RIP, Allen Carr

This is very sad, and also weird, given last night's blog post, but Allen Carr died this morning. I guess he finished his last book and it's available as a free download. I've been thinking a lot about addiction lately, and I feel like some kind of small and spooky torch has now been passed on.

Goodbye, Allen. You'll be missed, but your message will live on.

- Andrew

Plenty Going On

The most exciting news around here right now, for me, anyway, is that I've written and recorded a jingle for one of our clients at the ad agency where I work. And I think it's going to get used! I REALLY, REALLY want to put it on here so you can hear it, but that would possibly get me fired, and I should wait until it's gone through all the hoops and revisions anyway. But I don't mind telling you, it's super catchy. I'm very psyched to hear it on the radio.

We went to a party at our friends Ron and Kristina's in Dartmouth on Saturday. It was a really fun time. I'd recently decided I didn't want to drink any more because the combination of alcohol in me and the annoying self-aggrandizing behaviour of drunk people around me brings out a certain biliousness in me that I don't like. But at this party I had a couple of glasses of wine and still had a really nice time talking with everyone. Maybe it's just bars that I hate. Especially the smoking ones. Yuck!

As of this Friday, there's no more smoking in any public places in Halifax. A lot of people are telling me that includes anwhere outdoors that is not your own backyard, but I find this pretty hard to believe. If it's true, that seems like some very tough love. I don't know what all those wretched nicotine addicts are going to do! Every day I thank my lucky stars that I'm no longer one of them.

Allen Carr, the guy who wrote the book I and Ali and many of our friends used to successfully quit smoking, now has lung cancer. Could be because of the many years for which he smoked before quitting twenty or so ago, or it might be related to all the second-hand smoke he's inhaled since then, helping others who want to quit. He encourages smokers to continue smoking as much as they want until they're ready to stop on his program, so that their powers of concentration will not be diminished while he de-brainwashes them. Whatever the root cause is, it's very sad. He's helped so many people, and is still unrecognized by any advertised cessation programs. I guess he's writing one last book about that very "scandal".

Final bit of news: I've been doing some rehearsing with Al Tuck, and will probably be playing a show with him and one or two other guys on Friday night at Gus' Pub. He's back in Halifax now, so I hope this'll be an ongoing deal. He's such a great songwriter, and a heck of a guy.

OK, must go tweak some cheesy drum sounds now. Still no Borat in sight!

- Andrew

Celebrations Part II

The Thai dinner was great and the bowling was even better. We went to the alley with Krista and her friend Steve, grabbed some ugly shoes and hurled some balls pinward. Pretty soon Johanna showed up, and then Cliff. I won the first two strings semi-handily, but then Steve came out of nowhere in the third with a score over 150, beating all previous scores by a substantial margin.





I got some real nice gifts and had a very fun birthday, so thanks a lot to everyone. One of my coworkers told me how her forties were the best decade of her life, which I thought was rushing things a bit since I only turned 39, but still nice. Krista gave me Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney's Book of Lists, from which we all read while bowling and at which we generally busted guts. The lists referred to are somewhat like David Letterman's Top Ten lists, but generally wittier. And there are lots of them. Here's a sample:

Lesser Known Movie Prequels

Borderline-Inappropriate Dancing
Four Bachelorette Parties and a Friend in the Hospital
Joseph and the Nondescript Monochrome Sportcoat
There Are Plenty of Mohicans

I drove Alison crazy last night reading it in bed, chortling, and outright guffawing until all hours. I was actually still laughing as I fell asleep.

Today at work I was assigned the task of writing a jingle, about which I'm super excited, so I'd better go work on that now. It's for a car dealership. Anyone know a good rhyme for micropolymers?

- Andrew

Celebrations

Of course it was Ali, ya gooves! Who'd you think it was?

It's been a pretty nice birthday so far: card and homemade cake at work, plus a couple of presents, everyone's being real nice to me, and we had chirashi-sushi for lunch. Yum! I'm just waiting for Alison to pick me up now, and we'll go out for Thai food. Then there's gonna be some bowling! Probably the usual suspects, and maybe a few less familiar faces. Meg can't go because she's in Cape Breton overnight on business. Bummer, man. But she gave me a really nice looking book this morning.

Looks like Big A's here. I'll let you know how it all went.

- Birthday Boy

Have a great day!

