Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Come along inside... We'll see if tea and buns can make the world a better place.
-- Kenneth Grahame (1859 – 1932) –

Have a great Wednesday!

Perogies for Lunch.

When I was growing up on the Canadian prairies, in as Ukrainian a family as it is humanly possible to be, we ate a lot of perogies. Only we did not call them perogies, we called them perohy.
Pronounced “peh”... as in pedophiles, “ro”... as in roast, and “heh” as in hell.
Peh - ro - heh.
And when you say the "ro" part, you have to make sure your tongue touches the roof of your mouth, or else you are saying it wrong. You have to get that subtle European "rh" sound in there.
Here is a nice picture of a plate of perohy, served alongside that essential Ukrainian mealtime beverage... a snifter of borscht!
Yes, I was raised on this stuff.
If it were not for perohy, I probably would have died at a very young age... from.... dough deficiency or something. But thankfully, every day or two, I would eat a couple dozen perohy that my mother made, and I survived. We ate a lot of these, seriously we did. Loaded with sour cream, fried onions. Our concept of dessert, back then, was..... a few MORE perohy.
This is probably the source of my present shape, now, as a middle-aged man. Sort of tapered at each end, thick in the middle, basically a big pillow-case on legs, and filled with mushy potatoes.
No, that is an exaggeration really, I am being overly mean to myself here.
The walking pilowcase is filled with sauerkraut, occasionally letting off gaseous bursts, just like it does when fermenting in the crock, under a weighted plate .
For those of you who were not raised eating perohy every day of your childhood, I will briefly explain that they are made from dough that is rolled out and then cut into little triangular shapes. These are then filled with a potato and cheese mixture, or perhaps sauerkraut, or slow-running animals... pretty much anything you want to cram in there I guess, and then the resultant little pillowcase is pinched together at all the edges, and then these perohy are boiled for a while, and they can be eaten just like that, drawn from the boiling water, BUT it is always better, and less healthy, to drain off the water and fry the perohy in tons of onions and butter, and then serve this with a tub of sour cream.
Sweet blessed Lord!

So [get to the point man!]... at the current time I have "temporarily-employed employees" working where I work, [I hate calling them temps, it sounds too impersonal, in an improper noun sort of way], so anyway, among these temps is one vivacious vixen from Poland. When I say from Poland I mean actually FROM there, and she has the wonderful accent to prove it.
So, me being Ukrainian and all, and Polish/Ukrainian/Russian being so similar in language and culture, over the past couple of weeks we have bantered back and forth with each other as to the translation of certain words and I have learned a lot about Poland, including the fact that, according to her, it is not as cold there as I had imagined. I always thought it was sort of Siberian or something. Year-round polar-bearski weather! You know?
Basically.... North Pole-ish!

So, just yesterday, I asked her about perohy.
She said she knows all about it.
I asked, “Yeah, but were you raised on it? Was it considered three of the four main food groups?”
“I know what perohy are!” she said.
“You don’t know perohy!” I yelled, [just like Tom Cruise, in Jack Nicholson’s face.]

“I MAKE THEM!” she yelled back.

Wow.
Silence in the warehouse.
I can’t top that claim. She called my bluff.
My feeble three-of-a-kind constant EATING of them, does not beat her full-house MAKING of them.

I said.... still wary like.... “Really?”
“Yes,” she said. “I will make some for you and then you will see.”
I did not believe her. I left it at that.
I guess it had been such a long time since I had seen a good plateful of perohy, that I just could not believe that this woman before me was a Perohy-Maker.

Fast forward to high-noon today, in the lunch-room at work....

We all cram in there like a herd of cattle and I start digging out one of these frozen dinners that you buy in your grocer’s freezer for $3.49. Every ingredient in the ol’ table of contents is a word containing nineteen letters, you know what I mean?
Well just then, Elizabeth, for this is her name, she hands me a tupperware container and says “Here, this is for you. I made this last night.”
And I take it, and it is full of perohy.
The real kind. Like from scratch. I almost died.
REAL PEROHY.
And I opened the container and looked, and they looked correct.
Like what I mean is there are at least a thousand ways to make perohy, some people make them the size of a hubcap, or a calzone, or a frisbee.... other people make them like little tater-tots!
But no.... here before me was a whole container of real, official, regulation-size perohy. The way they are supposed to look. The way MY mother made them.

