Seal of Disapproval

The federal government has given their seal of approval to sealskin uniforms for our 2010 Olympians. All parties voted unanimously in support of the move to protest the European Union ban on Canada’s seal hunt.

Because our polar bears are suffering so greatly with the global warming issue, perhaps the government should kill off the remaining polar bear population instead, and market 100% genuine polar fleece. It would be like assisted suicide. As the glaciers melt our guilty conscience could be alleviated by using their pelts for something memorable, like the Olympics. Go team!

If the MPs wanted to knock the cotton socks off the competition, surely they could have come up with more agreeable alternatives. Like uniforms made from Starbucks coffee cup pulp, pitched plastic water bottles or disposable diapers. I suppose if we continue to make our landfills bigger though, we will have more ski hills to boast about. Olympians in 2050 will be challenged by Black Diaper Diamonds and Starbucks slopes, looking flashy and intimidating in the latest endangered species fashions. I’m thinking leatherback turtle helmets, Blue Racer snakeskin boots, down jackets stuffed with the feathers of at risk species like the Whooping Crane and Eskimo Curlew. A high-end option would be the Burrowing Owl down jacket with a Swift Fox collar.

Athletes could enter the opening ceremonies parade proudly wearing Woodland Caribou coats and Vancouver Island Marmot fur hats. Instead of bouquets of roses, podium winners would receive an attractive arrangement of Canada’s most endangered flowers: Western Prairie Fringed Orchid, Seaside Bird’s Foot Lotus, Small White Lady’s Slipper and Golden Paintbrush.

I’m wondering if the MPs who voted in favour of the sealskin sweatsuits brainstormed with New Democrat MLA Mike Farnsworth. In response to the January murder spree in the Fraser Valley of BC by United Nations gang members, Farnsworth proposed introducing a bill in the legislature that would regulate body armour use with gang members. Farnsworth said only police should be wearing protective body armour, and under his bill it would be an offence if someone was caught in armour without a police permit to do so. Good one! That’ll stop the criminals from wearing the vests!

I picture the politicians yapping excitedly with hamster cheeks packed with beluga caviar and shark fin soup, “Farnsworth, get a load of our idea! To help promote seal products we’re gonna cash in on the Olympics and the 2010 haute couture is going to be clubbed seal!” Bloc Quebec MP Raynald Blais probably fell asleep that night with dreams of sugarplums and sealskin spandex dancing in his head. Double Olympic champion speedskater Catriona Le May Doan retired all too soon—imagine her gams in seal! No blubber there.

Mike Chambers, President of the Canadian Olympic Committee stated in The Vancouver Sun that, to the happiness of barking seals everywhere that “adding seal products to Olympians’ gear would not only mar athletes’ performance, but politicize the Games.”

South Vancouver Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh supports the seal hoodies because it directly supports an industry in the Atlantic. Providing BC Bud marijuana swag bags would also support west coast grow operations. Understandably, aboriginals have incorporated seal into their wardrobes for years if not centuries. The waterproof quality of seal boots and coats is a no-brainer to locals. Crocs and Haviana flip-flops tend not to make the Inuit catwalks. But, do our Olympic figure skaters and luge athletes need seal gear too when there is ample Gore-tex to be had?

I wonder what Montreal artist Jana Sterback thinks of all this. In 1991 she was grilled when her “meat dress” was hung at the National Gallery. She artistically stitched together 50 pounds of flank steak and hung the “dress” on a mannequin to artistically rot under the name of Vanitas: A Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic. The governement think-tanks and Sterback could design a knock-out Olympic clubbed seal collection that would leave Jean-Paul Gaultier and Vera Wang anxiously thumbing the Classifieds.

Supporting Canada’s notorious seal hunt with piggyback Olympic marketing is an idea that needs further fleshing out. I thought the world was upside down when Roots Canada was designing uniforms for the US. This year, the Americans will be wearing garb from Polo Ralph Lauren. The only harm done to animals will be the stitching of horses, Polo’s trademark.

