Today is the first day of spring (2016 edition). As such I have a few requests to make of Mother Nature regarding this season of growth and renewal:
Mild temperatures.
Plenty of sun.
Only enough rain to keep things green and prevent drought. NO MORE.
No major earthquakes. No one wants the Big One, right?
No major freak storms. These will probably happen, anyway.
#3 has already been a bust as today it rained buckets. Well, it rained rain, but the amount was copious. We’re set for the rest of the month, I’m pretty sure. NO MORE.
On the plus side, no major earthquakes or storms today, either, so I’m calling the first day of spring a draw.
I am mostly posting this to help force that animated cat image down the page so it’s no longer the first thing I immediately see when the site loads. I mean, it’s funny and all but it’s also kind of weird and more importantly, testimony to my complete inability to write anything, even lousy things, over the past week or so.
There, two paragraphs of text should help. I could also pad this post out even more by inserting a picture…say, an animated cat image…
This is a uniquely 21st century headline, though the actual news item is probably not unique. It may not surprise you, either, that the unfortunate incident happened to an American. It’s my favorite news headline so far this year:
It’s the first day of March, I’m ready for spring. Instead it’s soggy and cold outside (admittedly it would be even worse if it was cold and soggy inside). I do not approve.
If this situation has not changed by March 20 (spring equinox) I will be cross. Cross, I say.
My history with the Oscars goes something like this:
watched live, would make up “voting ballots” with a friend and put a lot of thought into who/what I thought might win and who/what I thought should win
watched live, dropped the whole ballot thing
watched live or if unable due to work/blimp accident/etc. would record and watch later
recorded to watch later
recorded and watched a few highlights
recorded then never watched
stopped recording
I can’t say why I lost interest, exactly, but I did. However, I do stay apprised of who and what gets nominated and then wins, so here’s my shallow, uninformed analysis of last night’s winners:
The We Can’t Give You Important Oscars So You Get All the Technical Awards: Mad Mad: Fury Road (won 6 Oscars, all for things like sound recording)
Important Movie We Can Give An Oscar To And Feel Good About: Spotlight (about investigative reporting on naughty priests)
The He’s Been Nominated Enough, Give Him An Oscar, Especially Since There’s No Decent Mimic Performances This Year Award: Leonardo DiCaprio
The We Can Give An Oscar to Pixar This Year Award: Inside Out (this wouldn’t have happened if The Good Dinosaur had been their only 2015 release)
We Love Directors Who Make Very Stylish Movies Award: Alejandro G. Inarritu for The Revenant (it would have won Best Picture, too, except Important always trumps Stylish, see above)
The Skyfall Effect Award: Giving the Best Song Oscar to the terrible “Writing’s on the Wall” because it’s from a Bond movie and Skyfall had an awesome song, so this one must be awesome, too, right?
The I Don’t Know These People Awards (impressively given to three of four acting nominees this year): Best Actress (Brie Larson) and Best Supporting Actress (Alicia Vikander), Best Supporting Actor (Mark Rylance)
The Better Give Him an Oscar Before It’s Too Late Award: Ennio Morricone (87), who won for his score for The Hateful Eight. He had five previous nominations, going back to 1979.
The What Did We Do Wrong Award: To the Oscar telecast itself, scoring its lowest viewership since 2008.
With the recent addition of Family Day in February, we’ve got statutory holidays in pretty much every month:
January: New Year’s Day
February: Family Day
March: Easter
April: um, sometimes Easter is here instead of March
May: Victoria Day
June: ???
July: Canada Day
August: BC Day
September: Labor Day
October: Thanksgiving
November: Remembrance Day
December: Christmas
What we need is a new holiday for June to help smooth over the gap between Victoria Day and Canada Day. Let’s take a look at how the holidays currently break down:
Honoring the country/province/monarchy: 3
Being grateful for what we have/what others have sacrificed: 2
Religious: 2
Honoring workers: 1
What the hell, let’s just slap a holiday in here: 1
Honoring family: 1
The clear favorite is a holiday honoring some kind of government. This is perhaps not surprising since it’s the government that gets to make the holidays. We already have holidays for the country, province and the Queen. That means we’d probably have to go macro (the world) or micro (the city). City Day probably wouldn’t fly so let’s go with World Day. It sounds grand, almost important. We can say it’s all about remembering how we’re all in this together.
