Do not press "Send"

Dear Relative-who-shall-remain-nameless,

Sorry it's taken so long to respond to your note, but I hadn't scrolled down far enough on first reading and so had failed to spot the attached homily in bold print and italics with the stock photo of people gazing into the sunset until I showed it to my husband, asking him how to respond. His answer was lost in the chaos that followed. Keyboards are really difficult to clean.

Toodles,
Your Nameless Relative

PS Are we really related? I'm not sure we inhabit the same universe...

Tears of a clown

I've been known to weep quietly at bus stops. Not often, you understand, just once in a while. I can get away with it because (I believe I've mentioned this before) after a certain age, women become invisible and no one notices, provided you're reasonably dignified about it. A couple of weeks ago, I was waiting for a Transitway bus at the corner of Slater and Kent in downtown Hades and sniffling unobtrusively, not in self-pity this time, but because I was listening to the Moth podcast on my iPod.

The Moth is a series of storytelling events. It started in New York, but there are now stages in L.A., Chicago, Detroit, plus a road show. A Moth evening usually has a theme and the rule is that the story be true, from the teller's own life and be told without notes. Moth storytellers are often famous, or published authors (or both), but your average John or Jane Doe can participate in "Story Slams". The story I was weeping quietly along to was from the Moth Mainstage and was told by comedian Anthony Griffith. I'd never heard of this fellow before, but I gathered he is successful at what he does, so I looked him up when I got home. He's very good. Take a look at his impression of his mum delivering discipline in the midst of a Baptist hymn:
That's funny, right? Okay, now, if you can bear it, listen to the legendary story he told on the Moth Mainstage a few years back. Get some tissues first. It will take you a little less than ten minutes. Or if you're invisible, just go to a bus stop and sniffle quietly.

I vote because I like to complain

The bell rang this sparkling shining morning, and I tripped down the stairs to answer it. (Never mind what I was up to.) A pleasant young man stood there clutching a clipboard and I could see from his pile of brochures that he was our local Progressive Conservative candidate.

Some of you may be aware that Canada is suffering through yet another federal election. For the past decade, we've been having a damn federal election every couple of years. This is because we have a minority government, run by a lacquer-hair control-freak who has succeeded in reducing media coverage of his Progressive Conservative Party's shenanigans to carefully spooned-out sound-bites. Their latest trick has been tossing people out of PC events because they've vetted their backgrounds for tell-tale trouble-maker Facebook features such as liking environmental groups or having their picture taken with a Liberal Party member. I wish I were kidding.

I looked brightly at the guy on my porch: "Oooh, you're our PC fella!"
"Will you be supporting the Progressive Conservatives?" he asked hopefully.
"No, we're NDP and Greens in this house," I said cheerfully. "But we're pleased to see you as a part of the democratic process."
"It's nice to see a smiling face," he said and went on his way. This neighbourhood has been a Liberal riding for about a gazillion years. This means my vote will have no value whatsoever, but I will vote, dammit, because it's my duty and I figure I can't participate in the grand Canadian tradition of dissing the government, unless I cast my ballot.

Thankfully, we have the Rick Mercer Report to take the sting out of most elections. It's a very funny show, probably funny only to Canadians, but then, I have to Google most of Graham Norton's references, so there. Part of each show is a feature called the Rant. This week, Rick goes after young voters. About thirty eight percent of eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds turned out for the last election:
If you're not Canadian, and you're thrown by the accent, he's from Newfoundland.

Double-duty book review (for Doctor Who fans only)

Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter by Russell T Davies

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Okay, I'll be straight with you. If you're not a follower of the sci-fi/fantasy television series Doctor Who, there's probably little reason for you to read this book (or this review, for that matter). It's not just about Doctor Who, of course. It's about British television in the early part of the first decade of this century, and, above all, it's about writing, but to get to that, you 'll be wading up to your waist in Doctor Who and if you're not a Whovian, you'll just get lost, trust me.

