A New Gesture of Extreme Consternation

It's always nice to learn a new gesture to add to your repertoire! Just as learning a new word can help you express yourself better, so can learning a new gesture help you reveal your innermost feelings to others.

I'm particularly fascinated by "gestures of extreme consternation." Previously, my favourite gesture of this type was to be seen only in Bollywood movies, when the heroine accidentally hits the hero on the head with a kitchen utensil; instead of putting her hands to her face and saying "Oh NO!" the way our western sitcom characters would, the Bollywood female would raise her hands to shoulder-level and flap them forwards and backwards quickly, like she were putting out a shoulder pad fire.

While watching Benny Hill this week I discovered an entirely new gesture of extreme consternation, one that I think was uniquely British: when Benny Hill does something cruel to you in a restaurant, put one hand on the top of your head, stick the thumb of your other hand in your mouth, and then moan terribly while stroking your nose:


I'm not kidding. That's Louise English in the picture, doing the most exaggerated version of this gesture that I've seen so far (usually the "hand on the head" element is not included).

What is this supposed to mean? I think it means "I am so shocked and upset that I've reverted to infancy!" But it's presented in such a nonchalant way that I suspect this wasn't just part of Benny Hill's show...I think it might have happened in British screwball comedies in general. But the first time *I* saw this I sat up in my chair and said "What the HECK?!?"

Somehow I can't bring myself to watch a "Carry On" movie in order to do more research.

Weird Eyebrow Hairs

It's no secret that your hair starts doing strange things as you get older. By way of example, here are three hairs that I plucked out of my eyebrows several months ago.*


The hair in the middle is entirely typical. Almost all of my eyebrow hair looks like that: straight, thin, flexible, and brown.

The hair on the RIGHT is the type I'm seeing more and more: white, coarse, and much longer than usual. These hairs are like vicious spikes and they really yank when I pull them out.

The hair on the LEFT, however, is the weird one. I see one of these every six months or so. It's globular, stunted, and irregularly coloured. Since it's so thick and chunky I see it immediately when it grows, and all I need to do is prod it to make it come out.

I understand the concept of grey hair -- and I suppose that's what's happening to the hair on the right -- but fat little glob-hairs? I don't get it. I'm wondering if anybody else gets hairs like these.

* I didn't save these hairs for a year and then put them online today; this is an old picture from my old camera, which had obvious problems focusing on little nearby objects.

The Emancipated '80s

Some days, to pass the time, I read back issues of '80s computer magazines. It's a nerdy pursuit but sometimes I run across something interesting.

The North American computer scene was pretty stoic. Lots of horny kids owned computers, but the magazines themselves tried to maintain a certain respectability, writing in a fact-based journalistic style in an attempt inform and edify. "Creative Computing" was downright dry and businesslike in its approach, whereas even the less formal magazines kept their childish shenanigans to a minimum.

Then there was Crash.

Published in England and devoted to the ZX Spectrum, Crash Magazine was a swill of pre-adolescent humour, faux hipness, and over-the-top gore. Add Oliver Frey's strangely homoerotic cover art and you have an untinted window into the minds of repressed British childhood during the middle '80s. It's boring and annoying and repetative, yes, but it's a type of sensationalistic weirdness that I've never been exposed to before.

"Tip pages" were very popular in these magazines. Readers would write in with advice for beating the games, or programming cheats, or maps of the sprawling levels which typified Spectrum games. Crash's tip page was nothing special until -- in 1986 -- the previous tip page compiler stepped aside and he was replaced with...A GIRL!

Hannah Smith's hiring was presented initially as some form of female emancipation: women could be smart and clever and competitive just like men! But some of the spotty readers wrote in to say typical '80s things like "Women should go back to where they belong and stop taking men's jobs," as though being the self-styled "girlie tipster" for Crash Magazine was a high-paying position of executive power.

What's most bizarre, however -- and what, in retrospect, was very typical of the '80s reaction to female empowerment -- was how other readers (and the editors) would simultaneously defend and DEGRADE women. All the male readers said things like "Get out of your chauvinist caves, you idiots! This is the '80s! Hannah Smith is great and she's GORGEOUS! Please give her my PHONE NUMBER!" The female readers said "Just because we're weak and frilly doesn't mean we can't do a man's job!" And the editors...

...well, the editors printed covers like this:


...and they wrote articles about how sweaty she got during aerobics, and they tried to set up a jello-wrestling contest with another female writer...

...all while defending her right to be a member of the team.

I'm not saying that England was particularly sexist at the time -- they had Benny Hill, sure, but they also had Margaret Thatcher. Reading these magazines, I'm remembering that this was how female emancipation was treated by the average person in the mid '80s: "Sure women should have the freedom to do whatever they want...as long as they do it in my pants!" There are still lots of people who have that attitude, surely, but you don't see NEARLY so many of them, and they CERTAINLY don't have a mainstream high-profile forum for their views (not without being viewed as crackpots, at least).