When the rest of the world is trying to eliminate sweat shops and create greener clothing lines from renewable resources like bamboo and hemp, Canada goes straight for the jugular, of seals.

 

*With less fanfare, Sterback created Chair Appollinaire using flank steak as her chosen medium again, with a little black button thread on a polyester resin structure. View The Bread Bed (made with loaves of bread) and Catacombs of soild chocolate and the Vanitas dress under Images on her Web site : http://www.janasterbak.com/images.html (unsure if there are downloadable patterns for the dress though).

25 Random Things

Everyone else was doing it, so I did too.

Jules, an Expose…

1.  In a perfect world I would eat coconut-battered shrimp for breakfast, KFC skin for lunch and strawberry Pop Tarts for dinner.

2.  I would like to set up an exchange program for low-income African dogs so they could experience a Canadian winter.

3.  I am fascinated by stories of Bigfoot and Ogopogo.

4.  I believe in UFO’s, ghosts and the power of wishing on wishbones and falling stars.

5.  I ate guinea pig in Ecuador, despite growing up with a darling, whistling one named Cocoa.

6.  Diamonds are not a girl’s best friend: watches as big as belt buckles are.

7.  The smell of pig manure reminds me of home.

8.  I can’t wash out empty peanut butter jars, it would make me vomit.

9.  I’ve kissed the Blarney Stone.

10.  On my must see list: an aardvark, a duck-billed platypus, naked mole rats, a roadrunner and the polar bears eating garbage in the dumpsters of Churchill.

11.  Kenny G and most other instrumental music makes me aggressive and violent. I assume it is a job hazard of giving massages in a serene atmosphere.

12.  I’ve wanted to be an orinthologist (someone who studies birds) since age 6. Seeing the blue footed boobies in the Galapagos was my birding dream come true.

13.  I’d like to run a marathon with my sister, providing our lumbar intervertebral discs allow it. Maybe the Midnight Sun Run in Anchorage, Alaska during the summer solstice?

14.  Send roses to the mistress, I love tiger lilies and birds of paradise.

15.  This year I will read Love in the Time of Cholera.

16.  In another perfect world I would be a cake decorator. Or, run a little dog bakery that made whole-wheat cat shit-flavoured bones for pups.

17.  If I can teach Wanda how to perfect pancakes and wait for the tiny bubbles to appear on the surface before flipping, maybe we could open a bed and breakfast in St. Margaret’s Bay, Halifax. But, we would call it a “Bread and Bekfast” because those two words are really hard to say together, and inevitably, four times out of ten, this is what people say anyway.

18.  I worked as a clown, very briefly for $5.10 an hour in the early 90s.

19.  I’m a minimalist but a maximalist when it comes to books. I will probably die from a bookshelf falling on me, not a piano or a falling airplane part.

20.  There are so many places to go: Easter Island, Portugal, the Yukon, New Orleans, Bostwana, Madagascar, Isle of Man, Iceland, Ikea, IHOP.

21.  My mother always said, “Only boring people get bored.”

22.  My mother also said, “why don’t you try writing something for Chatelaine or Maclean’s,” after reading my latest lesbian erotica submission about having sex with Marge Simpson. Guess she didn’t find the sex appeal in me pulling Marge’s avocado green dress gently over her head and then ripping off her red pearls.

23.  Dogs, sunshine and flip flops are really all one needs in life.

24.  I have an autograph somewhere from David Hasslehoff posing with Knight Rider.

25.  We should always crave something in life. Someone, something or somewhere. And my craves would be: Wanda, a Garage Sandwich Company sandwich piled high with roasted sweet potatoes, roasted peppers, avocado, sprouts and bacon on 12 grain with mustard and, Anderita Beach, Africa.

Seeding Clouds

In the Vancouver Sun this weekend I learned that in anticipation of major public holidays, the Russian Air Force often dispatches a dozen cargo planes “carrying loads of silver iodide, liquid nitrogen and cement powder to seed clouds above Moscow and empty the skies of moisture.”

