What? I'm PG?

Wow, I just tested my blog for its “rating” at this Ratings Place.
Apparently, I am listed as PG [← Pretty Gnarly?] and get this, this judgment is based on the criteria that somewhere in my 1,045 blogs, I used the word “Death” two times, and “Crack” one time.
Ummm…. in my opinion, that is quite tame, am I right?

Like, didn’t I use the word “bitch” just yesterday in my Splash du Jour? And the radar chose to pick up on the seemingly banal “death” and “crack” words? Hmmm…. who is running this ratings place…. the ghost of Jerry Falwell?
Wow!
I thought I was pretty prime time!
Maybe the PG stands for “Positively Grandmotherly”?

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Splash du Jour: Friday

I agree with you, Kitty.
That looks like one fine treat there!
But I’m gonna stick with my Pringles©, is that alright?

Have a great Friday!
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Splash du Jour: Thursday

A girl from Illinois and a girl from the east coast were seated side by side on an airplane. In an attempt to be friendly, the girl from Illinois said, "So, where ya from?"
The east coast girl said, "I'm from a place where they know better than to end a sentence with a preposition."
The girl from Illinois sat quietly for a few moments and then replied, "So, where ya from, bitch?"
-- sent to me from a reader IN Illinois, I swear --

Have a great Thursday!

Adventures in Duckfarming: Part 4

I’ve been sort of slack on my duck-reporting!
Remember the Duckmistress?
Well, here is the most recent shot of her darling brood!
Aren’t they cute?
The plumage has really gotten so much more colorful since their days of ducklinghood. Now they are pretty much all growed-up.
Flying all over the place.
Sometimes swooping down for a group landing and deciding at the last second that they did not have proper runway clearance. Up they go again, to re-calibrate their instruments… descend, and finally touch down, tumble a bit, and then strut around looking at each other with that pompous “Nothing to it” look on their beaks!

Apparently, one of the females did not return from the flight last night. She is still AWOL, the truant little thing.
And the last time she returned from such a stunt her mascara was all smeared up, she was walking a bit funny, and positively reeking of cologne! The wayward thing!
The Duckmistress is worried, as are these five remaining do-gooders.

Here are some former duckblogs.
Ahh… they grow up so fast!

Part 1

Part 2
Part 3
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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

Hot town, summer in the city 

Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty 

Been down, isn't it a pity 

Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city
All around, people looking half dead

Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head. . .
-- The Lovin’ Spoonful –

Will somebody please turn down the humidity around here?
If today is as hot as yesterday was, I’m going to croak!
How about you? What’s the temperature in your part of the planet?

[All the same →] Have a great Wednesday!

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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

No animal should ever jump up on the dining-room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.
-- Fran Lebowitz –

Have a great Tuesday!

Cute! Real Cute!

A funny thing happened on my way out of the lunchroom today, at work.
I glanced at the big bulletin board and there, right in the middle of it, very conspicuous indeed, was an envelope with my name on it.
So I unpinned it.
It felt a bit funny, the envelope, I mean.
As though it contained something other than mere paper. Something a bit heavy, and sort of concentrated in only one corner.
I tore it open and what fell out but one of those yellow sticky notes, all folded up.
Weird.
I unrolled this, to reveal no words whatsoever.
Just two quarters.
50 cents.

I’m a bit slow on the uptake, I’ll admit. Especially after a nice fat-laden Swanson TV-dinner!
So I did not “get” it, did not quite get the joke for those first 9 or 10 seconds.
Then I laughed!

See, there is only one person at my workplace that really reads my blog.
So, having read my blog from last night, she thought she would help me out a bit with my… [ahem!]… financial issues, regarding payphones!
Cute! Real cute!
I immediately turned around and went up to her office to congratulate her on such a witty gesture!
At first she played dumb. I handed her the quarters back, still stuck to their moorings in the yellow paper but she said, “No, no, I want you to have them. You really need them. You keep those quarters.”
[The brat!]

So I did. I kept them.
And I have them right here, right now, still stuck to the yellow paper, in fact.
And I’m sitting in a Starbucks at the book store.
And there’s a payphone over yonder.

So there can only be one right thing to do at this moment.
Yep!
Since I don’t need an ambulance [that I am aware of], I am going to go to that payphone and order a pizza!
Ahhh... the serendipitous beauty of blogging.

Hmmm… I’m now thinking of writing a blog about how badly I need a new car.