This leads me to Benny Hill. I've been watching his 1982 specials today and comparing them to both his older '60s programs and to today's television shows. They're creepy because Hill had gotten older while his female talent got younger (and more scantily clad), and 95% of the jokes involved Hill and his cronies trying to squeeze some woman's bum...

...but what's weird is that Hill almost always suffers HUMILIATION for this. The women outwit him, or he suffers some sort of punishment for his actions, and we (the viewer) are left respecting THEM and laughing at HIM (while still chuckling at his impotent horny buffoonery).

What's my point? I only have an inkling of one. It seems to me that as sexualized and marginalized as the Hill's Angels and Hannah Smiths were, they DID embody a sort of privilege and power as long as they remained at arm's length. By being intelligent and beautiful they had control of the scripted, imaginary situations they were put in. They were very much the superwomen...fetishized goddesses on pedestals.

When I do drag I'm very aware of this aspect of idealized femininity, so I see the attraction to it, and I also see the benefit of it...

...but it all DOES fall apart when reality enters the picture. The average woman on the street is NOT one of Hill's Angels, and NO women live inside his television scripts. The REAL world is a dangerous place for the desired female, and its one where that element of sexual power tends to wane as the years go by.

So it's certainly good that today's Hannah Smiths are not so routinely dismissed as "girlie tipsters" (though it does seem to me that many women would embrace that type of diminutive for themselves). Things have certainly changed publicly, and that's a good thing.

As for the rest of it, though...gender, sexuality, society, and politics are a terrible stew.

The Looming Swine Flu

I just spent twenty minutes in the front seat of a car next to a coughing swine flu sufferer. Then I spent another ninety minutes sitting in a small, stuffy studio with her. And I handled her papers. And her CD cases. I might as well have stuck a cotton swab into her throat and then stuffed it in my nose, I was that exposed.

I practiced breathing in various strategic directions, and I handled her possessions by the corners, and I washed my hands repeatedly. I even kept my fingers away from my face, which is sheer torture for me. If I could have worn a surgical mask I would have.

There's no point, though; if significant numbers of people around me are going to get this flu then I will too, I ALWAYS get the flu. The fact that I've avoided it so long is absolutely shocking.

I'm writing this as a prediction: tomorrow I will be as much a physical wreck as she was. If not, however, then I will cheerfully toast my fragile immune system and thank my lucky stars.

Reassessing Peri

I was an avid Doctor Who fan as a child, but I stopped watching the program midway through the Peter Davison era. So when I resurrected my fandom as an adult I was unpleasantly surprised by Colin Baker's incarnation as a clownish, brash, bullying, smug, but somehow impotent know-it-all.

Far worse, though, was the huge-breasted presence of Nicola Bryant as Peri Brown, the Doctor's assistant. She simpered and bounced and bitched a lot. She had a range of exactly two emotions: stuttering fear or eye-rolling sarcasm. And her American accent sounded weak and terrible, sprinkled with incorrect word usage and lapses in pronunciation. Every time she appears in a scene I want to scratch my ears out.

I developed a serious Nicola Bryant hate-on.

But like many of the more obnoxious aspects of that era -- the pantomime acting, the crap-synth music, the Doctor's outfit -- I've slowly begun to realize that Bryant wasn't really the problem. All of these failings started at the very top of the hierarchy -- John Nathan-Turner's potentially-compromised vision for the program -- and trickled down to the poor people like Bryant and Baker who didn't have any real say in the matter. Colin Baker HATED his coat and he was BAFFLED by what he was told to do. And, likewise, Nicola Bryant was simply Doing What She Was Told.

It was Mindwarp that really changed my mind about Bryant, first because she does some really first-rate villain acting, and second because the Peri/Yrcanos love story is so ridiculous that it spells the whole issue out for all to see: the Peri character was poorly scripted, not necessarily poorly acted. What's more, during the commentary for Attack of the Cybermen, Bryant specifically mentions Peri's incorrect American word usage, and reveals that she was told to speak that way so British viewers would understand her.

Well blow me down.

So even though I get annoyed every time Peri Brown gets stuttery and out-of-breath, my respect for Nicola Bryant has actually grown, and I can see moments -- usually funny ones -- when she managed to REALLY act in the role. I feel a bit sorry for her being written as T&A eye-candy "for the dads." I can still hate Peri...but I can finally appreciate Nicola Bryant.

And she's great on the commentaries, by the way.

Our Lame Town Square

When I heard, two years ago, that developers were going to tear up one of downtown's uglier parking lots and turn it into a town square, I was THRILLED. All the objections to the plan were silly ones involving apocalyptic parking shortages and supposed safety issues. The nay-sayers didn't seem to care that uptown Waterloo doesn't have a convenient and communal place for people to just sit down and relax, a place to congregate while shopping, a place to eat your food outdoors.