This technique of “seeding clouds” helps prevent rain from spoiling a holiday. The reason this made the news was because one of the planes accidentally dropped a 25-kg sack of cement on a suburban home in Moscow. Personally, I would rather sacks of cement fall on my roof than all the rain we endure here in the Fraser Valley.

I would like to begin fundraising for the purchase of a cargo plane and some silver iodide (wherever one buys that) so I can seed all the soggy BC clouds until the end of summer.

Donations, anyone?

Boo Hoo! I’m Gonna Miss Hallowe’en

October 30, 2008

Boo Hoo

Hallowe’en has always been my favourite religious holiday (next to Gay Pride weekend of course). It’s the same concept really,except at Pride you wear as little as possible and enjoy eye candy.
Growing up in the country, we were spoiled by “neighbours” (who sometimes lived miles away and weren’t really neighbours at all) who anticipated and expected our Hallowe’en arrival. They didn’t mind that I was still trick-or-treating at age 17. Mrs. Kellam handed out baggies of buttery nuts & bolts with two unfrozen freezies every year. Mrs. Columbine made cookies as big as our heads dotted with Smarties (although I suspect now that they were Smartie knock-offs, those bulk bin cousins with the budget chocolate inside). Mrs. Vigh routinely gave out real-life-size Oh! Henry bars—not the mini ones. We loved her for not cheaping out, but I have to admit, the Oh! Henry’s were always the first to go in my “tradesies” pile. Somewhere along Pleasant Ridge road an elderly couple with a parrot gave us candy apples with candy that stuck more to the Saran Wrap than the apple. They always told us their last name, so we could inform our parents that the apples were razor-blade friendly, just like dolphin-friendly tuna in a can.
My parents had to drive us between the long stretches, otherwise Halloween would have been a terrifyingly dark two hour walk of maybe seven farm houses with too-long laneways. And, our mobility would have been affected by my brother’s generally immobile costume choice of the year. Poor Dax, his creative attempts (which he usually began after school on the night of Halloween) were always failed. One year he ambitiously started wrapping his legs with my dad’s hockey tape in his plan to be a mummy. By dusk he was only up to his knees with tape that was wound a little too tight and making his upper legs purple. He smeared some grey eye shadow under his eyes to look more mummy-ish, but everyone pegged him to be a baseball player with the tape up to his knees and shadow under his eyes fo catch fly-balls. Then there was the pumpkin-head year. Dax picked the heaviest, most awkward pumpkin from the garden and made a neck hole big enough to not totally strangle himself. The eyeholes were too small, giving him a pinhole version on the world, and were cut around his nostril level. After visiting three houses with a 15-pound hazard on his head, Dax left the pumpkin behind in the backseat of the Oldsmobile and simply trick-or-treated in what he was wearing, meaning, he was just Dax Torti with pumpkin pulp in his hair from another disaster costume. The award winner though, had to be the Hallowe’en that he decided to be a toilet. Doesn’t every kid want to dress up as a toilet? Dax found the largest boxes he could for his dream costume, painted them porcelain white and affixed a flush handle. What he didn’t consider was fitting his toilet contraption into a vehicle (it would have been so much more efficient had he been a bidet). As you can imagine, the toilet costume was also abandoned somewhere along Pleasant Ridge road, and Dax left everyone guessing. Now, what are you?? I think that’s when he became gay.
My sister was the forever princess , fairy (she copied Dax) or ballet dancer. She was sugar and spice, and all that’s nice, that’s what little Kiley was made of. She was the humanitarian right from the get go with her damn Unicef box. Dax and I usually left our boxes at home due to the infringement they had on quick candy collection—and the toilet design didn’t really allow for a hanging box. Kiley held us up with her pleading Unicef requests, I’m surprised she’s not the one in Africa right now. Dax and I would eventually ditch her and cut across the dark yards at high speed, with poor Kiley crying behind us. “Wait uuuuuuuuuuup!” She was born with the ability to scream and make every hair on your body stand on end but always gave us the excuse that she had her legs in a brace as a child and couldn’t keep up with us(which we’re pretty sure she is lying about, but somehow she still identifies strongly with Forrest Gump because he had leg braces too).
