Friday, July 4, 2014
Manul: one strange-looking cat
The gif version. This is one of the most eerie things I've ever seen.
William Shatner: deal with the devil
William Shatner kicks off the Calgary Stampede
Throngs of fans jostled to catch a glimpse of the actor, who is serving as this year’s Calgary Stampede parade grand marshal
The Canadian Press
July 4, 2014
Jeff McIntosh/CP
CALGARY – William Shatner got an out-of-this-world welcome Friday as throngs of fans jostled to catch a glimpse of the Canadian-born actor, who is serving as this year’s Calgary Stampede parade grand marshal.
Even before the parade began, some people were yelling “bring out William Shatner,” who played Capt. James T. Kirk in the original “Star Trek” TV series and subsequent films.
A crowd gathered as Shatner and his wife Elizabeth prepared to make their way down the parade route in the back of a light blue antique convertible. Fans snapped pictures on cellphones and clamoured for autographs.
“I’m excited that they’re excited,” said Shatner, who donned a white cowboy hat.
He said with a laugh that he’s looking forward to the end of the parade.
Shatner intends to stay in Cowtown for a while to take in the rodeo and other attractions.
“I’m going to be part of the experience,” he said. “That’s why we’re here, actually. We’re rodeo fans.”
About 250,000 people lined up early on downtown Calgary streets to get the best vantage point.
Rae Thorogood, who said she is a big fan of the actor, got up at 5 a.m. to stake out a prime spot.
“We barely slept. We were so excited,” she said.
Vern Neiley said he has never been able to make it out to the annual parade because he’s always had to work. Now that he’s retired, he said he couldn’t pass up a chance to attend this year.
“The big draw, I guess, was William Shatner. I’ve been a fan of his for a lot of years — ‘Star Trek’ and all the other stuff that goes with it.”
For Neiley’s wife, Sandy, it was a similar story.
“William Shatner is one of my favourites as well too and he’s my big draw too,” she said.
“This is fabulous for Calgary and I think this is wonderful that we get so many people every year for the Stampede parade.”
Before the parade began Jean Cornell sat on a curb with her 18-month-old grandson squirming in her arms, while his siblings played nearby on a blanket.
She said seeing Shatner would be a treat. But for her the main attraction would be “watching these guys’ faces light up.”
On hand to watch the parade were Prime Minister Stephen Harper and federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau.
The Stampede runs through July 13.
OHHHHHH. . . kay.
This I have trouble with.
I've been unofficially following Shatner since his Trek days. There's something admirable about someone who can send himself up in such a good-natured way, and besides, the man's a dynamo, with a finger in every showbiz pie. He keeps popping up here, there, everywhere. He hosted a show I LOVED called Weird or What?, a sort of digest of the paranormal interspersed with Shatnerian clowning, and another one called Raw Nerve, in which he did in-depth interviews with people like Whoopi Goldberg and Jerry Springer and (yes!) Leonard Nimoy himself. As a matter of fact - and this can't be true, it really can't - I seem to remember him interviewing Carol Burnett. Unfortunately, these watchworthy enterprises (!) lasted only a couple of seasons.
But something's off here, or at least weird.
He isn't ageing.
He isn't.
He just. . . isn't.
The man looks to be hovering somewhere between 60 and 65, and STAYING THERE. He just looks like he always does, not Botoxed, not frozen-faced or Asian-eyed from brow lifts. He just looks like himself, comfortably overweight (and somehow he makes chunkiness look healthy and good), slightly ruddy of complexion, not the fox he was when young (and God, was he a fox when he was young), but still quite good-looking, well-settled in himself, a rare trait in Hollywood (or anywhere, for that matter).
The photo at the top of this post was taken 54 years ago. William Shatner is 83 years old.
There was a Star Trek episode in the first series, I think it was called Requiem for Methuselah, in which it becomes apparent that the title character had lived for so many centuries that he had stood in for all the famous men in history, Galileo, Rembrandt, Brahms, and a bunch of others I don't want to look up. But you get the gist. The guy couldn't die. I don't know exactly what I am talking about here, except that I do, somehow.
I talked to my husband recently about quantum physics. It's something he knows about. He is the antithesis of the woo-woo types who believe in reincarnation and astrology and that sort of jazz. So in a jocular, I'm-kidding-of-course manner, I asked him, "Now is it true what I read somewhere, that you can be in two places at the same time?"
My husband, whom I have known and loved for forty years, and just about the smartest man I've ever encountered, deeply oriented in science for a lifetime, said, casually but with conviction, "Yes."
He said yes.
"Theoretically, it's possible," he explained, and then told me how, as I sat there like Bugs Bunny after he has been run over by a truck: "Duhhhh. . . duhhhh. . . duhhhh. . ."
