a glance down the row to where Chris sat. He was scowling, his arms crossed.

Suddenly, I knew that it was going to be an entertaining evening after all.

We were now in what would presumably become a commercial break. Conan took his place behind his desk, in front of a window that looked over downtown Los Angeles (sadly, I regret to inform you, this too was fake. Were there a window in that spot, it would look over a Lovecraftian spectacle of horror – the writhing breeding colony of comedy trolls from where the warm-up comic sprang).

Meanwhile, the band continued to drive home subliminal messages to compel our compliance (why else play a cover of the Clash’s “Clampdown?”). Conan sat behind his desk, reviewing his notes, Ritcher perched perched behind his announcer’s kiosk, like a kid at a lemonade stand on a rainy day. He doesn’t look very comfortable in that APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! And we’re back!

First thing first, Conan tells us what will be happening on tomorrow’s show: “Academy Award Winner Reese Witherspoon will be here!” APPLAUSE! “Star of the new movie Precious, Gaboures Sidibe!” APPLAUSE! “And musical guest Kris Allen” (who? Nevermind!) APPLAUSE!

Again, for viewers at home, there was some creative sound-editing going on, because it turns out that while I was just happy that tonight’s guest was someone I’d heard of, my fellow inmates were less pleased. Chris, of course, was fuming that he had driven halfway across Los Angeles in order to breathe the same air as the arch-fiend, but he was not alone in his disappointment. The words “Reese Witherspoon” and “tomorrow” elicited a collective groan from the crowd: instead an evening swooning over the sweet nothings uttered by America’s Sweetheart® we were getting an evening of thinly-veiled digs about our lifestyle choices from America’s Sanctimonious Uncle®.

Zipping right along, Ritcher was allowed to grace the stage with Conan for a “In the Year 3000” segment, in which I noticed that what few funny lines there were went to the host: Ritcher strained mightily, but failed to make funny a joke about baseball player Sammy Sosa bleaching his skin to join NASCAR. It occurred to me that if it is the writers who are coming up with all this stuff anyway, would it kill them to share out the few scraps of humour they generate, instead of sacrificing their entire harvest to the insatiable maw of Conan as if appeasing some jealous god? The man’s the host after all, he doesn’t need to APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE!… and we’re back to commercial: the band is playing a salsa version of “Stay in your seats and no one gets hurt.” Ritcher has been banished back to his lemonade stand in the corner and APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! We’re back, as Conan introduces Al Gore.

APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! Us marionettes rise on our strings to give Gore a standing ovation, apparently for navigating the distance between the studio’s stage and Conan’s couch without being blocked by the Supreme Court. The elephant in the room (yes, that was a clever reference to the Republican Party logo. No need to congratulate me for my cleverness – I’ve got it covered) was sitting on his hands, his eyes shooting daggers at the stage.

The interview was a strange experience. I’d seen late night talk shows before, so I wasn’t expecting a Frost/Nixon-type interrogation. Nontheless, something about seeing it in person made me contrast it with how I conduct my interviews: a question, listen to the response, a follow-up question, maybe a clarification, then on to the next topic.

After the initial queries about Gore’s Nobel Prize win, Conan brought up the book the former VP was on the show to promote. There’s a children’s version – Conan says he hasn’t read it, then goes on a tangent about scaring his kids with predictions of climate doom. Gore makes polite noises about the youth of today solving the problems of tomorrow – I steal a glance at Chris, who is clenching his fists. No matter - Conan’s now on to geothermal power… Gore says there’s enough to power the US for 35,000 years – what? How? What happens after that? Do we run out of Earth? – no matter! Conan’s off windmills killing birds, largely as excuse to show funny looking graph in Gore’s books. The graph is duly laughed at by everyone – I look at Chris, who doesn’t want to do anything positive Gore-related, but would like to believe he’s being ridiculed. So he splits the difference, and rather than laugh, he smirks, angrily.

The graph purported to show windmills were not – as some opponents claim – as much a threat to ornithological life as your average housecat or tall building. “It’s not a real problem” asserted Gore confidently. “Wait” thought I, “Windmills are usually located in different ecological zones than housecats or skyscrapers – we can spare a few million pigeons, after all, but not so many whooping cranes.” No matter! Conan’s off to Afghanistan now – should we invade them for their geothermal stores when we run out in a few millennia? No, it’s something about Obama’s current choice, and Gore’s diplomatically saying he wished Johnson (wink wink) had figured out an exit strategy when he went into to Vietnam (wink wink) all those years ago. Chris’s wife is restraining her beau with a whiteknuckled grip, as his face turns purple from the effort of not screaming “Liar” when Gore suggested that perhaps the presence of American soldiers might be resented by the freedom-craving citizens of Central Asia, and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! We’re done with Gore, and now on to our next guest – some dude from a sitcom I don’t watch. He’s amusing, but he’s clearly terrified of by the juxtaposition of Conan’s idiot smile and his pitiless stare, as he’s squirming like a five year old with a bladder disorder. They pretend to joke about Star Wars, and then the guest (Jim Parsons) oh-so-casually mentions he used to do a commercial where he had to pretend he was raised by wolves and oh what a coincidence we happen to have that commercial right here says Conan. They ran the commercial, which featured Parsons pretending to nurse at a wolf’s teat. The APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! sign made its demands above me, but by now I couldn’t be bothered. I was wrung out, wearied by the sham. We in the audience were clearly key to the feeling of spontaneity a show like this required. But couldn’t they give us a little credit? Did they seriously believe that we didn’t know this was discussed and possibly rehearsed ahead of time? Stop lying to me, Conan!

“Well, we’ll have to have you back, you’re so much fun to talk to,” said Conan to his horrified guest and APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! we’re off to commercial.

Now, despite having just said how much he enjoyed talking to his guest, during the intermission, while we waited for the musical act to set up, Conan – despite sitting right next to Parsons – did not say a word to him. That menial task he left to Ritcher. Instead, he got up, wandered to the front of the stage, surveyed the huddled masses arrayed before him with a sociopathic blank expression, wandered back behind his desk, and stood for three minutes next to the apparently animated chat his supposedly buddy-buddy sidekick and “so interesting” guest were having, while making no effort to participate or even feign interest.

Observing this strange non-interaction, I was inclined to chalk it up to our host’s focus: he was clearly psyching himself up for the last part of the show, preparing his lines and delivery in his APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! and we’re back!

“Ladies and gentlemen… Jason Mraz, the Tonight Show band, and the San Diego Gospel Choir!”

That was it. So, apparently, not psyching himself up so much as being a bit of a jerk. But no matter, we had the musical guest to endure! APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE!

Again, having re-watched the show after the fact, I can assure you that the song that was broadcast was not at all the song I heard in the studio. The song that was broadcast was a low key, happy little number with an uplifting chorus. Such are the wonders of mixing boards and sound engineers. Lacking those ameliorating mediators, what we experienced, in that over amplified echo chamber of a studio, was a man miming at playing guitar while occasionally signaling his distress via an improvised semaphor system – that being the only way he had to communicate over the cacophony emanating from behind him. If you watch the show online, you can see the panicked look in the eyes of the choir members behind them – they can’t hear themselves think, let alone sing, have no idea if they’re in the same time-zone as the song’s key, and are clearly unsure as to whether they’ll survive the racket long enough to see their loved ones again. It was an auditory horror show – if a jet engine opened to full throttle been added to the mix, it would have not been out of place, and in fact might have been an improvement.

The song mercifully clanged to an end, and we all shifted in our seats – finally, now we could leave. Right? No, not quite. Conan leaped on stage, shaking hands with the musicians as we pounded our palms bloody at the behest of the sadistic bastard running the APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! APPLAUSE! sign. But still, they would not let us go. Eventually, our arms tired, and the clapping petered out. Conan came forward, and sang a comical little ditty to thank us for showing up. Then, in a puff of sulfurous black smoke, he was gone. Andy Ritcher walked out a side door, Jim Parsons went through the back stage. The musicians chatted amongst themselves, packing up their instruments. And still, they would not let us leave.

When will they let us leave?

No, I'm not writing about Twilight to drive up my traffic.

2009-11-17T16:26:00.000-08:00

_{The Bruin Theatre, with red carpet}

Ah, another lovely California morning. As I meander through the Westwood Park on my way home from walking Amynah to work, I pause to take in the scene: behind me, the pok-pok-pok of socialites on the tennis courts behind me, in front indignant pigeons glare at me for interrupting their bath with my camera. Off in the middle distance, on a spot carefully chosen to avoid the sweep of the jets coming from the water sprinkler, an elderly Asian woman practices her Thai-Chi, her movements apparently undisturbed by the throbbing of the helicopter above, which is monitoring a possibly dangerous cloud of estrogen developing two blocks north of Wilshire Boulevard.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have seen the face of madness up close, and it looks like a Twilight fan.

The second movie in the Twilight series had its premiere last night at the Bruin theatre. Ordinarily, I would not be aware of this development, and would not have come prepared with my camera, except that that theatre is on the way to Amynah’s work, and there were people camped out for the premiere five days ahead of time.

Five days.

Now, I won’t comment on the literary value of the books, nor of the cinematic value of the books – I’ve consumed neither. And in my day, I’ve been known to camp out in far less hospitable conditions for cultural phenomena for which I had an embarrassing zeal _{(cough… Aerosmith)}.

Of course, I was 19 at the time, and it was only one night, in my hometown. The woman in the front of this line – according to the Los Angeles Times – was 37 years old, and had driven all the way from Arizona. That level of fandom – be it for glitter-vampires or pseudo-Buddhists with laser-swords – is utterly beyond me.

_{Cardboard cutouts at the head of the line. Insert your own joke here about Robert Pattison's acting here.}

According to the article, and my own observations, the crazed Arizonan wasn’t all that unusual – at least one other person interviewed in the Times story was in her mid-thirties, and evidently willing to spend over 100 hours sleeping on concrete in order to show their devotion to fictional characters half her age (or perhaps the actors portraying those characters, also roughly half her age). However, as one traveled further down the line, the average age of the fans descended out of the pedophile zone and closer to what you’d expect to be the target audience for a movie based on young-adult novels. Roughly half, for reasons that are a mystery to me, were wearing branded cardboard crowns from Burger King.

I stopped to get some pictures, and as I did so an old man on a bike stopped to ask what was going on.

“It’s the premiere for New Moon,” said one of a quartet of black-mascara wearing girls applying the final sprinkles of glitter to their handmade “Team Edward” sign.

“Oh, that’s… good,” said the man, obviously no further enlightened.