So I started crying.
No, just kidding. I was stunned though, as I put them in the microwave.
To make this story even better, Edward, this other “temp” had SOUR CREAM!
All that was missing was a snifter of borscht!

So it is that I had the best lunch ever, today.
That is the final thing I must say. They were very good. Perfectly made.
Thank you Elizabeth. I apologize for all former lack of faith in your perohy abilities.
And if you are reading this..... umm... what’s for lunch tomorrow?
I feel in the mood for cabbage rolls.

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

A man said, "Think as I think
Or you are abominably wicked,
You are a toad."
And after I had thought about it I said,
"I will then be a toad."
-- Stephen Crane –

Have a great Tuesday!

The Wind In The Willows.

I think that we should never feel that we are too old to rediscover (or maybe discover for the first time) children’s books.
Even if I go on to attain turtle-like longevity I am already well into the second half of my lifetime, and yet I continue to read children’s books. I make it a point to do so. And I will continue to do so as long as I have the eyesight.
For one thing, it keeps the wrinkles off.
And of all the children’s books I have read, I think that my favorite has been Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, first published in 1908.
I, a reluctant grown-up, confess that my life has been enriched through my meeting of these four Edwardian animal bachelors.
The Wind is a classic that should be read TO or BY anyone YOUNG or OLD enough to have an imagination! Grahame created a wonderful pastoral world where the River-Bankers (consisting of Rat, Mole, Badger, and Otter) and their friends form a close-knit community of leisured landowners who observe an extremely strict code of responsible behavior.
Uh... then there's Toad.
Toad, although he is one of the River-Bankers, continually distinguishes himself as one who is conceited and irresponsible, a spendthrift megalomaniac who disgraces his friends by even landing himself in jail. Because of his incarceration, the stoats and weasels of the Wild Wood attempt to invade Toad's ancestral home, and this threat to River-bank society is the one thing that can rouse Badger out of his cosy retirement. Together, he and Rat lecture Toad with the inflexible moral fervor of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Will Toad ever come to a sincere repentance and reform? Well, that is the question.
Throughout the whole book there runs the leitmotif which may be roughly described as the conflict between Us and Them - or more specifically, the attempts made by Grahame's ideal rural society to defend itself against encroachment. I personally believe that this subtle theme can be a great vehicle to instill in the young reader (or listener) a sense of the importance of peaceful living, and of how our actions affect others. Adult readers will definitely have lived long enough to clearly recognize themselves in one of the main animal characters.
Alas... I am undoubtedly Toad!
The Willows series has been serialized by the author William Horwood (published by HarperCollins) and I have read all of these sequels: The Willows and Beyond, Toad Triumphant, The Willows in Winter, and The Willows at Christmas.
All of them are superb.
As in A+.

When I contemplate the reading of children’s books, I cannot help but think of another favorite author of mine, C.S. Lewis, creator of The Narnia Chronicles.
Soon, very soon, in the 2005 Christmas season, his The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe will be in the theatres, and I will be first in line to see it. At any rate, Lewis (1898-1963) has written at length on the adult value of reading children’s literature. Here are just a few Lewis quotes, culled at random from different sources.

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty--except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all.

...a children's story which is only enjoyed by children is a bad children's story.

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. No reader worth his salt trots along in obedience to a time table.

And I think it possible that by confining your child to blameless stories of child life in which nothing alarming ever happens, you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them or make them endurable. For, in the fairy tales, side by side with the terrible figures, we find the immemorial comforters and protectors, the radiant ones; and the terrible figures are not merely terrible, but sublime.

Once in a hotel dining-room, I said, rather too loudly, "I loathe prunes."
"So do I" came an unexpected six-year-old voice from another table. Sympathy was instantaneous. Neither of us thought it funny. We both knew that prunes are far too nasty to be funny. That is the proper meeting between man and child as independent personalities.

