!

The Unofficial "Torchwood Declassified" Drinking Game

If you find yourself watching the bonus "Torchwood Declassified" DVD in the season one box set, set up the booze and follow these rules. You'll only survive if you're very, very drunk.

• When somebody uses a string of one-word adjectives to describe an episode, take a sip for EVERY adjective.
• If the episode is described as "dark," take two additional sips. If it's "SO dark," finish your drink. If somebody says "it's SO dark," and then laughs, polish off the liquor cabinet.
• When Russel T. Davies, Julie Gardener, or one of the executives tries to explain why the sex and violence is "important to the plot," nod your head knowingly and drink a shot. When this explanation is followed by an extended, exploitative montage of sexy clips from the series, simply admit that you knew it all along.
• Whenever it sounds like a cast member is in a "watch Torchwood" commercial, throw your shot glass at the screen. This doesn't count if the cast member is John Barrowman because he ALWAYS sounds that way.
  
• When a cast member talks about their character in the third person, take only a tiny sip, or you'll quickly lose your eyesight.
• Drink a glass of wine every time somebody is described as "lonely."
• Whenever somebody describes Captain Jack in a way that could equally apply to Doctor Who, drink the entire bottle of wine. Destroy your wine cellar if this is within five minutes of somebody saying that the series premise is totally different from Doctor Who.
• When Russel T. Davies "gushes" about a plot twist, that's okay. When the plot twist is horrible and should never have been conceived, let alone filmed, drink your brandy and write him a nasty, fannish email.
• When John Barrowman is slick, Eve Myles is goofy, Burn Gorman is deadly serious, or Naoko Mori is wide-eyed sincere, take a sip of whatever you're drinking and then ask Gareth David-Lloyd for another, please. When Gareth David-Lloyd appears on the screen and you wonder why you never noticed his teeth before, clasp him tightly like John Barrowman would and say "I'm SO SORRY" in a broken-voiced way.
  

Blasted Barmy Poozy

Somebody pooped on my workplace. Literally, he or she pooped on the SIDE of the building, two feet from the door that few people other than myself ever use.

Since Monday I have seen this poop twice each lunch hour, and it has done nothing for my appetite. I'm increasingly fascinated by its longevity: nobody seems to have noticed, and it is impervious to the weather, looking exactly the same now as it did three days ago.

This is a strange secret that I'm keeping, especially because the poop is right underneath my manager's window. I see her several times a day and I keep wanting to tell her about it, but I know she wouldn't appreciate the news. She'd either have to clean it up herself or just sit there by her window, thinking about it, the way I do.

Vanilla has never seen the poop but I keep her appraised. I pretend that it's Allison Goldfrapp's poop. I pretend that she'd call it her "blasted barmy poozy." This makes the situation more bearable.

Every night I wonder if it will go away, and every day I return to find it still there. There's nothing I can comfortably do about it. I can only see which one of us gives up first.

Cartoon Confusion Due to Creepy Ending

Otto Soglow is confusing us again, this time in the September 8, 1928 issue of The New Yorker (click for a full-size image).

I'm not stupid; I assume the joke is that the diver left his suit to join the mermaid underwater. But does it make sense that my first thought was that she'd EATEN him? And does it seem strange that I still halfway believe that this was Soglow's intention?

For the Love of Melons

The people who write the best advertising copy are probably fetishists. From the September 1, 1928 issue of The New Yorker, here's an...oddly breathless...story about...melons...

"I WANT melon...cold melon...with some taste to it"...growled the Temperamental Musician...He has played too many concerts in one season...He hates everything from Bach to steamships...He eyes the steward balefully...He wants to complain...The melon comes...He can't....it is cool and beautiful..."Why, it's delicious...so juicy...and what a flavour"...His smile is as sweet as a Beethoven melody..."Quite, Sir," said the steward..."that is English hothouse melon...you can tell it by the bright canary colour of the outside, under a net of white...It's considered a very fine product, sir, one of the best..."

Who wrote this crazy story with its ellipses and Canadian spelling? I bet the writer has got more than a few melons stored in his fridge, and that he spends every day anticipating...the moment...when he can be alone with them.

PS: In case you're wondering, it's an advertisement for the Cunard Line, which is still operating today.

