The Little Cat and the Dirty Dog

I think Swedish band "Whale" was the best thing since Surströmming, but after their disappearing act us Whale fans have needed to delve into the past.

So I present "The Little Cat and the Dirty Dog," a song by Eurotrash group "Ubangi." Often compared to Devo (but more reminiscent of Oingo-Boingo in my opinion), they put out a few singles in the early '80s, most of them nasty, explicit, juvenile, and obnoxious. So in other words they were fun.

Cia Soro -- lead singer for Whale -- got her start in Ubangi, and you can see her here in all of her hyper-lipsticked glory. I can't quite get over her weird dance at the end. I've been trying for years to get my hands on an actual Ubangi CD, but they just don't seem to exist anymore...

Sarah Binks, Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan

Since we're talking about poetry -- and also about the unforgiving wilds of Canada -- I can't help mentioning Sarah Binks, the "sweet songstress of Saskatchewan" who wrote such eerie poetry during her P.R. ("Post-Regina") period:

"They Arose"

They arose, three dead men,
Stiff and dank,
From the gloomy depths
Of a water tank;
And they bowed full soon
To the rising moon,
For the one was Bill,
And the other two, Hank.

"(Untitled Fragment)"

When I'm buried in a graveyard,
And this feeble flame is snuffed,
Will a spottled magpie murmur,
Mutely sigh with ruff unfluffed?

Who can forget this stanza from "Hymn to Rover?"

When on that day the last bark rings
To call the dog-like throng,
Rover shall rise and don his wings,
And raise his voice in song;
He'll raise his voice in song and sing,
In ecstasy of dog-like things.

Eventually Sarah rebounded from her misery and gave us some of her best work. As her biographer Paul Hiebert notes, "sheer exuberance of joy is expressed in that paean of praise to the hunt":

"The Duck Hunt"

The duck hunt, the duck hunt,
Ahoy, for the duck hunt,
Yahoo, the duck hunt so fine;
With my shot gun and duck-dog,
I'm off for the duck-bog,
And I leave for the duck hunt,
While yet there is time;
My loved one is weeping,
And clings to my side;
"Oh stay with me Oscar,
The duck hunt can ride,
Remain with me Oscar,
And let the duck hunt slide."
But hark, in the gloaming,
The moor-hens are moaning,
The marshes are sighing,
The sea gulls are groaning,
So I'm off for the duck hunt,
The duck hunt, the duck hunt,
I'm off for the duck hunt,
While yet in my prime.

I leave you with the first stanza of Sarah's acknowledged epic, "Hordes of Sheep":

'Tis night on the prairie and night on the plain,
And all is still--no sign of rain--
And all is peace, and deep in his teepee
The red man sleeps and his squaw is sleepy;
The red man snores with the red man's cunning;
But hark, what's that? 'tis the sound of running,
'Tis the sound of rushing, of hurrying feet,
And hark, what's that? 'tis the sound of bleat;
Louder it comes, it rises wild,
Ah, the mother hears it and grabs her child,
Louder still, the frantic mother,
Grabs her child, and another and another;
And the red man waked by that hurrying tread,
Turns deadly pale beneath his red;
The Indian Brave is roused from sleep;
"Run for your life boys, here come sheep!"

Awful Poetry

There's nothing quite so heartbreaking and hilarious as a piece of bad, sincere poetry. A few years ago VanillaJ held a "bad poetry" party, and I think everybody agreed that the best places to find bad poetry are:

• online,
• in yearbooks, and
  
• at open-mic poetry readings.

You don't have to pay a fee to get a poem into any of these places, you are largely free from criticism (especially if your poem is so sincere that people think you'll commit suicide if they make fun of it), and most people involved with them are adolescents. And adolescents write the BEST bad poetry.