*******

Splash du Jour: Monday

He once told her he wanted to share his life with her. He said he’d never asked anyone that before. How she melted over that, how she lapped it up! But he never said he wanted her to share her life with him, which, when it happened, turned out to be a very different thing.
-- from the short story Uglypuss, by Margaret Atwood –

Have a great Monday!

The Adventurer in Me.

I just bought a new bottle of cologne. About every six months or so I have to make this same old purchase. And for the last ten years or so, I’ve always bought the same thing. It is a cologne called Adventurer, made by Eddie Bauer.
I have a theory about cologne.
I think that after you have worn the same cologne for an extended period of time, as I have done with Adventurer, it sort of gets into you. Like, you absorbify it, a bit. You extrude it. Your skin just sort of always smells like it, and when you try and switch, or you occasionally spritz on some diplay item at random as you walk past the fragrance section of a department store.... hmm... it just seems wrong.
At least to me, it just seems wrong. It feels like my whole body, at some deep pheromonious level, is rejecting the new intruder. The sheer surprise, the sudden clash of scents, is tripping some inner olfactometer, and you don’t want to do that!
Once in a blue moon I may stumble across some fragrance that seems like it has the potential to become something I might hose myself down with... but ultimately, no. I’m sticking with the Adventurer, which, when you think of it, is sort of contradictory huh? Like, I mean, I am not being very adventurous, in my constant return to Adventurer.
But seriously. By now, I feel as though if you took my appendix out and smelled the thing, it would have hints of Adventurer to it.

The Sweetness of Camping.

You know what I really used to love about camping?
The cereal.
The cereal was so good.

Camping.
This was when mom would load the trunk of our old Pontiac Catalina with the most sugar-laced cereal known to mankind. At every other time of the year, yea, every single day of the year, you ate oatmeal. Like a horse. And you didn’t argue, or expect anything different. Like a horse.
But camping was a whole different story.
For some reason this was the time when pre-sweetened cereal rained down from on high, like manna.
You’d find it there in the morning, glistening in a bowl.
Back then I was not at all concerned with whatever profound reasoning process brought about the appearance of the cereal. It probably had more to do with convenience than anything else. Just pour milk, and eat. No fuss, and all that.
Maybe mom felt that cavities would never originate in a wilderness environment. Or that sugar took on wondrous nutritious properties when consumed outside city limits. I cared not for any such explanations, I simply marvelled that time and again, the cereal was there. And equating the taste of it with things like peripheral vistas of pine trees, morning mist, and the spatter of campsite water taps, remains with me to this day.
Eating pre-sweetened cereal at home was not, nor ever shall be, the same as eating it in the pre-human dawn of a campsite. I believe that there are certain differences, on a molecular level, that are impossible to understand scientifically.
For instance, when you are at home and you pour milk onto (say) Froot Loops, which is actually a prime example of the chemical process I am describing here.... nothing special happens, really. Cereal and milk. Whoop-de-doo!
But pour some milk over Froot Loops when you are shivering at a picnic table, with the fishing rod leaning beside you.
Birds sing.
Something in the air breaks little particles of simulated froot flavour from the actual loop, and these float there, discoloring the milk in a way that is impossible at home. The sugar hits you in ways that transcend explanation. There is electricity, and not a power outlet for miles.
You lift the plastic bowl to your lips to drink the dregs [note: for maximum effect, ensure that the bowl is plastic] and with this action, you are transformed.
Sleep, and/or the desire to sleep, is gone.
Thus empowered, you find yourself running now with the fishing rod across your back and a swinging, clattering tackle box at your side. Squirrels scatter.
You hope that you are in time to get down to the water before they open up the dam’s floodgates. On this side of the massive concrete walls the water has receded in the night, exposing on the jagged lakebed the hooks, the lures that yesterday’s anglers snagged on the rocks. You want to capitalize on their misfortune, you want to slip around on the damp rocks, picking treasure out of the cavities. Soon the gates will open and what is now visible will be buried by miles of water.
Hopefully no one has already been......