Russell T Davies is the guy who resurrected Doctor Who. Or ruined it, depending on whom you ask. I'm married to the Resident Fan Boy who seems to have been moving into the latter camp ever since we were exposed to the final four specials that rounded off Davies' tenure in the New Who universe that he created. (The Resident Fan Boy is a Classic Whovian, devoted to the series as it was between 1963 and 1988, although he'll watch anything Who-related.)

Now, I wasn't crazy about those specials either. However, I can credit Davies with making me a New Whovian in the first place. Like many current female fan-girls, I came to DW after watching Tenth Doctor David Tennant in the saucy biopic Casanova, penned by Davies. My reaction at the time: "Hey...isn't David Tennant the new Doctor? Wait a minute...Russell T Davies wrote this? Didn't he write Bob and Rose? He's writing the new Doctor Who too?!?"

So I started watching the new Doctor Who, then I started staying up late to catch reruns of Davies' first Who season, with Chritopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor and...

...I became a prime candidate to read A Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter which covers the period when Davies began writing his final full season of Doctor Who while beginning a long, detailed and deliberate series of e-mails with Doctor Who Magazine writer and journalist Ben Cook. This gives fans of the show a peephole into the shadowland of roads not taken in character development, plot, casting, and special effects (usually the first to go to save money).

For example, early on in the correspondence (back when it was going to be just a Doctor Who Magazine article and not a 600+ page tome), Davies describes his ideas for the Doctor's companion to follow Freema Agyeman's Martha Jones. (Again, if you're persisting in reading this and you're not a Whovian, you really should stop. Really.) He envisions an older woman in her thirties as a change to the twenty-somethings usually traveling through time and space with the quadricentenarian Doctor, a lady who has just been jilted by her fiancé. As these ideas are forming, news comes that Catherine Tate, who played one-off companion Donna Noble, will be returning for a whole season. Donna is thirty-something and has been jilted by her fiancé (who actually betrayed her before being fed to gigantic infant alien spiders), but now Davies must come up with a re-introduction, rather than an introduction.

And you've got to hand it to him, this guy is bursting with ideas. I spent the book thinking: "Ooooh...that would have been nice..." or "Gee, I'm glad we were spared that..." It's probably the tantalizing promise of what a story could be and the the fear that it will fall short that results in what seems to be a lot of procrastination on Davies' part. I'm beginning to wonder if this is an essential part of writing, remembering the late Douglas Adam's classic line about loving deadlines and the "whooshing sound they make as they fly by". I certainly felt a pang of recognition myself, every time Davies confesses using up precious writing time doing unrelated work or watching television, even though I have neither Davies' talent nor the responsibility for the success of an iconic television show.

Of course, having this responsibility means having not only talent and imagination, but a healthy ego and a thick skin. Davies has the first three in spades (and enough humorous self-deprecation to temper the ego). However, for all his protestations to the contrary, he has a surprisingly thin skin, particularly when it comes to the slings and arrows of outraged DW purists. When Helen Raynor (writer of two double-parter episodes) fails to resist the temptation of checking out Outpost Gallifrey (a vehement Doctor Who online fan forum), she is badly burned and Davies howls in her defense: Helen is in a delicate position in that she's only just started, and she's on the verge of being really very good - and now she finds herself ruined by this wall of hostility. It makes me furious.

Now, I think both he and she are being a bit silly. Raynor's episodes were certainly not amongst my favourites, but apparently they were vastly popular so somebody must have like them. Davies claims you can't resist seeing what people are saying about you online. I say you can and you must and any DW writer who is misguided enough to venture on to a Doctor Who fan forum must be bonkers, anyway. It's like a fight club in there; I avoid forums on any topic like the plague. I do, however, engage happily in post-episode analyses of Doctor Who episodes on other people's blogs. I think it's one of the pleasures of being a fan. We certainly don't expect Mr Davies, Ms Raynor nor anyone else involved in the show to drop by, take our advice or get their feelings hurt. Most smart actors don't read reviews; smart writers should probably do the same.