I'll leave somebody else to compile a list of Bad Poetry Themes ("moth to the flame" and "broken china doll" are my favourites, not to mention your average thinly-veiled threats of suicide), but I want to bring up one pervasive technique of bad poetry: forcing the rhyme by displacing the verb.

(Please note that I learned everything I know about English from reading books. So I know how English is supposed to be written, but I don't necessarily know the technical aspects. So if I'm wrong in my explanation for WHY the following technique is bad, please let me know, and recognize at least that it IS bad for whatever reason).

The Bad Poetry Author settles on a single verb that fits the rhyming scheme of his or her poem. In this example from the 1956 edition of "The Grumbler" (the Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate yearbook), poet Barbara Kraft has written:

The soft, gay voice now still

and she can think of only ONE POSSIBLE WORD that rhymes with still: "fill". But the problem is, the verb form "fill" doesn't come at the end of sentence clauses. "Filled" does...but "filled" doesn't rhyme with "still!" (let's ignore that "still" shouldn't come at the end of that clause in the first place).

So Ms. Kraft does what bad poets always do: she sticks "fill" at the end of the clause anyway, and since it can only be placed there in the infinitive form, she has to add "to" or "did" or "will" or "so" in front of it:

Her heart with grief did fill

Damn! That's awkward and bad and all wrong! "Her heart filled with grief" would be correct, but then she'd have to change her previous line to rhyme with "grief," and that's too hard! It might be trying to evoke some classical sentence structure, but it never works...and sentimental bad poetry is FULL of this! Here are some more examples from "The Grumbler":

"A night by strife so torn"
"Stained red with blood so quiet lay"
"All hearts i' the castle now do weep...
...Two hearts true, their love to keep"
"Which round thy sands do seethe"

See what I mean? This drives me nuts, even when they try to soften it a bit with a few extra words ("so quiet lay"). If you're a bad sentimental poet, think about it this way: when with this method I do write, my writing correct does sound? No, so stop it!

Call of the Wild

I suppose I have a fascination with "The North" the same way some people are fascinated with "The West."

Growing up on a relatively isolated farm I learned to love ponds and swamps, trees and groundhogs, not to mention storms sweeping across the fields in either winter or summer. It was "wilderness in miniature," just big enough for a child to get lost in.

Here in Ontario we're blessed with the Niagara Escarpment. When I was very young my father would take me on trips to Mount Nemo, where we'd hike pieces of the Bruce Trail and explore the smaller caves. Later I made a few wonderful trips up to Cypress Lake -- the furthest north I've ever been, and by far the most rugged and unforgiving landscape I've seen for myself.

But this is all small potatoes. In reality I want to see the unspoiled, virtually unreachable places...the land of moose and bush pilots. The problem is that you can't simply get in a car and drive to those places. If you're going to actually get out and EXPLORE, you need to endure the hardships that come with such places. And though I've got pretty good endurance I don't think I'm up to the task.

So instead I find myself reading about OTHER people doing the hard work. Right now I'm working on "This Was the North" by Anton Money. It's the true story of the seven years he spent in Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon. In 1923 the land was still largely unsettled and partially unexplored. Money arrived from Britain as a "Greenhorn" and fell totally in love with the landscape, frequently referring to it as "Eden."

The book is beautiful, written in a plain and descriptive style, and Money perfectly conveys the majesty of the countryside. He tells you about the lives of the Hudson Bay traders, the Indian trappers and the ubiquitous gold hunters. He describes in minute and fascinating detail how they built their houses and roads, their boats and "high caches." He also provides pictures of the people and places he describes, taken by him in the 1920s.

So far they've reached Frances Lake, and he and his friend are of the first few Europeans to survive the trip there. I wish I could be at the lake with them...but I'd settle for another weekend in Northern Ontario!

alloc! init!

For the third time now I am tackling Aaron Hillegass' "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X." I've finally reached the farthest point that I'd reached previously ("Bindings and NSController"), but this time I actually understand what's going on. Mostly.

