Life cycle

If I've been down in Cook Street Village for a coffee, I usually drop in on Demeter on my walk home.

This morning, the main bathroom door is closed, so I know she is probably bathing. I spot a full bag of recyclable materials waiting in the entrance hall, and figure, rather than just sitting and reading, I can save her energy and time by zipping the stuff to the bins in the parking lot.

I'm carefully depositing the paper first, so the tins and plastic don't go tumbling in the wrong receptacle. A car is just parking, and a couple emerges, with a cat in the carrier. The woman approaches me, introduces herself and gently touches my arm.

"We wanted to give you our condolences on the loss of your mother."

A split-second cool wave of confusion washes over me, as I stare at her. It is comprised of three thoughts:

Nope, I was just up there.

Dang, I should have knocked on the bathroom door.

And finally: This is how it will be; people will say this to me.

The woman spots my hesitation, and double-checks who I am. We have met briefly before, but that was months ago. It turns out the people who have moved into the apartment above Demeter have recently lost their mother. I guess there must be a resemblance. We exchange empathetic observations about the stress on these new neighbours and have a quiet chuckle about the mistake.

I make my way back up to the apartment, where Demeter, getting dressed, greets me cheerily and thanks me for taking down the recycling.

What will be, will be.

It's not your birthday, baby

My birthday, and that of eldest daughter, find themselves on a collision course with Easter every few years. Sometimes it's a direct hit; my birthday has fallen on Easter Sunday three times during my lifetime thus far. Elder daughter had her eighth birthday on Easter Sunday and won't have it again until she's 87. I'll only get another Easter Sunday birthday if I manage to become a centenarian.

However, my birthday this year fell on Easter Monday. The last time it did that was on the day I was born. That made it rather special, and I had a lovely time, thank you very much.

It's not my birthday today, which is one of the reasons I like this song, which has been playing rather a lot on weekday mornings on CBC Radio. When I first encountered it, I heard: "You're gonna hurt yourself; it's not your birthday, baby. If there is nothing wrong, why am I gone so long?"

The correct lyrics are supplied in the following video, and frankly, I don't think they make much more sense. However, I do like the song and the singer - especially the fact that she has a gently self-deprecatory air, which tells me, without checking, that she's Canadian.

If you do check, you'll find she's from Winnipeg.

Gucci on a Ritz

There have been a lot of retrospectives of The Carol Burnett Show in recent years. None of them ever include this splendid (and affectionate) spoof of the Fred Astaire/Ginger Roger musicals of the 1930s.

The songwriter Irving Berlin had a strict proviso against any parodies of his songs, so the songs here only hint at the Berlin originals - with the exception of the singing gondolier who warbles a garbled version of "Putting on the Ritz", which includes a reference to "Fred Austerlitz" (Fred Astaire's real name).

Other delights include Ken Berry's dancing (not what he was famous for in the television of the 60's and 70's), and Roddy McDowall's rather good impression of Edward Everett Horton.

Appalled when it comes to a Baldwin

I think Randy Rainbow's videos are clever, hilarious, and loaded with high production value. They can also sting, and not just his targets. This one makes me laugh and wince.



Maybe I need to sing "Cockeyed Optimist" to myself at bedtime?

This is a hold-up

Got a message from elder daughter this morning. I was in the middle of my art lesson at the time, and my fellow students looked around for the harp. (I find it less stressful than the whistles and bells usually used for notification.)

When you have library fees, she texted from Hades, you are a "delinquent" user. Just one more delinquent book to go and then I should be on the straight and narrow.

She's been piling up and extending library holds since obsessively insisting on reading all seven books in the Harry Potter series in French. She thought she could do it over the Christmas holidays. She was wrong. She finished last week, and there's an impressive stack of library books on her coffee table.

Not that I can talk. I annually insist - that's "annually", not the other adverb you might be inserting - on watching as many Oscar-nominated films as I can manage before the Academy Awards ceremony. I got to five of the eight so-called Best Film nominees, plus a half-dozen films that figured in other categories.

This means I will be reading books from my own suddenly burgeoning holds list. Most of the films were "based on real events". We all know what that means, don't we? Two books on Dick Cheney (Vice) have just become available, and I expect my requested book on Queen Anne (The Favourite) to follow fast. I'll have to wait quite a bit longer for the books Can You Ever Forgive Me? and Black Klansman, the latter being the inspiration for this:

For the record, my favourite of the bunch was Roma, and my least favourite was Bohemian Rhapsody.