What did I learn from this book? I learned that Russell T Davies wrote not only his own episodes, but as the show's head writer re-wrote most of the episodes by other writers. Some evidently didn't mind and their comments on the process are included; a couple probably did. (I don't think Davies re-wrote episodes by Stephen Moffat who eventually took over the series from him.) Again, I was stunned by the quantity of ideas generated by this man; many of which were not used.

Bottom line? While anyone who is not a fan of Doctor Who would not get this book at all, it is pretty well irresistible for anyone who does love this extraordinary television show, whether they're a Russell T Davies fan or not. All Whovians owe a debt to him.



View all my reviews

Flower graveyard

I thought one of the things I might do for April blogs is post some of the photos I've taken over the years. (The ones I'm really proud of, that is.) I'm going with the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, so yes, this is another cheat. This photo was actually taken in April a few years back when I was relatively new to digital photography. I realized that if the landscape is drained, bleak and sepia, why not go all the way and make the photo sepia? That way, what is an eyesore becomes art. Right? Uh, right?

I'm putting myself to bed early again tonight. I've got a long blog tomorrow, but it's about Doctor Who, so you might not want to wait up...

While we're waiting for the spring....

Ice pellets today as I struggled up the hill to the library to return a book I hadn't finished about tectonic plates and Krakatoa because someone had put a hold on it. I'm periodical and writing something, but it's not finished and I'm tired, so here's a song I really like from The High Dials from Montreal:

Wanna make thumbthing of it?

Oh, but I'm damp and crabby. In the true and vicious tradition of April in Hades, we were forced to walk to the bus stop this morning through a precipitation which Environment Canada describes as "wet snow" but that is actually thick white missiles that go plop-plop-plop like a blizzard of bird-droppings. By the afternoon, I was forced to go out again in what was now cold, pelting rain.

I hadn't had enough sleep because I stayed up to watch The Killing and The Borgias. The former is an American retelling of a Danish murder-mystery series filmed in Vancouver. I recognise next to no one in the cast, but so far, it's compelling. The latter is clearly a very expensive production, features three fabulous actors: Jeremy Irons, Derek Jacobi, and Colm Feore, and each shot looks like a High Renaissance painting. Then they lost me. In a beautifully photographed, sumptuous recreation of Rodrigo Borgia's procession on his way to being crowned Pope, I listened in disbelief to the background music which was Zadok the Priest. You know, that coronation anthem that George Frederick Handel composed in 1727? They even played it kind of softly, as if hoping no one would notice. Well, they didn't sneak it past me, and then they killed off Derek Jacobi's character, so to heck with them and their bleedin' anachronisms.

Boy, I'm cranky. So I'm putting myself to bed early tonight and leaving you with this gem which is undoubtedly long past its expiry date in Britain:I like this so much, I've friended Bertram Thumb-cat on Facebook. So there.

Just ten looks is all it took (write of passage number eighteen)

April in Hades means a sepia world of still-dead grass and weather-beaten brick. We're out of our boots and back into street shoes at last, the beat of our footsteps knocking up the gravel and salt left over from winter into our noses and mouths.

This morning, I'm seated next to a young woman who's busy texting. Directly in front of me, another young woman of similar age keeps glancing back over her shoulder at my seating partner, smiling expectantly. Seating partner does not look up, not even a flicker of an eyelash in this other girl's direction. This goes on as the bus cruises down the long stretch of the Vanier Parkway. I'm starting to feel very sorry for the ignored girl, who persists in repeating her grinning backward glances with not a sign of encouragement from my seat-mate.

It's not until we're nearly at Hurdman Station when it finally dawns on me that the girl in front of me is texting too...