While we carried on with our gluttonous collecting, my parents sat in the idling car pilfering our treasure. Our technique was to empty our bags frequently so that the neighbours would be more generous, perhaps giving bigger handfuls to the poor kids just starting out. It took us a while to catch on that my mother was not to be trusted. Her mumbled conversations with us between candy unloading were due to all the chocolate she packed in her mouth when we left the car!! She later confided that she took from us equally, but still, the betrayal! My dad only ate our raisins, which was fine by us. He liked those Sun-Maid boxes with like six raisins in a box—not even the Glosette variety!
The Grandmother tour was a critical part of the Torti Hallowe’en route, luckily two of them lived on our road and were our first stops. The photo sessions at Nan Chapin’s were like a Vogue fashion shoot with proper lighting, different stances and location changes. Another pile of grandkids would arrive and we would be released with cans of Cplus or grape crush, and surprise bags. The cans of pop were like hauling around shot puts after 30 minutes.
Our end point was my grandmother’s in the city where we would sit cross-legged guarding our piles, watching It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown out of the corners of our eyes.. We would dump our garbage bags and freak out at the colossal amount of sugar we had just gathered, for free. The fighting would start soon enough and the most-loved treats quickly hidden. I was a sucker for the Kraft caramels, Thrills gum, Smarties and Crunchie bars. Kiley would go for broke trading for Crispy Crunch minis and Gobstoppers. Dax gladly accepted our Aeros and Oh! Henry’s, Ju-jubes, Swedish fish, Fizz-Whiz and black and orange jelly beans were usually one-offs, hurriedly eaten before stolen. The Sweet tarts and suckers were kind of throw-aways (as well as the dumb toothbrushes from the dentist who lived near us) –that candy lasted well into November and was only eaten out of sheer desperation.
Unfortunately, we were all such hoarders that our candy apples without the razor blades would be rotten because we tried to save them for so long. The nuts & bolts would be stale, and Mrs. Columbine’s cookie became a weapon, budget chocolate or not. My mom always said they tasted poorly because she “must have used margarine instead of butter.”
There is just something magical and whimsical about Hallowe’en that I will miss this year. I imagine if I handed out free candy to kids in the local village that I would be stampeded. Somehow the one night of free candy wouldn’t translate well and I could see a pack of kids at my heels chanting “Candy, Mizungo! More candy!” until I leave in January.
I know Wanda will have the lights out and be crawling around on her knees to avoid being spotted by potential trick-or-treaters. Moving to suburbia with her excited me, finally after downtown Toronto apartment living in a gay village, I would have kids to dish out candy to! Little did I know that for police officers Hallowe’en is the most dreaded night of year to work. And with dogs, little goblins screeching and chanting at the door doesn’t make for a happy golden retriever who is already scared of a plastic bag blowing across the street!
Church street in Toronto is certainly a remarkable place to be on Hallowe’en. Boozy drag Queens, and some of the best costumes you will see anywhere. There is always a salt and battery, 5,000 gay sailors,3 groups of the Village People, 5 Monica Lewinsky’s in stained red dresses (still!)…but my favourite was the guy who carried around a framed Mona Lisa with his face where Mona’s would be. Or, the woman who was a box of Godiva chocolates and her face was one of the truffles! Brilliant.
Of course, with age I have moved on from sticky candy apples to candy apple martinis (1 oz vodka, ½ oz butterscotch schnapps, 1 oz Sourz apple liquer and 1 oz cranberry juice.). At some bar I remember drinking candy corn shooters. How would one make a Thrills shooter? Maybe I have the Ugandan ingredients to make one. Yeah, I know, laundry soap and gin, haha.
I tried to source out a pumpkin to carve tonight (African pumpkins look more like green watermelons), but none will be available until Tuesday. Sigh. I asked Ruth, our staff cook if she knew of a place where I could get one and she bent over cackling at me like a wicked witch. Maybe pumpkin means something else?
At least there is a ghost in this house to make me feel like I’m celebrating…
Boo from Africa to everyone at home, enjoy!

