Margaret Atwood Follies: "gee, thanks, lady"

Margaret Atwood "can't write a novel," according to Norm Macdonald

(AARON VINCENT ELKAIM / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

By PETER EDWARDS Star Reporter

Fri., Nov. 18, 2016

After kicking off something of a one-way Canadian literary feud, comedian Norm Macdonald has deleted a series of Twitter rants in which he called author Margaret Atwood “a no-talent mountebank bent on fooling fools” and other insults.

Some of the tirade from Macdonald, a former Saturday Night Live star, came late Tuesday night and Thursday morning of this week, after Atwood tried to console Americans after the election of Donald Trump.

Atwood: “Just like the Wizard of Oz, Donald Trump has no magical power”

Macdonald: “You make a very good, if utterly obvious, point. So, you’re saying he DOESN’T have magical powers. Thanks.”

And then Atwood, a Toronto resident, tries again to console American readers with: “Dear Americans. It will be all right in the long run. (How long? We will see.) You’ve been through worse, remember.”

Macdonald replies: “Gee, thanks, lady.”

Atwood, winner of the prestigious Booker Prize for Literature, urges readers to take practical measures to help them cope with life under Trump, to which Macdonald adds: “How to SURVIVE in the era of Trump, lady? How about staying in your house with your money?”




Earlier, the 57-year-old Quebec City native observed, “Canadians have frauds and imposters just like everyone else. Most people in the arts are charlatans. One is @MargaretAtwood.” Macdonald later deleted the Atwood run of tweets (though they remain on his Facebook page), as he has done in the past with stories about meeting Bob Dylan, helping to write the SNL 40th anniversary special and more.

The comedian has a well-received book of his own currently out, Based on a True Story: A Memoir. Despite the title, Macdonald has described it, on Twitter and elsewhere, as a novel.

The shots he took online at Atwood went beyond her advice on life in a Trump America.

When Atwood sends a reader a handwritten quote from her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, Macdonald jumps in and posts: “Oh, bad writing scribbled on a piece of paper. Well, who wouldn’t want that?”

Atwood has 1.32 million Twitter followers while Macdonald has 768,000.





Several of her fans jumped in to defend her. One posts: “as if I don’t have enough to deal with Norm hates Margret (sic) Atwood??”

Macdonald replies: “I don’t hate @MargaretAtwood. I hate bad writing.”

He then adds: “It isn’t her fault and I’d never have anything but pity for the talentless. But the Canadian school system makes you read her.”

One Atwood defender tries for some sort of anti-Trump solidarity but Macdonald has none of that.

“@normmacdonald In an authoritarian regime, the most important thing is whether you are ‘one of them’ or ‘one of us,’ ” he tweets.

“no,” Macdonald replies.





Macdonald accuses Atwood of “chasing celebrity and promoting anything for a buck” and compares her unfavourably to Canada’s Nobel Prize-winning Alice Munro.

“It is nauseating to consider that through shameless self-promotion someone like @MargaretAtwood could care consider herself Munro’s peer,” Macdonalds writes.

“Unlike Munro, @MargaretAtwood is incapable of writing a novel, yet churns out chum at an alarming rate,” Macdonald continues.

“Munro is the greatest writer Canada has ever produced but feels herself incapable of writing a novel. On the flip side sits @MargaretAtwood,” Macdonald continues.

Atwood, 77 ,did not respond to the Star’s request for comment.





https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/2016/11/18/norm-macdonald-deletes-anti-atwood-tweets.html

No, I'm not finished with you yet

In case you think I am finished with the dank, scary topic of tardigrades, think again. I am finding millions of images of them on the internet, millions of videos, songs about them, dances about them, artwork, jewellery, tshirts, and even. . . cartoons.

Yes. I was astonished and a little taken aback to find a whole episode of the British cartoon series Aquanauts to be devoted to Water Bears. (Not Water Bearers - that's Aquarius, another issue.) This animated tardigrade looks less like the electron-microscope-enhanced nightmares I have posted above, and more like the Pillsbury Doughboy.

Calling them water bears (or, even more euphemistically, moss piglets) plays down the horror of these creatures who cannot be killed by ice, flame, 100 years of dessication, or being shot out into space. If they're going to send them out into the cold reaches of the universe, why not send ALL of them?

Here, Tardy Grade lounges with his friends Retro Grade, Make The Grade, Centi Grade and Shady Grade. All look like nothing more than obese caterpillars.

This is what tardigrades look like. This. THIS. Stop looking away. Stop evading reality and face the truth! These are not "moss piglets" or "water bears". They are micro-horrors waiting to take over the world. Yes, once we've poisoned the environment and driven all the other animals and life forms extinct, these "things" will still be swarming around, because they can live anywhere, under any circumstances, at any temperature, and even without water or (probably) air. They don't even need genes, for God's sake, When they're a little short of DNA, they just "import" some from other species.

(I just got a horrible idea for a short story. Tardi-humans? No. No, I mustn't!)

So no matter how innocent and Disneylike these things may look here, don't be fooled. They are horrible. They have too many legs. (Anything with more than four legs is automatically off my wubby list.) They even make bad cartoon characters, lumbering and lumpish. In fact, they remind me a little bit of those termite queens seething with eggs, so fat they can't move, like something from My 600 Pound Life.

(Blogger's note. I here deleted a gif of a seething, undulating termite queen, immobilized by her own egg-laden weight. I couldn't even stand to look at it myself.)

I think some tidy unmarried British scientist from the 1800s must've named these monstrosities Moss Piglets. It's a slightly perverted name, the kind of name bestowed by someone who never got any, I mean never, and thus thought these things charming - if not captivating, if not provocative - as he peered at them through his incredibly crude microscope (the kind you could make with two mirrors and a toilet roll) all day long.

THIS is a moss piglet. A piglet made of moss.

This is a piglet. Is there any resemblance?

You decide.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA