Vacation: I haz it.

So I’m sitting here on Sunday night realising that I don’t have to go to work this week.

Truly. A switchover in HR systems about a month back led to the discovery of a kajilion or so banked vacation days, and the All-Powerful Accounting Magic (to which I occasionally sacrifice a spreadsheet by the light of the moon) has decreed that in order to free up the accumulated $$, the days must be taken by January 31st 2010.

I’ve been here five years, that gave me five days. My carpool driver was already taking off this week, so. This is not quite as unbearably cool as the one buyer who couldn’t figure out how to schedule so many days off, so decided she was going to sleep in ’till 10 every single day in January… but it is not hay.

I do not mind that I’m not going anywhere. I am frankly a little freaked out by how much I am revelling simply in having enough time to get everything done that I want to for once. That I don’t have to spend the weekend trying to make every moment of relaxation count, dammit!

Apparently I was a bit more tightly wound than even I suspected.

So let’s see…

I want to check out the newest ebook apps on iTunes.

I want to update & tidy my WordPress mirror blog.

I want to catch up on email correspondence.

I want to listen to my new audiobooks, and maybe actually finish one before the next credit comes through next month.

I want to finally decide whether to sign up for Twitter, & if I do, to get the hang of which feeds I want to follow.

I want to finish culling and sorting my photos.

I want to shamelessly sign up for eMusic just to get the 25 free downloads, which I will then shamelessly splurge mostly on Bob & Ray routines.

I want to finish signing up for the Author’s Den website — OK, OK, I need to actually post some stuff over there. Also find out how to turn off the flood of ‘helpful’ email newsletters. Not necessarily in that order; if many more helpful emails come through, my first piece might just be the touching tale of an author driven to run screaming out into traffic.

Um, move away from the computer? OK… I guess I could play with my kitten, do some baking, sleep in and watch cartoons every morning, read a couple books I’ve been putting off, experiment with my new makeup, go for long walks and just generally chill with friends and family… Oh, and Shoemom and I have booked an afternoon to finally go see the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the ROM.

Stress-free relaxation may be a bit tricker than I thought.

The Internet: Allowing people to publicly whine about not being noticed since 1995.

Suite101.com declined my deathless prose. I am not as surprised by this as I would have been had they not posted their ‘10 Golden Rules of Internet Writing’ on the confirmation page for the application — evidently their idea of a little gag. Ten seconds past confirming that sucker, and I knew I was screwed. Turns out those little dry sticks of articles that *ahem* convinced me I was a shoo-in are actually the house style. Oopsie.

So once again the search for an appropriate home for my writing aspirations has foundered. The ‘am I good enough for publication’ hurdle has been well and truly breached, and my horizons are all set to be broadened; the trouble is that what I write seems to fall, messily, between several different cracks.

I can write on specific subjects, but am hampered by the conviction that most everybody I’m writing for already knows more about whatever-it-is than me. I have no university education, no way to claim expertise. Besides, I can only prattle on for so long before getting deadly bored with myself and deciding to liven up the joint.
So instead I’ve honed a knack for what you might call comic appreciation. To put it another way, I can review things fine, but it always seems to turn out funny… look, you in the back, this is where you just go with me, ‘kay? OK.

I can pick out the odd and irrelevant and downright strange and turn it to at least some kind of account. Which I had figured would make me a natural negotiator through the pop-cult wilderness, but the one time I proposed a column on those lines to PopMatters, it was turned down as not focussed enough. Apparently you need to be a certified expert even in celebrity gossip, which raises the disturbing spectre of Perez Hilton: Career Counselor. I’m too wholesome to be slapped! …but I’m also a bit sick of being asked when the tea and cookies show up.

All told I still think of myself as a would-be humourist, anyway, as the closest thing to a category I’d fall under. In various unofficial fora I have recapped, ranted and mused, and people have laughed in turn. So far, so good. Thing is, I have no idea where one goes to become an official Humour Writer. There doesn’t seem to be any online application labeled ‘Future Erma Bombecks needed here!’ Unless I just haven’t been looking in the right places, in which case, any direction available would be most welcome.

The simplest route to recognition would likely be to pick a popular show and start recapping again, but that would mean dealing with fan wank. And I really, really don’t wanna do that… to either myself or the fans in question. You have to sincerely buy into the machine to at least some degree, in fandom (see note about quickly getting bored and deciding to do something about it, above, and shudder).

So the search continues. Just by way of convincing myself that I’m not totally delusional, I will point out that my writing style has been dubbed ‘unusual and nice’ by a commenter on WordPress.

