This Just In

I'm in the process of collecting and fixing photos from our week at the cottage to post on here. It's kind of taking a long time. In the meantime, here's a very funny "news" piece you can watch. I just stumbled upon it today. It's from The Onion.

- Andrew

And It's Not Even Labour Day Yet.

The cottage was just perfect, as expected.



Our friends Cliff and Angie very generously drove us out to Green Bay, even though they couldn't hang around for very long once we got there. We did get to spend some time in the sun on the nearby beaches with them, which was really nice and also unexpected as it had been raining all day up until then.

As they left that evening (possibly in the wrong direction, possibly due to my poor navigational skills — I'm afraid to find out), another friend of ours, Jill, showed up with her friend Tiina (sic) and we had a nice dinner together and checked out the musty old books filling two walls of the place. Pretty good selection, I must say. And a good hiding spot for the mouse that was living there. At least, we chose to think of it as one mouse.

Anyway, those two stayed over as there was plenty of extra room, and we spent the next morning wandering around the beaches along Green Bay Road with them. After they left, Ali and I felt briefly at a loss for what to do. But the weather was fantastic all week long, and we soon got more seriously down to the business of relaxing. Together we got through five books, had lots of fires, ate whenever and whatever we felt like, played cards, did yoga, went for long hikes and bike rides along previously unexplored trails, swam in the ocean, napped, took lots of pictures (many more to be posted soon), chatted with animals both wild and domestic, played frisbee and badminton, listened to a lot of crappy radio, and generally appreciated life. I think I already said this, but it bears repeating that it was perfect. I'll fill you in on more details when I post more pictures.


But in the meantime, and more importantly, my sister Erika and her husband Mike just took delivery of what is from all available evidence a beautiful baby girl. She's named Charlotte Mary and she arrived via express stork Friday morning. Congratulations, guys! First daughter, second child for them, second niece and fifth in the niece/nephew category for us. Why is there no metacategory for nieces and nephews? I'd like to be able to say, "I have five nerfs" (or whatever). Seems odd. Think I'll write a letter to my local newspaper editor.

- Andrew

More Vacation

Believe it or not, we're hitting the cottages once again, this time at our favourite spot on the South Shore, Green Bay. We'll be there for a week, living rustic with no phone, TV, or computer. Nothing to do but read, eat, and yoga it up. Our friends Angie and Cliff are driving us up and spending the first day with us, and after that we'll be stranded. This has been one great summer for "getting away from it all". If only Buster could join us...

So, and not that this is anything out of the ordinary, but there'll be no blog posts for the next week. My hope is that while we're away the culture won't change so drastically that we can no longer communicate with others on our return. That would be terrible. Do you understand this concern, dear reader, or have my words already become just a borderline-conscious-looking set of pixels on your monitor? If it's not too late, here is my advice: don't let them delete this image from the collective memory, and everything else will follow.

- Rip

R & Art & R

I did sleep on the shuttle a little, using my own chest as a pillow. Not very comfortable. But we made it over to the island and had just about the most pleasant time you can imagine with regular Our Blogloo reader Jennifer and her awesome family. Their cottage is beautiful, the island is beautiful, the sand and waves and seaweed and caves, kites and fun and books and sun, mussels and cherries, ice cream and berries, outdoor showers and thunder showers and meteor showers and unfilled hours all added up to the backdrop for a dream from which we never wanted to wake up. Plus they're the nicest people you'd ever want to meet.

Unfortunately, Alison took all the pictures, so she's not in any of them. But I swear she was there too.












Then there was a short week of work in there (boring), and then on Friday evening we went out to Mahone Bay to see a gallery show of Johanna's most recent paintings. It was a great show. Impressive work and I believe she sold four pieces. Again, you'll have to take my word for it that Mister Snuffaluppagus, I mean Alison, was also there.





Afterwards we went to a restaurant and chatted over some food and beers with Johanna's friend Ian and his friend Jen (a different one). Even though the conversation unfortunately got onto The God Delusion and I stubbornly wouldn't let it go, it was still a really nice evening.

And on Sunday my softball team played an exciting game — under a blazing and relentless sun — whose score remained tied right up to the end. Going into extra innings, we confidently shut down the other team, thanks in part to my patented end-of-the-game-rhythm-changeup pitching style, which never fails to confuse. Then we proceeded to hit as well as we had all day. I got on base with a short bloop straight toward the other team's infuriatingly infallible centre fielder, who, I'd noticed, had not turned around yet when the pitcher began his windup. It was one of the most satisfying moments of the day for me when he almost but didn't quite make it to the ball. A few more equally impressive at-bats from my teammates, and I easily scored the winning run. Great ending to a nice weekend. And Alison was there too.

- Andrew

Quick Update

I went with Johanna and her brother Jochim to see Sloan at the Marquee last night. It was the first bar show they'd played in Halifax in about twelve years, and it was a doozy. Got right up at the front, pumped my fist, sang along, and had my eardrums blown out. Then I saw tons of people I hadn't seen in a really long time and hung out backstage until all hours of the morning. A perfect night.