"I Married the Klondike"

For the last few months I've been on a Klondike kick. I've read all about the social, political, and historical significance of the event. I've learned intimate details about all the gold rush archetypes: prostitutes, dance-hall girls, con men, Mounties, miners, and opportunistic businessmen. I've followed the history of Dawson from the first pan of gold to the start of the town's decline.

What more was there to learn? Obviously something, because Laura Beatrice Berton's autobiographical "I Married the Klondike" has been an eye-opener even to this jaded reader.

Berton, a school teacher, went alone to Dawson in 1907. The town was already in mid-decline but the unique social life of dances, teas, recitals, and endless gossip was still entrenched. Berton's book is a unique perspective of a 29-year-old woman's adventures in a dying mining town, including her marriage and the upbringing of her two children (one of whom, of course, was author and historian Pierre Berton).

The first half of the book consists of her detailed memories about the town's social stratification.

The social level began, of course, with the commissioner and his wife, and worked its way down through the judges and officers of the police, the high civil servants, the heads of the large companies, the bishops and church people, the bankers and bank clerks, lawyers and nurses until it stopped with us teachers, who clung to the charmed group by our finger-nails... The Mounted Police, noncoms and constables, were not admitted to Dawson's social set... Below the first social level came the merchants, who were known as "the downtown crowd", and below them the labourers, policemen and so on, who were, in turn, several steps above the dance-hall girls and the prostitutes of Klondike City and the half-breeds and Indians.

We also learn something about what it was like to be a single, unescorted woman living in the Yukon at the turn of the century. She describes riding an open sleigh from Whitehorse to Dawson, a week-long trip in the middle of winter, crammed in with thirteen other passengers, two of them amorous.

I sat in the rear seat, squeezed between a Swede on one side and a French-Canadian miner on the other... For five days I parried their advances, which followed much the same line.

"I mak' you present ermine skin, hey?" murmured the Quebecker, affectionately pressing my arm. "Two, t'ree, yes, enough for nice collar. How you like dat, hey?" Another squeeze.

Then from the other side--this time pressure against my leg and the Swedish voice: "In Dawson you go mit me to show, yah? Ve haf a good time, yah?" To all of which I smiled demurely and maintained a discreet silence.

Reading this in the midst of my furnace breakdown, I was particularly thankful that I wasn't currently Up North.

We could never quite keep the cold or frost out of the house. It seemed an animate thing, creeping insidiously under the crack of the door in a long white streak. Each nailhead in the strapping around the kitchen door was covered by a little coat of ice... A thick line of frost marked the lower edge of the door, and we could judge the temperature by gauging the distance this white line crept up along the door's edge from the floor to ceiling.

The environment kills many of her friends. They succumb to cold, incompetent medicine, animals, and drowning. Some go crazy, some just disappear. But most of them gradually trickled away as the city emptied, and eventually she left as well.

It's not all sad, though; far from it. She describes scenes of incredible bliss, spending summers floating around on the Yukon, picking an uninhabited island and living there for a month. She talks about the necessary acts of charity and kindness in a city where the smallest weakness could lead to death. She eloquently, breezily, and matter-of-factly describes the love that many people feel for small towns and the people in them, and the fact that Dawson was such an impossible place makes it all more fascinating.

The Love Show!

On Thursday the 14th -- that's Valentine's Day in case you needed a reminder -- Drew, Victoria, and I will be hosting a special "LOVE" show at Club Renaissance. It probably won't be ENTIRELY about love...but really, how easy is it to find a song that ISN'T about love in some way? Us humans sure have one-track, euphemistic minds.

So come to the club and cheer us on! And not just on the 14th, but on the second Thursday of EVERY month, because...

...Victoria and I are starting a stint as "featured entertainers," with our own special night that we like to call "Glamourspunk." More news (and a poster) coming soon!

I'd Buy Anything By...Bryan Ferry (and then I'd SMOOCH him)

Does he deserve an entry apart from Roxy Music, considering he was their frontman and primary songwriter? Well, yes, but for no rational reason. I just like him so much.

Bryan Ferry really only has two vocal techniques -- "slinky" or "shouty" -- but they are both sublime. He has managed to be a sort of "lounge lizard" without ever being sleezy; he filled his videos with fashion models and never seemed exploitative; he has recently survived a scandal wherein he was misquoted as saying he "praised the Nazi regime." Has anybody else done that stuff, and with such style? I don't think so. It's the little things that count.