I will confess I do not at all understand the logistics of camping out for an event like this. Presumably, one wants to get closer characters/actors that moved you. But if you want to impress “Jacob” or “Edward” (or “Bella,” should you be that way inclined) do you really want to do so smelling like someone who’s been sleeping in the same “Edward ruined it for men” t-shirt on a sidewalk for the better part of a week?

_{The line stretched all the way around a city block.}

In any case, I got whacked with the second-cousin of all migraines last night, and therefore missed the excitement of the actual premiere. Amynah (Team Jacob for those wondering), specifically timed her departure from the lab to check out the madness.

Parking, which that morning had been $8.00 for the day had gone up to $30.00 for the evening. Helicopters clattered overhead. Traffic was chaos, as half the streets in Westwood were either blocked by the police, thronged with fans and stages for the television crews, or slowly draining a thick stream of black stretch limos. There was also a line of young women Amynah described as "VIP party girls" - done up to the nines in short dresses and heels, apparently there in some official capacity, presumably hired to inject some glamour for the television cameras that could offset the tediously unfamous, average-jane fans lining the security fences.

Undisturbed by this the girls – and let me assure you, there was nary a Y chromosome to be seen in that line – were screaming at the blackened windscreens of the limos, waving their signs, clutching laminated pictures of their heroes on popsicle sticks. Sadly, the big stars were in the last limos, so when Amynah went by, no one recognizable was on parade.

Amynah reports that even the hardcore fans were sometimes confused as to who was who, although always retaining a firm grasp on their importance in the canon: “Who’s that?” “Oh, he’s one of the Vulcani. He’s really cute.”

_{* Part II of my Late Night with Conan experience is coming soon, though I don't know if I can muster the same bile. I'll try.}

Conan is at war with Eurasia. Conan has always been at war with Eurasia.

2009-11-13T20:14:00.000-08:00

_{This image most likely belongs to NBC.}

There is a technician in Amynah’s lab who arrived in Los Angeles at roughly the same time as we did. Dylan’s originally from Reno, Nevada, and was unsure how long he was going to stay in Los Angeles. He had therefore promised himself that he would ensure himself at least one “showbiz” experience, and so booked himself four tickets for the Late Show with Conan O’Brien. He offered a ticket to Amynah, but her brother and sister were scheduled to be in town at the time. Not to mention, the tickets contained dire warnings about highly restrictive toilet-access conditions to which Amynah's current pregnant state would not permit her to comply.

So her ticket went to me, and the other two went to her other co-worker, Chris, and his wife.

We’d been instructed to be in line no later than 3:30. Apparently this was so that we could go through the essential audience-softening technique of standing around in an iron cage for an hour in the hot sun. Once we were properly dehydrated and footsore, the NBC pages released us from our paddock and herded us, single file towards the studio. And lest you think I mean “single file” in the sense that most grown-ups understand it i.e. small groups of people walking behind one another, let me assure you: they meant single file, like we were in kindergarten lining up for gym class.

After one particularly officious page ordered Dylan and I to separate – one behind a tree, the other in front of it because if one of us stood beside a tree it wouldn’t be single-file anymore I mentally dubbed them Greyshirts. I wasn’t alone in this assessment – the guy behind us said “Jeez, I’m looking around for the guard towers.” He whispered it though, because he didn’t want the Greyshirts to hear.

As we approached the studio, a Greyshirt explained that we would have but one chance to use the bathroom before entering the studio. After that – assuming they were satisfied with how we made it through the metal-detector and frisking - you would have to hold it, until such time that we were released from the confines of the studio.

The Greyshirts directed us to our seats in the very back of the first tier of seats, to the right of the camera above the entrance in this photo. Not bad.

The auditorium filled up, and then we waited. Janitors vacuumed the set, technicians wandered to and fro, music blared at a level that pretty much forbade conversation amongst audience members. In retrospect, this was clearly because they were worried we were formenting a plot. Clearly they were concerned that our previous humiliations had not left us docile enough – the stage was defended by four beefy security guards, arms crossed, glaring at the crowd in front of them. Greyshirts patrolled the aisles, keeping a gimlet eye out for potential transgressors of Order.

More telling than the puffed-up martinets with the peacock badges was the two producers, standing near the stage entrance. They stood, a man and woman dressed with a casual sloppiness that spoke to their authority on the set, surveying the crowd ranged in front of them with hard eyes and distrustful expressions. Even when they spoke to each other, out of the corners of their mouths, they never once dared take their eyes off the rabble.

Clearly, constraining our movements and asserting their control over our bodily functions would not be enough for them. And so, they brought out the warm-up comic to destroy our souls.

“So, any of you Twitter? Yeah? You’re stupid. Go suck on a muffler.”

There was a murmur of protest at that “joke,” but after ten minutes of similar abuse (“You’re name’s Tannis? What, your doctor not know how to spell Janice?”), we were beaten, emotionally drained, unable to resist. It was Stockholm syndrome. We were ready to laugh maniacally when told, sit when told, stand when told, and applaud until our palms bled as long as the flashing white sign told us to.

To test our Pavlovian conditioning, the producers then brought out a test-celebrity, to make sure that we would behave with the appropriate docile mindlessness when a real one arrived. And so Conan’s sidekick Andy Ritcher was brought out to introduce the show.

It was at this point that I realized that NBC was even more evil than events to date had made me believe: when Andy took the mike from the warm-up comic I saw what the distance and strange dimensions of the studio had hidden from my perception before – the warm-up comic was, in fact, a homunculus, probably purpose-bred in a studio backlot, raised to loath humans, nursed on bile and posion. Either that, or Andy Ritcher is a giant of Himalayan proportions, because he could have crushed his colleague with his thumb. In fact, his distaste for the gibbering goblin before him was plain, and the temptation to do just that must have been great. I suspect the only reason he didn’t is because purpose-bred comedy-trolls don’t come cheap.

Andy then introduced the Max Weinberg band (performing without its eponymous leader) which proceeded to further reduce our capacity for resistance, by overwhelming our sense of balance and hearing via a very long, very loud, trumpet-heavy jam session that demanded… I choke on the horror of the words… audience participation. Like the agents of many a totalitarian system before them, Colonel Max Weinberg’s melodic shock-troops ensured compliance of the herd through randomized acts of terror. Shoot one, and the rest will fall in line. We did not know, in that darkened studio, who they would come for next – a neighbour, a loved one, but please, we prayed to our indifferent gods, do not let that iron fist point the microphone at me. Clapping fearfully, shocked under the barrage from the brass-sections, we sat sweating as one by one our comrades were plucked from our number to squall “Baby baby baby” into a mike. It was awful: there were no mercy, no regard for age, race, handicap. It was relentless, cruel, and effective: “Please, take my neighbour, don’t pick me! I’ll tell you anything! Laugh at anything! Just let me live!”

Our capitulation was complete. We were ready for ~~The Presence~~ Conan.

Besides, think of how much cheaper gloves will be!

2009-11-11T10:28:00.000-08:00

Does anyone need more baby-related blogging from me? Well, tough, it’s the only thing I got going on in this town until I go to a Conan O’Brian taping on Thursday.

Amynah and I have been slowly acquiring the considerable infrastructure seemingly required by babies – dressers, clothing, bassinets, car seats, diaper pails… the list is endless. While diaper pails, changing tables and bassinets are all very important, there are specific items I see as being relevant to Dad-specific-tasks. Strollers are one, largely because they have wheels, and therefore belong in the domain of things governed by the Y-chromosome.

In preparation for this purchase, both Amynah and I have been accosting random pram-pushing strangers on the street and asking them what they like and dislike about their wheels.

It’s been an interesting experiment in gender perceptions. Most of the women we’ve spoken to recommend strollers based on how easily they fold, whether they have a storage basket, and how heavy they are. Men, on the other hand, seem to like cup holders.

Personally, I seem to be attracted to carriages with big wheels, the better to go hiking in the local mountain parks. The other day, I stopped a woman pushing a stroller that seemed to match what I’d like – not too big, large wheels, fairly stylish. I asked the woman about it, and she said “Yeah, it’s great! Except it doesn’t fold very easily. And it isn’t car seat compatible. And my first child outgrew it very quickly. And it’s way too heavy for me.”

Needless to say, her husband had bought it for her.

I didn’t want Amynah transporting our child on a white elephant. Her choice of stroller, after polling friends and strangers, was the MacLaren Tech XT. I can’t help but laugh at the model name – whenever I hear it I can’t help imagine it in a commercial, zipping in slo-mo over the Salt Flats trailing a dramatic plume of dust.

_{Image from themaclarenstroller.com}

Saturday we drove out to the Babies R’ Us store to pick one up: no luck – they don’t carry it. This was deeply frustrating to me – I had decided to get a stroller, so goddamnit, I wanted to come home with a stroller. So yesterday, I headed out again, walking this time to a baby matériel depot.

I walked in and told the friendly woman at the desk the model I was looking – refraining from using my Monster Truck rally voice (“Maclaren Tech XT …xt… xt… xt… Versus… The Bugaboo Brawler! This Saturday! In the Diaperdrome!”) She immediately pulled one out for me, showed me the various features (it holds a baby… and rolls. No cupholders, iPod stations, or DVD players). Apparently, the promotional material for this particular stroller boasts that it was designed by aircraft engineers.

I would have been happy to have paid and wheeled it out of there on the spot, but she told me that the store had received a recall notice on the stroller just an hour before. Being more irritated at having had walked twenty blocks* only to be thwarted again, I didn’t ask why. The saleslady took my name and number, and promised to call when the strollers had been fixed.

It wasn’t until that evening that we learned what the recall was about. Amynah’s uncle called us in a tizzy, telling us that the MacLaren strollers were being recalled in their millions because they are apparently amputating the fingers of their passengers. Somehow, the saleslady neglected to mention this.

Now, there’s a certain amount of panic about this online , with plenty of people saying they’ll never use MacLaren strollers again. For our part, we’re still going to buy ours.** The defect is only relevant if the child sticks their finger in the hinge while the stroller is being folded – in other words, if they’re doing something they’re not supposed to do, something happens that isn’t supposed to happen. It doesn’t strike me as particularly onerous to keep an eye out to make sure that infant digits are out of harms way when folding the stroller, especially as the problem is now being fixed. Other things that will hurt your fingers when you stick your fingers into them include bagel cutters (me, age 22), car doors (my younger sister, age 3), and dogs (me again, age 7, 9 and 18). Not to downplay the trauma suffered by the parents and children involved, but the world is full of risks and, quite frankly, 12 non-fatal injuries out of the millions of buggies sold over the last several years is a better safety record than pretty much any other household item I can name, including telephones and houseplants.***

Nonetheless, I can’t help but be somewhat concerned. If the MacLaren was designed by aircraft engineers, I’m not quite sure that I’ll be comfortable flying ever again. Maybe next time, they should try using baby-stroller engineers.