I'm realizing something that I think the book glosses over: the AppKit framework -- the classes you use to communicate with the OS X GUI -- is quirky. Understanding what you're doing involves knowing all of the bizarre ways your code needs to interact with AppKit. For the methods in any particular class you have to know what it returns, what it retains, what happens if you send it nil...and you also need to know which methods it delegates to other objects...

I'm sure that for common classes this becomes second nature. But when I see inconsistencies in Hillegass' code, and he doesn't explain why they're there, a bit of research reveals that it's due to a class quirk...a quirk I wouldn't have known about if *I* were writing the code.

I was in a rage tonight, trying to figure out why he allocates memory for and initializes SOME objects, but not others. I think it's because some of these objects -- the ones you use often for temporary reasons, like NSString -- can allocate and initialize for themselves, since they're immutable and they'll be autoreleased as soon as the method ends anyway.

Speaking of releasing, I'm not even thinking about that yet. The knowledge that (as Hillegass basically says) some methods retain objects and some don't, and you just need to learn which does which, is not exactly heartening.

But I do have to say: wow, this is elegant. The way that all these objects lock together, sharing their duties in such a logical way, is a miracle of design. I love it!

Until I get stuck again...

Why I Didn't Like "Frankenstein"

Deciding to read Frankenstein was a bit of a whim. I wanted to see how different it was from the twentieth-century film versions, and since I love to be grossed out and I get thrilled by Arctic adventures...well, Frankenstein seemed a worthy book to read.

I can't blame Mary Shelley for some of the things I disliked. I find early 19th century fiction to be strangely paced -- paragraphs and chapters are generally of identical length and tone -- and I simply cannot stand these sensitive, high-born protagonists who suffer nervous fits. I can understand the women fainting -- their lungs were corseted into their necks and they wore sixty pounds of heavy clothing -- and I suppose even the hardiest miner could be excused a consumptive faint. But these delicate lords who require six months of recuperation after every surprise try my patience. And Victor Frankenstein has so many nervous fits -- and spends so long in recuperative spells of madness -- that it's a wonder he ever gets a chance to build a monster in the first place.

So I can excuse these novel-elements as par for the course -- particularly since Shelley's own husband was known to flop into narcoleptic slumbers on occasion -- but I can't excuse Victor Frankenstein's justifications for his actions. I could see it if Shelley were ultimately condemning Frankenstein for being such a lazy, selfish, inneffectual, cold-hearted bastard...but she isn't. The only thing Frankenstein did wrong was to play God by delving into the secrets of nature.

The fact that he totally abandoned his "monster" (so he could flit around Europe studying Eastern languages) is not seen as irresponsible. And when that monster found itself alone and terrified, spurned by all humans, unable to find companionship even from the man who created him...well, Frankenstein doesn't think this is particularly sad. When the monster decides to get revenge of those who rejected him -- ESPECIALLY the man who created him and then abandoned him -- Frankenstein (and Shelley) both label the monster as "cruel" and "bloodthirsty."

Almost half of the book is about the monster's good deeds and his heart-wrenching attempts to join a society that will never accept him. The other half is about Victor Frankenstein running away from every responsibility he has (to his creation and to the protection of his friends and relatives), occasionally taking time out to explain to us (again and again) how he is the most miserable person on the planet...not because he screwed everything up through his own impotence, but because he created the monster in the first place.

I couldn't help feeling that Victor Frankenstein was like a deadbeat dad. Rather than support his child and take responsibility for what he's done, he runs and regrets, runs and regrets. Hey Vic, just give the monster a MATE already!

So I got very little out of the book. When describing geography -- lush and majestic Switzerland, the malevolent Arctic ocean, and the flat, barren Orkney islands -- Shelley entranced me. When it came to characterization, however, I could only care about the monster...and I don't think she intended it that way.