You may say his eyes are small and too close together; I say he's devilishly handsome. You may say he slips into adult contemporary pop too often, and I say "so what?" My very own mother might complain that she can never understand what he is saying, but I call that "creative articulation." Bryan Ferry, in my world, is somewhat beyond criticism, so hush.

First, in shouty-mode, here's a largely overlooked Ferry song that I consider to be one of his best: "The Price of Love." It's so bombastic! The primary female in the video, of course, is Jerry Hall.



In '80s pop slinky-mode, "Don't Stop the Dance." I don't know who the models are in this one, but one of them is certainly NOT a professional sax player. Still, she's probably more attention-grabbing than David Sanborn. Note the Mark Knopfler guitar.



The best thing about Bryan Ferry is that he isn't dead yet! He just released a CD of Bob Dylan covers, and while I wouldn't swear by it I can happily say he "still has it." Sex appeal, smarts, talent, and good taste: that's my Bryan.

Albums to buy: try "Bête Noir" for its mix of catchiness and Brian Eno odd-production. Albums to avoid? Quite frankly, Ferry's albums are a mixed bag which are rarely good all the way through, and I can't think of any that are "less good" than any others. For fans only? The smell of his morning breath, because I bet that EVEN HE stinks sometimes.

Pictures, Pictures, Pictures!

Originally I thought it would be fun to reenact my "fixing the furnace" experience to the tune of Meat Beat Manifesto's "Plexus." I spent my sacred "Saturday Breakfast Time" coming up with an elaborate shooting schedule. It was to have been a monumental experimental video to rival Luis Buñuel's "L'Âge d'Or."

Then I came to my senses. Screw that, I wanted to have FUN on Saturday, not to hop around shooting some crazy video with barely a moment's notice.

So instead I took a bunch of pictures.



These encompass tonight, mostly, but also go back to New Year's Eve. Enjoy!

Freeze-a-vu

When I was getting ready for work this morning I noticed that my kitchen floor was awfully cold, but I had so many other things on my mind that I forgot about it. After lunchtime I came home to a freezing apartment and the crashing realization that it was happening again: the furnace had stopped working.

I spent two hellish weeks in November 2006 without heat, in a different building but with the same landlords. I have vivid memories of sleeping under a suffocating mound of blankets, and spending evenings trying to watch television in front of two howling space-heaters. My life ground to a halt back then -- there's just no way to be productive when it's only 12 degrees in your building -- and I DO NOT WANT THAT TO HAPPEN AGAIN.

Fortunately, this recurrence was ridiculous enough to get immediate action from landlord D, who brought me space-heaters and invited me to call him if things got unbearable.

But the problem is, what is REALLY unbearable for me is NOT KNOWING WHAT'S GOING ON. If somebody had told me "we've got a service person coming tomorrow at 10am," I could just moan and deal with it. What I CAN'T deal with is sitting by the telephone waiting for an update.

And landlord B -- who does the repairs -- is not a guy who gives updates. I spent hours, wearing a sweater and a robe and an afghan and a cat, waiting for the telephone to ring...and it didn't. This situation is absolute hell for me, the feeling of powerlessness, at the whim of somebody who doesn't communicate the situation to me.

Something had to be done.

I went down to the basement and stared at the furnace. It was humming quietly. I flicked a switch on the wall and it stopped humming. I opened the furnace up and found an instruction manual, which told me to turn the furnace off for thirty seconds and then turn it on again.

I did this. The furnace buzzed back to life and proceeded to make four feeble popping sounds before going quiet again.

One part of the manual told me to turn off the natural gas and go through a bunch of complicated BTU calculations. I decided not to blow myself up; if it was a natural gas problem, somebody else would have to fix it.

Another part of the manual said that the furnace wouldn't start if its filter was clogged. So I found the filter and pulled it out, and it looked like Frankenstein's table napkin. Since there were no clean filters in the basement I scraped the black gunk off as best I could and put it back into the furnace (upside down, for luck).

I flicked the switch on...and the furnace began to hum like a warming-up kitty. It's been running now for an hour (constantly, because it has a lot of rooms to heat). I'm scared that it'll suddenly stop working again and I'll be back to square one, but maybe...

...just maybe...

...did I fix a furnace? If I didn't have the black gunk on my sweater to prove it I wouldn't believe it myself.