.....there he is.
It’s your own dad, his open and generously replenished tackle box revealing the fact that he ate his Froot Loops much earlier than you did.
“Heddon Tiny Torpedo” he says, holding up the two-barbed fish-nightmare. “Five bucks in Jim’s bait shop. Free out here, if you’re early enough.”
Together you continue to slide among the rocks, gathering, as the dam hums beside you. Soon, soon, and without warning, the water at its base will churn and froth. Even the hardiest of hook-gatherers will scramble to drier land where they will then attach lures to their lines, and cast them forth into the murky depths, to lose them among the same rocks for the rest of the day.
And tomorrow’s another one.
And none of this happens at home.
None of it.

*******

Friday's Few Finds.

Well, after work I went to the Rockcliffe Park Book Fair.
It is an annual event (mostly used books) and I’ve been at every one for about the past ten years. Sometimes I even take the day off work to browse books for eight hours and fill the trunk of my car with treasures.
However, this year two things conspired to make me spend a lot less, and walk away with just a very modest amount of books.
Firstly, I could not have the day off work, so I missed the 10 a.m. mad rush to the book shelves when the doors first opened up. Seriously, people stampede in there like a herd of cattle, it’s quite dangerous. But today, by the time I arrived at 5:30 p.m., well, the best stuff would have long since been in someone else’s car trunk, and driven far from my greedy grasp!
Secondly, the second reason I did not buy as much, is because I am aware that I must budget myself, after my horrendous automotive repair bill of two days ago.
So, here is what I nabbed today, at horrendously discounted prices.

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom. Perfect shape hardcover version.
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, an autobiography I have been interested in ever since recently reading Lolita.
A nice hardcover illustrated edition of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
Life Before Man, a novel by Margaret Atwood.
And Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. I have always wanted to read it.

An evening of much literary and fiscal restraint.

Splash du Jour: Friday

The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense his life. . . . The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds -- how many human aspirations are realized in their free, holiday-lives -- and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!
-- John Burroughs (1837 - 1921) –

Have a great Friday!

******

Solzhenitsyn.

One day when I was about ten years old I was downtown with my mother. I am not sure what it was she was shopping for, but at one point we turned into this store that had floor-to-ceiling books. Looking back on it I think I was the one who dragged her in there.
I begged her to buy me some books. So she told me to pick one or two out.
I have never forgotten which two I chose. The first was one of the Star Trek paperbacks, written by James Blish. I don’t recall the exact title. [And really, would it matter?]
The other book, was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.
Even back then, in and around my first decade of life, my literary tastes were severely eclectic.
Truth is, I had (of course) absolutely no idea what I was doing, handing my mother this book. Nor did she, taking it from my hands as I said “I want this one, too.”
But I was always melancholic and just weird, and what intrigued me was the blandness of the silver-grey cover of the book, the way the barbwire in the backround penned in the obscured silhouettes of bland-faced prisoners, and the fact that Alexander was spelled “Aleksandr” on this Harper & Row edition, which indeed, came out in 1973, the year I turned ten.
And the typeface was so small. I have always been drawn to small print.
My mother did buy me the book. Both of them.
Did I read Gulag though?
No.
I read the Star Trek one. I definitely remember reading the Star Trek one. When all was said and done, space-ships were more my speed, but I liked to aim high.... hence, the Solzhenitsyn.

Confession: I have the book today. I still have that old silver paperback. But I also have a dandy nice hardcover edition, and have vowed vehemently to read it. Why? Because I have read so many other books by this author [Cancer Ward, The First Circle, One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich] along with biographies of the man and I find his fictional work, alongside his personal history, utterly fascinating.
About three or four summers ago, I gave the Gulag another shot.
I got to page 340 [of 620] and I stopped. There is still a bookmark, right there at page 340. It is a tough read. There are no two ways about it! The injustice gets to you. It is almost unbearable, to read of the atrocious injustice of the Gulag, where Solzhenitsyn spent ten years of his life in servitude.
Slave-itude.

I could say so much more about Solzhenitsyn, telling you why I think he is one of the most important writers to have ever put pen or pencil to paper.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970.
His Nobel speech is well worth the reading.
http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1970/solzhenitsyn-autobio.html

For now, I will leave you with a few words I once wrote, about his novel One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich.

