I think this is how movie ideas are generated now.
Epic Penile Picnic Panic
There’s a hot dog joke in there somewhere.
Each morning I do a series of New York Times puzzles including Wordle, the Mini crossword, Connections, and Strands but I start with the Spelling Bee. That's how this gem of a sequence of words appeared as I puzzled away on the possible anagrams (where you try to create as many words as possible with the seven assigned letters).
It even included the word “Alien”. I only wished I hadn’t thought of it out of sequence. Can you imagine being confronted with “Epic Alien Penile Picnic Panic” first thing in the morning? Even separately there's fun to be had: "Epic Penile-anything" could be fun or terrifying. Who hasn't had a "Picnic Panic"? Or, if I may say so, who amongst us hasn't suffered a "Penile Panic"? The less said of "Penile Picnic" the better.
“C’mon people! Let’s go! Let’s do this! You got this!”
- insanely inspired Peloton coach
Am I the only person who finds those Peloton ads actually make me less likely to subscribe to the service? Part of adulthood might mean doing boring things like work or paying and filing taxes but it also means I’m not a child being scolded by teachers, librarians or life coaches. Is there something from my upbringing or childhood that means I would rather push a bullying fitness coach off their stationary bike than put up with their relentless, vociferous positivity?
Why am I so put off by cheerleading? It is annoying but that seems like a universal truth rather than a personal insult. I suppose it’s my own skepticism that makes such an approach seem entirely performative and thus, wholly disingenuous. Am I too cynical to be cheered on by someone paid to cheer me on? I used to wonder about myself, “Am I a pessimist?”, but I don’t think so. I used to say I’m a realist but I think that’s something pessimistic people say to not sound so negative. Rather, I think I am an optimistic person but perhaps I fall on the dark side of optimism. What is the dark side of optimism? Is it like the dark side of the moon, always in shadow and cold beyond imagination? Or is it just the cautious, chill, relaxed view that warns you to not get your hopes up in case everything goes badly?
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I've never been someone for whom sleep comes easily, though I'm not an insomniac either. Once I get to sleep, I'm fine. My natural rhythm, discovered years ago at university, is to fall asleep somewhere between 1 AM and 2 AM and wake around 8:30 - 9 AM. I imagine I get about 6 to 6-1/2 hours of sleep and I know that more than 8 hours of sleep can lead directly to a headache. A bit less sleep leaves me feeling drugged by the afternoon and the only cure is a nap. Too much sleep can lead to a migraine. The only reason I can see this being called "unhealthy" is because it doesn't fit within societal norms.
The other night, I was uncomfortable due to back pain, so I took an over-the-counter muscle relaxant that I know also happens to make me drowsy so I usually wait until bedtime to assess whether I'll take it or not. As I usually wake up with an alarm, I don't often remember my dreams. I think in general, you tend to remember dreams if you awaken either during or just after you were in REM sleep, so you're more susceptible to remembering dreams when you wake up naturally. For me, it's typical to remember my dreams on Saturdays or Sundays when I sleep in.
On this particular night, I had a weirdly detailed dream of staying at a friend's house and finding a doorway that led down to an immense underground concourse full of stairways, landings, rooms, and levels that were open to a very high glass ceiling. Imagine a space similar to a shopping mall that is open and looks down to lower levels. There were many spaces, all in some 1970s style of concrete and rust-coloured carpeting that were full of people doing various things like playing foosball or ping-pong, relaxing with a drink, watching TV or with older people gathered together doing crafts or even one "room" of older women grooming their enormous cats. I eventually found my way back up to my friend's house and when he asked where I'd been I asked him about this enormous (and surprisingly bright) Piranesian space. He answered matter of factly that all the homes in the neighbourhood shared this communal basement, like a big shared rec room and that I was just seeing his neighbours who all live nearby. Read more »
Sometimes the Universe doesn't care for your plans.
As Toronto finally joins the rest of Ontario in “Stage Three”, which sounds more like a cancer diagnosis than a pandemic economic recovery plan, we’re trying to return to normal except we really aren’t. We’ve had almost 40,000 cases of COVID-19 with almost 2800 deaths, so there’s really nothing normal here, new normal or otherwise. Whether it’s all the restaurants that can’t fully re-open or the closure of movie theatres or the fact that travelling somewhere, anywhere, now feels unnecessarily risky, the pandemic has sucked a good deal of fun from the summer. More than the pandemic however is my own skin which won’t quite heal from the urticaria that has plagued me for the last eighteen months. Fun in the sun is a no-go. Stepping out in the searing bright sunshine almost immediately leads to painful hives. I’d love to go for a paddle but sitting in kayak sweating would be my undoing. A cool swim might be the perfect summer treat until I have to shower and soap up which may turn my skin into a living version of kimchi.
