Philoillogica

Delighting...

...that I (an etymologist) sat next to an entomologist on the airplane. Sounds like the start of really nerdy joke.

Put your money on Big Bird, fellas - there's gonna be a huge payload

A chicken salesman to another passenger, overheard at Dorval airport:

“Turkey is making big inroads on our territory…expect big things from turkey.”

“I'm telling ya: beef is gonna be the third meat.”

Blue cheese, Italian, Thousand Island, Ranch, Butter Pecan...

Abby and I have decided to stalk the Fredericton senior population to see where they feed.

We figure this is a good idea, because old people generally know where the cheap food is, and they don't move very fast. Even if they're driving, we should still be able to follow them on foot to the local diner.

This is plan B, you understand. Plan A involved actually listening to the coupons that came in the mailbox, which led to a disasterous Ponderosa Steakhouse experience involving 21 pieces of fried shimp and tiny chocolate chip cookies in the salad bar. There wasn't a menu; the food options had been photographed and stuck to the wall - which should've been our second clue that no matter what the coupon said, this was not the place to eat. The first clue was that there were no old people in the restaurant.

Those of you reading this from Toronto are smugly chortling as you suck back dim sum and sensible pairings of fusion cuisine, likely having just boo-hood your eyes out over Ontario's sushi debacle. "Ponderosa steakhouse?" Your eyes get buggy. "She must be joking."

No, sportsfans, I'm not joking. I'm hungry. My Toronto-bred tastebuds are insolently rejecting local nacho and burger cuisine, longingly remembering glorious pho and tom yum gai, streetmeat and falafel, burnt marshmallow ice cream from Greg's and beef carpaccio. In the absence of such glorious foods, I have been forced to settle for good, down-home, WASP cooking, but damned if I can find it anywhere.

Hence stalking the elderly. The way I figure it, it's like evolution. They've already done a lifetime of legwork to figure out where the fittest watering holes are, where survival is most likely and where competition from other species is lessened - why not take advantage of that collective wisdom?

Plus, they tend to give away free mints if you hug them. I LOVE that.

Delighting...

...in Jack Hanna on Letterman last night.

"There's no Columbus zoo, really, is there Jack? You're not a zookeeper at all, are you?"

It is immoral to take funding from the public to do research, and then charge it access to that research

Why aren't more people talking about this?

Like trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people come into a room and breathe on it.

They're making a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie, and I'm not happy about it.

I knew this was coming, of course; the film’s been in negotiation for twenty years, with a quagmire of legal issues and a lack of interest holding up the project. In the early nineties things started moving with Ivan Reitman at the helm, but his unwillingness to let Douglas Adams have creative control (!) saw him to the door. Once again, progress on the Hitchhiker movie languished as production companies claimed that science fiction and comedy just didn’t mix well in film. Then in 1997, Men In Black came out. “Hmph,” said Everybody. “Maybe they do mix after all. But it doesn’t matter because American audiences don’t find British humour entertaining.” Then Austin Powers came out. “Hmph,” said Everybody again. “Look at the egg on our faces.” And so people started to show a little more interest. But it’s really only been since Adams’ death three years ago that anybody in Tinseltown actually cared to look into Hitchhiker again, after envying Peter Jackson’s LOTR ubiquity and wishing for a piece of that geekpie. Once a wry exec realized that Hitchhiker too has legions of smug uberfans who’d see the thing twenty times in the theatres and buy both the theatre release and extended versions of any DVD six and ten months afterwards, it was only a matter of time before they started filming. The cherry on top of the excessive marketing sundae was no doubt the fact that that pesky author was well out of the way, trapped in that big airplane in the sky, awaiting lemon-soaked napkins for all eternity. Bring on the Happy Meals, the stuffed-toy Zaphod and my very own Sony-made Marvin the Paranoid Android. My Globe and Mail assures me that the thing has a “hip and interesting cast,” and that “John Malkovitch has a cameo.” Oh, bliss. Somebody pass me a lemon-soaked napkin to catch my tears of joy.

Tsk, tsk. So not an issue in the grand scheme of things, really. Why must I dump on everything, anyway, right? What’s wrong with there being a movie? If I don’t like it, I just shouldn’t see it, right? If what you’re griping about is that people will only see the movie and not read the books, then that’s stupid, because look how Tolkien has been in print since the LOTR movies came out! Or Harry Potter! See??? Now stop fretting about adaptations, Sarah, and be happy that the movies will “encourage more people to read.”

Bah. I urge such sympathizers to consider that people should read for reasons other than “I saw this on TV,” but that is a discussion for another day. Let us consider this particular text, the first of the trilogy in five parts that we are discussing:

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a small paperback book; as such, it is lightweight, composed of processed wood fiber (like other small, paperback books), fits comfortably in one’s housecoat pocket, provides practically no nutrients or vitamins if one happens to chew on a corner, and is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a towel. Any of its 150 or so pages can be immediately accessed by opening the front cover (so) and turning the pages in either a backwards or forwards manner (thus) and gleaning information from the small black marks which are superimposed on the processed wood fiber. This is not a particularly difficult process, especially after one has been instructed in the gleaning information method, useful for so many other processed-wood-viewing purposes. This action, known as reading, is an entirely different sensory experience than what one gets from allowing a multinational corporation with zero sense of humour to tyrannize our imaginations for 90 minutes, informing us at several subtle points that our lives would be oh-so-much better if only we had more Reese’s Pieces, or an Omega watch, or perhaps this lovely BMW. What’s that? No, never fret, darling. We’ve maintained that quaint “Britishness” as a marketing ploy – now you and I both may have tea (just like the British! Just like Arthur Dent!) that “tastes almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.” ™

