The champ

Six hours into this day I have:

• slept in magnificently
• brushed my teeth
• made a coffee
• took my pills
• went for a walk
• solved a crossword puzzle
• created a crossword puzzle for my collection
• read a chapter of Dark Tower book 8
• met a new dog named Tonks and told her pet human Tabatha the Tale of the Squirrel Invasion
• took in recycle and trash bins
• made pork chops, tomatoes and tator salad for dinner
• checked email and messenger, charged phone and updated calendar
• watched a documentary about the America's Cup
• won a game of chess
• may or may not have lost a few games as well. Shut up.
• listened to two Lemon Jelly albums

How's that for a list of accomplishments? I'm probably the champion of the world now.

Benko

Benko: The Benko Cup is the trophy awarded annually to the playoffs champion of the Strat-o-matic Hockey League of which I was a member for about twelve years. I made it to the finals four times, was statistically the favorite to win every time and didn't finally win until the fourth time.

I miss my Strat-o buddies. I have kept in touch with them, showed up to hang out every now and then on league nights and participated muchly in their off-season board-gaming nights, which have been Covid-curtailed of course.

Benko is the surname of the man who originally introduce the league's founders to the strat-o-matic game back in their university days. I never met him.

Dungeons and Dragons is the "Strat-o-matic" of fantasy role-playing and I have added Benko to my DnD names database. This means that a non-player character might be assigned that name at some point in my campaign-building endeavors. At this time I am not building a campaign per se but I am building and collecting tools for such. I'm looking forward to playing again; possibly online.

Question B: Favourite BOOK ever read

I really want to say Siddhartha because I think it was the deepest most meaningful connection ever made but really, instinctively, it was the genesis of Dungeons and Dragons in my interpretation, both personally, and societally: The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) which thrills me the most. 

Covid19 Survival Guide: Page 11

For those times when you just can't bring yourself to be productive, or to engage in a creative project: Twenty links with excellent distraction power. Don't wait. Add them to your bookmarks at once! 

http://drawing.garden/

https://alwaysjudgeabookbyitscover.com/

http://www.omfgdogs.com/#

https://www.mapcrunch.com/

https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/#

http://nooooooooooooooo.com/

http://whitetrash.nl

http://www.stuffonmycat.com

http://simonpanrucker.com

http://www.omglasergunspewpewpew.com/

https://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/

https://neave.com/

http://www.patience-is-a-virtue.org/

Bad Lip Reading

https://www.boredpanda.com/

https://theoatmeal.com/

https://asoftmurmur.com/

http://theonion.com

https://www.ted.com/

and finally:

https://theuselessweb.com/

... for a random useless web site.

Hear us, people of Portugal!

Hey hey my little homies! It’s H day and here’s my helpful, heady, higher-order, humanitarian hiking pal… The Healer. And she has heralded this little number for us to deal with, which sure sounds like an adverb but I’m fairly sure it is not:

Hyperdactyly

Indeed it is a noun; an abnormality in mammals characterized by the presence of bonus fingers or toes above the usual count. Also known as polydactyly.

There is only one such human ever to come onto my radar and that’s the girl from John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. This is easily my favourite Wyndham piece (which I haven’t read since high school) because it’s the most compelling type of plot I can imagine; one where the most vulnerable of heroes (children) are in essence pursued by an overwhelming force of evil and must struggle for their lives and well-being. It’s a story of great injustice and it tugged at my young heart of course.

Now the eleven-toed heroin eventually finds salvation. Sorry for the spoiler but that needed to be said in order to explore the lesser known sequel to the book: The Chrysalids 2: Jake the Cat, which is very factually based on a true story about a Canadian cat named Jake who is the most famous polydactyl cat in the world with a record-breaking 28 toes. Please note I’ve done the research and can verify Jake the Cat is real and indeed holds the world record for toes (distributed through all four paws by the way). Go ahead and look it up. He’s adorable by the way.