Tripping the light font taste test

Wikipedia pulled a witty April Fool's stunt yesterday. For "witty", read "rather esoteric in-joke". The only reason I got the joke (in an off-side kind of way) is that when I'm avoiding things I'm supposed to be doing, I read through the comments on postings on Passive-Aggressive Notes, a site that collects notes, very few of which are truly passive-aggressive, although the site-host(s) readily admit to this. One of the key things I have learned from piddling my time away at PAN is that Comic Sans is bad. Comic Sans is the equivalent of portraits of Elvis Presley painted on velvet, ruffled tux shirts, having "Sometimes When We Touch" sung at your wedding. Or, according to one of those insufferable London press fashionistas, wearing a cape. You know, the ones who decree every year what we should and shouldn't be wearing and what losers we are if we don't comply? Am I the only one who wants to slap them?

Comic Sans is a font (yes, it's okay if you didn't know this), and Wikipedia's big joke on April 1st was using Comic Sans in their entry on Helvetica which (apparently) is a very tasteful font even if its name does remind me of cheap cheese.

I've got nothing against Comic Sans, or Helvetica for that matter, although I now know that I dare not use the former if I'm ever to be taken seriously. Up until recently, I had no idea that I was being judged on my choice of font. I guess the fact that I usually use whatever default font is available (usually Arial or Times New Roman) betrays me as being hopelessly unimaginative or completely lacking in initiative.

Frankly, my favourite font ever was a "Harry Potter" one that computer-savvy elder daughter (then about age ten) downloaded for us. It got lost when our computer went foom, and since I have no idea how to download fonts, I use whatever's available on Outlook Express or Word Perfect. When I do choose, it's Calligrapher when I want to take up a lot of space and Perpetua when I don't.

Of course, someone with a lot of time on their hands came up with a clever online test to determine "the font that is best for you". You've probably seen it. I took it for the second time a few weeks ago, having forgotten I'd already taken it months ago and my result this second time was: Okay, I may not have anything against Comic Sans, but I think Plastica is vile. This font sucks. It was apparently assigned to me because (supposedly) I'm emotional, understated, traditional, and relaxed. Plastica doesn't say any of that to me, besides, I'm reasonably sure that last time I took this silly test, I got Archer Hairline (emotional, understated, progressive, disciplined -- apparently I've deteriorated and backslid between the first and second takings of this test) which was okay, but I couldn't find it anywhere. Besides, of the fonts available on the quiz, I only really liked Baskerville Italic(rational-understated-traditional-relaxed) and Perpetua Titling Light(rational-understated-traditional-disciplined), but the latter appears to be only in upper-case, so I'd be shouting all the time. But very tastefully. Besides, I thought it was called Perpetua Tilting Light which I found far more appealing, and so was rather put off when I discovered its true name while attempting to google it.

So, lessons learned:
1. Comic Sans is to be avoided, unless, of course, you're being ironic and everyone else gets the joke.
2. If you take on-line quizzes seriously, you're a fool in more than April.

I wonder if I can find an ironic way to wear my cape.

Waiting for Goddam

If we hadn't left the theatre by the back door, I never would have spotted the body.

We'd just spent ninety minutes watching Christopher Plummer becoming John Barrymore. That's a story in itself; maybe I'll tell you about it some time. The Resident Fan Boy and elder daughter were disoriented as we stepped out into the frigid street behind Toronto's Elgin Winter Garden. I have a better sense of direction and persuaded them to turn right, following knots of fur-coated theatre-goers. Our hotel was about a three-minute walk away. As we crossed Queen Street East,I happened to glance across Victoria Street and saw a man lying prone in the middle of the sidewalk where the shadow of the office block kept him out of the glow of the streetlights. A coat was spread over his head and upper body. Other theatre-goers strolled briskly past him, down Queen.

What to do? We dithered for a few minutes, then hurried down to the Italian restaurant where we'd had dinner. A few young servers were chatting by the bar, and they told us there was a hospital right around the corner, but agreed to call 911. Elder daughter took younger daughter back to the hotel which was just across the street from the restaurant, and the Resident Fan Boy and I gingerly approached the shape on the pavement. It turned out he was lying on a grate, but I noted that his stockinged feet were not getting any of the warm air. We called to him and got only a waggling of his hips.