The Cat and I

I grew up with all sorts of pets. Living on a farm, we weren't limited when it came to space or animal husbandry; hamsters, gerbils, mice, budgies, cats, dogs, rabbits, lizards, a racoon and -- yes -- a tarantula named Legs who poisoned my father's wine.

After I moved away from home I didn't feel comfortable having pets, because I lived with unpredictable people. But when I got my own apartment seven years ago there was no question about it: I needed a cat, and I needed one who would allow me to pet its belly.

So I went to the Humane Society, since I'd rather rescue an animal than pay $500 for a cozy inbred pet store creature. They had lots of cats, but when I came to Zsa Zsa's cage she immediately rolled on to her back, kicked her legs in the air, and started to purr. She wasn't going to just ALLOW me to pet her belly, she was going to REQUIRE it. Zsa Zsa was mine.

We have always had a good relationship. Sometimes she gets too needy and begins to meow plaintively, and when I'm trying to work or trying to sleep that can drive me into a fury. In return I don't clean her litterbox as often as I should, and she doesn't contribute monetarily to the household, so I think we're pretty much even.

When I come home she flops onto her side, squeals, and begins to kick herself across the carpet. This is her "seal impersonation," and you are supposed to respond by enthusiastically petting her. If you do a really good job she begins to drool. After that she leaves me alone until the afternoon, when she sits either on me or beside me as I do whatever incomprehensible things I feel the need to do.

She rarely wants to play. When she does, her favourite game is to hide behind something and watch ME play, which I quickly get bored of. When she walks into a populated room she announces herself calmly. When I take a bath she does perilous tip-toes across the edge, and though her tail gets wet she never falls in. Sometimes she drinks out of the toilet and licks her butt. She is meticulous in her grooming.

Our new apartment is heaven for her, because she has access to most of the windows and they overlook scenes with bushes and trees. In the bushes are birds, sometimes squirrels. She hunches down and wiggles her bum, but never pounces. She does not see herself in mirrors, doesn't recognize cats on TV, isn't afraid of thunder, and can't seem to hear cats or dogs, either live or electrically reproduced. Though if I imitate her she will imitate me, and we can have a nice conversation this way.

On Saturday nights, when I come home drunk, she is very calm and understanding. The next morning she literally demands soft food, which she only gets after I've been drinking. She gleefully scratches at the furniture even though she has no claws. She stomps around in a tiny circle before lying down, even though there is no grass. If there IS grass somewhere she'll eat it and not throw it up.

Her favourite spots are the couch, the computer chair, the sun-drenched living-room floor, and under the armchair. At night she waits patiently while I read in bed, usually lying in the scoop between my ribs and my hips. When I turn out the light she'll sometimes scratch at the covers until I let her go underneath, where she curls against me and crackles and sometimes dreams. When she wakes up from a dream she "talks" frantically, looking all around the room, and eventually runs away to take stock of the situation. At 3am, when I wake up, she's always lying on the bed hoping to be petted.

This morning, at 3am, she had sticky black gunk on her head, where her mast tumour is. I clipped away the hair; the tumour was ugly and crusted up. I positively could not sleep and regretted that I hadn't written down the way we lived together. When I finally did sleep, I dreamed she was in a sack and I couldn't get her out.

This afternoon I put her in her cat carrier and took her to the vet. The vet took a look at the tumour, said "oh, yeah," and gave it a steady squeeze. Black sludge oozed out of Zsa Zsa's head in a thick tube, like rancid toothpaste. She kept squeezing until all the sludge was gone, and so was the tumour, then she washed it off and said it would probably fill up again eventually. She says the sludge is a combination of mast cells and melanoma which -- she assures me -- is pretty much harmless. I'm to watch for infection and not worry about it; the tumour just "popped" when it got too full.

The vet likes Zsa Zsa and didn't charge me anything for the visit. On the way home the cab driver told me about how he'd had to put his own cat down, and that it's something you never want to happen but will always eventually happen.