* It would have only been 12 blocks, were it not for having to circumvent the iron fencing defending the enormous Mormon temple complex between my apartment and the store. That is, the enormous complex for the Mormon temple – it isn’t a temple complex for enormous Mormons. I think.

** Nonetheless, in honour of its monster truck heritage, I’m going to call it “The Mangler.” Take that, Bugaboo Brawler.

*** Besides, don’t babies’ fingers grow back?

Arguments for helmets

2009-11-06T08:41:00.000-08:00

Two years ago at roughly this time, Amynah and I were still rubbing the soreness out of our legs from our 160 km bike ride from Strasbourg to Basel, a trip we undertook, in retrospect, largely so that we could have a crazy story to tell at dinner parties. It was the first trip we had done of that length, and it really opened up the region to us: after that epic, the prospect of pedalling to Obernai, Offenburg or Baden Baden wasn't so forbidding.

We put on a few thousand kilometers on our bikes in France, and desperately wanted to maintain the habit here. So, we bought a rack, roused our Canadian bikes from their three-year slumber in a Montreal friend’s basement, and carted them all the way to Los Angeles, visions of beach-side bike paths dancing in our heads.

When we told Amynah’s Mom we were doing this she laughed, promising us that if we ever used the bikes, she would buy us a baby carrier, in the same way one might say “I’ll eat my hat.” So far, she has nothing to worry about: with Amynah’s pregnancy, she’s been unwilling to hop on her bike, and I’ve little incentive to explore the distances this city requires of its commuters on my own. So the bikes are gathering dust (well, greasy smog residue) on our balcony.

We’re actually not in a bad neighbourhood for biking by local standards – there are dedicated bike lanes that actually go places. Unfortunately, as with most North American cities, motorists tend to see cyclists as their enemies. In our short time here, we’ve met two people that have come out on the losing end of run-ins with cars while on their bikes (to say nothing of someone we know who was run down by an SUV while at a crosswalk).

Earlier this week, a Los Angeles doctor was on trial for aggravated assault, for an incident in which he cut in front of a pair of cyclists and deliberately slammed on his brakes, causing them to smash into his car. He told the responding police officer that he did it to “teach them a lesson” because they were biking side by side, so that he couldn’t pass them.

Now here, as in most jurisdictions, bikes have all of the rights (and responsibilities) that cars do on the road. If you can keep up with traffic, you’re allowed, as a cyclist, to occupy a car lane.

The cyclists had GPS equipment that proved they were traveling at 30 mph when the incident occurred, which was the posted speed limit. Meaning the driver’s defense was, essentially, that he attacked them because they weren’t letting him speed.

He was found guilty.

Anarchist with an accordion

2009-11-01T20:09:00.000-08:00

My friend Félicie sent me an email the other day, recommending I watch this video of Renaud's "En Cloque - Renaud is a French singer that Félicie described as "half rocker, half anarchist but very sweet." He made his name writing political protest songs.

"En Cloque" is a French slang terms for pregnant - this tune is about watching his wife progress through her pregnancy. I really have no idea what he's singing about - the lyrics riddled with slang terms I can't follow even with Félicie's helpful translations - but for some reason I can't stop watching this and getting bewilderingly emotional (it is a pretty little tune).

French anarchists obviously are a bit more multi-faceted than their English speaking brethren - I don't see Johnny Rotten sneering his sentimental way through an accordion based-tune about the miracle of childbirth.

Hallowe'en on the high seas!

2009-10-30T16:29:00.000-07:00

Hallowe’en is almost upon us, and so – following a tradition honoured as much in the breach as the observance, I give you The Mark Reynolds Hallowe’en Tales of History Horrors. Previous editions have featured Alsatian folklore and cannibal Canadians. This time, I’m going back to the maritime well, for the incredibly stupid and horrifying tale of The Saladin.

The Saladin was a barque, built in England but based out of Gaspé in Quebec. In 1843, she was under the command of Sandy McKenzie, who had taken her to Peru to pick up a cargo of several tonnes of guano to deliver to England.

_{The Figurehead of the Saladin. Image from the Nova Scotia Museum}

While in the South American country, McKenzie was accosted by a Mr Fielding, who had recently escaped – along with his son - from a Peruvian prison, and were now stranded in an unfriendly country without funds. Taking pity on a fellow English-speaker – even one with so sketchy a history - McKenzie agreed to allow the unfortunate duo to work for their passage out of Latin America.

McKenzie should have listened to his Mother: Never pick up a hitchhiker.

Once aboard, Fielding learned that in addition to the reeking piles of excrement in the hold, the Saladin was carrying a substantial shipment of Peruvian silver - bars and coins - across the Atlantic. Fielding decided that he would like that silver to be his own.

Mckenzie’s poor judgment of character apparently did not stop with his dinner guests: within a matter of days, Fielding and his son were able to recruit half of the Saladin’s crew into a ruthless mutiny. With calculated brutality Fielding and his new allies butchered the officers and half the crew of the vessel, throwing the corpses overboard.

The Saladin was now an outlaw vessel – a floating rat’s nest stuffed with birdshit and manned by murderers, thieves, mutineers and pirates. Worse, they were murderers, thieves, mutineers and pirates with serious trust issues. With weeks ahead before any landfall could be made, the brigands made a pact: all weapons – swords, firearms and blades – would be thrown overboard.

The pact made, the sailors made to sail to an isolated cove where they could abondon ship, part ways, and spend their ill-gotten gain. But then one of them searched Fielding’s cabin, and discovered a brace of pistols. Clearly, the chief mutineer was not playing by the rules.

Within the day of leading the mutiny against Sandy McKenzie, Fielding joined him in the dark Atlantic, followed shortly thereafter by his son, despite the boy’s pleas for mercy.

Now there were only six crew left – Fielding, his son, and all the officers were dead. Unfortunately for the dirty-half dozen, they had not thought to spare the life of anyone with any knowledge of navigation. I repeat: they killed the navigator, leaving no one on board who knew how to drive the poo boat.

So, instead of following the original plan and sneaking into an secluded and empty cove, the Saladin drifted into Country Harbour, Guysborough County, a small fishing port on Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore, running aground on a rocky point. The locals were suspicious that the name of the ship had been inexpertly obscured, (kind of like taking the plates off your car), and that the boat was remarkably understaffed, and that all offers of help were rebuffed by the mysterious vessel’s hostile crew. So they called in the authorities.

The Saladin killers were brought to trial – four were found guilty and hanged. As murderers, their bodies were not interred in a proper cemetery, and instead were buried under a crossroads – their corpses (possibly) further mutilated by being impaled on an iron spike before burial, as was common practice at the time. Two are believed to be resting under the sidewalk by the Public Library on Spring Garden Road in Halifax.

The universe still exists. You're welcome.

2009-10-26T11:47:00.000-07:00

_{This girl barely came up to my knee. I wouldn't try this even if you put me in a suit of armor first.}

We had our first visitors this week – our friend Chihiro, from Amynah’s former lab, and Brigitte, her former boss. Brigitte didn’t stay with us, but as she has many scientific collaborators here in California, she spends a month here every year to touch base and recharge her batteries.

On Saturday, she took us to Venice Beach, where we were hoping to gawk at the assembled freaks. Amynah, in particular, was hoping to go to Muscle Beach, haven for those whose anatomy requires topographic maps to describe. Sadly, the temperatures were just cool enough that most of them were flexing to keep warm in their gyms, with the exception of one barrel-chested guy in roller-skates and a Star-Spangled speedo, whose intimidating scowl was considerably undercut by the fact that he was holding a radio blasting Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Lovely.

The Venice Beach boardwalk is a circus of jewelry sellers, noxious clouds of incense, medical marijuana dispensaries, and street performers of unreliable quality. There’s a skateboard park, where we watches a serious four year old girl whip around an empty pool like she was born with wheels on her feet. I would have been jealous, but while it seemed effortless, her expression made it look like she’d rather be doing her taxes.

At one point, we all sat near the water’s edge, watching sailboats in the distance. As we chatted, a pair of girls in bikinis came in our direction. One stood in the water, the other got ready to take her picture: as a wave came in, the girl in the water jumped up, kicking up her heels and putting on her “laughing” face – striking the kind of pose you see in fashion magazines when they’re trying to capture “carefree youth.”

It was one of the more “meta” moments I’d ever witnessed: they weren’t having fun – they were playing at having fun, mimicking photos of people pretending to have fun. I would have taken a picture of them taking a picture of something they’d seen in a picture, but I was afraid the paradox would cause the universe to collapse in on itself. Plus, I didn’t want to look like a pervert.

Of course, I can still only drive one car at a time.

2009-10-21T11:40:00.000-07:00

Anyone want more driver's permit's stories? No? Tough, it's all I got.

When I converted my Quebec driver's permit for a French one in 2007, it was a straight exchange - I marched into the prefecture with the appropriate documents and a photo, handed them over, and a week later I received a cheap-looking piece of pink paper granting me leave me to drive the roads of La Republique.

When I returned to North America, things were not so simple, but since I had a Canadian permit on record, I didn't need to turn in my French one. So, now I have a Canadian and a French permit.

California doesn't exchange permits with any jurisdiction, so when you show up from out of state you have to, at a minimum, take a written test. If you're from out of country, you have to do a road test as well.

Mine was Monday. I showed up bright and early, taking my place near the head of line. An employee came out, and demanded my registration and insurance information, then told me to wait for the guy who would be testing me. I sat in my little Honda, looking up at the approach of… the same guy who had the confrontation with the far-sighted Russian the month before.

He turned out to be very nice when not defending the integrity of the DMV eye charts, and I did fine, but it was strange being re-tested for something I’ve been doing for half my life. I felt like I was being judged by my composure. Should I make small talk, or would he mark me down for being inattentive? If I’m too quiet, will he think I’m too nervous? All in all, it was a little like being on a date, complete with the concerns about being seen as “too fast.”

That said, I really had nothing to worry about. They can’t confiscate the permit issued by Nova Scotia (let alone my back-up permit from France): If I flunked, I’d simply have driven home.

All right, I'm calming down now.

2009-10-15T12:56:00.000-07:00

Wow! I want to thank everyone who left advice or encouragement on my last post, as well as those of you who emailed me. It’s all very encouraging, and has helped steady my nerves a great deal - it's comforting to know that babies don't necessarily turn your life upside down. I can deal with merely being knocked sideways. However, if any of you have more ideas or thoughts, keep them coming – they were much appreciated by us both.