You can be in two places at the same time. Fine. So what about that other thing I've always wondered about? "So is time travel possible?" This time I really expected a sneer.
"Yes. According to Einstein's theories, it's possible, because time and space do not exist in a straight line." His hand described an elegant curve that somehow gave me the shivers. Then he reminded me that if an astronaut remained in space for long enough and then returned to earth, he would be younger than when he left. Reverse ageing - oh, a simple enough concept! He also went on for some time about wormholes, something I had thought was invented by the writers of The Next Generation.
I was getting frightened.
I have had moments, just moments mind you, when I have felt complete disorientation, as if I am about to "phase", to enter or overlap with another reality completely. Not in another time, but OUTSIDE time. The usual rules, for a second, appear to slip sideways. Physics falls away, leaving a bizarrely beautiful, indescribable otherness.
"Things as they are," goes a very beautiful line of poetry, "are changed upon the blue guitar." Changed, changed utterly.
And for some reason I remember a line in Tom Robbins' wacky masterpiece Jitterbug Perfume, uttered by the brilliantly insane immortalist Wiggs Dannyboy: "The universe doesn't have laws. It has habits. And habits can be broken."
I don't know about deals with the devil or people looking younger than they perhaps should, eerily reversing the dial of time. I don't know about Shatner's lifelong association with science fiction - a happy accident, after all - but hey, wait a minute, before Star Trek, didn't he used to appear on The Twilight Zone? The episode I'm thinking of, besides that iconic monster-on-the-wing scene on the airplane (where he cracks up at the end as only the Shat Man can) is about a man sitting in a small-town cafe who becomes obsessed with a fortune-telling gizmo topped by a devil's head. It's beginning to look like a theme, or at least too many things to be mere coincidence. He claimed Weird or What? was just an interesting concept for a show, not something he necessarily believed in. But the evidence is beginning to pile up. Isn't it?
There are two Shatners (at least), the hammy Trekkian "no blah-blah-blah!" Kirk-figure who became so famous he could never quite live down that histrionic style, and the serious Shakespearian actor who cut his teeth at Ontario's Stratford Festival in the 1950s. I have found a video of him doing Hamlet's Soliloquy on the Mike Douglas Show, and it's a solid, almost low-key, thoughtful interpretation of the most worn-out of actorly cliches. In other words, he is a real actor, not a cliche, and can do whatever he wants and do it well. But what does this have to do with being out of phase, of entering another reality where time, perhaps, goes backwards instead of forwards, where the usual laws of ageing just sort of. . . stop?
I keep thinking I want to meet him, hoping something will rub off, perhaps. It's just so odd. His friend and colleague Leonard Nimoy is shrivelled-up and fragile as an old burned matchstick, and yet they are almost exactly the same age. If you believe in astrology, their destinies are so similar as to be almost identical.
Yes, you could say that remaining active keeps you young, etc., etc., and that all his many business and professional concerns (especially the horses, which would keep anybody young) have somehow frozen the clock at around sixty-five. But it just doesn't happen that way. Every time I see a picture of him - and years can go by in between - he either looks the same, or better. More ruddy and healthy, without wrinkles or the caving-in that feels inevitable as flesh falls away from bone. This goes way beyond his bluff physical appearance to a kind of age-proof animus, some spirit that mysteriously refuses to get older, or perhaps can't.
What universe does he inhabit? Where can I get a piece of this action? Do people sidle up to him and try to make a deal? WAS this a deal of sorts, and with whom? Star Trek posited many versions of reality, and sometimes they overlapped or even blended together. Cornball as the show seems now, it was cutting-edge for its time, and many of the underlying hypotheses about time and space are still intriguing and even (theoretically!) possible. Or so we have come to believe.
But the rest of the Enterprise crew didn't end up this. . . ageless. It has to exceed genetics. Then WHAT? It's driving me crazy. I wondered at the fact he won't be riding a horse in the parade, but then when I thought about it: an 83-year-old man sitting on an unfamiliar horse for four or five hours - ? He's not that crazy. Not crazy at all, in fact, and obviously knows way more than the rest of us do, not just about survival but thriving, and not falling into the supposedly inevitable pit of mortality.
It would be even more eerie if he made it to 100, then suddenly keeled over dead, looking the same way he does now. Quick, get out the surgical instruments! You know, the ones they used for that alien autopsy.
(P. S. You Trek fans out there - do you remember that episode where the Enterprise crew was afflicted by a strange disease that caused rapid ageing? Not long ago I saw it, and it was laughable. Shatner looked like his own grandfather.)