And then I will go over to Suite101.com, read their ‘golden’ articles, and snicker quietly to myself.

Maybe if they’d brought in an *actual* spotwelding torch…

So I finally managed to slip the credit card out of Shoemom’s sight long enough to purchase the Bob & Ray movie. (On the principle of making hay while the sun shines I also bought the Not Always Right book, and am loving it, but that’s another post).

At any rate, yes, the B&R movie. An Award-Winning Film.… all twenty minutes of it. Plus a lengthy written insert by Keith Olbermann, video intro by Jeffrey Lyons, a Mary Backstayge episode set to a picture montage and — inexplicably, esp. given that the rights to all of their own TV series eps combined would probably have been less expensive — three Carson-era Tonight Show appearances.

Well.

[harrumphs slightly]

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I really should’ve known better. You know the interview avoidance technique described in this post? The post I wrote? Buy this movie for a live-action demo.

I was off in my initial impression; the filmmakers don’t want to crack their artistic code, they think it’s really cool that they haven’t. You can tell, because the first five-ten minutes — showcasing the duo ‘relaxing’ before an afternoon’s taping — are shot in that peculiarly Sixties art-house style, the one where the more random the conversation gets the more incredibly cool it must be. In this case: not so much.

Which would not be even as awkward as it is had Olbermann not recounted, in his excellent essay, being treated to a fine display of backstage charm not much later at WOR (Ray, on correct nautical terminology: "Don’t want to have them step on some whale ship. We can’t say that on the radio…").
And there are other indications in the current subject that they know exactly what they’re doing; notably a certain funny half-smile Bob gives the camera at one point, that’s mirrored in several of the still pics. Also Ray’s restless dark eyes, noticeably too sophisticated for a podgy middle-aged face. After awhile the viewer starts following them as the last best clue to why anybody thought this film worth creating…

Meaning that what we have here is a documentary whose major theme is that the subjects really didn’t care about being in this documentary. Lovely.

It gets better once they settle down to work — a couple on-the-fly promos, one Matt Neffer episode recreated from a script, and a rework of the Komodo Dragon sketch — inasmuch as the camera goes from unwanted to utterly unimportant, and the indifference becomes part of the show.
It still resembles nothing so much as a documentary I once saw on twins who’d created their own language. Worlds conjured up literally off a few muttered cues and the degree of slyness in a grin. There’s one really incredible sequence in which their producer (the guy whose mustache is bothering them in the YouTube clip) throws a bunch of non sequitur sounds into their scripted taping, and they’re just effortlessly caught up and twirled into the vortex.

…all of which, it must be said, essentially boils down onscreen to ‘two guys who happen to be very, very good at making each other laugh.’ You think we could get a bit of the larger picture over here, please? Creative, historic, what they had for lunch that day, whatever? Olbermann’s essay would’ve been a lot more effective as an interview cut into the film, along with any others they could round up.

The special features don’t help a lot. Some of the pics are cute, especially the oldest ones. Of the (undated) Tonight Show clips, one is the Slow Talkers of America, one is an obscure-but-deserving tale of a legendary pizza flipper… and in the third Ray looks distressingly ill, not to say a bit too realistically out-of-it. Major ‘the hell?’ factor happening here. Didn’t any family members check this thing out prior to release? For that matter, where are the family members? If they got Jeffrey Lyons, they could probably have pried Chris Elliott or his daughter Abby off the SNL lot.

Ah well. Reminders of imminent mortality excepted, not a bad waste of an hour. Definitely a waste of at least fifteen of the thirty bucks, but that’s OK, I’d probably have just blown it on Starbucks’ punkin scones anyway. Now, I get the scones and complete indifference from a couple comic geniuses. It works out.

Heebeedee funnee happidee horbdee postee!

OK, if you got that, we’re good. If not, here’s a quick primer:

…I don’t know about you, but I feel much better.

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Seriously, the replenishment people came through like champs, the leggings are on their way, and all’s right with my little world once again. Of course, the warehouse people could still take issue with my polybags, but I have a backup plan. To wit: I care nothing for such petty matters as employment, for I have this day uncovered the GREATEST POP-CULTURE MASHUP EVER IN THE HISTORY OF STUFF.

Hint: Star Wars: Episode IV was filmed partly in England, yeah? And the Muppet Show was also filmed in England, right around the time the ST phenomenon was peaking…

Oh yes, my friends, they did. Luke, the droids, Chewbacca, and the Princess Leia… sort of. That’s where the Pigs in Space crossover comes in.