While Amynah understandably nervous about labour, she’s much calmer about the “ever after” part than I am. For Mothers, I think there’s a certain confidence about the fundamentals: warmth, love, and food are biologically provided for. Dads lack the same innate knowledge – I’ve seen our daughter on the ultrasound, and felt her kicking, but it’s an intellectual understanding. And since I lack the anatomical tools to provide for my daughter’s basic needs, I turn to the traditional solution of homo habilus: somehow, I am certain, that if I can just acquire the right stuff, I can make everything all right.

Comparing the barren, utilitarian space that is “the baby’s room” with the rainbow-bedecked fantasy suites that fill parenting magazines in our doctor’s waiting room was filling me with anxiety: shouldn’t there be colour in there? A Hanging Garden of stimulating mobiles? Calming pictures of barnyard animals and puppies? We have an open staircase in our apartment with rough concrete steps: shouldn’t I coat those with rubberized foam or something? Is it crazy to want to sand the corners off all of our furniture? (Yes, it is).

Of course, I turn to technology because there’s not much else I can do, other than make life easy for Amynah. Also, to be frank, I am not completely at ease with children, especially babies. Nor are they completely at ease with me. A couple of weeks ago, we bought a bassinet from a woman in Brentwood. Her four-year-old daughter was enchanted with Amynah, laughing whenever Amynah laughed. As those of you who know Amynah can guess, this meant the girl was laughing a lot. In contrast, whenever I looked in the kid’s direction, she would cling to her mother’s leg, saying at one point “Mommy, I don’t want to see that man anymore.”

Sure, I was a stranger. But a mere month before, my friend’s similarly-aged daughter had done her level best to ignore me during our recent visit, while fawning over Amynah: "Amynah, do you want to see my room? Amynah, can you read me a story? Amynah, are you going to stay here?" Though she'd met me before, I was wallpaper to her. In fact, the only time she deigned to recognize my presence at all was in the morning, when Amynah was sleeping in. The little girl looked at me: “So, Mark…” she said, pushing aside her bowl of cereal. “Yes?” I replied, grateful to be acknowledged, ready to be the star. She put me in my place immediately: “What do you think Amynah would like for breakfast?” Apparently, she thought I was Amynah’s manservant, as she later ordered me to water the plants in front of her house.

Then there was the little French girl who tried to blind me. It’s not just the ladies I fail to charm: my friend’s son, when two years old, pressed himself into a corner in abject terror when left in a room with me, and the following year refused to say my name – I was just the guy living in Amynah’s apartment. He also head-butted my nose, but that was an accident. Probably.

Of course, babies are a different kettle of fish, and I’m sure ours will like me just fine. If not, I’ve already started buying stuff to win her over: who wouldn’t love the guy who puts this doll in their crib?

Shifting gears: help! baby!

2009-10-12T11:53:00.000-07:00

I’ve been told by more than one person that my increasingly erratic posts here have been trending negative since my arrival in Los Angeles. That’s not at all why I started this thing – there’s plenty of cranky people elsewhere on the internet, after all – so today, I’ll try and switch gears.

As I mentioned here to zero fanfare a few months ago, Amynah and I are expecting a baby girl sometime in December (I say “sometime” as our various French medical professionals gave us two different dates, our calculations gave us a third, and our new American doctor gave us a fourth. I feel that I should start a betting pool).

Like most new parents, Amynah and I have absolutely no idea what we’re in for, or what we’re doing. We’ve picked up a couple of stuffed animals, and a meager selection of clothes, and a couple of things like a bassinet and some sort of vibrating baby-massage chair doohickey that I wish was ten times larger.

We’re many thousands of kilometers away from our immediate families and closest friends, and I, for one, am terrified. So I’m throwing this one out to you, dear readers. After all, all you are parents, or had them, have kids or were kids.

Give me your advice, both technical, emotional, practical and philosophical. What courses/videos/books were helpful? What advice did you get that was helpful? What was useless? How did you get through labour? What do you wish you had known, getting into parenting? What do you wish your parents had known, when they got into it? What are the frustrations? What are unexpected joys? What gets you through the long nights of crying (please assume that “coffee” and “love” have already occurred to us). How do you change a diaper? How do you trick your spouse into taking your turn to change the diaper?

How do you raise a good person?

I realize nobody is born to be a “Mom” or “Dad” – you’re born to be whoever you are, and the Parent/Role Model part is figured out as you go along. But as long as I have readers – even if most of you never comment – I figured I’d try to learn from your collective wisdom.

So please, whether you have kids or not, or normally read me hear or not - leave a comment, or email me your thoughts –big picture, small picture, whatever you got. It’s either you, or my daughter will be raised according to the wisdom of Wikipedia.

Well, isn't that... nice.

2009-10-08T17:45:00.000-07:00

This is the Los Angeles Cathedral - also called Notre Dame (well, "Our Lady of the Angels"). They aren't fooling anyone.

Star watching in LA

2009-10-02T12:43:00.001-07:00

_{Smog over LA. To be fair, there are fires in the region and actual fog near the coast, so it looks worse than it is.}

I posted about this on my French blogalready, but here it is again in English…

We visited the Griffiths Observatory this past weekend, as part of a massive tour of the city organized by a colleague of Amynah’s. The Observatory is a fascinating place: it was built in the 1930s as a “public observatory” – that is, one not to be monopolized by scientists, but rather by amateurs keen to discover the wonders of the galaxy themselves.

_{Hollywood sign, as seen from the Observatory}

It is still used as such. The night we showed up, the lawn in front of the facility was crowded with amateurs with their own telescopes, some of whom were there with their expensive devices solely in order that visiting children could peep into the cosmos.

We weren’t there for the science (though I was sorely tempted to check out the film in the Leonard Nimoy Theater) but rather for the view of the city.

_{One very, very, small part of Los Angeles, as seen from the mountains}

The sun sets quickly, and early this far south, so we were able, in the course of half an hour, to sip our drinks while watching the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles skulk in and out of the thick smog, witness a tremendous sunset, and then watch the streets emerge from the gloom with their endless strings of lights.

Risky business

2009-09-29T11:25:00.000-07:00

Health care reform is a huge debate in the U.S. right now. As Canadians who spent the last few years in France, Amynah and I are still grappling our way through the American system – learning the differences between HMOs and PPOs, and the complexities of private health insurance.

So far, our only direct experience with the medical system was last week, when we had our first appointment with Amynah’s new obstetrician. The contrast with France was astounding.

We had visited several different doctors in France – our GP, a specialist when I broke my arm, and the “gynecologue” to monitor Amynah’s pregnancy. In each case, the doctors in question had exactly zero staff. They took their own appointments, did their own paperwork, answered their own phones. And they were, without exception, very good at what they did.

When we showed up in our new doctor’s office it was a bit of a shock. There were three people behind the reception desk and a nurse’s aide we had to get through before seeing the doctor, who was accompanied by an intern and who handed us off to a nurse for the ultrasound.

This, in itself, was not too surprising – it’s a hospital-based practice, and not shockingly overstaffed when compared to a Canadian practice. Still, our insurance is paying for it all.

What did shock me was the feeling that we had walked onto a car lot. It’s a for-profit health system, operating in a legal system that allows for massive lawsuits. Which means that it is in the doctor’s interest to “sell” you on tests that will a) earn the practice money and b) further cover people’s butts if things go wrong.

In this case, the tests we were being sold were for inherited disorders. According to the papers we were given, the American Geneticists Association recommends that everyone be tested for these illnesses – impeccable family histories notwithstanding - at a cost of roughly $800 each.

The documents we were given threw up some scary numbers for the diseases “One in 150 women is a carrier” for Fragile X (which, incidentally, is far higher figure than I’ve seen online, leaving me to feel even more manipulated) was one number that was particularly emphasized. That the actual incidence of the disease was only one in 4,000 was barely mentioned at all. Amynah and I declined the tests, at which point we were forced to rethink our decision by having to sign a ominously-worded waiver absolving the doctors of liability for our choice.

All of which seemed designed to push prospective parents – nervous and overwhelmed as they are – to shell out money for tests that they probably do not need. Meaning the technicians, labs, doctors and pharma-companies are - 3,999 out of 4,000 – wasting their time with tests that needn’t be done, however profitable they might be. While those resources are being consumed, the parents-to-be are sitting on pins and needles and out of pocket to the tune of $2,400, money which might have gone to their child’s college fund.

Mountains and molehills

2009-09-28T17:12:00.000-07:00

This weekend, friends of our from Amynah’s lab took us on a massive tour of Los Angeles, the only way that Los Angeles can be seen – by car. We covered some 130 miles (which is… errr… 200 km?).

The most interesting thing we saw (in the picture above), for me, was this dune in a park near Manhattan Beach, a ritzy part of town south of Santa Monica.

College and high school football is a huge - huge deal here. Roughly half the LA Times sports pages are dedicated to the sport.

This park, with its enormous sand dune, was used by a select group of athletes in the know. They would race up the unstable, mushy slope as a means of strengthening their calves and thigh muscles, the better to do battle with their meathead peers on the athletics field.

However, with the internet, word got out. Soon, athletes from all over Los Angeles were converging on the little park. And they brought their friends, their girlfriends, their cars, and their car stereos.

_{This picture has nothing to do with this post. This thing isn't a real island - it's manmade, built to hold an oil rig.}

The local residents were somewhat discomfited by this invasion. The newcomers were loud, they stayed all hours, and their presence denied others the use of the park. Unavoidably, there were class and racial elements to the conflict – the locals were rich and mostly white, the invaders poor, and mostly black.

And so, the authorities solved the problem by putting up a fence, forbidding anyone the use of the dune.

I think all of this could have been avoided if people here just played hockey instead.

Yeah well... so's your mother.

2009-09-25T11:57:00.000-07:00

_{The crowded fountain in the apartment courtyard}

I suspect there are few places in the world better for people-watching than Los Angeles. The city is renowned for attracting the odd, off-kilter, and bizarre.

One of these is my landlord.

Our landlord was German who spend part of his early life not far from Strasbourg (he was the son of a factory manager posted to Lorraine in 1940, until the family suddenly had to leave in 1944. “We were refugees from the West,” he told us, seemingly expecting sympathy. No comment.) He now owns our building and at least one other in our neighbourhood, as well as a mysterious “business” in Chile.

He is rich as Croesus, and owns at least three identical Mercedes Benz (white, black and red). He wears a cowboy hat at all times, as well as a Bolero tie fashioned from some kind of animal horn. He wears two $15,000 watches, one on each arm – one is set to German time, the other to local time.

As a landlord, he’s not bad – the place is well maintained, and most of the initial problems we had moving in were dealt with expeditiously. Nonetheless, I am plotting against him.