Old Gold

Another set of ongoing advertisements in The New Yorker is "Now You Tell One," a 100% unfunny ad-comic that started appearing in the Spring of 1927.

Drawn by Clare Briggs -- who produced one of the first (if not the first) newspaper comic strips -- the advertisements are usually about a wife who forgets to buy Old Gold cigarettes. Her husband is forced to smoke ANOTHER brand of cigarettes while doing some important piece of work (talk on the radio, give a speech), and he ends up coughing all the way through.

The strips always end with somebody saying that Old Golds have "not a cough in a carload," which is not the world's best punchline, believe me.

Here's a slightly different take on the gag, featuring "Frank and Earnest" (not to be confused with the comic strip from the '7os), "direct from the Gus Sun Time" (a vaudeville circuit). I suspect that Frank and Earnest actually existed -- because of their fleshed-out style and the weird note at the end -- but I can't find anything about them online. Either way I hope their routines were better than this.

"Got a new pair of shoes today, Frank...how do they look?"

"Immense Earnest, absolutely immense!"

"Maybe you can tell me who wears the biggest hat in the army?"

"A cinch, Earnest, a cinch...the guy with the biggest head."

"You're so smart, can you tell me why an Old Gold cigarette is like a hot dog?"

"Because you can't get a bark out of either of them."

"Give the boy credit for a hit. But now get set for a fast one."

"Shoot Earnest shoot."

"Then tell me why Old Gold Cigarettes are like a carload of hams."

"Earnest, THERE'S one that stops the old riddle king. Infrorm me."

"Because they're smoked ALL OVER!"

"AND HOW!"

The cartoon ends with this comment: "Note: The boys like their vegetables FRESH."

Memory Spill: Westmount Place

It's difficult for me to figure out when -- and for how long -- I hung around Westmount Place Mall. It seems like I was always there, forever, but the period I'm remembering probably only lasted two summers at the most.

My father was a welder during the construction of the Bruce Nuclear Plant, and he spent most of the week living in Inverhuron (since the construction site was so far from our home). Meanwhile my mother worked full-time at the Zacks Ladieswear in the Westmount Place Mall, so during the summer -- when I wasn't in school -- she had no choice but to bring me to work with her.

This probably started in 1980, so I was eight or so. I don't remember the drive to or from the mall, but I have vivid memories of what I did when I was actually there. It was huge and it echoed, there was always quiet muzak playing, the decor was entirely earth tones and burnt oranges; somehow those colours -- coupled with the stifling air-conditioning and lack of skylights -- didn't seem depressing back then. It's just the way malls were designed at the time.

I'd spend eight hours a day there. Sometimes I'd hang around the back room at Zacks, a tiny, dirty, smoke-filled area. I'd bring papers and pencils and draw mazes, and label them "TEMPA," which was my very own maze organization ("Totally Excellent Mazes Produced (by) (my name)"). There was a desk in the back room, and its drawers were filled with plastic condiment packages from fast-food restaurants. I became accustomed to the company of women.

My mother was always fun at Zacks, because she had fun co-workers: Wendy (who was tiny and spunky) and my aunt Marlene. Sometimes Marlene would bring her daughter Melanie, who was my age, and we'd hang around together. Melanie was flippant and funny but didn't share my interests...I wanted to play "Doctor Who" and she wanted to play "Beverly Hillbillies."

Once she confessed quietly that a teacher had read a story to the class, and that it had made a big impression on her...I encouraged her to buy the book, but she confessed -- even quieter -- that she wasn't able to read it. So the two of us sat in the huge glassed-in mall foyers with the orange rubber flooring, and I read "The Tell-Tale Heart" to her. The sun coming through the glass would heat those foyers up more and more and the rubber would start to give off a delicious gasoline smell.