And speaking of all hours and faces from the past, it's quarter to six AM now, and we're about to board a shuttle to PEI, where we'll spend the long weekend with our friend Jennifer and her family. They have a cottage over there, where they're spending the entire summer. We haven't seen Jenny in I don't know how many years, as she lives in Toronto, and we're really looking forward to spending time with her, Tom, and little MacKenzie. I hope I can sleep on the shuttle, because right now I'm running on two hours' sleep.

See you when we get back!

- Andrew

Abnormal Hank

I was thinking about how to make money selling recorded music in these crazy, digital, everyone's-an-artist-and-no-one's-a -patron times, and I think I stumbled onto an ingenious plan. Ask yourself, what's the one genre of music that people will continue to buy, no matter how glutted the popular market becomes nor how freely downloadable current recording formats may be? That's right — parody songs! As long as there's room in people's brains for crappy music they wish they didn't know note for note, there's room for parodies thereof. Weird Al Yankovic has held a nice little corner on this highly lucrative market for a few decades, and it's time someone else got a slice of the comedic pie. And what better way to grab people's attention than to parody Weird Al himself? I mean, if parody songs like "Another One Rides the Bus" and "Like a Surgeon" are super popular, then parodies of those parodies can only be mega-super-duper-popular!

I've already started working on the concept and the material. I'll call myself "Abnormal Hank Henkeltrocken" and release a video on YouTube for my first song, "She's Got a Pickle on Rye (and She Won't Share)". I'll dress like a Beatle, only zany, and make lots of crazy faces while I sing lyrics about all the kinds of food in a deli. It'll be hilarious, and I'm pretty sure I'll even be able to convince Weird Al to make a cameo in the video. It'll become an overnight sensation, in the modern, viral way these things do, and I'll be offered a record deal of extrayankovian proportions. I figure I can put it all together pretty professionally for a cool fifty thousand, which should be no problem to talk the bank into loaning me on Monday morning. Alison's gonna be so psyched when I surprise her with the finished product.

- Hank

Seen It!

Two yellow thumbs up!

Cynical, Antisocial Satire and Unabashedly Sweet, Anachronistic Croonin' — I'll Take It All!

Is anyone else looking forward to the Simpsons movie as much as I am? Of course, I'm sure millions of people are. What a stupid question. I guess it's a new bit of excitement for me. I hadn't really thought much about it at all, but recently I've been reading and re-appreciating a bunch of old Life In Hell strips. I remember my kneejerk contrarian friend Buffy always said when Groening's TV vehicle was still a new thing that she preferred the comic strip, and I accused her of being a kneejerk contrarian, which, as I mentioned, she is. However, I'm reminded now that there was something pretty great and inimitable about that strip. So many jokes in such a small space!


Anyway, I'm sure the movie will be provocatively compelling, with enough additional layers lurking in the mises-en-scène to warrant repeated viewing.

The other thing I'm really into lately is Burl Ives. I bought a 1973 compilation record at a church yard sale in Yarmouth, and am totally digging it. There go whatever hipster credentials I may once have believed myself to possess, though, in my defense, I hear Frank Black is a big fan.

- Andrew

A Tale of Two Cities

I know, I know, I haven't blogged for a long time, and there's probably lots of stuff I should be telling you, but I've taken so long in choosing and fixing up these vacation pictures that I have to dump them on here and hit the sack. All you really need to know for now is that we were in Maine for a week at a cottage with my family and got to visit with my grandparents in Montreal on the way back. As you can probably tell from the photos, everyone had a really great time.













The other bit of news is that the day before we arrived home, someone was murdered in broad daylight on the corner two doors down from our house. At four o'clock in the afternoon, a man was shot by one of the two people with whom he was walking, and they quickly fled the scene. I guess the whole place was covered in police tape and crawling with investigators all night long, and was only cleaned up half an hour before we got back. There are still yellow circles all over the sidewalk where the police marked any little thing that could possibly be a piece of evidence. It was quite shocking, as this block is very yuppie/family-oriented, though I suppose things do get pretty sketchy pretty fast in either direction. The whole neighbourhood is palpably upset.

Buster, meanwhile, is doing fine and very happy that we're home. Thanks, Sherry, for taking care of the little scaredy-cat.

- Andrew

My New Favourite Musician

This guy is truly omazing.

- Andrew

The Hissing of Summer Lawns

Since this is such a frequent posture to find Buster in, Alison and I thought he might like to try going out in the backyard with us. Only problem is, there are a lot of cats in this neighbourhood, most of whom (or which, depending on your views re. cats, consciousness, and grammar) are really really tough. Like one of them has an eyepatch and spits tobacco out the side of his mouth before he meows. We were worried that if something freaked our admittedly quite freakable little friend out, he might run away somewhere to hide and not come out for a few days. So Ali picked up a harness for him at Canadian Tire and we gave it a try last weekend.