Why? Well, the day we viewed the apartment, after chatting about eastern France (and glossing over what, precisely, his father’s affiliations were that earned him, at age 28, the strategically important position of manager of a steel mill in occupied territory during wartime), he asked where in Canada we were from. I told him Halifax.

“Oh, Halifax, I have been there!” he said.

“Great! Were you on vacation?” I asked, expecting polite noises about my hometown’s many charms.

“No, no. My friend was visiting, and he had a heart attack. I went there to visit him in the hospital,” he said.

“Oh, that’s too bad…” I began, but he interrupted me.

“Let me tell you something about Halifax. I’ve been to many countries all over the world…” he began. I began a smile, expecting that he would finish “and the people in Nova Scotia were by far the friendliest!”

Nope.

“… and the women in Halifax were the ugliest I’d ever seen. Really. The portrait of the Queen in the hospital was the best looking one I saw the whole time I was there.”

Now, Dear Readers, I would like to be able to report that at this point I drew myself up to my full height and launched into a furious defense of the womenfolk of my home province. But understand: we had not yet signed the lease. I had no home, Amynah really wanted the apartment, and this Stetson-wearing pseudo-cowboy held the key to my future comfort.

“Oh, well…” I smiled weakly, “I guess you were unlucky then.”

Forgive me. Though in my defense, I'm considering hiding a dead fish in one of his lovely cars.

A day at the beach. Well, an hour.

2009-09-22T11:08:00.001-07:00

Venice beach and the beach of Santa Monica are relatively close to our new home, and so on Sunday we decided to take a trip to the seaside. Unfortunately, we left it far too late, arriving at the seaside at close to 4 PM. Even though that’s pretty late in the day for beach going, the roads around Venice Beach were choked with traffic – it took us 15 minutes to go through one light.

Parking was going to be impossible (and expensive - $12 minimum!) so we headed north a mile or two, to Santa Monica. For some reason, even though the two beaches are pretty much the exact same stretch of sand, Santa Monica was nearly abandoned when we arrived.

We didn’t stay long, and I wasn’t the least bit equipped to be on a beach (next time, I bring sandals) but it was interesting to see the differences between the two sections of coast. Venice Beach (what little we saw of it) is a refuge for bikers, hippies, and people with tattoos on their necks. The big event we saw there – other than the boardwalk lined with noisy bars and tables of junk jewelry and psychics’ stalls – was a massive drum circle on the sand, a throbbing mass of pot smoke, sweat, and whirling dreadlocks.

Further north, we crossed an invisible line in the sand onto the considerably more staid Santa Monica beach. It lacked a boardwalk – instead, it was lined with a grassy verge dotted with folks reading, and a bike path on which cyclists and rollerbladers competed for space. The big event on the sand here? It appeared to be an outdoor prayer meeting of a Santa Monica synagogue.

Notre Dame... again?

2009-09-21T11:40:00.000-07:00

Le rayon vert de la Cathédrale de Strasbourg
Uploaded by StrasTv. - Up-to-the minute news videos.

Some time ago I did a post on the fantastic pulpit in the Church of Notre Dame de Strasbourg - I mentioned, offhand, that on the equinox (I probably said solstice) the sun will shine through a particular pane of glass onto the carved crucifix. I've never seen it, but here's a video, of what it should look like tomorrow.

Tales from the DMV

2009-09-17T15:16:00.004-07:00

So, after sitting in the DMV for two hours, to register my car in California, that happy moment arrived when they called my number "B128 - counter 18." Clutching my heft of paperwork, I went 18-ward, arriving with a cheery "Hello!"

"Grunt," said Miss (Ms?) Counter 18.

I explained what I wanted, and she asked me what paper I had brought. I opened my folder, and presented her with the wonders within: a document from Homeland Security! Another document from Homeland Security! A document form Honda! A document from the dude outside who inspected the car! A document from Nova Scotia! A document from my new insurer! My license! My lease! My smog inspection certificate!

"Grunt," said Miss Counter 18, obviously rendered speechless by the splendour of my muniments.

She proceeded to thump away with some ill-humour at her computer which, judging by her repeated appeals to her coworkers, was not able to cope with the ineffable foreignness of my car. Judging by the sub-voce imprecations afterwards directed at her coworkers, their advice was not helpful.

At one point, one of her passing colleagues dropped by to offer a hand. As she explained the difficulties the mysterious stranger from the Great White North was posing to her database, he eyes lifted, first to me, and then to a point somewhere over my right shoulder. I stood still, worried that perhaps my cowlick was acting up again, perhaps assuming some obscene form on my head.

"Hey!" he suddenly yelled. "What are you writing?"

"Nothing," said a Russian-accented voice behind me (not my cowlick - phew!). "Just... something personal."

I turned. All of us in the DMV that morning turned, desperate as we were to counter the shattering ennui of waiting, waiting, without even some piped-in smooth jazz to alleviate the torment. The Russian was a big man, in a t-shirt with an airbrushed logo for a heavy metal band, clutching a pad of post-its and a pen to his chest, jaw thrust out defiantly.

"You were copying the eye test chart," said DMV guy.

"I was not. Besides, it's a free country," said the Russian.

"You can't do that. Go sit down over there," said the DMV guy.

"I can write what I want. You can't tell me what to do! It's a free country!" said the Russian.

The exchange continued like this, until a security guard finally came out and escorted the man off the premises. The last I heard of him, he was yelling "I'll sue! I'll sue!"

Disappointed, all of us in the DMV went back to inspecting those points in the middle-distance that had occupied our attention before. I looked up at the eye chart - it was suspended from the ceiling, about ten feet behind the counter where I stood. I could read it easily with my glasses on. I asked Miss Counter 18 where one normally had to stand to take the eye test.

"Right where you are," she said, as she entered my address in her computer with extraordinary viciousness.

I fell silent. The Russian had been standing about 20 feet behind me - three times further than he needed to be to pass the test. If he was copying the numbers from there without aid of a telescope, why did he need to copy them at all?

Me versus Substance X.

2009-09-16T12:56:00.004-07:00

When you’re a married couple planning on driving across a Continent in a two-door Civic, what you take with you can become a matter of friction. Our car was packed to the brim, and virtually nothing was easily accessible. And, as is usually the case, it was always theother person’s stuff that was superfluous: if Amynah wanted access to her other pair of shoes, for instance, it would be my guitar that would be in the way. If I was attempting to squeeze in the tape recorder I use for interviews, one of Amynah’s superannuated pharmacology textbooks would be clogging the box.

One item that caused a certain amount of stress was my camping gear. "Why do we need a gas stove? Why do you own two hatchets?* What use for a mosquito net hat are you going to have?" asked Amynah, as I grunted and cursed, trying to squeeze these items into my bag.

As it turns out, plenty. We didn’t have power on the first day we lived here, and so our tea was brewed over the blue flame of my camp stove on our balcony, and the two flashlights I packed came in handy in the dark.

The upstairs bathroom has a skylight that has, over the years, been encrusted with a black coating of Substance X. Personally, I believe Substance X to be a combination of shower steam and smog residue, baked on the interior of the glass by the sun. Amynah, on the other hand, was convinced that it was a toxic mould of some sort. Given that she is relentless, pregnant, and able to conjure up all sorts of horrific scenarios as to what could happen if she or the baby inhaled Substance X (“We could have some sort of lizard baby, with two tails. You don’t want a two-tailed lizard baby do you?”) I was induced to clamber up onto the bathroom counter, stick my head into the skylight, and investigate.

_{Skylight, with Substance X}

A swipe with a sponge did nothing, but when I poked at it with my jack knife (thanks Yann!) some flakes came loose – which I immediately inhaled as they fell on my upturned face. This was not going to be pleasant.

Fortunately, Amynah had brought home a filter mask from her lab for the job, but that did nothing for my eyes (not to mention my precious, precious hair**). Whatever Substance X was, I didn’t believe it was toxic, but on the other hand, I didn’t know it wasn’t.

Suddenly, a flash of brilliance. I would wear my mosquito-net hat, and the filter mask. Not only would it prevent me from turned into a reptilian monstrosity, but I would also be able to justify having carted the damned thing 9000 km in the first place.

Yet somehow, when I summoned Amynah to the bathroom to deliver a triumphant “I told you so!” all she could do was laugh, and insist I post this photo on the blog.

_{* Why do I have two hatchets?

** I recently got my first LA haircut. The barber referred to my hair as "strong" as he rubbed the cramps out of his scissor hand. If you're going to charge me twenty bucks for a 15 minute cut, you better work for it buddy.}

Movietown

2009-09-13T21:02:00.003-07:00

Now that Amynah and I are settled, we're making some small efforts to exploring our neighbourhood. Before moving here, I knew nothing about L.A. at all, beyond what I'd seen in the movies (almost none of which was flattering). I'd never heard of Westwood, but once we let our friends and family know our address, everyone hopped on to Google Maps.

"Oh! You're near where Nancy Reagan lives!" said Amynah's Mom, inexplicably enthused by the idea.

"You're not too far from Hollywood," my Dad informed me.

"You're really close to the Playboy Mansion! It's like, four miles from you! Seriously!" said an excited friend, seemingly expecting me to be so electrified by the news as to drop the phone that instant and race there that instant. To save him embarrassment, I won't tell anyone here that that was Tim.

Tim also found out that in addition to our proximity to UCLA, our part of town is apparently well known for its historic theatres (I think historic in this context means "old" not in the sense that "Lincoln was shot there." And "old" means "pre-1960" not "around when Lincoln was shot." I'm still making adjustments here people, bear with me). They're certainly local landmarks, and Amynah and I fully intend to visit one for a matinée as soon as possible. They're certainly shinier than my previous city's landmarks.

Home tour

2009-09-11T12:56:00.003-07:00

_{From the Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy, week 25-28: "You will be busy buying final supplies, finishing your baby's room...." Here you go baby. The finest empty boxes and plastic bags money can buy.}

We're home, and I have Internet! Life is grand. Now that we have sufficient furniture to sleep, eat and read, I present you with our life so far.

_{Our bedroom.}

We live in an area called Westwood, which is very close to UCLA - close enough that Amynah can walk. We're very (by local standards) close to Santa Monica, and the Pacific, though we haven't yet visited. Being this close to the ocean means its a little cooler here than other parts of the city, and we're nowhere near the wildfires.

_{The main floor, kitchen, dining area and parlour area}

Our immediate neighbourhood is pretty well appointed: all the major amenities are here. There's even a bagel shop, and a French bakery (staffed by une vrai française. Neither matches up to Fairmount/Christian standards, but I'll take what little bits of home I can.