In Chrysalids Two this cat, whose extra-toed paws are so wide he can walk on the surface of water, leaves his home in Burnt Cove Newfoundland and strolls out across the Atlantic ocean. But as a sudden storm obscures his sight of the land he rushes in the wrong direction and is lost at sea.

He wanders for forty days and forty nights and meets some interesting creatures such as a whale named Jonah and a woman named Amelia who is just floating around in her damaged airplane, drinking absinthe and painting pictures of the clouds. He also meets a colony of teenage mutant zombie turtles who live on a floating island of plastic garbage and these scenes are particularly disturbing.

Eventually he arrives on the coast of Portugal in the town of Praia da Vagueira which is Portuguese for Fish on a fork. A local telephone repair woman spies Jake’s arrival and welcomes him and takes him to Father Pedro, telling the amazing story of the cat who walks on water. So Father Pedro asks Jake to walk across the village fountain and observing this miracle pronounces to the gathering crowd that this is Jesus returned in cat form. Quickly the entire village flocks to feline Jesus and worships him and congratulates themselves on being the chosen village in all the world and Jake has a great time. He’s eating the best tuna, drinking the best port and smoking the best cigarillos all day every day and submitting to selfies with all the villagers.

But when Archbishop Alfonso learns of this madness he declares the Vagueirians sinners for this false worship and declares Jake a terrible demon cat sent by Satan to deliver a lethal coronavirus to the doomed people of Portugal. A terrible civil war is fought for an afternoon which is swiftly ended when the Portuguese army riddles Praia da Vagueira with rockets. Jake and Father Pedro die in each others’ arms.

But the story does not end here. Redemption follows. The Canadian people having learned of this hideous tragedy demand action from their federal government. They demand retaliation.

Their leader, Justin Trudeau makes a speech which is heard by every man, woman, child, and cat in the country. The dogs were like, whatever…

Trudeau begged his people to remember that they “…are Canadians and as a proud Canadian it is your job to chill; to reap the lush rewards of lethal global first-world corruption so generously provided by the world’s great roster of slave countries and the lush material rewards of the terminally insane rape of the biosphere and to overlook the beguiling landscape of financial smoke and mirrors which transfers ninety per cent of our fabulous ill-gotten riches into the hands of my corporate sugar daddies and do not worry about the gathering storm or the fate of poor Jake. Jake will have eight more lives.”

But the people of Canada were angry because they didn’t understand a word he had said. He had said nothing about hockey or the weather or how polite we all are.

So the next day Trudeau was given a new speech to present in order to win back his favour. And he said, “Hear us, people of Portugal! We are Canadian and we will not have you molest our national cat hero, Jake the Many-Toed and expect us to take it sitting down! It is a dark dark day in the world, when a sweet and innocent feline freak can not take a moistly walk across the water to visit a NATO ally-”

But here he was interrupted as the nation fell apart in riotous laughter.

“Dude, did he just say moistly?”

“I think so! LMAO!”

“Who says moistly!”

“I don’t know Dude, but next hockey season better not be delayed or I’ll personally kill the fucker.”

“No doubt,”

And in the glee of this great comedy Jake was forgotten but his spirit lives on. And Trudeau, refusing to be rattled over the term moistly, hired the finest musicians in the land and he recorded the Moistly Song and he sang it with pride.

The end.

Now if this tale sounds far-fetched I assure you it is all true. And here’s the proof:

Return of the Avitable Scramble

Forgive me father for I have sinned. My last avitable scramble was back in September 2012.

1. I’m at a Portuguese restaurant for the first time ever. On College Street in The Big Smoke. It’s lovely. The waiter dressed all in black with shiny slick black hair is also lovely. He informs me that he has excellent skin because of the healthy Portuguese diet.

2. I ordered a meat sampler dish and found something on it rather distinctive and almost beef-like but with a decidedly avian bone structure. Weird.

3. I am here because the Ponderer suggested I travel early in order to miss the tres horrible rush hour mess that will decimate the Q.E.W. highway at the strike of three. Indeed my trip was a breeze and now I’m in town three hours early.