But if that doesn’t fly, we need a backup. Adding more religious holidays would be too controversial, even if Christmas is just a bunch of gift-giving and crass commercialism, and just as many people associate Easter with a magical bunny that delivers candy eggs as they do the resurrection of the son of God. So religion is out.
Family and workers have holidays so it’s highly unlikely another could be squeezed in. Honoring/remembering is also covered adequately with Thanksgiving and Remembrance Day. This really only leaves the “What the hell, let’s slap a holiday in here” category, currently represented by New Year’s Day (come on, what makes the first day of the calendar so important it requires an official holiday? As discussed in the previous post, our calendar doesn’t even work properly).
June is the month in which summer begins, so maybe we could do Summer Day. Except that’s kind of lame. No one would buy that.
Maybe it could be a celebration of some group everyone likes or even loves. Like babies. Baby Day. Except that comes a bit close to Family Day, so probably a no-go. Most people like doctors. Doctor Day. It even has some nice alliteration. On the other hand, a lot of people view doctors as overpaid rich folk that also happen to cure sickness and save lives, so there may not be enough of a groundswell to support Doctor Day.
We need something that all Canadians love and cherish. Framing it that way, the choice is obvious: Hockey Day.
But Hockey Day in June makes no sense, even if the Stanley Cup Playoffs absurdly drag into that month.
Canadians also generally love maple syrup, poutine, moose, beavers, snow and being nice, at least as far as most Americans think (those who realize Canada is not actually part of the US, that is). Unfortunately, these are all too weak to put forth as official holidays.
Well, I give up. I say we just declare some Monday or Friday in June as statutory holiday and it can be whatever anyone wants it to be. We’ll call it National Holiday Day. There, done.
Every four years we get a bonus day at the end of February because our calendar sucks and this is the best we can do to make it work.
Since this has no real impact on anyone or anything other than serving as a reminder that there’s some kind of Olympics that year (the summer games in Rio this year, a place currently best known for the Zika virus and some of the world’s most polluted water–have fun, athletes!) it seems like a reasonable solution. And it lets people born on the 29th pretend to age in quasi-dog years. “I got my driver’s license when I was four years old, that’s right.”
I’ve finally added a few more posts to the little “Posts I Like” thing over to the right (or at the bottom if you’re on a mobile device). These are posts that I find amusing/terrifying or somehow worth noting. Of note is the brief, tragic “Learning to Swim” saga.
In 2015 I read 36 books and one short story. Actually, I read a lot of short stories but only one that was purchased standalone (“In the Tall Grass”).
I once again saved a tree by reading 100% digitally, primarily via a Kobo H20 ereader, an iPad mini (which unceremoniously died midway through the year) and my iPad Air (which did not unceremoniously die but is used primarily for reading in bed, as it’s a bit too big for me to enjoy carrying around for book reading). The iPad reading was done via the Marvin ereader app. Kobo and Amazon’s Kindle apps are both seriously lacking in features vs. their ereader counterparts, possibly to drive sales of said ereaders.
I reviewed the majority of books on Goodreads and the reviews break down as follows on their one to four star scale (Goodreads does not allow half stars):
Five stars: 1
Four stars: 15
Three stars: 8
Two stars: 2
One star: 1
For the most part I enjoyed the books I read last year, with 23 of 27 reviewed netting at least three stars. Even the pair of two-star novels (Swan Song and The Gate at Lake Drive) both had their strengths and I don’t regret reading them.
The five-star was a re-read, Stephen King’s On Writing. As I wrote in my review, it’s the seamless fusion of writing primer and memoir that lifts this book from being very good to great.
The one-star review is for The Store, Bentley Little’s semi-satirical take on a Walmart-like store chain that takes over small towns for nefarious and profitable purposes. I’d never read Little before and have no idea how representative The Store is of his style, but it left me unwilling to investigate any of his numerous other The _____ books. The utter banality and formulaic writing made this the most eye-rolling read of 2015 (Swan Song would be the runner-up, see my review for a few examples).