THEME: Personal struggle for survival in a Stalinist concentration camp. A more literal translation of the title from the Russian would be "The Day Of Ivan Denisovich".
This "one day" is seen through the eyes of the hero Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a humble peasant who during WWII was captured by the Germans. After his escape he came back to the Russian lines where he was arrested, accused of being an enemy spy (forced by Soviet counterintelligence officers to sign his own "confession"), and sentenced to ten years hard labor.
The story follows the routine details of Shukhov's life: jolted out of a frozen slumber at 5 a.m.; a breakfast of slop and boiled gruel with fish skeletons floating next to rotten cabbage leaves; roll call in the polar frost, followed by a ravenous-dog-escorted march to work where prisoners mix cement and build walls in the utter desolation of the Northern steppe. The author's depiction of this ceaseless slavery is literally mind-numbing.

On the way back to the barracks the men are meticulously searched for anything they may be attempting to smuggle in. Shukhov privately revels over a piece of wire and a string that he has managed to sneak past the guards. After all, who knows how vitally necessary these items may be "one day"! At the end of this particular day's near-deathly labor, Shukhov actually feels fortunate that he has managed to finagle an extra bowl of skeleton soup, get some shreds of tobacco, and keep from being thrust into solitary confinement for any one of the million minor offenses of the camp.
The story ends: "The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one. Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell. The extra three were for leap years." The final point reminding us of the Gulag system's merciless punitive accuracy. A world of no parole... and no reprieve.

The reader is chilled by this book. It is shivering. Do we pick up anything by Solzhenitsyn for its "warmth and fuzziness"? Most definitely not. We pick him up to come face to face with mankind's capacity to methodically inflict cruelty and despair upon others. In the process, we are always afforded a very important glimpse of what those "others" can endure. And we set Solzhenitsyn down, thankful that we are none of his characters... even as we realize that some very real people (including the author himself) did not have that luxury.

*******

Splash du Jour: Thursday

"One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to."
-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn –

Have a great Thursday!

Is that on film?

I am sitting at Starbucks, drinking about my ninth gallon of cafe americano!
Now, what is on my mind today is I am wondering if you have ever had something real hilarious happen to you (something way out-of-the-ordinary-ish) that you wish was somehow captured on videotape, but dang it all.... it wasn’t!
I’m sure we all have.
In fact, I bet that all of us have had things happen, i.e., you have wiped out somewhere or bounced yourself off a trampoline or whatever, and there was no camera to capture your hilarious and unique near-death experience.
I bet we all have at least SEEN things that would have won the Grand Prize at America’s Funniest Home Videos if we had just had a camera rolling.
For me, it is a simple thing that I did once, but bizarre. I wish it had been captured.
I would at least maybe have won some money from Bob Saget to pay for my car repair bill today (It came to $2,600.00, and I am still in disbelief).

It was like this.....
I was working on a road crew and we were tearing out a section of highway, preparing to redo the base, and then repave. At one point, after an onsite coffee break, I was walking back to my gear at the side of the road. There was my yellow hard hat laying there, like a bowl, the open part upward. In one fluid motion I stepped on the near side of it, flicked it over onto my boot, and kicked upwards as hard as I could. It sailed into the air, I’d say about 15 or 20 feet high, end over end over end, tumbling in space. As it descended I could see that it was coming straight for me, so I just scrunched my neck into my shoulders and..... “PLOP”.... it landed absolutely perfectly on my head.
The front lip of the hat was exactly where it should be, in front.
Only one guy saw it happen, and he was running the big machine that was tearing out the road. The glass window was removed from his cab at the time and he laughed so hard he nearly fell right out into the bucket.
You could say he almost scooped himself laughing!
Where are the cameras when you need ‘em?
You could TRY to do such a thing three million times, and never succeed, but when you are not trying to do it, it happens.
Surely I would have won some good loot with such footage!

Feel free to use the comments section to send me an account of your own filmed or unfilmed stories of harrowing exploits.

*******

Splash du Jour: Wednesday

For the poets nothing is wasted, because even if it is, they can write about the waste.
-- from Loulou; or, The Domestic Life of the Language, by Margaret Atwood –

Have a great Wednesday!

Things That Bug Me.