4. I’m invited to Doc Lock’s brother’s place - wait! Doc Lock’s brother has his own alias. He has appeared in this blog before. The Potter? The something-Potter? The Eloquent Potter? Damned if I remember. I will have to look it up.

5. It’s a game night tonight. We’re to play Takaido. I have done my homework by watching a Takaido-featured episode of Table Top - hosted by Wil Wheaton who once played…. Gordie?? Maybe?? in the Stand By Me film which is based solidly on the Stephen King novella The Body.

6. I have to finish the last couple chapters of The Dark Tower by Stephen King which is the final book of the wildly distinct and compelling series of the same name. I keep putting it off, not wanting the series to end. It will probably mark the end of my Stephen King experience. But I must move on if I am to get on to Soul of the Orcs which is a sequel to Lord of the Rings written by none other than my host tonight: the something-Potter. Or Sculptor. Not Potter? The something-Sculptor? And there I have gone full circle. Did you see that! Did you see what I did there?

7. My butt hurts from sitting here for nearly three hours.

8. I am assembling my first ever video compilation in order to support an upcoming blog piece. A very similar compilation almost certainly exists somewhere on youtube already but - I don’t know. I want to do my own. Maybe because it indulgently qualifies as a creative project which I can work on even when tired. Which is far too often.

9. I have no idea if Doc Lock will even be here tonight.

10. According to the excellent-skinned waiter I have eaten quail for the first time! Mystery solved. Damn. My only familiarity with quails up to now have been with cute live ones. [insert sad emoji]

11. My eyes have been continually drawn to the TV here which is blessedly silent but full of images and text of the CNN variety. I can’t describe how dog-vomiting stomach-turning this silent lunacy appears to me. HOW in the flying fuck do CNN watchers not go running screaming into traffic after ten minutes of this vacuous quasi-political horse shit? By god the human creature is a wonder.

12. That didn’t sound judgemental did it? Just a little bit?

13. How many items are in an Avitable Scramble? Thirteen? Wouldn’t twelve make more sense? After all, twelve is so preferable a number to thirteen that the ancient Babylonians assassinated an entire constellation just to bring the zodiac into groovy twelvacious compliance. Which is not precisely the reason that me and most of my “Capricorn” companions are actually mislabelled denizens of Sagittarius. That has more to do with the twenty-five thousand year wobble period in the Earth’s rotation. Regardless, there is just no way for the doubly-screwed astrology community to explain their way out of their mess.

I’m not sure that was a proper scramble. It seemed to be more of a narrative, didn’t it? I will try to be more random next time.

Fact check: Wheaton's character was indeed named Gordie Lachance. The potter has not received a consistent nickname but shall forthwith be favoured with the moniker: the Eloquent Potter! 

Rules and boundaries do not apply!

In a very special town the laws of nature are bending wildly to spectacular effect just as the "rules" of literature have moved aside to clear the path for this unique story of intimate neighbors in an infinite landscape, delivered by a voice of rare grace and presence. It is perhaps a fairy tale; one of immediate warmth, gathering momentum and a glimpse of cosmic joy; a resonant celebration of life and a rare celebration of narrative! 

100 Must-See Films! -- King

There are of course reasons why novels and their adapted screenplays never match up well when judged by linear standards and often match up in no way at all. People inherently approach novels and movies in a different way; simplistically: novels with patience and movies without. We expect a movie to be fast and linear and horizontal. We expect a lot to happen at once.

For a theatrical adaptation to be completely faithful to its novel it would have to run from 15 to 30 hours long and put every viewer to sleep. Books and movies are apples and oranges.

But then there are the novellas: briefer and simpler in terms of themes and ideas and applicable to more direct translation into a visual story of a couple hours length. And what famous author writes a damn fine novella?

Stephen King for one.