Sure, I like Queen, but this movie had every cliché in the book - which isn't on hold.

Leaving out the whistles and bells

This Twelfth Night, I look at a string of blue Tardises shining against the curtain, and our tree, gradually decorated by our daughters in the week leading up to Christmas.

The presents underneath have gradually disappeared; we opened the last gifts this evening.

Tomorrow, as was our tradition before leaving Victoria, and is becoming so again, a couple of long-time friends will come to dinner and help us put away the tree for another year. We may leave up the other lights until Candlemas.

This evening, enjoying the quiet glow for one last time, I stumbled across an old favourite song, by a group that takes its name from one of my favourite movies. The song is about another blue light, a canary-shaped nightlight which is and isn't your friend, and muses about a lighthouse, its ancient ancestor.

I'm your only friend
I'm not your only friend
But I'm a little glowing friend
But really I'm not actually your friend
But I am...

Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch,
Who watches over you,
Make a little birdhouse in your soul.
Not to put too fine a point on it,
Say I'm the only bee in your bonnet.
Make a little birdhouse in your soul.

I have a secret to tell
From my electrical well.
It's a simple message and I'm leaving out the whistles and bells,
So the room must listen to me,
Filibuster vigilantly.
My name is "blue canary", one note spelled l-i-t-e.
My story's infinite;
Like the Longines Symphonette, it doesn't rest.

There's a picture opposite me
Of my primitive ancestry,
Which stood on rocky shores and kept the beaches shipwreck free.
Though I respect that a lot,
I'd be fired if that were my job,
After killing Jason off and countless screaming Argonauts.
Bluebird of friendliness,
Like guardian angels, it's always near.

(And while you're at it,
Keep the nightlight on inside the
Birdhouse in your soul.)

There wasn't a readily available internet when this song was first popular, and in checking a few details, I discovered a cover in an equally quirky television series of the aughts, Pushing Daisies. This fan video captures a few seconds of it, along with a number of other old favourites sung by Kristin Chenoweth, who played a smitten pie-shop proprietor named Olive Snook in the show. Her singing partner for "Birdhouse in Your Soul" is none other than Ellen Greene, the original Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors. (Their eye-patched driver is Swoosie Kurtz.)

"Candle on the Water", which we hear briefly later in the fan-vid, also has strong memories for me. Maybe I'll tell you about it sometime. Maybe I already have...

Brolly secrets

Beautiful sunny morning, after a bleak rainy day filled with reports of up-Island rivers sloshing over their banks.

My National Gallery of Canada umbrellas fortuitously arrived early in the soggy afternoon. Now, I'm sort of hiding them from the Resident Fan Boy, who got me a lovely, if small and flimsy umbrella for Christmas, festooned with First Nation moons, and made in China.

Empress Hotel and the Butchart Gardens

Oak Bay Marina and BC Legislature

Emily Carr's birthplace 

Craigdarroch Castle and Tally-ho carriage

It was meant to replace my treasured, but now leaky and rusted Robert Amos umbrella, which gave me such comfort (and limited shelter) in Hades.

I've secreted my new William Morris patterned "Strawberry Thief" umbrella in my packsack, and concealed my larger and sturdier Norval Morrisseau behind other brollies. The Resident Fan Boy, not the keenest of observers at the best of times, hasn't noticed yet. He will, and his feelings will be hurt.

But this morning is blue and clear, and the first thing I spot is a crow hopping along the curb in front of our building. One for sorrow.

I exclaim out loud when I spy another crow up the road on the next block: "And two for joy! Thank you!"

I realize, too late, that I'm right next to a lady in a wheelchair, parked on the sidewalk just around the corner, having a smoke. I explain the folk-rhyme to her.

"I'll have to remember that," she says, squinting up into the sunshine.

I stroll off to rescue worms.

Ambushed by 2019

Woke up this morning with a start. The Resident Fan Boy had gone to work - back after more than two weeks off, and I realized that it was January 3rd, and the things that seemed so far off during Christmas - aren't.