Why there hasn’t already been an Internet shrine erected to this half-hour of film, I have no idea. To think, all those poor souls out there scarred for life by the Holiday Special… perchance I can bring a new hope into their trembling lives. (‘New hope’, see what I did there? Just made that up now. Dang, I’m good.)

So, is “Boy, shoulda gone in for something relaxing, like bomb defusing!” cliche yet?

So I’m helping my waaaaaay-too-accommodating-for-his-assistant’s-sanity boss put together a legging program, aka this season’s surefire gifty… kind of… thing. C’mon, you know you want ‘em! Everybody now: "O-oh, I hear the music/close my eyes, feel the rhythm…"

OK, I don’t really get it either. Especially since for some reason none of our usual major, experienced vendors could handle this for us. Nooooo, we had to start from scratch. Meaning I, your humble narrator, also had to start from…

…let’s put it this way: I am a buyer’s assistant. I am not a replenishment person. Nor am I a shipping, receiving, Finance or logistics person. Really. I have a copy of my job description right here, and ‘frantically trying to find definitive answers regarding warning placement on polybag packaging’ is so not on it.
Given these past several months, however, I can now see myself teaching these courses. Self-defense courses. Oh yes. You’d be amazed (or maybe not), what a couple well-placed Chuck Norris fantasies can do to maintain your retail career.

As of this morning, though, all seemed well with the world. Hey, the vendor was almost maybe possibly ready to ship this week, right?

Then Marketing called.

The CEO wants to feature the leggings in her latest radio ad. Can you have the product in-store for the 10th? Including Vancouver, of course. Did I mention this stuff is shipping out of Scarborough?

Good thoughts, people. Good thoughts.

‘Tis the season to be snarky

Public-service announcement: Given that you’re all probably writhing in disappointment that I didn’t catalogue Little House’s hilariously blatant anachronisms in full below, I point out that others have gotten there first, and funnie. Here’s the most excellently ranty essay I’ve read on the subject yet.

Albeit it leaves out the one I especially liked: at the blind school, Mary presents her visiting parents with a (quite obviously modern) layer cake she made all by her little self — "I know it’s lopsided, but then my cakes were always lopsided!" D’awwwwww… um, wait. Just how much sugar, butter and white flour was available to a dirt-poor family on the 1880’s prairie, anyhow? Mary was sixteen when she went to the blind school.
I always figured that for what it cost to subsidise his daughter’s baking career Pa could easily have afforded that addition he never put on his two-room shanty. Carrie & Grace probably cursed those cakes with their dying breaths.

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Otherwise, it’s Sunday, kinda cloudy, and I got nothin’. Except maybe relief that Hallowe’en is over for another year… another sweet, blissful year of not having to watch the neighborhood struggle with fake cobwebs.
Seriously. We are unclear on exactly why this particular decor choice bugs us more than, say, the plastic skeletons with cheery-boutonniere-wearing-tarantulas in their eye sockets; we only know that it does. It may be the sheer laziness of the thing. "Hey, Bob, we just string this-here stuff onto the hedge and whoooo! Looks spooky!"

No. No it does NOT. It looks like you voluntarily decorated your house in huge wads of dryer lint. Dryer lint is not spooky. STOP DOING THAT.

We also feel the need to point out the seasonal nastiness over on ‘realistic’ comic strip For Better or For Worse. We do not currently celebrate the holiday chez Shoe, of course, but this particular strip we see more as perpetrating crimes against childhood generally. Also we just like ragging on FBoFW whenever possible.

Honestly. ‘Honey, I’d like to throw the rest of that candy away now’? On the morning after Hallowe’en? The hell? Not only is Elly confiscating the candy pile before the poor kid’s even got through the good stuff (which, to a kid being confronted with that choice, is all of it, homemade popcorn included), she’s forcing him to admit it’s ‘the right thing to do’?!

Pre-enrollment as Witnesses, great ceremony attended the post-Hallowe’en candy sort chez Shoe — Shoemom even gave us tips on how to rank the pieces, albeit not necessarily helpful ones. ("You’re not gonna eat those brown molasses kisses? We had those when I was a kid! Those are the best ones!")
At any rate, once sorting and trading was over, the brown kisses were handed over to Shoemom en masse after one sample — leading to Dark Suspicions of her motives — and the rest was left to us. If we gorged ourselves right away, we only had ourselves to blame for the consequences; but interestingly enough, we more often saved them. I think we were overwhelmed by the responsibility of it all. Having all the candy you want, to a little kid, is Serious Business.