39. Stand By Me (1986, USA)

Wil Wheaton, River Pheonix, Corey Feldman, Jerry O’Connell, Kiefer Sutherland

Adapted from King’s The Body from popular 1982 collection Different Seasons, Stand By Me is often name-checked among people’s favorite movies of all time. Why is that? And the theme song borrowed from Ben E. King is likewise one of the most covered songs in history (Catch my hands-down favorite version below!)

Is it because the movie – like the song, is a resonant anthem of friendship and that friendship is perhaps our most coveted external asset? Perhaps secretly so? A relationship model which often engenders more trust or longer endurance then that of the presumed-superior love-relationship/marriage model?

These four lads embark on an adventure together; one that can only make sense in the minds of early adolescents, and despite their constant age-typical baiting of one another it is obvious that they rely on one another much more than on the familial figures in their broken homes. So perhaps it is the deeply moving notion that when the last refuge fails; that of family, that there just might be one more refuge after all: the “family” of our choosing.

The performances here are superb, in large part due, some insiders claim, to the bang-on casting of four boys with real-life personalities exactly like their characters.

Writers: Stephen King, Raynold Gideon and Bruce Evans (Starman)

Director: Rob Reiner (The Princess Bride)

Budget: $ 8,000,000

IMDB rating: 8.1

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUVnfaA-kpI

The four novellas in Different Seasons were in fact written at different times across many seasons. They lacked typical horror elements and for a long time appeared to have no home in the publishing world until King, with all of his acquired clout and renown, simply brought them together as one book. And what a tome it was: In addition to The Body: he included Apt Pupil, a more sinister youth adventure also adapted to film in 1988 to far less fanfare than Stand By Me; and a winter’s tale called The Breathing Method and finally, rather spectacularly: a tale fated for much fame, about friendship and survival within a federal prison, called Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption:

40. The Shawshank Redemption (1994, USA)

Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, Bob Gunton,

What heresy might I be hanged for if I dared compare William Shakespeare with Stephen King! Let me confess right off that I’ve never enjoyed a single Shakespearian sentence, and rarely comprehended one. I am not personally aware of him being any kind of genius. I’m only aware that he had a very big voice in his day, and thus speaks for his era.

Does King perhaps do the same? Without precedent he has literally owned an entire genre for half a lifetime, yet looking at his writing one seems to find no genius there either. Could it be that the genius of these writers lies in honesty? People everywhere seem to look upon King like they would a plane crash: "Ew! How does he come up with all that weird and macabre stuff! What an imagination!"

I suggest to you that King is simply a fearless man; unafraid of his imagination or to admit how wild the human imagination truly is. Thus, unlike the rest of us, he does not fetter himself.

I read every book King released for a couple decades before the habit trailed off. I loved the Shawshank story and the movie too but I’ll be damned if I can pinpoint why! On the Internet Movie Database website, more than one and a half million viewers have contributed to an average Shawshank score of 9.3 stars out of 10! That is almost unfathomable!

Sure it is a gripping tale of injustice and struggle but that alone does not explain it. Movie execs tagged the film: “Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.” And that sheds no light for me whatsoever. People just dig the highly-marketable word hope because it sounds so nice and friendly and cuddly. King’s written story had little to do with hope but rather with the opposite of hope, which is action. Our hero is only a hero because he takes his fate into his own hands.

Perhaps that is at the core of our love for this film. For he dares to fight his monsters as we secretly wish we could fight our own, while we cling to the apparent safety of hope instead, and likely to our detriment.