What I hadn't counted on was the fact that the town square designers were bone-headed morons. They tore up the old parking lot in front of Waterloo Town Square...and then they basically paved it over again, giving us a huge flat concrete area ringed with concrete seats, with a tiny little garden enclosed by -- you guessed it -- more concrete.

It looks vast and featureless and unwelcoming, but the biggest and most obvious problem is that there is no shade. I mean seriously people, what the f*ck were you thinking? Did nobody stand out there and notice that the sun beats mercilessly down on that area between 9am and 5pm? Didn't anybody say "maybe we should position an awning or some trees to block out some of the sun?" Or how about -- lord forbid -- GRASS to break up the heat reflection, or at least a water fountain?

No, the only additional feature they gave us was a metal butt-plug sculpture which -- you guessed it -- has been carefully positioned to provide no shade whatsoever.

This really is a sad bungling of a well-intentioned opportunity. The square appears to be vetted by people who never actually go outside and who have a disconcerting concrete fetish. The only other explanation I can think of -- and this is probably the REAL issue -- is that they built the square specifically for EVENTS, and therefore didn't want to muck it up with pesky "features" and "trees." The fact that those events only occur during eight days of the year must have slipped their collective minds.

So now we have a parking lot in uptown Waterloo that you can't even park on. During the day, six or seven stalwart shoppers sit along the edge, dwarfed by the emptiness. Other people sit on the plastic patio furniture that has been hastily placed in the shadow of the mall -- a shadow that doesn't even touch the square itself. The only people who enjoy the square are the skateboarders, who are managing to slowly remove those metal divots intended to keep them from having fun.

Waterloo Town Square's town square? An abject, stupid failure. A meeting place designed to repel people who might want to meet there. A two-and-a-half million dollar thud.

PS: I hear that the square "isn't finished yet," and that they're asking people for their opinions. My opinion? Rip up half of the carefully-laid concrete and put some grass and trees there, and then add seating in those areas. As for complaints about the skateboarders, well, perhaps you shouldn't have built something which screams "SKATE ON ME!" As it is they're the only people who seem to regularly use the park, so more power to them, they're filling a void. If the void wasn't there -- because people actually felt like sitting in the square -- then the skateboarders would move to another area of unobstructed concrete, because they probably don't want to skate on fingers and feet.

Voyageur!

Season seven of "The Daily Muffy" begins on Monday, July 7th with "Voyageur," a trip down Guelph's Speed River in search of fur and frolic! The adventure will commence here on Flickr.



These things are always a strange mix of anxiety and fun. Fortunately, when I did this on June 21st, I was gorgeously photographed by Shay and punted around by canoe-heroine Natasha. How could I NOT enjoy myself, especially on such a gorgeous day?

There are a few things to note about the shooting of this trip. The first is that I'm wearing the outfit which helped destroy my shoulder back in February...an outfit so terrifying that I call it "The Impossible Costume." Its odd back-centric doohickeys -- which I specifically remember having trouble with on that night -- left me in so much pain the next day that I can only assume it made my problem worse. By wearing it again for this photo shoot, I wanted to prove to myself that I CAN wear just about anything these days as long as I'm careful. I was, and it worked!

The second thing to note is that Natasha did not come with the intention to be photographed, so all the pictures feature only half of a canoe: the half with me in it. Rest assured that we WERE actually afloat, though I can't pretend that the Speed River is a particularly dangerous place to be.

There was, however, the danger of the canoe flipping over every time I hobbled into it. But Natasha is a pro and she kept me high and dry.

The third thing to note is that this was part of my "Shall I continue to do drag?" experiment. I needed to see how these pictures turned out, and to improve the experiment I even bought new eyelashes (the old ones were clunky, quirky, and more dry glue than lash). I'm thrilled that I can still burn up a dress and handle the harsh rays of the sun. Drag, we're still buddies, you and I.

Anyway, be sure to check out Flickr on Monday when the journey commences!

This is My Humerus

People are always showing ultrasounds of their babies to suitably impressed friends and family. Instead of showing you an image of my life and happiness, I present you with an image of pain and dysfunction...yes, this is what my shoulder looks like on the inside:


I'm no doctor so I can't tell you what it means. All I know is, if the inside of your shoulder looks like this, your shoulder is F*CKED.

Today I went to the Guelph General Hospital to pick up a disk of my MRI results, partly because I'll need to give them to a shoulder specialist but also because I'm really darn curious. What sort of awful thing did they see when they looked at my cartilage in three dimensions? Did they scream? Do they still have nightmares?

Probably not. All I know is that once you view your body "in slices" like this, you cease to recognize it and you realize just how meaty you are. The only landmarks I can find in the images are the bones; everything else is just so much generalized gristle.