Meanwhile there was "Billiards," the gloomy, grown-up pool hall in the basement of the mall. Besides pool and pinball they also had the first video games. Somehow I learned about slugs at Billiards; maybe my father gave me one to try out. I remember holding a donut-shaped slug -- heavy, unmarked -- and slipping it into a pinball machine.

Then came "Astropark," the REAL arcade, which my aunt jokingly called "Astroturf." Two sisters worked there, very pretty "rocker chicks" with crimped hair and bad attitudes. They used to give me free quarters to play the games. One day the sisters beckoned me into the back room, which was dark and full of greasy machine parts. In the middle of the room they'd put down a napkin, and on the napkin were three or four dead flies. They said they were going to cast a magic spell to bring the flies back to life. I don't remember what the spell was, but they sprinkled sugar on the flies, and some of them started twitching.

I think those women had a huge impact on my life. I wish I knew where they were.

The mall had a somewhat deshevelled Home Hardware where they sold two choice items: Mexican jumping beans (two per package and a paper "race track" for bean-racing competitions) and another product I have difficulty describing: a cardboard sheet with some sort of background on it, and a transparent sheet (similar to Letraset) with figures on the back. You'd position the figure on the background, then rub a pencil over the transparent sheet until the figure detatched and remained stuck to the background. If you were careful this worked perfectly, but if you were impatient then Wile E. Coyote would end up missing an arm.

Upstairs, the Sears department store had a computer section that always smelled like burnt wiring. The TI-99 was there, and Intellivision, and a large vector-based console whose name I don't remember...but the star was the Commodore 64. I'd spend hours up there typing games out of the book "More BASIC Computer Games" (which is still fun to flip through now and then). Just when I finished entering and debugging Hammurabi, the salesmen would need to use the computer for something, and in seconds all my hard work was gone. But it wasn't about PLAYING the games, it was about unravelling the mysteries behind them.

The man who helped me was somebody I remember as "Mr. Long Tall," a computer enthusiast who worked at Sears and who was always ready to explain things to me. He suffered the indignity of all effeminate men who are good with children: my mother warned me constantly never to go in the bathroom with him.

A short distance down from Zacks was a Bent's Camera store. The people who owned it had a son named Ian, and we became best friends. We were both literate nerds with overactive imaginations. He took me into the back room of the camera store -- you'll notice that many of my defining moments ocurred in the back rooms of stores -- and showed me what happened when you put a magnet under a work-table covered with iron shavings. He probably understood why it happened; I didn't. But our knowledge was pure give-and-take: one day he came up to me at W. H. Smith's and asked me -- secretly -- what "being stoned" meant.

Behind W. H. Smith's we'd sometimes come across boxes of discarded books, all of them missing their covers. We got a lot of books that way.

Dinner was Dairy Queen, and was always a super cheese-dog with milk. They had a jukebox, and I played "Whip It" and "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," so I'm sure everybody hated me. I learned that if you put your thumb over the end of your milk straw and pushed it down into the inside of the hotdog, you'd end up with a hole in your hotdog and a straw filled with meat.

Most of the time Ian and I hung around Videos, which began as a VHS rental store but gradually turned into a (you guessed it) computer store. I watched "Watership Down" there and was ashamed of my crying. I was fascinated by the cover of "Driller Killer," and I always wondered why the movie was called "Happy Birthday Tome". I remember the police arriving to take "Snuff" off the shelf.

The best game at Westmount Place Mall, though, was to start at one end, pretend you were a rocket ship, and run all the way to the other end. The brown floor tiles were okay but the orange ones were meteorites.

Now the only part of the mall that remains is the Pharmacy; everything else has changed. It's entered stage three: Refurbished As Headquarters for Insurance Company (stages one and two are birth and decline).

Another in Our Series of "What the '80s Were REALLY Like Pictures"

For the record, this is Fernando Herrerra and his son.

Fernando wrote "My First Alphabet," a bizarre and obnoxious game that I remember far too well from my childhood.

The eyeglasses, the collars, oh shit.