I will write more later, but now I desperately need to catch up on the work that somehow slid over the previous month's epic journey.

Los Angeles: The beginning of the end of the beginning

2009-09-04T11:06:00.004-07:00

At some point, I am going to do a proper post with photos, amusing anecdotes and the tales of woe and suffering that seem to please all you readers so much, but at the moment, I'm going to stick with a "I'm still alive post."

In effect, we arrived in Los Angleles on Sunday. Since then, we have found an apartment, Amynah got a Social Security number, we've transferred our meagre belongings to our place, I've ordered, but not yet received, phone and internet service, and we've done a little bit of furniture shopping.

Amynah's lab has been astounded that we've accomplished all that we have as quickly as we have, but for me, it's been endless: we have been living out of our suicases since July 31. I want my own bed, in my own place, and to have the choice of clothes that aren't wrinkled from weeks of being crammed in a bag.

The ferocious heat isn't helping my temperament either - the temperature is supposed to reach 34 degrees celsius today. The sun is my enemy. My car is covered with ash from the wildfires (which are fortunately nowhere close to where we live) - the last two nights, it was like the sun had set two hours early because of the smoke. Or maybe that's just LA's famous smog - I haven't had time to ask.

Once I have some semblance of a normal life, I'm sure my humour will improve. So far, the few people we've asked for help have been incredibly generous - our apartment is full of borrowed camping equipment, dishes and food. Amynah's relatives have been very generous with their hospitality. And our apartment is amazing - two levels, two bedrooms, a balcony, parking, quiet neighbourhood near UCLA. So at some point, our lives will be much better, and easier.

The end is in sight, but it isn't nearly close enough.

City of Angels. Fire-breathing Angels.

2009-08-31T14:35:00.002-07:00

_{The Oregon Coast}

We’re now settled into our home for the next seven days – a hotel, somewhere in and/or near Santa Monica. Blogging will continue to be short, sporadic, and probably cranky, because it’s 99 degrees Celsius here (4,544 degrees Fahrenheit) and half the city appears to be on fire.

We’re looking for an apartment, along with a million other stressful things that need to be done, like setting up a bank account, registering the car, getting a doctor and, eventually, finding me a job in a state where the government is paying its bills with IOUs. But no, I’m not stressed.

_{Somewhere on the highway where James Dean died.}

Newport, Oregon

2009-08-27T21:20:00.003-07:00

_{Beach, moon, fog}

We spent three hours locked in Portland's traffic, navigating construction-clogged rural roads, in order to make it to the Scenic Pacific Coast Highway, which everyone assured us was beautiful.

So far, nothing but fog. Beautiful, ocean-obscuring fog.

Welcome to America

2009-08-26T17:45:00.006-07:00

_{Mount Robson, British Columbia}

This trip – and really, I think the word odyssey is more appropriate – is technically to Los Angeles, but really has been to Blaine, Washington. Why Blaine? That’s where the border crossing is between Vancouver and Seattle.

The U.S. border service, for Canadians, is like the weather. We are constantly complaining about it, usually personally affronted by it, but for all we carry one, we're usually only ever slightly inconvenienced by it.

Everyone has their horror stories to share: my Dad had heard from one of his golfing buddies that if we didn’t have “the right form” our car could be confiscated at the border. There was, of course, no hint of what “the right form” was, nor was the legality of such a car seizure explained, but such is the mythic power of the U.S. Border service: to listen to Canadians, you would think that the 49th parallel was patrolled by a particularly unreasonable species of ogre.

So, as we left Vancouver, the tension level in the car was high. We had several forms for the car that we hoped were “the right form” (one of which had arrived by fax at our friend’s work yesterday). We had our visa applications, and several other documents we found on the Internet, one of which seemed to want to know if I was or ever had been a member of the Communist party. We had copies of our birth certificates, wedding certificates, college diplomas, and a Merit Badge from when I was in Scouts.

We didn’t need any of it.

_{Forest-fire devastation near Kamloops, as seen from the car}

As we pulled up to the border, my hands were literally trembling. Amynah had her folder of documents sitting discreetly over her swelling abdomen. The guard looked in the window.

“Nova Scotia plates? Wow, that’s the first time I’ve seen one of those.”

“Yeah,” I said, controlling the trembling in my voice, “It was a heck of a drive.”

“I can imagine,” he said. “How long did that take you?”

Ah ha! A question! This had to be a trap. I thought quickly… how long had it taken?

“Uh, yeah. About sixty hours, all told,” I said, then, confidence building, I ventured a joke to prove my Canadian credentials: “There’s a whole lot more Ontario than the world really needs.”

“Oh yeah. Well of course – Ottawa’s there.”

What? Did a U.S. Border guard just make a Canada joke? Who was trying to ingratiate himself with who here?

In any case, he waved us aside, and told us to go to the desk to fill out our visas. This was done by a guy who was about to go off shift, and so was trying to dispense with us as quickly as possible. Anxious that our car should cross the border properly, and having gone to some difficulty to acquire “the right forms” we asked if we could import it legally. He gave us a doubtful look.

“Well, you could… I guess. But it’s up to you,” he said, in a tone that made it clear that he would prefer that we not bother. When we indicated that we wanted to, he sighed, and called over a colleague to help him out. I suspect if we hadn’t mentioned it, no one would have brought it up at all.

In any case, we’re now in Seattle, about to have dinner with a friend here, and then make our way south to Los Angeles. Three countries, eight provinces, and 6500 km on, the final leg of the journey begins!

Strasbourg, Saskatchewan

2009-08-23T20:04:00.006-07:00

_{The Strasbourg grain elevator, a classic of disappearing Prairie architecture}

Before leaving Strasbourg, France, I had told all of my friends there that I was going to pass through Strasbourg, Saskatchewan. The Canadian Strasbourg is a Prairie farming town founded a mere 102 years ago. They were Germans, who founded their community when its namesake was in German hands, and so called it Strassbourg. In the intervening years the settlement discreetly lost that Germanic third “s.” Since then it has grown to be home to nearly 800 people.

Saskatchewan was the only Canadian province I’d never visited. The village seemed worth the detour on our way to Edmonton, if only for the novelty value of sending postcards from Strasbourg to Strasbourg.

Dad and I pulled into town in the late morning, stopping to snap a photo of the town sign and the grain elevator by the railway. Then we parked on Mountain Street (the main drag) to hit the post office. I handed over a stack of postcards I’d written somewhere between Cobalt and Longlac earlier in my journey, and asked if they had any cards for the Town of Strasbourg.

“No, but I think the drugstore next door might have some,” said the postal lady, as she rooted behind her counter for some stamps for France.

We then went next door, asking the girl stacking the shelves with deodorant if they carried Strasbourg postcards.

“No,” she trilled in her melodious Saskatchewan accent, “But you can try the Every Little Thing across the street, they might have something.”

Dad and I thanked her, and crossed the road to the craft store. We’d have no luck here, said the proprietor, “But you can try the municipal office on the corner.”

Losing heart, Dad and I entered the Town of Strasbourg Municipal Office (and Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment). The woman behind the counter there was on the phone, but put her caller on hold when she saw us.

I explained that I was looking for postcards of the town, in order to send them to Strasbourg France, where I’d lived before. She thought that was absolutely delightful.

“Just a second! I know we used to have some back here,” she said with alacrity.

After a few minutes of rummaging around failed to turn up any postcards she went back to her phone: “I’ll have to call you back,” she said to the person on the other end.

“I’m just going to call the mayor,” she said to us.

“Uh… ok,” I said, a little startled.

_{Notables from Strasbourg's history, on the Centennial mural}

After a brief conversation with Her Honour, the municipal authority directed us to the Cornwell Centre (a sort of Jack-of-all-trades store that sold hardware, clothing, computer supplies, and served as the editorial headquarters of the local paper) a few buildings up the street. We were to ask for Lance, to whom the Mayor was going to speak on our behalf. Lance, in turn, would print us out some postcards of an aerial view of Strasbourg.

This was far beyond the call of duty, we felt, but we were hardly going to say no. We ambled up to the Cornwell Centre where we met Lance. He wasn’t able to print out any photos for us, but he did present me with a selection of photos of the town, which he emailed to me on the spot.

Dad and I were feeling hungry at this point, and after checking to make sure the museum would be open after lunch, we headed to the Royal Hotel, which boasts a small restaurant and pub.

_{The Strasbourg Museum, in the former rail station}

We ordered roast beef sandwiches and coffees, fairly pleased with how the visit had gone so far. As we were finishing up, two women walked into the restaurant. One of them stopped at our table.

“Are you the guy from Strasbourg? I’m the mayor.”

Her Honour – Carol, to her friends – and I chatted for a bit. I told her we were on the way to visiting the town museum, and she insisted that I stop by her office afterwards to talk some more.

Better yet, as we walked up to the counter, Carol waved the waitress away: “Just put it on my bill – it’s on me.”

Note: it took three years before I earned a free meal from La Mairie in my previous Strasbourg. It took thirty minutes here.

_{Incidentally, when I popped by her office afterward visiting the museum, Her Honour also asked me to write something for the local paper. I'm happy to do it, but it goes to show there really is no such thing as a free lunch.}

Big sky country

2009-08-19T22:49:00.005-07:00

_{Prairie storm brewing near the Sakatchewan/Alberta border}

I am writing this post, believe it or not, standing in Amynah's parents' basement workroom in Edmonton, with the computer sitting atop the clothes-dryer, as it is the only room where I can be assured a decent wireless signal while not keeping her awake with my typing. Such is life on the road.

Ottawa to here was a heck of trip - three days on the road, fifteen hours a day behind the wheel. My Dad graciously volunteered to help with the driving. Northern Ontario is a lot bigger, and a lot more French than I'd expected. Manitoba was exactly as flat as I remembered. I saw Cobalt Ontario for the first time - that being the small northern mining town where my parents started their married life and produced my older sister. I also saw a lot of other towns, villages, hamlets and lakes I'd never seen before.

_{The school where my Dad taught in Cobalt, Ontario}

Canada is a country to challenge the imagination of any cartographer: how many names for geographical features can you come up with, after all? I imagined some poor soul at the end of a long night, staring at yet another blue blob on his map - "Long Lake taken? Broad Lake? Mary's Lake? Oh to heck with it, just call it Fish Lake and be done with it." My imaginary cartographer had really hit the end of his tether by Saskatchewan, when he named the Qu'Apelle Valley which I believe roughly translates as the "What do you call it" valley.

_{I have an awesome story about my visit to Strasbourg, Saskatchewan, but it will have to wait: but all of you in Europe receiving postcards from me in the next few days should pay particular attention to the cancellation stamp.}

The say it's the journey, not the destination. They are wrong.