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Splash du Jour: Monday

Undaunted by the protesters, the G-8 leaders focused on finding consensus over global warming. And by “consensus” we mean getting Bush to agree with the other seven.
-- Jon Stewart, on The Daily Show –

Have a great Monday!

Payphone Robbery

I am sitting at Starbucks right now and I need to use the payphone. But I’m not going to.
The reason why?
Because the price of a payphone call here in the city of Ottawa has recently risen to 50 cents. Plus, I am a cheapo.
These two factors combined mean that I am not using a payphone anymore for any reason less urgent than calling for my own ambulance!
50 cents?

What has this world come to?
When I was a kid [← Oh my God, I have turned into my father]… when I was a kid, using the payphone costed a mere 10 cents.
That is fair, I think.
Ten calls for a buck! Excellent. Who can’t live with that?
Then it went up to 25 cents.
OK, I’m not going to jump off a bridge over it or anything. 25 cents. A quarter.
Still reasonable.
But, here is how the new Payphone Robbery recently revealed itself to me.
I was driving down Strandherd Street and stopped to use a payphone. Put in the 25 cents. Nothing. The display read out some jibberish about my having a 25 cent “credit”. But no call went through. I thought the phone itself was broken.
So I drove to the next phone booth.
Same deal. “Credit” but no call.
Then it dawned on me… this thing is wanting me to put in another quarter?
NO DAMN WAY!
For 50 cents, I’ll write a letter!

Now here’s the thing.
99% of you reading this little rant of mine… you own a cellphone. So, the whole phenomenon of Payphone Robbery is irrelevant to you. PLUS, you are saying to yourself, “Cipriano, isn’t it time that you sort of got with the programme here and….”
NO!
I have previously spoken somewhere about what I think of our silly cellphone culture.
Plus, I think that holding it next to your head like that gives you brain cancer.
Hence, I will not buy a cellphone.
I would rather adopt a somewhat more radical, yet, in my opinion, more feasible approach.
I am going to quit phoning people altogether!

And might I just add one more thing here?
It is you people, the ones with cellphones, all 99% of humanity out there that have caused this Payphone Robbery. This 50 cent problem! It’s all your fault!
See, the phone companies have been losing money. Why? Because everyone is using their own cellphone.
So they hike the rates of payphone usage, to compensate.

Thing is, I think this strategy is going to backfire on them.
Because see, people like me, part of that last 1% who still think that the Indians did it best with their smoke signals and all…. this Last Vestige of Antiquity… many of us are going to give in, and finally GET cellphones.
Because of the Payphone Robbery.
Whereas, [are you following me?]…. the smarter thing for the phone company to do would be to revert back to The Age of the Dime!

But they’ve made their greedy quick-fix of a choice.
And I will not bow, nor give in.
For me, when I am away from home, I am going to maintain my NNFA-NNFP Rule©.
No Need For Ambulance → No Need For Payphone.

That is, unless I have to order a pizza.
There are still some phone calls that are… umm… non-optional matters of life and death!

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Ornamental Cruelty

I feel sorry for fish.
Not so much the wild kind, like in a lake or stream or ocean. Well, actually even those type haven’t got the greatest life either when you think about it, having to worry every single moment about some bigger fish eating you. Not even being able to erect a fence against intruders!
Not knowing what fishhooks are?
But I mean domestic fish.
The kind you keep in a tank.
I feel sorry for them, I really do. What kind of a life is this?

I am sitting at Starbucks and in walk these three giddy girls. Young, and well…. giddy.
They each plop down a bunch of plastic bags filled with water and fish. Just leave them there on the table and then they walk away to go and get their drinks.
There must be a pet store nearby.

So I’m looking at these frantic fish in these bags.
Not a one of them is just sitting there, or even casually swimming. No. The tails are frantic, these are fish in turmoil. Fish well aware of the precariousness of their situation, and perhaps even chagrined at the giddiness of their new owners.
A couple of the bags are even sideways, and all that is keeping the occupant from a grisly gill-flapping death on a Starbucks table is the strength of a hastily-tied knot.
What if one were to accidentally roll off the table and smash to the floor?
Exactly.
The knot would burst, there’d be no last rites, all would be over.
No one is worried about this, except the fish itself, and me, apparently.

The girls return.
They set their drinks down amid the bags and are comparing fish with each other. Picking them up one by one and peering in. Imagine what the fish sees.
These big huge bag-distorted monster eyeballs ogling them!
It’s got to be horrible.