Instead, I’m trying to focus on the stuff I can enjoy this summer instead of all the stuff I’ll miss due to either the Pandemic or Urticaria. I might not get the long rides, kayaking or swims but there will be hammock hangs, grilled meats, home made ice cream, and movies on a shiny, new TV beneath the chill of the A/C.
I hate my backpack. I hate all backpacks. I even hate the name. Back. Pack. I hate this entire category of luggage. There was a moment when I thought what a great idea a “No-strap Backback” was, until I realized it was a terrible idea that was also an April Fools prank. Even the most ergonomically designed pack is putting stress on your shoulders and spine (even “strapless” ones). I hate the sweatiness of a pack covering a large portion of my back. What’s the point of wearing breathable fabric outerwear if most of it is covered with a heavy nylon unbreathable pack stuffed with junk?
Of course, it’s not really about the bag itself. Living in a city where you leave your house for hours at a time and don’t have a car to secure personal affects means you have to carry everything you might need with you. I’m fascinated by the “Persona” project where an artist asks to photograph a person and the belongings they deem essential enough to carry with them everyday (a surprising number of people carry two phones and knives - big knives?!) If I emptied out my backpack you’d find an asthma inhaler, a handful of ibuprofen, maybe a protein bar, a couple of notebooks, multiple pens, a phone cable and a backup battery to recharge my phone on the go. Probably the oddest things I carry are part of a repair kit for my bike, namely a wrench and a pump (a compact pump but a pump nonetheless). Read more »
With a calm canal flickering by one shoulder and a near full moon over the other I couldn't escape the feeling, an intense feeling, of deja vu. I had been here before and I knew every detail. It had been a dream but now I was experiencing it for the first time for a second time. I knew from the moment I stepped from Saint-Ambroise to Turgeon and the eery familiarity of the cascading light over the red brick houses that this was the same surreal, I'm talking Giorgio de Chirico surreal, setting I had wandered through in a dream I had years ago.
I rarely remember the dreams we apparently have every night. Such is my sleep cycle I guess. But occasionally I will awake fresh from a dream in the way that I not only remember it afterwards but that it stays with me for a very long time. Read more »
Something is off today. The street car was uncommonly busy and crowded this morning (for the time I travel). It feels cold and damp but the snow under foot crunched dryly. My toes are icy nubs at the end of my feet and I can’t get them any warmer. My hair seems thinner. My neck is stiffer. My back aches but isn’t stiff. My guts are roiling as though I drank 10 cups of coffee followed by a can of black beans. Worse of all, despite my nose being congested by a winter’s worth of dry crumble, I seem to be suffering some kind of olfactory dissonance; the street car stank of mouldy hockey equipment, the heater vent by the office entrance blasted out air that smelled like a cheese fridge, walking to my desk I noticed a slightly ammonia, piss-vinegar scent. Now in the kitchen there is a vaguely vanilla perfume, which would be normal if I weren’t drinking lemon tea.
Other portending signposts of curious happenstance? A usually quiet corner of the office was lively and loud like an outdoor market, my normally near dormant e-mail inbox was jammed with dozens of messages and my phone refuses to believe it has any connection to the outside world. Stranger still, people keep talking to me despite having my head down in this laptop.
If nothing odd or out of the ordinary events follow today then I can only conclude two things. One, my instincts are completely wrong, which wouldn’t really surprise me, or two, it’s just a bunch of stuff I noticed.
At 231 pages this year's almanac is the thickest ever. Despite the occasional typo or formatting error I was genuinely surprised to get the thing finished and printed in time for the holidays. For those of you less inclined to print and more inclined to read digital editions, you can read it here or download the PDF version from here.