2009-08-14T13:47:00.004-07:00

I'm in Ottawa right now - I had meant to keep up on the blogging while I did so, but it's been almost impossible, what with the socializing, repacking, driving, socializing and migraine-having, the last of which ruined one-third of my limited time in Montreal.

In any case, I will be back on the road on Sunday while Amynah takes to the air, and unlikely to appear on the Internet in the interim. Maybe once I arrive in Edmonton (3000km away) I will snap a photo of my new-to-me, road-beaten, over-stuffed, bicycle-bedecked car.

Incidentally, my friend's daughter is completely ignoring me, and fawning over Amynah. The only time she addressed me today was to ask me what Amynah would like for breeakfast, and to tell me to water the plants in front of the house while she was out at daycare. She appears to believe I am some sort of footman.

Farewell to Nova Scotia

2009-08-08T17:29:00.004-07:00

_{Bandstand in the Halifax Public Gardens}

I hit the road for Montreal tomorrow: Nova Scotia was too short, and too busy. I did get some photos of Halifax, wandering around today with my friends Tim and Jocelyn. The city's changed a lot in the last ten years since I've lived here, mostly without anyone telling me.

_{George's Island in the Halifax Harbour}

Sadly, I didn't think to take any picture's of my parent's fortieth anniversary celebration last night, but it was a lot of fun - a house full of family and friends that have gathered around a solid, loving marriage.

Kafka's car

2009-08-07T07:04:00.001-07:00

No pictures in this post, just a tale of woe.

My Dad has extremely generously agreed to transfer ownership of his old car to Amynah and I, so that we won’t have to walk from Halifax to Los Angeles. Amynah and I had assumed that we would be able to get by on our European driver’s permits until such time as we were officially resident in California.

On Tuesday, I called up an insurance company to arrange for insurance on the new car. I was answering all of the questions no problem (Honda… black… 120,000 km…) with no problems, until the guy at the other end of the phone wanted to know my Canadian license number. I explained that I didn’t have one: I had swapped my Quebec one for a French one in 2007.

He told me they couldn’t insure me until I had a Canadian permit. So, I got on the phone with the Nova Scotia government and explained my situation: I used to have a N.S. license, switched to a Quebec one nine years ago, then to a French one a little less than three years ago. She told me that – with luck – I would be able to re-instate my Nova Scotia one for a fee, assuming they could find my Quebec one in the national database.

Yesterday Amynah and I went down to the “Access Nova Scotia” offices and took a number. Then we waited. And waited. And waited some more. It appeared that last week, their computers had gone down, and this week they were clearing the back-up.

After an hour and a half, our number was called. I explained our situation to the teller, and she pulled up my license information. “I’m sorry sir, we can’t give you your permit. It says here you’ve been suspended,” she said, uncomfortably: license’s are usually suspended for criminal behaviour, like drunk driving.

This was not the case for me: I’d had a perfect driving record in Quebec, but the women explained that sometimes the Quebec folk mis-typed their forms due to their inexplicable Frenchness. I said I’d give them a call to fix the situation but then, on a whim, asked them to check out Amynah’s status.

Hers was fine – her license was merely expired. To prevent the morning’s expedition from being a total waste, we decided to get Amynah a Nova Scotia permit, making her legally a Bluenoser, much to her Alberta-girl chagrin.

We returned home and informed my Dad that he would be transferring title not to me, but to his daughter in law. While they were doing that, I would call the insurance people and tell them the new situation.

“Oh, my colleague should have consulted with his superior before he told you that. Hold please, and I’ll get back to you,” said my new insurance buddy. I desperately hollered at Amynah and Dad – halfway out the door – to stop.

After ten minutes, my insurance guy returned: “Well I talked to my superior, and he talked to his, and then it went all the way up the foodchain, and unfortunately, we cannot give you insurance unless you both have Canadian permits.”

Damnit. I hung up the phone, and called Quebec, to ask them why my permit was suspended. The man there told me that apparently, the Montreal Municipal Court had requested the suspension. He gave me a number for them. They, in turn, informed me that I had two parking tickets that I had left unpaid before leaving the city. As I had not received the summons to pay them, I now owed over $400 in fines.

The only way my suspension would be lifted was if I paid them – the only way I could do that was to go over in person, or pay by money order. Neither would fix the situation in anything less than two business days, taking us to Tuesday – our schedule requires us to be on the road by Sunday.

Desperate, I called my friend Dave, who works in downtown Montreal, not far from the municipal court: “You can always tell a good friend by how much money they ask you to spend on their behalf” I said, by way of introduction to our problem.

Fortunately, Dave was on lunch break, and willing to march over to the court with $400 bucks to plunk down in our name. He then – God Bless His Soul – walked over to the Quebec driving permit authority with the documents proving our fines had been paid, in order to lift my suspension immediately (when my Mom came home and asked if we had dealth with that, I told her “I called a friend of mine who works for the United Nations, and he spoke to some people for us – it’s taken care of.” Which is, strictly speaking, true).

Now it was back to me: I now went back to the Access Nova Scotia Office, and took another number: this time, I had a book. I waited, and waited, and waited – over an hour. The suspension had been lifted, and soon I had a brand new Nova Scotia license in hand. I called Dad – the transfer could go through. I took yet another number and settled in to wait.

While killing time waiting for my Dad to show up with the papers, I realized the woman who’d processed my license had screwed up, and put the last Nova Scotia address they had for me on my permit – a place I hadn’t lived in for 13 years. Resignedly, I took yet another number to fix that problem.

Dad arrived, and we settled in to wait: fortunately, I was called to fix my license and the woman told me we could transfer the car to me at the same time.

The transfer – the sole object of the entire exercise – took five minutes. For which we spent nearly $600, and waited in line for five hours.

On the other hand, it is a nice car.

They call it a geyser here too - what a coincidence!

2009-08-02T10:39:00.003-07:00

Waiting for the Geyser:

What a geyser looks like when you're standing right next to it:

What it looks like after you've dried off your camera and retreated to a safer distance:

The pictures say "Iceland" but the words say "Disaster."

2009-08-01T09:57:00.004-07:00

_{The view across the "Smoky Harbour"}

Reykjavik: the showers reek of sulphur, the town is tiny, the people friendly and the temperatures low. I’ve nothing much to say about beyond that as we were too tired today to manage anything other than wander from café to café, but tomorrow we’re heading out into the countryside. However, I’m breaking up this post with photos from here anyway.

Our final day in Strasbourg was as memorable as these things can be. We had been up until the wee hours of the night before packing, repacking, unpacking, and reorganizing everything we owned. Some of our belongings (186 kg worth) are being shipped to California. Everything else was coming with us, unless it could be sold, given away, or thrown out.

We woke up on our final morning exhausted – a solid week of goodbye dinners and parties mixed in with packing and paperwork had completely knocked us out. We walked over to Christian for our final breakfast, lugging an enormous box of books with us. There, our friends Yann and Félicie joined us, relieving us of the books in the process. Breakfast was fine, though our goodbyes with them were more than a little soggy.

Wiping our eyes, we rushed back to the apartment and threw out an enormous pile of boxes, used-up tape rolls and bubble-paper scraps (not to mention rodent poison). Amynah’s friend Any then dropped us off at the airport.

Thus is where things became dramatic. Just as we were about to get into line to check-in, we were surprised to see our Argentinian friends Carolina and Danilo show up – they had driven in from town just to say goodbye. We were in a rush, so we asked for them to wait while we dealt with our ticket.

Once we got to the head of the line, the ticket agent told us we were only allowed 20 kg.

“Per bag?” asked Amynah.

“Total – and you're only allowed one bag per passenger,” she replied.

This, needless to say, was a disaster. We each had two bags, and our larger suitcases were almost 30 kg each. To get them from Strasbourg to Paris, Paris to Reykjavik, Reykjavik to Halifax would cost us 100 Euros per bag, per leg, for a total of 600 Euros.

Then I had a flash of inspiration. The Air France Cargo service – the means by which we were shipping the rest of our belongings – was only a kilometer away. With Carolina and Danilo’s car, and one hour before we had to board our flight, we could ship our suitcases directly to Halifax, and still make the flight to Paris.

We hurriedly checked in our smaller bags, and then rushed back to our friends. We ran out into the parking lot, threw our bags in their car and drove like madmen to the freight terminal. Weaving Danilo’s hatchback through the 18-wheelers lining the cargo warehouse, we burst into the office: “We need to ship these to Halifax, and have to catch a flight in 45 minutes. Can we do it?”

The woman behind the counter shrugged: We could try. We quickly trimmed some of the heavier items from our carry-on, and scrawled “household items, clothes, personal” on the customs form. We then made a mad-dash back to the airport, praised Carolina and Danilo to the skies and we bid them farewell, sweated our way through the security check and managed to make it to the gate as the last few people boarded.

_{Honesty is the best policy (it's a holiday weekend in Iceland).}

Things didn’t get much easier in Paris: Charles de Gaulle is not a terribly welcoming airport, and Icelandair’s service is only slightly better than a discount airline. The lineup for check in was utter chaos – everyone was trying to elbow their way in front of everyone else, thus making enemies out of people with whom they were about to locked into a tin can with for the next three hours. An older couple used their maple-leaf festooned luggage cart to muscle us out of our place in line but Amynah used her superior “scootching” ability to cut back in front of them. Annoyed at having been beaten at their own game, they then started a pointedly loud conversation with the woman next to them about how rude the French were and how much more civil people were in Canada.

It was a weird feeling to be simultaneously amused by the irony, outraged at their unmerited sanctimoniousness, and slightly guilty that we had (justifiably!) counter-butted them in the first place.

Au revoir.

2009-07-30T02:40:00.010-07:00

_{Amynah's institute}

Today is my final full day in Strasbourg. Tomorrow morning, Amynah and I will rise early, have an early breakfast at Christian, and then be driven to the airport to catch out flight to Paris, Rekjavik, and points beyond.

This is therefore my final post as Strasmark – well, at least my final post in which the Strasmark name makes any sense. “View of the marching fishes” never made any sense outside of my head. I intend to keep blogging – I’m sure Los Angeles will have plenty to offer in terms of stories, even if it isn’t quite as picturesque. Failing that, I’m sure the 9,000 km drive to get there will yield a tale or two, assuming I’ve not descending into gibbering madness by the end of it.

In the last few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time blogging about Strasbourg’s history and tourism highlights. Sometimes I've written about the people we’ve encountered here, but I think overall I’ve left the impression that our only social contact is with those who we have commercial dealings, and supplemented by friends we temporarily import from Canada.