Writers: Stephen King, Frank Darabont

Director:  Frank Darabont (The Green Mile)

Budget: $25,000,000

IMDB rating: 9.3

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hB3S9bIaco

41. The Shining (1980, USA/UK)

Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers

And here’s the exception! The full-length novel which was somehow very successfully transformed into film despite the necessary story modifications. But really, how could it miss with such a deeply insightful visual artist as Kubrick and wickedly crafty casting! Nicholson was born to play a madman. Duvall personally suffered through the project and was given little mercy; in fact was apparently provoked into further losing her shit in order to transform her authentically into the eerie fragile basket-case which further imperilled poor little Danny Torrence; portrayed by the unusually deep-minded six-year-old Danny Lloyd who in this extraordinary debut was carefully coddled with blinders so as to not grasp the kind of story he was so effectively helping to create. He later portrayed a young G. Gordon Liddy in a TV movie before deciding at age eight that acting wasn’t for him! I doubt the true nature of his Shining experience had been revealed to him by that point but it was probably a very wise decision considering our society’s tremendous skill at ruining the humanity of young stars! Let’s face it: Destroying climate and destroying young celebrities are probably our two areas of collective expertise. High five...

Am I rambling? Surely no one is reading this because surely you have all seen this masterpiece already! Even I have seen it a few times and I normally avoid horror flicks at any cost!  

Writers: Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick, Diane Johnson (Le divorce)

Director: Stanley Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange)

Budget: $19,000,000

IMDB rating: 8.4

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G7Ju035-8U

And now, this important message from veteran musician Ry Cooder:

100 Must-See Films! -- Humanity

What is humanity? For one, it is the subject which humans have the most trouble understanding. What does that say about the state of our minds? Big day today! Here we have five of the most significant films on the list; films which dare ask the biggest questions of all, on this critical subject:

27. Apocalypse Now (1979, USA)

Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Donald Sutherland, Albert Hall, Frederic Forrest, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper

I’m not sure how possible it is to draw the deepest insights out of the film, concerning the dark side of the human mind and its manifestation in our industrial society, without having read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness novelette first. Having that perspective, the film seemed for me, to throb with a deadly heartbeat, as I sensed the looming presence of the dark anti-hero long before his arrival. And Coppola did not disappoint. Kurtz, in the film version a renegade colonel, looms just as powerful a beast here, embodied in Marlon Brando.

I personally feel that Coppola did an effective job updating the story from its 19th century African setting to the Vietnam arena, while still capturing its essence. I sensed allusion to Dante’s inferno, very appropriately, to boot! And some propose further homage to Homer’s Odyssey (just for the record).

Few projects have faced such adversity in the making. Thank goodness it survived to become one of the most revered films of all time. I’m betting you’ve probably seen the movie and not read the story. I strongly propose that you read Heart of Darkness and then re-watch the film (the extended 2001 edition). It’s a haunting experience. 

Writer: John Milius (Magnum Force), Francis Ford Coppola

Director: Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather)

Budget: $31,500,000

IMDB rating: 8.5

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HEiqAsrVMQ

28. Lord of the Flies (1963, UK)

James Aubrey, Tom Chapin, Hugh Edwards, Tom Gaman, Roger Elwin

I find Golding’s work in the original novel an incredibly valuable and insightful commentary on the nature of the human mind; the base instincts having so much power over consciousness. Many great speculative fiction writers suggest in their works that humans, upon losing their societal structures will quickly revert to overt slave systems and I find this work consistent.

I prefer the 1963 film over the Americanized 1990 version which linearly strays farther from the book. The former bears a more haunting exotic feel. But both films deliver the gripping immensity of the boys’ peril.

Writer: William Golding (Alkitrang dugo)

Director: Peter Brook (King Lear)

Budget: $250,000

IMDB rating: 7.0

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1x2wP5vP34

Do androids dream of electric sheep?

29. Blade Runner (1982, USA, Hong Kong, UK)

Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Daryl Hannah, William Sanderson

This first of several Philip K. Dick stories to reach the big screen is considered film noir, action, and sci-fi but reaches much beyond all that. I saw it at the theatre at age 13, expecting another action movie and was blown away by its fascinating moral complexity which I was just old enough to appreciate and had never seen before. To this day I could re-watch it any number of times (basically the criteria for inclusion in this must-see April movie list). The visionary dystopian scenery was captivating and the soundtrack by Vangelis hugely resonant.