Our Wonderful, Creative Friends

The other day our friend Al came over and ended up staying over for a couple of nights. We played some of his songs together with two other musicians. It was really fun, and I think we're going to try to work up a set for a show on December 1st. Then the next day he brought his daughter, Isabel, over for a short visit. Holy cow, what a cutie. She just turned one and the natural showmanship is astounding.







She really didn't want to leave when the time came.

Buster was not into Isabel at all. He wouldn't go away from her and eventually hissed at her and I had to banish him to the sunroom. He likes that room anyway, but I wish he could learn not to be like that. There doesn't seem to be anything we can do to convince him that he needn't worry. Now Al may spend another night here with Isabel, and I'm a little worried about how that might play out.

Also last night, we went to our friend Rebecca's book launch at the Argyle Fine Art Gallery. It's a collection of the "House of Sugar" comics she did for The Coast (Halifax's snarky and underinformed entertainment rag), an autographed copy of which we were very glad to purchase because they were so good and there were lots we hadn't read. The book looks great, too. Nice spot varnish on the cover. And they also had a lot of her woodburning-and-then-watercolour painting artwork displayed, which is all gorgeous.

Has anyone seen Borat yet? I still haven't had a chance. Looks pretty funny. Plus now there's a new one of those Christopher Guest movies coming out, which I'm sure will be fantastic. I'm so busy lately, though... Tomorrow I have to wade through 14 hours of dictaphone tapes, trying to find an electric piano part to one of Al's songs (I don't even remember which song), which I'm convinced is pure gold. Wish me luck!

- Andrew

They never call it "experimental" if the experiment is a success.

Hey, hi. We are going to warn you right now that we are doing an experimental blog post. You might wonder why the heck everything seems so weird about what we are saying, and you probably do. Let's see... Today we never meant to compose a cryptic message but here one is. The kooks are in the beans. So here's another important truth you should know by Andrew: this is being real poorly done by us each time. Help us to tell you what we're doing tomorrow. It must be said to you now that you're not alone in this puzzling debate because it is certainly confusing to us both too. That makes this even stupider, but we don't mind. Bye would be a way to go, don't you know, so let's do something else like say what is going on. Really silly shenanigans have temporarily caused side-splitting rules to be enforced in here: what we do is always type one word and the other person, in theory types the next one. This induces many hilarious moments of tears without fears in hopes of making you laugh, dear reader. Unfortunately we are sucking at this so let's just end up with the rub: we're having a nice weekend together. Hope you all like baloney sandwiches.

- Andrew & Alison


P.S. Grand Illusion is a great film for Remembrance Day, The Breakup is a piece of junk, we still haven't seen Borat yet, Scrabble with Joan is always fun, the Farmer's Market on Saturday morning is a good time only if you stay for less than twenty minutes, and tearing down the picket fence between your neighbours' yard and yours is a good way to get cat poop all over your shoes and pants.

Delight and Disgrace

We went to see The Prestige on Saturday, as part of our day-long anniversary celebrating, so now here I am telling you to go and see it. It's a really cool plot with lots of twists, told using an interesting structure (it's directed by the same guy as Memento — he's really into backwards causality), and it looks fantastic. In all senses of the word. Michael Caine is very good in it too. Plus it's about magicians. What more could you want? OK, some of the dialogue divulging important information is a little clunky, but there's a lot of important information to get out. It's not like Primer, which we also recently watched again, where you not only can't figure out what's going to happen but you don't even know what happened after it's over. Not that I didn't like that movie too, because I really did. But it was a little dense, you have to admit. I'm just saying.

Before that we went to the farmers' market to buy fresh fish and some little charcoal disky things that we burn our hippy-dippy loose incense on, then went to hippy-dippy yoga. And after the movie we rented more movies and ordered in too much Chinese food. It was a pretty perfect day.

I was recently glancing through Strunk and White in search of something I thought I remembered "them" saying (i.e. always spell "all together" as two words; turns out it was "all right" I was thinking of), and I ended up getting all excited and full of admiration as I usually do, and read the whole thing again. It's not like it's huge or anything. I was particularly struck by Reminders #8 and #9 in the "An Approach to Style (With a List of Reminders)" chapter:

"8. Avoid the use of qualifiers.
Rather, very, little, pretty—these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words. The constant use of the adjective little (except to indicate size) is particularly debilitating; we should all try to do a little better, we should all be very watchful of this rule, for it is a rather important one and we are pretty sure to violate it now and then."