Order The Glass Character from:
Thistledown Press
Amazon.com
Chapters/Indigo.ca
Makes me bloody sick
One of those things floating around Facebook that gets 967 "likes" and all sorts of squeals of hilarity and
delight. Makes me bloody sick. I'm not even going to illustrate this crap. WHY does anyone think there is anything positive in this swill? I would have hated it when I was 20 years old. There's a name for it -
ageism/misogyny - and it's worst when we're being fired on by our own troops.
Older Ladies by Donnalou Stevens
Well, I ain’t 16, not a beauty queen.
My eyes are baggin’ and my skin is saggin’,
And if that’s the reason that you don’t love me,
Then maybe that’s not love.
Well I ain’t 20 either and I don’t care neither.
My hair is gray and I like it that way.
And if that’s the reason that you don’t love me,
Then maybe that’s not love.
If you don’t think I rock, well we ain’t gonna roll.
If you don’t think I hung the moon, my hot just turned to cold.
If you want a younger model, I wish you well, sweet pea.
‘cause if you can’t see what it is you have,
Then you ain’t having me.
I got cellulite and achin’ feet,
And my thighs kinda jiggle when I giggle or wiggle,
And if that’s the reason that you don’t love me,
Then maybe that’s not love.
My tummy ain’t tucked or liposucked.
It’s a little poochy, but I still Hoochy Koochy,
And if that’s the reason that you don’t love me,
Then maybe that’s not love.
See, I’m no longer desperate. I’ll only have a man,
If he has the smarts to see how hot that I still am.
If you want a younger model, I wish you well, sweet pea.
If you can’t see what it is you have,
Then you ain’t having me.
Older ladies, older ladies, older ladies… are DIVINE!
Well I gotta chicken neck and I love it, by heck,
It makes a double chin whenever I grin,
And if that’s the reason that you don’t love me,
Then maybe that’s not love.
I got saggy breasts that droop from my chest,
Pert near down all the way to my nest,
And if that’s the reason that you don’t love me,
Then maybe that’s not love.
If you don’t think I rock, well we ain’t gonna roll.
If you don’t think I hung the moon, my hot just turned to cold.
If you want a younger model, I wish you well, sweet pea.
’cause if you can’t see what it is you’ve got,
You ain’t getting me.
Older ladies, older ladies, older ladies… are DIVINE!
Older ladies, older ladies, older ladies… what are we ladies? We’re DIVINE!
Make sure you share this with all the beautiful ladies in your life!
Share this with your friends and family by clicking the button below.
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
Something wonderful
This is a man who thinks with his heart,
His heart is not always wise.
This is a man who stumbles and falls,
But this is a man who tries.
This is a man you'll forgive and forgive
And help and protect, as long as you live.
He will not always say what you would have him say
But now and then, he'll say something wonderful.
The thoughtless things he'll do will hurt and worry you,
Then all at once, he'll do something wonderful.
He has a thousand dreams that won't come true
You know that he believes in them and that's enough for you.
You'll always go along, defend him when he's wrong
And tell him when he's strong, he is wonderful.
He'll always need your love and so he'll get your love
A man who needs your love can be wonderful.
This is a man you'll forgive and forgive
And help and protect, as long as you live.
He will not always say what you would have him say
But now and then, he'll say something wonderful.
Post-blog thoughts. This sort of welled up in me out of nowhere - no, it was somewhere. I had to trundle all the way in to Vancouver by bus today - God, it seemed like a long trudge, though I used to do it several times a week. Had to go see my doc. Had to go see my HEAD doc, as a matter of fact, who has helped me probably more than anyone else I can name, but just the fact that I GO to one is somehow ice-floe territory. But there you are.
It wasn't quite time for my appointment on the 17th floor of this luxe building that has such a gorgeous lookout on the waterfront, it would be the ideal place to commit suicide if you could only get through that 2"-thick plate glass. At any rate, having had a bad lunch at the food fair and having a teensy bit of time left, I forced myself to walk into the "local book store" (a big impersonal chain I've called Big Booky in my posts), which I knew to be the only place that might still be carrying The Glass Character. "Still" referring to the three-month window most small-time authors get before having it all sent back to an unhappy publisher.
Anyway, I walked past all the displays of useless high-end gift items, plus a few tables of mass mega-best-sellers by people everyone knows/no one knows, and ascended the TWO giant escalators - up, up, waaaaaaaay up - until, buried at the very back of the third floor, I found a rather small, obscure section called Fiction. And I began to hunt. Surely it wouldn't be there. But I had to look. In nine interminable years of non-publish-hood, I never again thought I would see a book of mine on a shelf in Big Booky or anywhere else (and in Vancouver, by now, there literally ISN'T "anywhere else"). And I saw the H's and I worked backwards and.