It wasn’t necessarily a hit at the original box office (1982 was clogged with big-budget sci-fi), but grew in cult status (and is eternally brought up in academic circles) to the point of current regard as one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time. Supporting actor Rutger Hauer called the film a “real masterpiece which changed the world's thinking.”

He might be right. It certainly got me thinking.

Writer: Philip K. Dick (Minority Report), Hampton Fancher (The Mighty Quinn), David Webb Peoples (Unforgiven)

Director: Ridley Scott (Alien)

Budget: $28,000,000

IMDB rating: 8.2

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIstljYkwjg

If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?

30. End:Civ (2011, Canada)

Documentary with Steven Best, Zoe Blunt, Rod Coronado

American author Derrick Jensen has been regarded the poet-philosopher of the modern ecological movement and yet few so-called environmentalists speak as if they’ve heard a word Jensen says. This film is almost entirely his voice; a voice which is almost unfathomable in its unflinching honesty. Nobody, including Jensen himself, really wants to say what he has to say.

I imagine that 95% of the viewers who gather the courage to view this film will swiftly find excuses (all flawed) to rationalize its dismissal while the other 5% will be left immobile, unable to resolve the gaping disconnect between the reality presented here and our current circumstances.  

The production value here is necessarily tiny. Compared to Jensen’s books, this project does not fare particularly well due only to its brevity, but compared to other documentaries, the material here is of unmatched importance and astounding for its brute honesty.

Writer: Derrick Jensen (Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet)

Director: Franklin Lopez (Why I Love Shoplifting from Big Corporations)

Budget: $20,000
IMDB rating: 7.9

The full film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRPjEA56VoE

Are we still the good guys?

31. The Road (2009, USA)

Viggo Mortenson, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy has been called, “harrowing and heartbreaking”, “haunting”, “emotionally shattering” and “the most depressing book I couldn’t put down.” I read it twice, followed by the movie each time, and I judge the film perfectly consistent with the book and just as emotionally devastating.  Of course that’s hard to say with confidence because one can observe that a film does not stray from the book, but you never really know if the film delivered everything you thought it did, because you’re bringing those same elements you gleaned from the book into the viewing experience with you. Right? Regardless:

I earnestly recommend that you view the trailer to lock in a visual image of the characters, then read the book, be blown away, and then watch the film to let the familiar story come visually to life.

I’ve blogged about this hugely relevant book here, here, here and here but they’re full of spoilers. Leave them alone if you haven’t read the novel already. If you are going to experience or re-experience this story, please consider this notion: Think of the man as instinct and think of the boy as consciousness. In doing so, the story will provide the consistent answer from both writer and director, to the most immense question in the history of Earth’s mankind.

Writer: Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men), Joe Penhall (Enduring Love)

Director: John Hillcoat (Lawless)

Budget: $25,000,000

IMDB rating: 7.3

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94KcI0gLq1A

Short List:

Koyaanisqatsi (1982, USA) Lou Dobbs, Ted Koppel

The Power of One (1992, Australia, France, USA) Stephen Dorff, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Morgan Freeman

The Wild Dogs (2002, Canada) Rachel Blanchard, Visinel Burcea, Mihai Calota

ace /ās/

It was their adventure; their quest. A fine heartfelt bonding experience. A coming of age.

But as they finely closed on the object of their macabre interest, the older boys descended on them as older boys will do, to ruin everything for their own pointless, cheap, cruel pleasure. For kicks. For the hell of it. Because they could.

But Gordie will not have it. Not this time. He will defend their moment and most certainly pay dearly for it later. He draws the sacred item; a real live GUN. And clenched in both hands he raises it and targets the leader.

“What are you gonna do?” Ace snickers. But his smile is nervous as he glances at his cohorts. “Shoot all of us?”

“No Ace,” says Gordie. And Ace knows at once that he’s not bluffing: “Just you.”

--paraphrased from The Body by Stephen King, and film adaptation Stand By Me (Columbia Pictures 1986)