A car drew up with driven by a lady with a young woman beside her.
"Have you called anyone?"
"Yes," I said. "We're just waiting here until someone shows up."
The lady explained that her daughter had noticed him and they had gone around the block to check.
"He's alive," I told them. "But he's only in his socks, and he's not answering us, just wiggling."
Satisfied, they drove off. Peering into the darkness, I made out the upturned boots of another rough sleeper supine under what appeared to be piles of tarps.

As we shivered on the corner, we had other visitors, like some twisted kind of urban fable. One of the young servers from the restaurant hurried up: "They want to know if he's responsive."
"Well, he squirms when I talk to him," I said, leaning over to check. The coat remained firmly over his head and shoulders, but he twitched irritably, rather like a small boy who's been kissed while asleep.

She stood with us for a while with her arms tightly crossed in her short-sleeved blouse and server's apron. It was something like -17 Celsius, with a lower wind-chill with the wintry gusts funneled between Toronto's tall buildings. We assured her we'd wait.
"Okay," she said, scurrying down the block. "This is a good thing you're doing. Most people wouldn't."

The minutes dragged by and the Resident Fan Boy and I shuffled awkwardly, glancing at the body as we stood guard. A man approached us, staggering slightly.
"Do you have change?"
"Sorry..."
He looked over at the pair of socked feet sticking out from under the coat.
"Are you helping him?"
We assured him we were waiting for an ambulance.
"All I need is..."
"We're sorry, we don't have any money on us."

He lolloped away as we scanned the darkness and strained our ears, and finally heard the sirens. Two police cars and an ambulance pulled up at angles to one another in the middle of the deserted street. The paramedics were playing a version of Good Cop/Bad Cop: the first one coaxing, "Hey Sir? Are you all right?" while his partner cut in with: "C'mon! Let's get up! Whaddaya think you're doing here?"

This time, Sock-footed Man responded, sitting bolt upright and furious. At me.

"It isn't FAIR!!" he bellowed. "I was WARM!!! Now I have to walk on the streets and be COLD!! Why can't you leave me be?"
Since he was bellowing at me, I held his gaze and tried to keep my voice from shaking. "You weren't answering us. You're in your socks..."
"I was WARM!! Miss, this isn't fair!"
"No, it isn't fair."
"I was sleeping! I wasn't hurting anybody, miss! Miss, you don't understand..."
"I know. But I was worried about your feet..."
"My feet are fine! I was WARM, miss! And now I'm gonna be cold..."

I could feel myself breaking down and suddenly turned and headed back to the hotel. The Resident Fan Boy fell into step.
"I couldn't just leave him."
"Well, if it makes you feel any better, he was being remarkably polite. He called you 'Miss' the entire time."

Into the hotel, into a sparkling elevator where I could see my eyes, filling up with self-pity, reflected in the brass. Up to our room, where it was warm, where the sheets were clean. Elder daughter reported that younger daughter had been discombobulated and upset. I went into the bathroom and turned on the taps. No, it wasn't fair. He was out there looking for another grate, and if he found one, well, maybe he could sleep a bit, and maybe by morning, his numb feet would gradually regain feeling. He'd been sleeping on top of his shoes, possibly to save them from thieves. While my family and I, bellies full with an Italian meal, brains full of a wonderful evening of theatre, would sleep in cozy beds in clean rooms with a bathroom nearby.

And as I stood there in shame, embarrassment and misery, gazing at myself in the bathroom mirror, it hit me. When the lolloping man asked: "Are you helping him?", I had misunderstood the question. He was really asking: "Why not help me?" Why not? Because he was on his feet, speaking to me? Just as I wasn't attempting to save the man sleeping across the street, because I could see he had boots? Who died and made me God?

Yet, I couldn't have lived with myself if I'd walked by on the other side. Even though that is exactly what I do every day. No, brother. It isn't fair.