The beard? This hair on my mug? It is temporary and temporal. I stopped shaving for a little while - it's not like I grew a beard, that's just a consequence of not shaving. I just got tired of using those crappy little blades that you throw away. Plus, they are insanely expensive. Insanely expensive garbage. Sometimes a blade lasts for a week, but usually just 2-3 shaves. Where's the quality control? I know no one wants to sell me a ceramic blade razor that I'll never have to sharpen or throw out. I get it. It's like when they give you a free printer as long as you pay $100 every other month for ink. For ink! Why is the disposable part the expensive part? Why is ink more expensive than oil or gas or I don't know… everything. Read more »
It occurs to me that no one reads this. That, in fact, as I type this sentence I may be the only person who ever reads this sentence. That's a little depressing, and a little weird. Like posting your diary poster size on hoarding and knowing people walk right by.
Dezeen, a designy design blog notes this recent commission of several designers to come up with a contemporary take on the Royal Wedding Souvenir Plate with A Very Modern Royal Wedding by KK Outlet
Well. That didn't take long. I know that there is an entire industry standing by to create the usual crap, still I admire the speed at which there was a counter strike from some collection of designers. Well done. I don't think anyone could explain why most people (oh hell, I'll just say it: "Old Women") want the same souvenirs their mothers had but I'm glad someone could produce something different.
My only comment would be, these plate designs are all so witty/ironic/clever/. Would it really kill you to design a lovely plate your gran would want. I mean, think of all the sweaters she knit for you. Sure, you may have hated the one with the reindeer, but I'm guessing you wore the simple flecked gray "fisherman's" style sweater throughout high school and maybe some sweet chicky or guy coveted it and loved the way you wore it. Maybe it even got you laid.
So, for God's sake designers. Make a contemporary souvenir plate your Gran would love. Doesn't she deserve it?
I spent a few minutes rummaging through some photo albums yesterday, picked out a handful of pictures and took them to the local pharmacy to scan them. Those Kodak photo kiosks are a real dog's breakfast of memory card slots, output trays and scanner drawers. Eventually, I managed to scan almost a dozen photos of my parents and relatives taken between 1955 and 1960 or so. Read more »
This spring I felt I had to get a new eye glass prescription. The script I'd had for years was causing more and more headaches and were twisted so badly that they never sat straight on my nose. They were that sort of thin wire-framed type where the bottom half was frameless. The thing I liked about them was they were almost invisible. Most people I worked with often ignored them. I wear glasses everyday, but most people didn't notice, that's how invisible they were. Yet, being so slight, meant they were incredibly fragile and bringing a hand anywhere near my face seemed to result in an instant and irritating smudge. They were also uncomfortable — which sounds crazy given how lightweight they were, but the point of contact always left red marks on the bridge of my nose. Did I mention they were also crazily askew on my face, or that any attempt to straighten them resulted in popping out a lens? Did I also mention that the prescription was wrong? Still I wore them and that stupid messed up prescription for years. I was always told by optometrists that I would "get used to them". I should have stood up and poked my fingers in their eyes and said, "Don't worry, you'll get used to it." Finally, one day I had a migraine of epic proportions that, if not triggered by the glasses, was not aided by the them. Instead of continuing to wear them I went back to an older pair with a weaker script that were as comfortable as an old pair of jeans. Read more »
When last I was upon that rocky protuberance known to us as the isle of New Found Lande I did bring with me two exotic curios that were new to my parent's home. Wi-fi and Polenta. Polenta, cornmeal as used in Italian cooking, seemed the more popular. Please see the brief kinomatic featurette below on the grilling of said polenta now available from your nearest Dominion.