When we first arrived in Strasbourg three years ago, we had almost no idea what we getting into. It was an adventure, and we romanticized what life would be life here; our expectations were unreasonably high. I didn’t really think I’d spend my days penning op-eds on the proceedings of the European Parliament while sipping a café au lait in a riverside terrace while sporting a beret, but… well, I kind of did.

Of course it didn’t work out that way.

The very first phone call I made in France, while in search of an apartment, ended with the woman on the other end telling me “to call back when I could speak French” and hanging up on me. I quickly realized that I was going to need far, far more language facility that I had on reserve to survive in this country.

Worse, I had expected that I’d be able to return to freelancing easily. Of course, after years of working in an office, I had become accustomed to having colleagues with whom I could take coffee breaks, bounce ideas off of, and occasionally socialize with. All of that was gone, and because we knew no one else in the city, I had no replacement.

The first six months – and beyond – were miserable. Going to the store to perform even the simplest errands required a 15-minute pep talk: what if I had to ask where the green peppers were? What if someone asked me the time? Slowly, I retreated within myself, avoiding the outdoors and dreading social contact. Amynah would come home in the evening, and I would talk her ear off non-stop about… well, who knows what the heck I had to talk about. Complaining about the accordionists, probably. But I had to talk to someone or lose my mind. She was foolish enough to marry me, so she had to put up with my blatherings.

I tried taking French lessons that the University of Strasbourg offered to foreign students and their spouses, but my fellow students were unapproachable, and the teacher not terribly pleasant or flexible: due to an early Hallowe’en-themed article I wrote that I mentioned in class, she was convinced that I was some sort of occultist. No amount of explanation could change her mind.

_{Just because I hang around graveyards taking pictures of haunted towers doesn't make me an occultist}

In my more despairing moments, I felt like I had been sentenced to solitary confinement: the three years stretched out in front of me like a desert. I couldn’t wait until it was over: I hated France, I hated the incomprehensible French, and I loathed their needlessly opaque language that served as an impenetrable barrier between me and happiness.

Of course, things were better than they seemed. Even during those first few months, there were plenty of people that reached out to us. Amynah started in the lab at the same time as another post-doc who came to Strasbourg from Bordeaux via England. With Julie and her boyfriend Sebastien, we made our first forays into the countryside, and were introduced to French customs such as mushroom hunting, viewing duck as dinner, rather than pond decorations, and cheering on Les bleus “football” team at the Stade de Meinau.

_{Julie and Sebastien, on our first visit to Mont St Odile. Natasha was just a glimmer in their eye at this point}

It was Sebastien who introduced me to his coworker Caner, the first of my language-exchange partners. The language exchanges proved to be fairly ineffective: Caner and I got on too well to bother correcting each other's language faults, and thus spent most of our “exchanges” speaking in whatever tongue was most effective for shooting the breeze.

There were others in Amynah’s labs who also made the effort to make us feel welcome – Audrey, one of the technicians, would always make a point of speaking to me, despite my near-total lack of French. Others invited us to dinners, movies, hiking and picnics, afternoons in her boss’s pool, voyages to pottery country, evenings of video-kareoke. But these were always “Amynah’s friends” – I was always welcome, but never quite au courant with the lab gossip and science talk.

It wasn’t until I signed up at the French course actually offered in Amynah’s lab that things truly opened up for me. The teacher, Danielle, was unbelievably welcoming. The day I met her was the day of her last class that semester: she accepted me as a student, and immediately invited Amynah and I to a housewarming party at her new flat across the Rhine.

_{Some of our friends here, from left: Guy who's name I don't remember, Qi, Sami, Chihiro, Hiroyasu, Amynah, Soraya, Mirna}

It was through Danielle and her class that we tapped into another social network here in Strasbourg. Most of her students – some learning French, some learning English - were in the same boat as us, foreigners finding their feet in France. They came from the U.S., Argentina India, China, Japan, Spain, Finland, Syria, Lebanon and Hungary. Danielle, and her husband David adopted us all as their polyglot children: their house was a frequent meeting point for dinners, concerts in the park, and a launch pad for expeditions to the Germany’s Black Forest.

Danielle and David were great friends in their own right, but of course without them we never would have enjoyed Qi’s Chinese New Year’s dinners, or started my language exchanges with Mirna and Lama (both of whom, I am happy to say, are now considering post-docs in Canada).

_{Two of the sweetest people I know: Lama and Qi, queens of the mountain.}

It was also through Danielle and David that had the opportunity to meet Sami the Finn with whom we enjoyed many disastrous outings into the countryside. And, without Sami, we would not have become friends with Belinda the Australian – not that Belinda was ever in need of anyone’s help in terms of making friends and settling in.

Once Danielle and David moved to England, we tried to fill their considerable shoes by welcoming newcomers like Belinda the way they had welcomed us, and so I made some ill-fated efforts to organize outings of internationals from Amynah’s institute into the surrounding countryside.

Finally, also through Danielle and David, Amynah and I have become good friends with Félicie and Yann, who have been so kind to us I can’t help but think there’s something wrong with them – surely we’re not so much fun that anyone would want to invite us on their weekend in Provence? My regular lunches with Félicie were a highlight of my week over this past year, and their relaxed good humour in all things - cleaning our apartment, last minute New Year's Dinners - made them a joy to hang out with.

Throughout it all, our friends and family kept coming for visits from Canada (and England, Germany, Ireland and the Congo). Because of them, I was motivated to get out into the country and explore - and as a side-effect, rarely felt homesick. Their patience with my grueling and didactic tour was appreciated: for a long time, knowing the city’s history was the only way that felt even somewhat at home here, and I appreciated the many opportunities I was given to show off my knowledge.

But as we prepare to leave, we’ve been shown an incredible amount of generosity from our friends here: dinners, gifts, even the occasional heartfelt note expressing sadness that we will be leaving. Almost everyone we know has offered to help with the considerable logistical difficulties involved in our move.

I’ve come a long way from the miserable, depressed hermit I was three years ago. Amynah’s lab, and For Amynah and I, the three years we have spent in Strasbourg have been the best time of our lives. There will always be a corner of our souls that will always be given over to this place, but it isn’t because of the bike trails and history.

The people we have met here are some of the best people we have ever known. I only regret that we did not spend more time with them all. I will miss them terribly.

Petit France: You feelin' lonely, sailor?

2009-07-29T09:06:00.004-07:00

Tomorrow will be my last full day in Strasbourg. Our flight for Rekjavik leaves Friday morning – we arrive in Halifax on Monday.

So, the tour’s over for now. There was an awful lot that I wanted to blog about before leaving – why the Marechal de Saxe is buried in Strasbourg even though he had no connection to the city, the location of the most ghoulish playground I’ve ever seen, the reason why there are three churches named after St Peter within a mile of each other in Strasbourg, the reason why the Cathedral bell rings every night at 10:05 – but I simply don’t have the time.

So, as my final Strasbourg city tour post actually from the city (though I make no promises that it will be the last ever), I give you Petit France.

Petit France is a neighbourhood of historic Strasbourg, and is the second-most visited attraction here after the Cathedral. It’s chock-a-block with the half-timbered architecture that characterizes the villages of the countryside, most dating from the 16th and 17th centuries. Their flower-laden profiles reflect in the waters of the many canals that run through the area.

The canals actually are the reason why the houses are still here, rather than being torn down in favour of the stone buildings that dominate the old town. These canals powered the mills and leatherworks that comprised the industry of old Strasbourg. However, these industries were distinctly smelly, and staffed by lower-class folk. The neighbourhood thus was avoided by the better class of people, who clustered together at the other end of the island, while Petit France was left to moulder: the landlords renting to the working class residents couldn't be bothered improve their properties. They were therefore saved from the wrecking ball.

So why the name? Petit France was so-called long before the French took possession of the city. It was, in fact, the German soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire that gave the neighbourhood its name. There was a hospital in the area, specifically there to treat those soldiers that had contracted syphilis - “The French Disease” – from the neighbourhood’s professional ladies.

And thus, Strasbourg’s most photographed neighbourhood is a former slum named after a venereal disease.

It's not exactly Tim Horton's, I know.

2009-07-28T02:33:00.004-07:00

_{The Christian salon, with the dessert shrine in the middle}

When Amynah and I actually lived on View of Marching Fishes the closest patisserie was a place called Christian. We were assured that it was one of the best places in town to pick up a croissant and we quickly discovered that its petit pain au chocolat were the lightest, most satisfyingly chocolatly pastries we had ever had, ever.

After a month or two we realized that there was a corridor leading through a courtyard behind the pastry counter. It leads to a hidden courtyard, off of which is a spiral staircase leading to the upper floors.

We bring almost all of our visitors here, as the Christian tearoom is everything you would imagine a European salon to be – if it were the 18th century. The walls are covered with a deep purple velvet, set off by the similarly-hued chairs and tables, both of which are covered in supple leather.

The café has an excellent lunch menu, but Amynah and I prefer to go for breakfast, so that Amynah can take enjoy one of the twelve varieties of hot chocolate on the menu, and I can snarf down the dejeuner complet: two eggs, four slices of toast with homemade jam, a small kougelhopf, washed down with fresh-squeezed orange juice and a cappuccino.

The staff at Christian are professional and efficient, which is why we were disappointed, about a year ago, to encounter a new hire. While obviously trying hard, and very friendly, the new waitress was not familiar with the menu, had trouble remembering Amynah’s order, and made one of the worst cappuccinos I’d ever had in the place.

I was inclined to let it go, but Amynah is not one to suffer inconvenience easily. Much to her annoyance, it seemed that every time we went to Christian in the following months, we ended up with the same waitress. She adopted us as "her" customers, and made a point of stopping to chat, which only seemed to irritate Amynah more.

However, the novice proved to be a quick learner. Over time, her cappuccinos improved and she mastered the menu. Now she makes the best coffee in the joint and, amazingly, won over Amynah as well. She became "our" waitress, and now we’re disappointed when she’s not on shift when we arrive.

In any case, after each of the several ultrasounds we’ve enjoyed so far in France, we’ve popped by here. After the first, though I’d promised Amynah I’d keep word of our pregnancy secret until we’d cleared various other tests, I was too excited by my introduction to Mademoiselle Reynolds to keep my happiness contained, and thus ended up telling our waitress the good news: she therefore knew before either of my siblings, and most of my friends.

*_{While our regular was by far the most outgoing of Christian’s staff, we’d evidently made an impression on the rest as well: when we mentioned to one of the more long-serving staff that we were leaving France, she said “It will be a little strange not having you here.” Perhaps we enjoyed their pastries a little too often?}