And so even if they survive the bus-ride “home” with these kids, what awaits them there?
A tank of some sort.
And they will probably be added to an already disgruntled and rudely displaced grouping of other fish that instantly hate them!
Even so, there is [I think] a worse scenario.
Yes, I am speaking of the solitary confinement tank.
Just you and the tank. Often, no accoutrements. No fake underwater trees, mermaids, or treasure chests. Not even that thing with the bubbles! Just you and water and this invisible wall you keep bumping against.
That’s gotta be fish hell.

No, I’ll go you one worse.
Put that tank in a bathroom. And while you’re at it, shrink the tank to the size of a baseball!
Seriously now, I was at a friend’s place and I was in the bathroom.
So as I was… sitting there [← enough detail? Ahh, the difference an “h” would make…] I look over and what do I see?
One of these baseball size jars WITH A LIVE FISH IN IT!
The thing’s got about enough room to want to kill itself, and that’s it!

I was horrified!
I mean, I had just peed more environment than this poor fish was living in!
It’s not right I tell you!
It’s not right, this fad with the ornamental fish in a jar. It’s cruel!
It would have been merciful of me to take that thing and flush it away.
And by the way, that fish’s funeral is going to take place there anyway! In the toilet!
But in the meantime, we feel compelled to have it suffer its life away in an almost always darkened bathroom. It cannot be good for the fish.

The girls have now left the Starbucks, giddy as ever.
Swinging their bags of frantic treasure.
Innocently filled to the brim with all manner of unintentional torture!

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Splash du Jour: Friday

Me, calling home to check in on Jack!

You know, sometimes I REALLY miss Mexico!

I really REALLY miss the place! [MORE PICS]
Have a great Friday!
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Splash du Jour: Thursday

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths.
This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water.
Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue.
The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. The light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.
-- Rebecca Solnit, in A Field Guide To Getting Lost –

For my own biblically inspired, [yet entirely whimsical] take on the origins of the blueness of the sky, see my poem → The Firmament.

Have a great Thursday!
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Splash du Jour: Wednesday

If there’s one thing that almost never fails to crack me up, it is David Letterman’s Top-Ten List.
Here is a recent one that had me very nearly soiling my pantaloons!
May it have a similar effect upon you…


Top Ten Signs Your Pilot Is Drunk

10. Introduces his co-pilots as Johnnie Walker and Jack Daniels.
9. Wings on his hat made of folded cocktail straws.
8. In lieu of P.A. safety instructions, he sings “Kung Fu Fighting”.
7. Long rambling announcements about animal shapes he’s seeing in the clouds.
6. At security, passengers remove shoes – he removes pants.
5. Giggling fit every time he says the word “cockpit”.
4. Delays takeoff to de-ice his mojito.
3. You experience heavy turbulence and you’re only taxiing to the runway.
2. Invites all passengers to a “layover” in his hotel room.
1. Midflight asks, “Which one of you losers is the designated driver?”

Have a great Wednesday!

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Time To Quit

I guess that Bizarro© cartoon I placed on this morning’s Splash du Jour© has gotten me thinking about it.
Smoking, I mean.
It’s been a real long time since I have had a cigarette.
Over 22 years.
In fact, my last cigarette was inhaled on November 26th, 1984.
For some reason I had slept on the couch that night, and when I awoke the next morning I reached for a cigarette, but I was all out.
And I instantly said to myself, “I’m not buying any more.”
Admittedly, the night before, when I had noticed that I was down to my last ciggy, I said to myself, “Time to quit.” I verbalized a resolution there. But I had no idea I would follow through so determinedly.
That afternoon [the 27th of November] I went to Smitty’s© Restaurant with a friend. A smoker. Was I tempted to light up?
Strangely, not.
And then, when my friend Gord arrived a bit later [Smitty’s was our hangout], he sat at the table next to me, an eye-high partition between us.
Soon, he looked over and asked me for a cigarette, and I told him I had quit.
He laughed.

And then he got up from his seat, went to the vending machine, and purchased a pack.
That he may tempt me, thereby. Test my mettle!
Back at his table, he took one out of his freshly unwrapped pack and tossed it to me, over the wall.
I will never forget how that cigarette rolled, oh so delightfully across my own table, as though nudged along by Satan himself! At the time I would not have been surprised if that cigarette, fueled as it was by Gord’s well-intentioned yet cancerous desires to kill me, would have rolled its way right up my chest and into my mouth, somehow igniting itself along the way!
But I picked it up before it could do any of that, and reaching over the partition, handed it back to Gord, and said, “Thanks. But, I quit!”