It’s been a long time since I've let fly with a really good rant, right?
This is going to probably sound as though I am in a real testy mood [note: “testy” not “teste” which is an entirely different matter...] but I’m really not.
I am not at all mad about anything.
There are just a few things that I hate, and not even really hate... hang on a second. I actually am mad about one thing, and that is that my blogpage, [bookpuddle] here is still all screwy.
And interestingly enough, I have found out that it is NOT screwed up for Mac users.... only us Gates worshippers are afflicted. On Mac screens, my page looks fine and dandy. Go figure.
You may say “Hey, it looks fine to me” but yes, it only looks fine because I have found a way to get around the blank page problem.
After much experimentation [Geez, you really take this thing seriously don’t you Mr. Puddle].... as I was saying.... after much experimentation I have found that I can make the page look OK only by eradicating the amount of visible posts on the main page. So, in other words, for now anyways, stuff gets archived a lot sooner. I can only keep a few current posts on the main page at any given moment.
Having said all that.... back to some things that are bothering me yet not necessarily making me lose my mind or go ballistic, or get testy OR teste!
They are just things...... things that I notice today that I DON’T LIKE!

OK. First thing.
And this is on my mind because it just happened like five minutes ago.
I’m here in the Chapters bookstore, and I go to the drinking fountain for some water. I’m enjoying a nice drink when someone inside the can flushes the toilet.
This immediately affects the trajectory of the stream of water I am ingesting.
This is not....... comforting to me.
Instantly, I am thinking “Am I drinking toilet water?”
Well seriously though, how is it that when the guy flushes the toilet inside the washroom, the water that is going into my mouth sort of lurches and sputters and whatever?
I want this explained.
Of course I know that logistically speaking, there is some sort of perfectly logical water-pressure-ish explanation for the connection between toilet and fountain, involving pipes and whatnot.... but at the same time, if we can go to the moon and back, can we not invent a little Deal-Grommet-Spindle that compensates for this sudden lack of water pressure?

OK. Second thing.
And this is only on my mind because it happened on the drive over here.
I’m driving down the road and then I want to turn right. But there is a person in front of me [we’re stopped at a red light] and they will not MERGE.
Like, they are waiting for three lanes of traffic to be clear because that is where they want to go... way over into that third lane. The farthest one over.
But there is a real nice merge thing, where the bus stops, that is perfectly designed to sort of speed yourself up a bit and then blend nicely into that first lane and then move on over to the next lane and then there you go. You don’t have to hold up traffic BEHIND you, waiting for three lanes to open up!
It is maddening! I get just this side of road rage. I am fine now. I have my coffee.....

OK. Third thing.
And this is only on my mind because it happened when I ordered my coffee just now.
I pay for it and say “Thank you” and then the coffee girl says “No problem” just as I am turning around to fix up my coffee with cream and honey. I pause.
No problem?
I feel like turning back to her and asking “Did I imply that there should be some sort of problem here?”
Of course she would have said “No sir. Not at all.”
But then I would have said... “Well why then do you feel you need to inform me that in this particular instance, there was no problem? Is seems as though maybe at other times, it is a problem... but this time, it isn’t? Is that it?”
She (the poor girl) would probably say “I’m sorry. It is just a phrase, I mean nothing literal by it, it’s sort of like saying ‘Have a good day.’”
I would much prefer that they said Have a good day.

[God... maybe I am real owly today huh?]

OK. Fourth thing.
Fourth, and last thing.
And this is only because it is happening right now, right here in front of me.
What exactly is the deal with women’s shoes nowadays?
By that I mean this prevailing fashion of shoes that are so pointy you could pick the lock in a car door with them.
A pair of them is clippety-cloppiting around in front of me right now, attached to a woman.
The heel is in one time zone, the toe in another.
I know this is supposed to be the trend, the fashion, and that there is something tres chic about it that I am too dull to get. I admit it, the glamour of it is lost on me. I honestly think that hiking boots would be more attractive.
And with a lot of these shoes, they are so elongated that the starting point of the five toes is visible.... not the end of the toe of course but the other side, the foot side of the toes, and then there is this...... anteater snout.... like at least six inches of leather (no exaggeration) needlessly pointing somewhere and I’m just thinking THIS IS NOT RIGHT!
This cannot be good!
Or comfortable even!
I mean, I could see if maybe this particular woman had some sort of..... foot deformity.
Like, where those five toes start out normal (and dammit, I can SEE them right there, they look fine to me) and then you know maybe all five of these toes mutate and they sort of knarl up into this one-toed turnip or carrot-like structure, [Proboscis-foot we’ll call it] and therefore she is trying to hide this horrific abberration by shoving the whole shmeer into the barrel of a shoe specially designed to hide such abnormality.
But this cannot be it, because they are everywhere these shoes. Proboscis-foot cannot possibly be that widespread.