As is nicely illustrated by little Mikey’s content in the last panel, having learned that in order to keep his goodies he must not only whoof them down like hyenas on the veldt, but lie, cheat and steal to and from trusting family members. "Survival of the fittest… and besides, it’s fun!"

All of which is the longform version of: Elly may have taken off her pointy hat and nose warts, but she’s still in costume.

Notes on October

The fog comes in on little cat feet.
–Carl Sandburg

And on those same little cat feet, it always seems to me on days like today, the summer goes out.

Even more so than the fog, autumn is the most enigmatic of natural phenomena; such incredible beauty arising out of relentless decay. Canadian raconteur Arthur Black once described this season as a velvet-gloved gentleman, tapping gently-but-insistently on our doors to warn of Old Man Winter’s approach. It’s a nice image, but my imagination can only reconcile it if the gentleman is F.Scott Fitzgerald.

All of which is an extended rationalisation for why I went out to Niagara this past sunny Sunday to see the fall colours, enjoyed them to the full, but didn’t take a single pic… then came home and took a bunch of shots during a random stroll down to the Second Cup on a misty Tuesday evening. And have now decided to inflict them on the readership.

Harlan Ellison, eat your heart out… on second thought, nevermind.

In case you’re wondering why Shoemom and sis haven’t been gracing these pages much lately, despite allegedly living with me, fear not. It’s only that Shoesis has lately acquired Season Seven of Little House on the Prairie, and the two of them are currently eye-deep in the amber waves of schmaltz.

We all watched this show as kids. Some of my fondest preteen memories involve the weekly episode, a big bowl of popcorn, and permission to stay up to 9pm, to watch TV in my parents’ queen-sized bed, oh, bliss!
Then, after awhile you would start noticing that life on the prairie was possibly getting kinda sucky… but that was OK, it was historical and stuff. Then, you’d catch yourself keeping a running tally of Rotten Things That Somehow Kept Happening to Mary… but you’d still be able to convince yourself that Grace wasn’t really using her baby to beat out the window during the fire at the blind school. Barely. This is the strange power that Michael Landon held over TV viewers, and it is awfully hard to explain to the young’uns today.

"A frontier dude with a perm?" they snort. "Striding around his prairie Hell, sobbing like a Robert Bly wet dream?" You do not hear the rest, because they are too busy racing to TWoP to record their delight. You are frankly kinda glad to be rid of the little whippersnippers.

But there finally came the ep where Albert’s teenage girlfriend got raped by the guy in the clown mask, and you were faced with one of those defining road-forks of childhood: to continue believing that the prairie dude with the perm had all the answers — in which case you were rewarded with an ep in which he literally called down fire from heaven to heal his dying son on a mountain altar — or to have your sentimentality circuits shorted permanently. Picking interestedly at the scar optional, but funny.

That I am not even allowed in there now, watching a couple more sniffly orphans see their parents killed in yet another wagon wreck, should be a pretty good indication of which camp I ended up in.

Still… occasional apparent psychotic breaks aside, there remains something endearing about the Landon mythos. Even the most fraught eps were wholesome, in that they were so completely innocent of any desire to hurt. I don’t think there’s ever been a media figure so totally unable to tell where drama ended and camp began; the sheer sincerity of it all loops back around on itself, meets the man’s undeniable charisma, and becomes something almost hypnotically entertaining.

Frankly, I enjoyed this iteration of the Seventies Sensitive Male a whole lot more than Alan Alda’s brittle, knowing version. Both were almost hysterically out of place, both operated off a deeply flawed sense of mission, both evolved series so inner-directed that they resembled therapy sessions… but Landon’s was about the flaws, and Alda’s the fastidious shame of having them. Obviously (one series lasted nine years, the other eleven) both models resonated with large segments of the public; I guess it’s another of those polarizing things.

…When I figure out what it all means, I’ll let you know.

Idiocracy, the documentary

I honestly don’t expect much from the free Metro subway paper. For one thing, it’s a free paper, and for another it’s designed to be read at an hour when I’m not physically capable of expecting much. That I am sometimes driven to mild irritation at the hack writing and/or shallow insight says reams about how dreadful it actually is.

Then I saw this article about ‘celebrity journalism giant’ Bonnie Fuller yesterday morning. The first few paragraphs had me mildly interested. The rest catapulted me straight past irritation and right to ‘that bout with PMS of which we no longer speak’.

So. Much. Fail.