I'll let the doctor figure it out.

In the meantime, you might be wondering how to look at the inside of your OWN body. First you need to get an MRI, and then you need to call the hospital and ask them to make a copy of the data. They won't mail it to you (or your doctor) so you need to drive back to the hospital in a pounding rainstorm in order to pick up the CD.

When you examine the CD itself, you'll discover that it contains quaint Microsoft DOS files with eight-letter all-caps filenames. The included viewer cannot be run on your Mac, so either you spend the rest of your life trying to interpret the hexadecimal data in your "DICOM image" files or you download OsiriX, a free DICOM viewer for the Mac.

When you use a layperson-monkey technique of hitting OsiriX buttons semi-intelligently until something appears...well, unless you have a railroad spike through the affected organ or something inside you has exploded, you'll see animated slices of incomprehensible things which look mostly like a Grateful Dead lightshow.

I'm not saying that it isn't worth it, but if I thought I could diagnose my own injury by looking at these pictures I was terribly terribly wrong.

PS: On second viewing I believe that the big white thing in the picture -- the one on the left, partly overlapping the ball of my humerus -- is the oft-cursed "labrum," which in my case is apparently torn. It shows up so well in the picture because they injected radioactive dye into it. If that's the case, it's sort of neat that you can see it right through the bone.

PPS: The picture above is not from the MRI, it is an X-Ray they took immediately after the dye was injected. I think the wormy-looking white line in the middle is the path of the needle with some dye backed up into it. Yuck.

The Tommyknockers Knocked On My Door, Hung Around for Three Hours, and Then Clogged My Toilet

Stephen King annoys me but I recognize that -- under all the repetition and hackery -- there's a big slice of brilliance in him. No matter how bad any given Stephen King book is, the idea BEHIND the book is usually a whopper.

"The Tommyknockers" fits this description perfectly. I haven't read it since it came out, but I remember it being a relatively poor -- and over-long -- treatment of a fantastic plot. It's unsurprising that the mini-series -- which I watched today -- took out most of the good ideas, drastically simplified the plot itself, and tacked on a horrible ending.

Television scriptwriters really do seem to think that we (the viewers) are incapable of dealing with complex ideas. The truly great thing about King's original book was that the "Tommyknocker" aliens were terribly flawed and destructive creatures; they could do amazing things but were far too selfish and short-tempered to really thrive. This was presented as a racial trait in the novel, and was a sly mirroring of humanity's own foibles: we have great power and adaptability but we're also very primitive, and there's nothing more dangerous than a baby with a loaded gun.

This element added an indispensible level to the book...it explained everything and lent itself to a lot of great plot twists. But in the mini-series, of course, the aliens were just hissing bad guys who wanted to exploit humankind, an idea that reduced it all to a typical "invasion earth" story.

Another thing that television scriptwriters Absolutely Must Do is add a climactic straight-forward fight -- good versus evil! -- and then make sure that everybody's alright in the end, no matter how improbable such a thing might be. I was pleased to see that, in the mini-series, all the infected townspeople underwent an instant spa-treatment as soon as the aliens died...they even got magically-applied lipstick and mascara!

But the show wasn't ALL bad. Traci Lords is always fun, and the major set-piece in the book ("What's happening in the barn?") was even more gruesome on screen. Yay!

Still, I feel personally insulted when a piece of entertainment treats me like I'm stupid. I'm not, and I'm hardly alone in LIKING a bit of a challenge!

New UPhold Song: "Think"

My Canada Day song contribution is one just finished from 2005 called "Think." It really IS sort of appropriate to the day, as it was inspired by a man who screamed insults at me from a balcony during a long-ago holiday...he was one of the men who explode.

You can listen to "Think" in its short, minimalistic, ambient glory here.

It sounds the way it does because of the technology I was using back then. I wanted to write a conventional song, but since I couldn't sing I decided to use a Vocoder plugin.

Unfortunately the only plugin I had was the one from Cycling 74's "Pluggo" bundle. While I grew fond of many of the "Pluggo" plugins (and many of their "Mode" plugins as well), they were terribly flaky and would sometimes refuse to work altogether. Their Vocoder usually only half-worked for me...you had to route it through their virtual "PluggoBus," and in the case of this song the bus would just randomly fade in and out.

I got so frustrated with the vocoder that I gave up on "Think" after only one segment of one verse. But this year, when I went back to listen to it, I realized that the vocoder fade was sort of nice, and though it completely ruined an attempt at "conventional" music it was a nice "experimental" touch.

So I stripped out the rhythm and the original keyboards and rewrote the track around the vocoder glitch. It probably turned out better than if I'd written some lame song about depressed persecution.

The lesson: keep all of your mistakes, even if you think you'll never use them!