Unfortunately, Buster was not too into the idea. Kind of like how horses are not too into the idea of firecrackers. After a lot of struggling and even some hissing and biting (I'm not naming any names), we got the harness on him and he slunk around the house backwards for awhile. When we decided he was used to it, we opened the door to the backyard and tried to coax Buster out, but he just looked at us like we were insane. So Ali kind of pushed him and I kind of pulled him and we got him a few inches out the door. It seemed like all he wanted to do was eat the grass immediately around him, so I tried to encourage him to explore the more interesting portion of the yard away from the door, and when the encouragement fell on deaf ears I started pulling him out into the open by the leash and that was when he slipped right out of the harness and ran back into the house. Not a nature lover, apparently.




In contrast to Buster, the humans of the house have been spending quite a bit of time in the backyard. Our electric lawnmower sort of blew up a few weeks ago and it started getting pretty wild back there while we waited for our landlady, who had completely forgotten about it as it turned out, to bring us a new one. This week she brought over a brand new push mower. I excitedly put it together and ran out into the yard with it, as I'd never actually used a push mower before. It's a lot easier than I thought it was going to be, though it does definitely take longer than an electric. Nice and quiet, though. I'm kind of into it. Keith from upstairs was also into it, and in fact took over and finished off the job after I'd only done about a third. Then when he went back upstairs, we found out Buster really doesn't like seeing people go up and down the back stairs. He (Buster) started making this crazy loud noise at him (Keith) that only got crazier and louder when I tried to show him (Buster again — I really should reconstruct this sentence instead of propping it up with distracting parenthetical pronoun identifiers. Oh well, it's not like this is spoken English or anything. I mean, you can just go back to the last open parenthesis if you lose track of where we were in the sentence. God! Don't be so lazy.) that there was nothing to worry about, by going up the stairs myself. Eventually it started sounding like he was saying, "I love you!" but in a tone of voice like a psychotic deaf woman who didn't speak English would use. It reminded us a lot of this dude.

Oh yeah, and in softball last weekend, the Bellies what are Painted Yellow slaughtered the Kelly Gruber Experience 13 - 8! In the second game, anyway. We actually lost the first game 12 - 6. But those guys are the best team in the league and completely humourless. They were the ones who went home in the middle of a game last year when an argument erupted between the two teams. So this win was incredibly satisfying. Meg forced a spectacular out at home plate, and Sarah had a record day with two outs made at home, one fly caught in right field, and a string of hits and walks at bat. She was pretty much levitating by the end of it. And the best part was that it was Tim, our founder and leader in absentia, 's birthday that day, so happy birthday to you, Tim.

- Andrew

Happy Birthday, Dana!

Call you soon.

Stuff I Really Like

This is my favourite song right now. At this moment. Not that I've ever disliked it, but I dunno, right now it's doing something extra special for me. The frenetic but precise guitar work, the obtrusively melodic bass, and Robert Smith's delightful disgust as he spits his old-lady venom at some poor poseur or other, all building to that super-exciting train sound that may very well be the victim leaving town in a hurry, because the train and the song quickly fade out thereafter, realizing that they're not gonna top that: it all adds up to 2:57 of sonic perfection.

And these are some of my favourite cartoons right now. They're by the American cartoonist, B. Kliban.






I discovered Kliban in my early teens and immediately loved his expressive drawing style and absurdist sense of humour. It took me a long time to warm up to that ripoff artist Gary Larson, though I did eventually have to admit he was pretty funny too. Lately, Alison and I discovered and swiftly purchased a couple of Kliban books that we didn't already have. In one of those I read the sad piece of information that he died in 1990. It's a shame, because I'd just gotten all excited about his work again and was considering trying to contact him and express my admiration. I guess he was never exactly unknown, what with his cultily popular cat drawings and calendars, but he certainly never achieved the recognition of Gary Larson, who not only stole his fragment-of-a-third-person-narrative captioning style, but even published his single-panel cartoons in books the same size and shape. Anyway, it seems from my poking around on the internet that Kliban is weirdly floating around in the zeitgeist right now, and I'm happy to do whatever I can to keep him there.

Let's see... what else? This short book I recently bought and read was pretty fantastic: In the City: Random Acts of Awareness by Colette Brooks. I picked it up because it was on sale, sounded vaguely interesting, and had a Fassbender photo on the cover. It turned out to be a sort of memoir-like collection of ruminations on cities, mostly New York, and the people who live in them. Sounds kind of dull, I guess, but it's incredibly insightful and mysterious and thought-provoking and sad. Quick read, too, at a mere 108 pp. And it makes a great companion piece for Italo Calvino's not really similar but at the same time kind of similar Invisible Cities, which I'm still reading on and off, even though I think it's an even shorter work.

So that's my current opinions, but what have I actually been DOING? Oh, this and that; y'know. Did some yoga, got a haircut, experienced some Being, illustrated some lies. Softball's really the only interesting thing I can think of right now. We've played three evenings = six games so far this season, won only two of the games but I still say we're looking pretty damn good. Here are some photos Alison took on Sunday.





(Pre-haircut.)

Talk to you soon, I hope. Maybe next time I'll have done more stuff.

- Andrew