I don’t know who to toss bricks at first. Fuller, for having real power to ‘explore the world’ via Michael Jackson, the Balloon Boy and Jon & Kate and using it to spawn cocktail chatter; or her interviewer, for not having even the tinest particle of wit required to realise what he’s currently doing with his actual journalism degree. If he has one. Maybe it’s ‘communications’. Or ‘media studies’…

"The great thing about celebrities today is that they come in all different ages, shapes, sizes and ethnic backgrounds… If your marriage is in trouble and you’re wondering if you can go through a divorce, you can look to Jon and Kate…"

Somehow, it all just sludges together into one massive wad of bleak.  On the plus side, though, I got to spend the rest of the subway ride fantasising about What Woodward & Bernstein Would Do if confronted with this situation. Too bad I got to my stop while they were still taking aim on the Pulitzer toss.

Nitpicking in Oz, part II

As was previously mentioned — and if you haven’t been reading my lit-crit masterpieces in order, why not, may I ask — at any rate, Oz was consciously designed as a very practical Fairyland. You notice, when the characters stop for supper on their nigh-endless journeys, how often milk is mentioned?

In other words: Tolkien, Baum was not. This is part of the reason I don’t buy into the idea of the first book as a political allegory; there’s just no evidence of that much conscious planning in the rest of the series. Really, the very idea of designing intricate languages and mythologies and making sure Celaborn was pronounced correctly would’ve seemed vaguely unwholesome, to a middle-aged Midwesterner at the turn of the 20th century.

Thus Oz grew into a truly American fantasy concept: sturdy and free and self-reliant and… not making a lick of sense, really. On the plus side, at least he didn’t attempt to turn the whole thing into a religious allegory.

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He did, however, have to deal with the effects of magic — yes, even in kiddy books. This posed a special problem for Baum, since — as TVTropes explains in their splendid page on the subject — you don’t really need rules, but you do have to have internal logic. If it’s been established that the Enchanted Whatzis can get you out of a situation, it’s bad form to repeat that situation sans Whatzis.
‘Cause you just know some random critic is going to turn it intosnark fodder. Or, as in the case of Star Trek, you have to reboot an entire decades-old franchise at least partly because there was literally no way left to get the crew in trouble that couldn’t be solved by previously demonstrated tech.

Baum seemed to have an especially unfortunate gift for granting omniscience. In Oz, after the third book, there is the Magic Belt, worn by Ozma, which functions as a shameless deus et accessory. Ozma also has a Magic Picture (noticing a trend here?) which shows her anything she wants to see the instant she asks.
There is also Glinda the ‘powerful Sorceress’, who possesses the Great Book, on which everything that occurs everywhere in the world is instantly recorded. There is the Wizard, on his return, who becomes her apprentice. There is even a frelling Powder of Life that can grant sentience to whatever it touches. All this, without even mentioning the winged monkeys.

So basically the remaining Oz stories should all be about two pages long. Instead, the characters go on quests like the one in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, in which the title characters get trapped in the centre of the Earth and held captive by vegetable people, who declare their intention of ‘planting’ the visitors.
After several days of fobbing them off, Dorothy and party escape via a steep cave path up towards the surface. It’s a long, hard climb. Along the way they get attacked by bloodthirsty invisible bears and captured by wooden Gargoyles, wander unaware into a dragon’s den and get annoyed the hell out of by a crazy man half-way up who won’t let them leave without a box of his High-Grade Artificial Flutters and Rustles.

All of which is splendid fun; nobody ever accused Baum of a dearth of imagination. The kicker comes when they find themselves trapped in a cavern juuuuuust too far below the surface to reach. Even the Wizard starts lamenting their fate, until…
…Dorothy calmly announces that they’ll be OK, because she’s made a deal with Ozma: At four o’clock every day, Ozma will look for her in the Magic Picture, and if Dorothy is making a ’special signal’, she’ll use the Magic Belt to transport her and her companions out immediately. So she does, and she does, and they do.

Right. Let me just remind the reader, this is several days later. It’s explicitly mentioned in the text.

Apparently Ozma has ethical qualms, or something, about using the thing indiscriminately; at one point in Road to Oz she tells Dorothy that she was on the verge of rescuing her, but Dorothy et al got out OK by themselves. That can-do frontier spirit in action again, I guess. But it still leaves everybody else wondering why Dorothy’s companions didn’t raise even the eensiest little question about why the @!$@#%#$ she DIDN’T MENTION THIS BEFORE THE GIANT INVISIBLE KILLER BEARS. Or, for that matter, have some choice words for Ozma’s ethics.