And I have not had one since.
Somehow, I have survived.
My story of quitting so “cold turkeyish” is unusual [uncommon], I know.
I had tried to quit several times [every New Year?] for many many New Years, and could never follow through. Could never do it.
Somehow this time, something clicked.

Dear Hopelessly-Addicted Puddle-Reader, if you smoke, I don’t want to lay a heavy on you, but I do want to encourage you.
Please quit!
Just try it. Try quitting. One more time.

In January of 2007, I flew to Mexico.
Not one person smoked a cigarette during that long flight, from frigidly cold Ottawa to beautifully warm Puerto Vallarta. Of course, smoking’s not allowed!
However, when we landed, HAI CARAMBA!
It was like a small brush fire around the tour buses waiting to take us to our respective resorts. I had to go back INTO the airport terminal for some fresh air!
EVERYONE was smoking outside. Like walking chimneys!
And I remember thinking, “How did you people survive that flight? Shouldn’t it be at least some sort of sign, telling you that you can actually live without filling yourself up with smoke?”

I am well aware that nicotine is powerful. It’s a powerful drug.
But maybe if you could just imagine that you are on a really long airplane ride?
Would that help?
No?
OK, how about this one…. Imagine that you are on a really long airplane ride, and that if you continue to not smoke when it lands, you will SAVE A LOT OF MONEY, and BE MORE HEALTHY and also LIVE WAY LONGER?
Ahhh…. but I said I would not be heavy…..!

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Splash du Jour: Tuesday

Have a great Tuesday!
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Splash du Jour: Monday

My mother was a high school English teacher, and when I was a kid she used to tear apart my compositions with scissors and a glue pot. That made me into a ruthless self-editor. When I came to the New Yorker, I was determined to have the cleanest Gould galleys of any writer, and I did. Miss Gould was my mother.
-- Judith Thurmann –

Have a great Monday!

The Pesthouse

I will skip all introductory preamble and move straight on to several opinionated statements → The Pesthouse, by Jim Crace, is an absolutely superb novel. Best I’ve read in a long time!
I loved it. I savoured, yet devoured it.
I didn’t want it to end, yet raced my way to its last page and I must conclude that anyone who thinks it worthy of less than five stars out of five is no friend of mine!
There. With that out of the way…

In this, the first novel by Crace I have ever read, post-apocalyptic America has been so long destroyed by some sort of un-named ecological disaster that the surviving population has reverted to a frontier, pioneering manner of life.
Gone [and seemingly long-forgotten] is the age [our own] of automation and electricity. No cars or planes, no big buildings or mass communication.
It is an America in shut-down mode, where a donkey is an extravagance.
It is an inversion of the American Dream, a reversal of Manifest Destiny, and nearly a return to the Dark Ages.
However, civilization’s demise is not global, or so the inhabitants of Crace’s America [and we readers] are led to believe. Legend has it that across the sea, in Europe, things are not so bad. Whatever has happened to America has not happened there. Europe is the new Promised Land, and hopeful Americans become pilgrims, making their way east where they believe they will board ships that will ferry them to their prosperous future.

Toward this utopia, the Lopez brothers, Franklin and Jackson, are making their way.
At a crucial point just outside Ferrytown, Franklin cannot go on, due to his bum knee. [Man, I could really relate to this guy, having a rickety knee myself!]
Low on supplies, Jackson heads into Ferrytown to work in exchange for food, leaving Franklin to rest on a hillside, and vowing to return.
But Jackson does not return. In the middle of the night, a landslide causes displaced gases from the lake to envelop the town, killing all the inhabitants, including Jackson.
Don’t let the first line of the book fool you [as it did, me]. “Everybody died at night,” does not refer to the overall end-of-the-world state of things. It refers merely to this one isolated tragedy, which serves, among other things, as a catalyst for Franklin’s meeting with Margaret.

Ahh, red-haired Margaret.
She has been abandoned by her family at the top of Franklin’s hill, in a hut known as the pesthouse.
It is a somber cabin where victims of the flux, a terrible disease, are left to die. Margaret is there, languishing.
Because Jackson does not return as promised, Franklin seeks shelter in the pesthouse, and a friendship is now born which will endure the length of the novel, and beyond.
Together they set out, their mutual ailments abating, toward the east.
But what a journey awaits them! This will not be your average Boy Scout hike!
The bulk of the novel is the chronicle of their journey, wherein they encounter peril after peril, and mutual pilgrims all along the way. Folks helpful, and folks not so helpful.
And bandits aplenty, none of which are helpful!