Splash du Jour: Tuesday

For one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult task of all, the epitome, the ultimate test. It is that striving for which all other striving is merely preparation.
-- Rainer Maria Rilke –

Have a great Tuesday!

The Thirtyfirst.

Well, dear ghouls and goblins.
Here is a little ditty I wrote, many scary moons ago.....


The Thirtyfirst

Chilled, no doubt the night
air felt
October’s final sigh.
A cloud as though a pillow
torn
threw feathers in the sky.

As summoned barking seized my heart
in rough
staccato time,
with dripping jaws the steamy breath
was puffed
though in my mind.

A bloated ghost with homely
stare, a
feeling not alone...
was floating there above me
where, a
lunar goblin shone.

Hastening then, the chase to end
and never
wond’ring why.
Chilled no doubt, the night
I felt
October’s final sigh.

© Ciprianowords Inc. 2005

Splash du Jour: Monday

"They all agreed that it was a huge creature, luminous, ghastly, and spectral. I have cross-examined these men, one of them a hard-headed countryman, one a farrier, and one a moorland farmer, who all tell the same story of this dreadful apparition, exactly corresponding to the hell-hound of the legend. I assure you that there is a reign of terror in the district, and that it is a hardy man who will cross the moor at night."
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of The Baskervilles –

Have a great and safe Hallowe’en Monday!

CALLING ON GOD! PART II

Please Lord!
Have I not endured enough?
Is it too great a thing, to ask You to please have a look at this blogpage, and perhaps fix it, in Thine great mercy and whatever?
Seriously, it is really bothering me now.
If it is not fixed in some way, I may go out and take at least seven or eight of my nine lives.
I plan to do it by profound beer consumption, and I know this is something You frown upon, so please... let's get on this!
Amen!

Splash du Jour: Thursday

I am currently reading Margaret Atwood's short stories.
A book called Bluebeard's Egg.
In one story, entitled Hurricane Hazel, Atwood is speaking of her fictional character (or perhaps herself) being dropped off by her boyfriend just after curfew....
...I got into the habit of coming in after the deadline, and my father would sit me down and explain very patiently that if I was on my way to catch a train and I was late for it, the train would go without me, and that was why I should always be on time. This cut no ice with me at all, as I would point out, our house was not a train. It must have been then that I began to lose faith in reasonable argument as the sole measure of truth.

Have a great Thursday!

Ode To Starbucks.

I am just sitting here at Starbucks (big surprise) and thinking about how much I love it here.... and why!
When it comes to “marketing”, Starbucks has me pegged.
I am addicted to all things Starbuckian, apparently even Starbuckian atmosphere.
The walls of my apartment are lined with Starbucks artwork that I picked up years and years ago (they no longer even allow their used posters to leave the store with spazzes like me). I used to have a sort of running list of store locations, where I would pester the managers to save me their old posters. They were very cooperative (probably, they were scared of me).
I would take the posters, (and back then they had real nice artwork on each one), and I would get them laminated at one of these Frame places. Crazy huh? One day I want to do a photo retrospective of the Starbucks artwork in my place, and I’ll post it here. [Currently, my digital camera is on the blink.]

But seriously, ever since I had my second cup of Starbucks coffee, I have not been able to tolerate any other sort of java!
My first time was in the Calgary airport.
I was going through the terminal, to connect with another flight, and I saw the first green Starbucks sign I ever had seen in my life. An epiphany.
Little did I know, of the lifelong relationship that was beginning, budding, like a spring flower, in this hectic moment.