The story of Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1889-1951) reads like a Coen brothers script. Photos from a lecture at the Powerplant Gallery in Toronto
A young go-getter Emanuel Julius begins working at the Socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason where he meets and marries a wealthy heiress. Eventually he buys 25% of the paper with the heiress' backing and starts publishing public domain classics in pamphlet format. When EHJ discovers there is a voracious appetite for the pint sized books, he quickly starts churning out pamphlets consisting of re-printed classics and commissioned originals from notable authors such as Upton Sinclair and Clarence Darrow. Not all of Haldeman-Julius contributers were as esteemed and the quality of the Little Blue Books, as they were later called, quickly deteriorated. The following titles attest to the range of work published:
1507. A Rational View of the Sex Issue [by] Harry Elmer Barnes. 1508. What You Should Know about Poisons [by] Heinz Norden. 1509. The Gay Chronicle of the Monks and Nuns [by] Joseph McCabe. 1515. The Love Affair of a Priest and a Nun (Abelard and Heloise) [by] Joseph McCabe. 1516. Facts You Should Know About Gonorrhea [by] Heinz Norden. 1517. Land, and Old Man and His Wife [by] Konrad Bercovici. 1523. How to Avoid Catching Venereal Diseases [by] Heinz Norden. 1524. Famous Eccentric Americans [by] J. V. Nash. 1534. How to Test Your Urine at Home [by] B. C. Meyrowitz. 1535. How to Throw a Party [by] Heinz Norden. 1536. Facing Death Fearlessly [by] Joseph McCabe. 1537. The Essence of Unitarianism [by] L. M. Birkhead. 1538. A Rational Sex Code [by] E. Haldeman-Julius. 1545. Why I Do Not Fear Death [by] E. Haldeman-Julius. 1546. An Encyclopedia of Sex [by] E. Haldeman-Julius. 1553. Beneficial Exercises for Nervousness and Indigestion [by] C. O. Benson and Dr. C. L. Smith. 1560. Why I Quit Being a Prohibitionist [by] Harry Hibschman. 1564. Homosexuality in the Lives of the Great [by] J. V. Nash. 1565. The Danger of Catholicism in the Public Schools [by] E. Haldeman-Julius. 1566. How to Conduct a Love Affair [by] Betty Van Deventer. 1567. Making Men Happy with Jams and Jellies [by] Elizabeth Palmer.
Of course, some of the more popular titles involved titillating topics of sexuality or the conduct of the sexually active (or deviant). Yet these pamphlets, sold mostly through mail-order for 20 for $1, made E. Haldeman-Julius wealthy. He became a man about town, which couldn't be that hard in a town like Girard, Kansas. Eventually though, his wife, Matrice ran off with his alcoholic assistant leaving Emanuel alone to womanize and write many, many, many, many, many, many more Little Blue Books.
In the end, it was E. Haldeman-Julius' writing that may have been his undoing. In a book about the FBI he outed J. Edgar Hover as a homosexual which of course didn't go over too well at the Bureau. The FBI already had a file on Haldeman-Julius due to his role as a publisher of socialist literature and as they dug deeper they discovered EHJ's unpaid taxes. EHJ was charged and found guilty of tax evasion but he died before he served any time. In 1951, he was found dead in his pool, or as many locals believe, the FBI murdered him.
His printing house was left to his son but on July 4th, 1978 errant fire works landed on the roof catching fire and burning the building down.
NOTE: I just had to fix the missing image of this post not just because it's such a weird Toronto image but also as it marks the day I started using an iPhone and it was the first photo I took with it. What this really means is that I'm not quite two years through my three year contract and I'm already on my third iPhone. Not such a great record. What this also says to me is that as your contract will certainly outlive the device, I would advise getting a two year contract rather than the three-year one (about a year too long) and as I got one phone replaced under warranty and the third heavily discounted it's still better than getting a phone unlocked outside of a plan as you'd be paying about $400 more than with a contract. Also, for me, the likelihood of changing providers within two years is slight. In 10 years I've only switched twice, from Bell, to Rogers to Fido. Take that as advice, if you care to.
How did they do it? How did the Chinese muster the strength and fortitude to win all those gold medals? Doping? Maybe. Nutrition? Probably. In fact you may be interested to know there's a particular restaurant in Beijing for anyone feeling fatigued or lacking strength. It's called Strong in the Pan and it specializes in one "thang". Wang. Dong. Johnson. That's right. Animal Penis.
The Chinese are well known to eat anything with wings but airplanes, and anything with legs but tables, yet this seems a bit far fetched. Perhaps as Schott's Miscellany notes, the Chinese think of animals very differently than we do in the West. Maybe this excerpt will shed some light;
"[it is said] that Dr Franz Kuhn discovered 'a certain Chinese encyclopaedia' entitled Celestial Empire of Benevolent Knowledge, which stated that all animals can be classified thus:
[a] belonging to the Emperor [b] embalmed [c] tame [d] sucking pigs [e] sirens [f] fabulous [g] dogs [h] included in the present classification [i] that shake like a fool [j] innumerable [k] drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush [l] etcetera [m] having just broken the water pitcher [n] that, if seen from a distance, look like flies"
Or maybe it doesn't shed any light at all. Couldn't they just eat the heart of their victim? Is nothing sacred? It just seems like the last indignity you can do to a creature... serve up its dick in a broth?
This is the reason mobile phones have cameras.