And, he was sitting there - listen. This isn't just a book. I wish you'd read it. It's a piece of my heart and it's still aching and breaking, even now. I came to be familiar with Harold the way some people must have actually known him, almost intimately. He was a heartbreaker. And I saw him up there, and oh God, and yes, there his is, by the holy. The phrase "something wonderful" kept echoing in my head after seeing him in all his blue-ness on the Big Booky shelf (and it's unlikely they have sold even one of them).
Something wonderful.
Then I thought of that melody, and couldn't get it out of my mind. I kept hunting for a good version to post here, and one didn't seem to exist. They were all oversung and schmalzed-up, the worst offender being Barbra Streisand, whose version I used to like 20 years ago. Then I found something strange - a delicate piano version, just the tune, in fact sounding more like music minus one, an accompaniment that peeled back the Broadway schmaltz to reveal the iridescence of the chords beneath.
I think Harold's character was a lot like the man in this lovely translucent song from The King and I. Then I got that yearning or craving or whatever-it-is, and because I can't make art I had to start pasting things up, to try to express some of this. I wanted to keep Harold out of it entirely, but I couldn't. If I COULD paint, maybe I never would have needed the head doc in the first place.
Order The Glass Character from:
Thistledown Press
Amazon.com
Chapters/Indigo.ca
Eaten right from the tin
Stupid Facebook thing on what writers eat, but I like the illustrations. God I wish I could draw or paint, or something, which is why I muck around with images so much. Good night.
.jpg)
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
DAM IT ALL: beavers kick polar bear ass!
(To celebrate July 1, I'm going to goof off and eat those cheese thingies and stuff like that. In other words, I don't want to work. But here's a nice piece, so old it's new, almost! Enjoy it, folks, and remember to respect your beaver friends, or they will gnaw down a tree that will pound you into the ground like a tent peg. Happy Canada Day!)
Oct 28, 2011 – 7:00 AM ET | Last Updated: Oct 28, 2011 12:55 PM ET
Polar bear should replace 'dentally defective rat' - the beaver - as Canada's national emblem: Senator
A Canadian senator has called for a national “emblem makeover” by replacing a vegetarian rodent that defends its territory with urine with the world’s largest walking carnivore that thrives in the cold.
Referring to the beaver as a “dentally defective rat,” Nicole Eaton called on Ottawa to replace the critter as the national emblem with the polar bear, an animal she hails as strong, majestic and brave.
“It is high time that the beaver step aside as a Canadian emblem or, at the least, share the honour with the stately polar bear,” Ms. Eaton said in the Senate Thursday.
“A country’s symbols are not constant and can change over time as long as they reflect the ethos of the people and the spirit of the nation.”
The Department of Canadian Heritage has the beaver as the only animal on its list of “national emblems,” a tally that includes the maple tree, the maple leaf and maple leaf tartan.
The beaver is certainly deeply entwined in Canada’s history.
The trade of beaver pelts during European colonization was so lucrative the venerable Hudson’s Bay Company put the beaver on its coat of arms in 1678, four of them, in fact. That same year, the governor of New France suggested the beaver as a suitable emblem for the colony.
When designing the first Canadian postage, they . . . awww, screw the rest!
WE HAVE THE BEST!
Didja ever see a beaver makin' lodges in the lake
And the way he chews on tree bark
It can can make your tummy ache
For beavers are so busy,
busy, busy all the way
You can keep your goddamn polar bears
Coz beavers rule the day!
(Chorus) Beavers, beavers, beavers, beavers,
Beavers rule the day!
Now a beaver never ate someone
But bears eat kids all day
Their breath it stinks from all that fish
We know it's not OK
But beavers only eat the trees
And chop the maples down
And swamp the fields and wreck the roads
and flood the whole damn town!
(EVERYBODY!)
Beavers, beavers, beavers. . . OK, you get the idea, eh?
Now the beaver once was very big
Just like a buffalo
And cave men kept him as their pets
They loved his flat tail so
So you shouldn't say he's boring
You shouldn't say he's small
Cuz when the earth began, he was
The meanest rat of all!
(Patriotic interlude) Where would our country be without the beaver? Maybe people wouldn't make fun of us so much for having a rodent as our national emblem. But hey, he made good fur, didn't he? I mean for those, like, fur hats for Hudson's Bay or something? He's busy all the time eating wood and chopping down the trees. Bears lie around and do squat all day, almost as bad as those eagles. Who needs trees anyway? There are way too many of them. But there can never be too many beavers. Eh?
Beavers! Beavers! Beavers!
We really think they're fine
We really think they're fine
We love him more than stinky bears
He's yours, he's ours, he's mine
He's part of our, like, history
He sacrificed his pelts
Let's hear it for the BEAVER:
We don't want no one eltse!
We don't want no one eltse!
"You had me at hello"
Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)