I ordered a “mild” coffee of the day. Looked awful dark to me, that coffee.
Oh well, I mixed it up (honey and cream) and took off to find my Gate.
Sweet Lordy!
When I took a sip of that preCambrian tar, I turned right around and went back there.
I said to the barista girl, “Ummm. Yeah! I ordered the mild coffee. This must be the stronger one.”
“No, sir” she assured me. “That is our mild one, but if you like, I can pour you another.”
“Yes, please,” I said... and this time I watched her.... yeah, uh-huh, she went to the mild spigot there..... well, I’ll be darned.
The resultant fluid still looked like something you drain out of the crankcase of a Dodge Ram.
Oh well. I mixed it up again. And I got on the plane with the thing.
Well, see... after surviving that first cup of Starbucks effluent.... I was thoroughly hooked.
Intrigued.
I had to stop in at every green sign, and see if that airport experience was unique.
And every Starbucks I went in to had this same strong, robust, flavorful coffee. NEVER WEAK! I cannot tolerate weak coffee.
So really, it was a match made in heaven.
And since that time, well, I have graduated to the harder stuff.
Mild Shmild!
I want the toughest stuff you’ve got. The darkest. Deepest.
Then this was not good enough.... I want the americanos. Espresso and water.
As Jerry Seinfeld says, of headache pills... “Find out what will KILL me, and then just back it off a little.”
That’s what I tell the barista girls now!

Say what you will, Starbucks is a very savvy company. They know where to put their stores. They know who they are trying to reach. But I fully believe that their real success can be attributed to the absolute perfection of their product.
I agree 100% with father-and-daughter author team, Al and Laura Ries, when they say in their book The Origin of Brands:
Starbucks might be perceived as a hip place for the corporate crowd, but the core concept of the brand is high-end coffee. Take away its high-end coffee leadership and Starbucks becomes just another me-too brand.

Think about it.
When have you ever seen a Starbucks ad on television?
I haven’t.
Yet.... who does not know about Starbucks?

The PRODUCT sells itself!
Yes, and the fact that there are two or three Starbucks on every urban corner, I know! But really, I have never purchased anything from Starbucks that was NOT GOOD!
Even their cakes, and muffins and cookies and (NOW) sandwiches.
They simply..... ROCK!
They do not need to hyper-advertise. They have already somehow saturated the caffeinated psyche of North America! Starbucks spent less than ten million dollars on advertising in its first ten years. That’s chicken feed in today’s world of multi-million dollar one shot commercials!
Yet Starbucks is the most recognized coffee brand in the world. Remember the glimpse of a Starbucks cup in the movie Shrek 2?
Everything about Starbucks is.... excellent.
Even the fact that they have wireless internet now. I am posting this blog FROM a Starbucks!
Even the fact that they have those little Starbucks credit-card jobbies, which I load up with advance dollars, so that Starbucks can earn interest on my as-yet-unused money.
It's fantastic!
Oh, gladly I surrender a rather horrendous proportion of money to this outfit, yes, gladly I do. With what I have rung (and wrung) through on my card I have surely bought some distant mogul a yacht or two, but do I care? NO!
It’s been a fair exchange!

And (here is the thing) they will let you sit here until your shoulder is attached to the wall via cobwebs!
See, recently, someone who knows that I live half my life in Chapters (the big bookstore chain) sort of admonished me, suggesting that I should quit my obsession, and (instead) frequent the independent bookstores. To which I would say..... “Gladly I will do so. As soon as those independents install a Starbucks in them.”
I know I know.... it is a HORRID thing to say. But it is true.
The independent bookstores are great, and they are quaint, and yes, more knowledgable in their stock than are the youngsters running around in the Chapters stores, yes.... but... BUT... will the independent bookstore let me sit in their store until I need a shave?
I think NOT!

As much as I love books (and admittedly, I do have problems here), the truth is that I would not sit in a Chapters for as long as I do, were it not for the sweet elixir that flows from yonder grommets and spigots!
Under the green sign.... oh the wonders that take place under yon Green Sign!
When I leave here everyday, a doctor would be hard pressed to find any blood in my coffee-stream!
I am STARBUCKS powered baby!
Empowered by the bean!
Vive le Starbucks!