Bently with The Great Pumpkin

“There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin.”

– Linus in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

Bullied Into Blogging

Last year I narrowly avoided the pencil jeans craze and am stepping clear of the Daisy Duke short-shorts phenomena of 2009. However, I was the first and only one to own a red faux-leather Michael Jackson Thriller jacket in elementary school. Sometimes I am ahead of the crowd and sometimes I choose to avoid from what I presume will be a bubblegum fad or a phase. Like Facebook, I would have bet a lot of Monopoly money that it would become Phasebook, so I was the very last to join the social media ranks. Previous to that, I was the last to get an email address, despite my brother having our family connected by dial-up back in 1993.

I’ll blame it on my parents. We were the last family in southwestern Ontario to buy a microwave. And a VCR? That purchase took years (during which we rented a VCR from Jungle Video for the weekend, and my father spent two hours, mostly exasperated, connecting the machine to our console TV). I never did learn how to program the VCR because a very wise part of me knew that it would go away. The DVD will as well (hello Blue-ray!), so it doesn’t make sense to become well-versed with the settings and features now. My 4MP digital camera of 2005 is already a museum exhibit which I will display next to my cell phone of 2000 which is as big as a rolling pin.

Should I confess that I’ve never sent a text message? Oh, the humiliation! I don’t think I’ve even bothered to figure out the necessary keys to make a happy or sad face out of apostrophes and parantheses. But, the time has come for me to blog. Rona Maynard, former editor of Chatelaine told me so. And what does she know? Well, when it comes to anything literary, writerly or necessary, she would be the woman I would choose to represent me for the Double Jeopardy question in any of those categories.

 “You really MUST have a blog (I say for the hundred and 99^th time).”

–Rona Maynard, April 25^th, 2009

In May, when Rona roams around China possibly eating frog eyeballs and chicken testicles, I will be featured as a guest post on her website www.ronamayard.com. This post has prodded me to enter the jungle of blogging because as Rona said, how would her readers find me otherwise? Where could they go to read more of me?

In the last few months I have read three books that have stemmed from blogs: Julie & Julia by Julie Powell, The 100-Mile Diet—Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon and Petite Anglaise by Catherine Sanderson. I have come to realize the power of love (thanks to Celine Dion), and the power of blogs in a society that has a hunger for the latest and greatest (preferably in word economy format that Twitter allows)with the immediacy of ordering a tall, no-fat latte.

Julie Powell’s humble blog about creating 524 Julia Child recipes in 365 days evolved into a movie starring Meryl Streep. For Smith and Mackinnon, who originally chronicled their attempts to eat local on theTyee.ca, their blog boiled into a Food Network series: The 100-Mile Challenge. The couple can now lean back and watch the exasperation as six Canadian families endure 100 days minus daily vices like coffee, tea, chocolate, olive oil and sugar.

For Catherine Sanderson, the Brit blogger living in Paris, fame came when she pink-slipped from her job at Dixon Wilson Chartered Accountants, due to her blogging activity. Her employer must be still frothing to know that canning Sanderson directly led to her publishing deal and first book. The initial gross misconduct charge was altered to “dismissal for real and serious cause—breakdown of trust.” The Petite Anglaise blogger was anonymous until press interest leaked her name. Sanderson’s complaint in court earned her a tidy sum of 44,000 euros plus legal costs and a two-book deal with Penguin Books.

As I begin this blog, I wonder where it will all lead to. Possibly getting fired if I don’t get a move on here and get ready for my real job. Don’t think Penguin will issue me a book deal for that.

And here I go.