I’ve settled into a bit of a pattern with my book-reading over the past few years, with my selections falling into these groups:
a couple of Stephen King novels, typically a mix of a current title and an older one or two I haven’t read. I read five this year, so I went a bit King-crazy. I have no regrets. I say that even having read Dreamcatcher.
a couple of science fiction, fantasy or horror classics dating back to the 19th or early-to-mid 20th centuries. Only two this year: Lord of the Flies and Alice Through the Looking Glass.
a smattering of current novels or books spanning my usual interests: science fiction, horror, weird stuff (UFOs, etc.). This was the bulk of my reading.
books by established authors that were on sale. These are usually old or lesser-known titles, like Arthur C. Clarke’s (excellent) The City and the Stars, an outrageously ambitious first novel.
a handful of books by new authors (or at least new to me) that were on sale, typically published by small presses or self-published. I’m always hoping that I’ll find a new author to follow but usually end up either disappointed or ambivalent. The best of these was probably Sarah Lotz’s The Three.
a few re-reads. I re-read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency again and did not regret it.
And now here are a few of my 2015 Reading Awards:
Favorite book of 2015: Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel) Favorite re-read of 2015: On Writing (Stephen King) Most depressing book of 2015: Idiot America (Charles P. Pierce) Best Stephen King book I read in 2015 (not counting On Writing): From a Buick 8 (yes, you heard me–the story is simple but is strangely charming) Most disappointing classic: Swan Song (Robert McCammon). I don’t understand why this book is rated so highly. It’s not bad, it’s just very average. I would say I’m a picky reader but I love enough junk to know that’s not true. The “Well, that was…interesting” Award: Given the Circumstances (Brad Vance). I figured it was time to read a gay romance. For the first half of the book the two main characters dance around each other (they are massive/studly NFL and MLB players, of course) then when they finally have sex it’s rendered in enough detail to qualify as a medical dissertation. It felt weird (that’s what he said). It was essentially story story story EXPLICIT HARDCORE SEX story story EXPLICIT HARDCORE SEX story story EXPLICIT HARDCORE SEX story fin. Maybe all romances are written this way and I never knew because I’d never read any. Now I know and well, it was interesting.
As happens from time to time, I was thinking. In this instance I was thinking about how I used to have a bicycle and in a small way I yearn to have one again.
On the plus side, a bike lets you get exercise without beating up your shins and feet like running does.
On the negative side, bikes require a lot more maintenance than running shoes and despite being a lot larger, are more prone to being stolen (as my last bike–and several before it–was).
On the plus side again, you can cover a lot more ground on a bike, zipping and gliding along.
Negatively, you can crash at high speed or get hit by a bus. I hardly ever crash when jogging. It’s really only happened once (stupid dog).
On a bike you ought to wear a helmet and no one ever describes helmets as “hugely sexy-looking and comfortable.” I wear a jaunty cap when I run and it adds a dash of flair, unless it rains, then it looks like some limp white blob died on my head.
Mainly, though, if I got a bicycle, I’d become one of them–the people I loathe at Burnaby Lake. Which people? These people:
I just completed a three day Conflict Resolution course at the Justice Institute of British Columbia (I know, I was also expecting to be greeted by spandex-clad superheroes when I entered the lobby–it even looks like a superhero headquarters) and the course requires a certain amount of roleplay (the third day is devoted entirely to it), with you taking on both the role of person causing conflict and person trying to resolve it. We had bonus roleplay when we divided into groups to demonstrate the different styles of conflict resolution. My group opted for a live demo of the right and wrong ways rather than go with flow charts and bullet lists.
I attended with two co-workers and both of them commented on my apparently convincing acting when playing conflict-creating people. One had me playing an indifferent IT guy who couldn’t understand why anyone would be confused by IT’s avalanche of changes accompanied by an avalanche of email, while the other was even better–I was a co-worker who openly bad-mouthed others in the office to the point of making a fellow co-worker and friend decide I was a poophead.
It was fun. I am normally quiet and polite to the point of being deferential, so playing against type is always a good time. That I can allegedly do it so well makes me yearn a little for the old days when I actually pursued an acting career (the last time I acted was in a 1988 Fringe Festival show. Think about it–that’s pre-Internet. There are adults out there who do not realize such dark times even existed). Interestingly, with the advent of the same Internet and more affordable consumer technology (eg. phones that shoot video) I could actually pursue acting again, post my efforts to YouTube and watch my efforts go viral. In this case “go viral” means getting four or five views, depending on whether I tell four or five people to watch the video.
But that’s what acting is all about, the impossible dreams.