I bolted out of bed and turned on the radio.

This song, which has been getting a fair bit of airplay on CBC Radio for the past month or so, is about other things that are far off. Hawksley Workman is singing about the towns of Battleford and North Battleford in Saskatchewan, but he grew up in Huntsville, another small town in Ontario, during the 1980s.

Most Canadians growing up in any Canadian town or even city in the latter half of the 20th century, though, will recognize elements of this song.



I feel less panicky this evening. I got a few things done.

More story than history

We like to begin the year with a film, but this year, it just wasn't possible.

Elder daughter took off for Hades in the middle of the afternoon, and we're bound to drift off in an evening screening, so we delayed our film until midday today - well, after the twenty-five minutes of car commercials, public service ads, reminders to turn off our cell-phones dove-tailed into cell-phone service provider ads, and oh yes, several trailers.

Our choice was The Favourite due to the cast, the premise, and the fact that it's likely to figure heavily in the Oscar nominations, if the Golden Globes nominations are anything to go by.

The Golden Globe nominations are, predictably, rather mystifying for this film. For one thing, it's been nominated under the "Best Comedy or Musical" category, even though what humour is in it is very dark. The soundtrack features baroque stuff, of course, with a rather strange ditty from Sir Elton John playing out over the illegible, but highly artistic credits. There's also a dance sequence that is so weird, I wondered if it might be a fantasy brought on by one of Queen Anne's ailments.

This brings us to the second thing: Olivia Coleman has been nominated for a Golden Globe as a lead for her role as Queen Anne of Great Britain (1665-1714; reigned 1702-1714); her costars Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone are nominated as "supporting roles" - in a film with a title that indicates the story is about them - each is a "favourite": Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, and her less fortunate cousin Abigail Hill (later Baroness Masham). This sort of thing seems to happen a lot with women's film roles, lead roles are interpreted as supporting roles, so they can be fitted into the categories.

At any rate, it's a strange film, but quite a beautiful one. The camera angles are sometimes folded into panoramic shots, or stretched into oval fish-eyes, with the shadows, highlights and shades of Vermeer paintings, lots of dark blues, black-and-whites. You can't find fault with the acting. It's the sort of film that makes me say inwardly, as I gaze on tastefully filmed scenes of royal lesbianism and bunnies (not in the same scenes): Goodness, I wonder what really happened?

Because it's a mistake to equate film-going with a history lesson.

Don't get me wrong; do go see it, and then find out how much is likely to be true. I suggest you start here - a web site entitled History Vs Hollywood, which, currently, provides historical context on about 200 recent movies, most of them made since 2000, although films such as Jaws and Schindler's List are included.

If you're like me, you'll want to check afterwards, not ahead of time, as facts do get in the way of a good story.

Welcome to the glass house

Elder daughter, who is on her way back to Hades, is a fan of Tim Minchin, who has released this bitingly funny - and I do mean "ouch" - video, as a harbinger of a new album and the new year.

The album looks promising. The year?

Let's be careful and kind out there.


By now, we thought that there would be jetpacks and flying cars,
Robots to do the cleaning-up for us,
And help with the shopping.

We'd all be famous for a bit,
That's what Andy Warhol said,
Thought we'd all get our coloured heads,
Well the truth would rock him.

He would be surprised to wake up and find that we have weaponized humiliation:

In the future, everyone
Everyone will have fifteen minutes
Fifteen minutes of shame
Fifteen minutes when they are unforgivable.

Pick up your pitchforks and your torch;
We'll go hunt the monster down,
But keep an eye out for uneven ground;
We'll turn on you if you stumble.

Don't need perspective or a heart;
Leave humility at home.
Welcome to the glass house; hope you brought your stones!
Are you ready to rumble?

I'm scared to write anything that might upset my tribe.
Never mind, 'cause in the future, everyone will have fifteen minutes
Fifteen minutes of shame,
Fifteen minutes when they are unforgivable
Irredeemable
Inexcusable
Scum
Fit only to be strung up in the village square.
I will see you there!

I am scared to say anything that may be taken the wrong way.
But, *$#% it, baby!
In the future, everyone
Everyone will have fifteen minutes,
Fifteen minutes of shame,
Fifteen minutes when they are unforgivable,
Irredeemable,
Inexcusable...