Quite suddenly, Margaret and Franklin are separated, and Crace chooses to follow Margaret’s continued quest, which is now no longer involved with merely reaching the ocean, but with a desired reunion.
She wants to find and/or rescue her Franklin. She becomes, for me as a reader, a very convincing heroine, someone I grew to love and admire for her courage and determination, and dang-it-all red-haired feistiness!
What a holy terror she is, at times!
And one of the main reasons is because, along the way, Margaret has become a mother to a child.
No, it is not what you think. The child is unintentionally adopted, along the way. Margaret is fighting not only for her own freedom and survival but also for her child, which she renames Jackie, in memory of Jackson.
Don’t mess with a mother!
The mother’s going to win.
The mother is going to get what is needed.

This was one of the most rollicking, gut-searing, adventurous, well-paced, un-put-downable, well-written, ending-redeeming, simultaneously scenically stark and beautiful novels I have ever read. Really, I loved it that much.
I agree with the Globe and Mail reviewer Joan Thomas, who called Crace’s style “just one draft away from blank verse.”
It is truly poetic. Mythic, even.

Some may find it an authorial inconsistency that towards the end, the travelers [now making their way west] encounter a landscape with “fewer dangers, warmer nights, softer going in a season that was opening up rather than closing down. It even decorated the way with early flowers.”
Early flowers?
What happened to the toxic soil and the barrenness and the despair?
It is overcome, in this novel, by the persistence of life and survival.
No inconsistency at all.
In the end, Franklin and Margaret are called upon to make some truly brave decisions, on behalf of the purest kind of love for one another.
And they do.
There are always flowers, somewhere.

To purchase this book, and you should do so right now, click HERE!
You can read an excerpt, HERE!

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Splash du Jour: Friday

There are a whole bunch of books about Hillary Clinton. According to a biography of Hillary by Carl Bernstein… Bill Clinton planned to divorce Hillary.
And when asked why she stayed married, Hillary was quoted as saying, “There are worse things than infidelity.”
To which Bill Clinton said, “Yeah. Fidelity.”
-- Jay Leno --

Have a great Friday!

Blindness: The Movie

OK, hold thy horses!
It’s kind of sketchy right now, I am searching frantically for information on this, but alas, all I have to go on is an article in the paper.
The web is very scarce on the subject.
But earlier today I was in the lunchroom at work, eating one of those individual size things of yoghurt and flipping through the papers strewn about at random, when what caught my eye but Blindness!
The word…. and alongside it, “Nobel Prize-winning novel”… and above this, a headline → Ruffalo, Moore Tapped for Canadian Film.
I nearly swallowed my dentures.
And I don’t even HAVE dentures!

So, here is the scoop.
One of my favorite novels of all time is going to be coming to a theater near me and you, soon!
In the spring of 2008, apparently.
It is in production, as we blog-speak!
Here…. I will tell you what I know.

Apparently, production of the film starts the end of July, in Toronto. Then moves to Uruguay, in September.
Some of the stars will be Mark Ruffalo as the doctor, suddenly struck blind.
None other than Julianne Moore → [and Cip said… “meooooow!”] will play the role of the doctor’s wife, one of the few that does not go blind.
Danny Glover will play the man with the eye patch.
The movie will be directed by Fernando Meirelles, whose previous work includes such things as The Constant Gardener [2005], and City of God [2002].

Oh my God, it is all too good to be true!
When the reclusive author, Jose Saramago, was originally approached by several hopeful filmmakers, they were “firmly rebuffed.”
But finally, in 1999, these two guys, Somebody McKellar and Somebody Fichman, “hopped a plane to the writer’s home in the Canary Islands, where they persuaded him to sign off on a deal.”
Wow!

Instead of my blabbing, you can read the same article I saw in The Globe and Mail, by clicking HERE!

I will be one of the first in line, to see this film.
I may even wear real dark glasses and carry a walking stick, and be led into the theater by my alcoholic Seeing-Eye Cat, Jack!

“You know, that’s not even all that funny, Dad.”

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Splash du Jour: Thursday

Scooter Libby, former aide to Vice President Cheney, was sentenced to 30 months in prison. Afterwards, Scooter said, “I just hope I have the chance to clear my incredibly stupid name.”
-- Conan O’Brien –

Have a great Thursday!