Ouch. OK, damning enough, but then I read on:

"9. Do not affect a breezy manner. (Uh oh.)
The volume of writing is enormous, these days, and much of it has a sort of windiness about it, almost as though the author were in a state of euphoria. "Spontaneous me," sang Whitman, and, in his innocence, let loose the hordes of uninspired scribblers who would one day confuse spontaneity with genius.

"The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that pops into his head is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day. Open any alumni magazine, turn to the class notes, and you are quite likely to encounter old Spontaneous Me at work—an aging collegian who writes something like this:

"Well, chums, here I am again with my bagful of dirt about your disorderly classmates, after spending a helluva weekend in N'Yawk trying to view the Columbia game from behind two bumbershoots and a glazed cornea. And speaking of news, howzabout tossing a few chirce nuggets my way?

"This is an extreme example, but the same wind blows, at lesser velocities, across vast expanses of journalistic prose. The author in this case has managed in two sentences to commit most of the unpardonable sins: he obviously has nothing to say, he is showing off and directing the attention of the reader to himself, he is using slang with neither provocation nor ingenuity, he adopts a patronizing air by throwing in the word chirce, he is tasteless, humorless (though full of fun), dull, and empty. He has not done his work."

OK, OK! Uncle! Even imagining the lameness of the CGI, Julia-Roberts-as-Charlotte version of E. B. White's Charlotte's Web that's coming out couldn't do any work toward softening those pointed blows. I hung my head in shame, vowing never to irresponsibly blog again.

Until next time.

- Ol' Cousin Cornmaster Himself

Hallowe'en Post Mortem

Well, Hallowe'en has came and went and it been one of the less eventful ones I ever seen. It was our anniversary too, but we're waiting for the weekend to celebrate that. I hope yours was nice, with the candy and the goblins and whatnot. Us, we didn't put on any funny costumes or anything, and in fact went to a yoga class. I know, bo-ring. I had this fantasy that everyone would show up in a rubber Nixon mask and do yoga in silence as if nothing was out of the ordinary. But that didn't happen, as you might have guessed. We did get what I think is referred to as a smattering of kids looking for handouts before we left, but they were soon dispersed when we called in the police. Just kidding; of course we gave them candy and lots of it. Most of them were cute as hell, too. The dominatrix was a little precocious for my taste, but otherwise...

And OK, there was also this pumpkin carving contest at work before the TOT'ing. I hesitate to tell you about it because the ending is so tragic, but I'm still bursting with pride so allow me to be a bit of a bloggart for a minute. There were three teams of four people, selected at random, and each team had a leader, also selected at random. I was the leader of our team, so I designed what I thought would be a pretty cool-looking jack o'lantern, observing the rules that we could only bring one tool apiece and triangular eyes were not allowed.

The night before, I tried out my human skull design on a much smaller pumpkin, so that I could work out the carving kinks and develop a teamwork strategy, as there was a time limit of one and a half hours. I got the whole thing completed while listening to Black Sabbath's first album, so it seemed that we would be fine for time. I messed up a little bit on the three-dimensionality of the brow and upper mandible, but could see where I'd gone wrong and how to do it right the next time. Especially exciting was the discovery that peeling the pumpkin, which I'd thought would create a really cool effect but also be difficult and time-wasting, was in fact pretty easily accomplished with a potato peeler. And it did create a really cool effect of bone with thin veins running through it. (I know that veins don't actually run through bone, but it just looked biological and creepy, OK?)



When the actual contest happened, the plan went off without a hitch, everyone contributed, and we ended up with an awesome looking pumpkin. Check it out.





However, the three adjudicators who were brought in from outside the company decided, in their infallible judgement, that both the internet-downloaded Frankenstein paint-by-numbers stencil and the internet-downloaded obscene hands grabbing a rear end stencil better fulfilled the adjudicatorial criteria of originality and creativity. Who cares, though, right? We had a fun time. Just because we didn't win the crappy tickets to see some crappy movie that probably nobody would ever want to see in the first place, even if you paid them, doesn't mean I'm going to get bitter about it.

But the final paring knife in the squash was that this morning when I entered the office — having had two beers, a yoga class, and a good night's sleep in that order and therefore being truly and completely not bitter in the least about the previous night's travesty, seriously — the glory that had been Yorick (as I'd come to call him) was now a pile of something the colour and consistency, but not the smell, of rolled cookie dough. Completely unrecognizable. Turns out the skin is essential to a hollowed out pumpkin's structural integrity. It was very sad, and my coworkers and I each said a few words of tribute and observed a few minutes of silence before smushing him into the garbage bag.

- Andrew