And such is my problem. I despair less that I will be forced to share my joy of Hitchhiker with the world than that the corporate world will assume ownership of my joy and try to sell it back to me. No doubt the Hitchhiker movie will have its clever moments, and its champions amongst the faithful “fanbase” (a fiction created by brilliant film promoters to claim legitimacy by stroking the egos of those who run web forums devoted to an author’s work) will claim that it is “true to the book” whether it actually is or not, simply because somebody with a byline asked them to. A major blockbuster version of a much-loved book is always welcomed by its fans, whether it is a good adaptation or not. Making it so is besides the point for a production company – the faithful will see it regardless, and the money will come flowing in.

So yeah, I think it’s time to panic.

Chairman of the Bored

You may want to skip this entry. It's about where I rest my ass.

When planning my move from Toronto, I'd debated sharing a moving van with Abby to take my books, furniture and other large items to Fredericton before me, to save myself the trouble of buying new ones when I got there. Abby and I had began discussing who was bringing what after our ludicrous 20-minute "courting" period, when we had sat in a Juice for Life franchise and based our decision on whether or not to live together for the next two years on what kind of shoes the other was wearing, and whether she double-dipped her french fries in the communal peanut sauce. It emerged that it was my responsibility to provide the dining table and chairs, and I could hardly object, since Abby was bringing the television, VCR, stereo, bookshelves, coffee table, rugs, appliances, dishes, housewares, sofa, easy chair, lamps, tea kettle, pots and pans, dish towel, cutlery, DVD player and wallcoverings. She also brought tweezers, q-tips and band-aids, indicating her possession of a forethought that I have never demonstrated fore nor since. Needless to say, I was in a bit of a bind once I decided against moving my furniture in the van with Abby's: I needed to fulfill my wimpy end of the bargain, if I was going to continue to live guiltless with the goddess with the tweezers. I'd declined moving my table and chairs because the quoted cost was prohibitive, and overexposure to my cynical father-in-law convinced me that I was going to get screwed somehow (it never matters how), but now that I was here, I'd better look to our eating dinner on the floor and fast. Especially since I was eating on the dishes of the tweezer dame, while watching her tv.

Don't get me wrong; I was feeling no pressure or resentment from Abby about my broken covenant - but it was a reproachful echo that buzzed in the corner of the apartment where the table should be, and simply knowing what "pathetic fallacy" means doesn't make one immune to it. I set myself out to find a table with all the guilty haste I could muster, pausing only to lay the back of my hand across one cheek in wearied self-indulgence. When the secretary of the grad program forwarded an email from a graduate who was moving, my eyes lifted in exultation: a dining table! For six! For only $60! Delivered! Joy knew no limits when confronted with such bounty. I bought it, sight unseen. Its owners mentioned that it was "in excellent condition, except one chair, but you can recover it." No problem. "A few marks, chips, on the chair backs and table top." Fine. Shabby chic. I can deal. "We'll bring it by tonight." I kiss the hem of your garment, you people of the Subarus.

It arrived.

It was dark when they got here with the thing, so I wasn't really aware of how it looked at first, other than it was BIG. Marvelously big. No guilty echo anymore, big. We lugged the thing inside where the light was, as the sellers dumped the chairs onto our patio and sped off into the inky night, clutching my $60, never to be heard from again. I swore I heard a low chuckle mingled with the crunch of gravel.

"Eeeeeeeeeee-eeeewwww...." said Abby.

It was filthy. Not kinda dirty, a lick and a promise'll make it better, dirty, but fil-thy. Like it had belonged to a family of raccoons who had pets filthy. Like orcs had made sweet orc-love on it filthy. Like it had been used for medical experiments in the bowels of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory, until he rejected it in favour of a table that was less revolting filthy. Like it belonged to Christina Aguilera.

So we started cleaning. And cleaning. And cleaning. And disinfecting. We used an entire roll of those Life Brand disinfecting cloths that they sell at Shoppers' (purchased, of course, by the Tweezer Dame in one of her moments of eloquent forethought) to get the thing clean, but the seats of the chairs were beyond our help. We decided to recover them with tea towels.

It is at this point in my entry that I would like to pay homage to Martha Stewart, whose perfectionist neurosis has led me towards dissatisfaction on so many fronts in my domestic life, and to my mother, whose "as fabulous as I want to be" attitude has taught me the Occam's Razor theory of decorating: the cheapest and easiest expensive-looking solution is always best. It is in honour of these two fabulous women that I dedicate our much-improved dining-room table:

I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways

...of course, the Lady of the Song of Songs wasn't talking about a laptop. But I am. And it is mine and it is glorious, and I can come away or stay or go wheresomever I please, and take it with me. And lo, I can do work wheresomever I am, or not do work, so as I choose. And lo, it is wireless, and this city is wireless. And where there is not wireless, there are wires that can connect. And I can connect to all those that I love, as I have come a world away from my fair ones back home.

Ain't technology grand?

Cursing...

...the guy who asked me, "what kinds of stuff do you put in your blob?"

Delighting...

...in the way the sidewalks here are crooked, which makes them fill up with the splashiest, clearest, "why-don't-I-have-rubber-boots-anymore" puddles imaginable. You rock, Fredericton sidewalks.