Brooklyn To Vancouver

The Lunch Thief

2008-05-14T09:10:00.000-07:00

Some years ago, when Winnifred was the regular staffer and I was a student employee at the Peak, I had my first experience of the Office Lunch Thief. The difference between this thief and subsequent thieves in my work life is that his identity was not a mystery. We all knew it was Dean. Dean was at that time a cartoonist and photo editor of the Peak. He was also a dance student and his first class ended at 10:30 in the morning, well before lunch time. So rather than eat his lunch and be hungry at noon, he would eat our's. Or whoever's. We took to leaving larger and more pointed notes on the lunch bags we put in the fridge. "No eating, not even you, Dean." Things like that. But Dean was too tricky for that. Dean realized right away that the bigger and more threatening the sign, the better the lunch. We reached an apotheosis of kinds with the brownie incident. Win and I had been to some sort of chocolate event and had gotten two extremely expensive brownies to have in our lunch the next day. Sure enough, in spite of nasty note, they were gone well before noon.

I admit it, I yelled at Dean. He was apologetic. He offered us an original, signed cartoon to make up for the brownies. Working on the theory that Dean would be famous some day and his juvenilia might be worth something, we accepted.

We are currently unpacking the stuff that has been in storage since we left Vancouver in early 2000. Among the items we found was the cartoon, charmingly signed. It is undated but it was drawn on the back of a layout flat, presumably circa 1990. I know it was well before he began his long string of appearances as a junkie in a series of tv shows. I guess it was the long hair he had at the time, but he was always being cast as a junkie. I believe it was on "The Commish" in 1994 that he got a single line of deathless dialogue: as the cop is dumping his crack down the sewer, Dean says, "Oh man, that's cold."

To check how our deal worked out, I looked on eBay for Dean memorabilia. I did find a doodle being sold for $100, so I'm guessing our cartoon is worth... more than a couple of brownies. For now, however, we plan to sit tight on our investment.

I should also point out that Dean is not actually the most brazen Office Lunch Thief I have encountered. In one library I worked at, where half the staff were perenially-hungry teenage pages, there was a lunch thief who would rifle through everyone's lunches and get the nicest thing out of each bag. We came to refer to this activity as a "getting a combo meal," as in, "Lunch thief got a combo meal so I need to run out and get some more sushi."

Flashback in Urdu

2008-04-30T17:22:00.001-07:00

The Messenger, September 7, 1981

There you have it. A 1981 Urdu-language cartoon of Ronald Reagan, from the Toronto fortnightly newspaper The Messenger. Without even being able to read it, I feel it says it all.

I do have the best job. I find stuff like this all the time.

Depressing Books for Happy People

2008-04-21T20:50:00.000-07:00

I have always thought of us as a cheerful family, which is why it is so strange that we particularly love art that's a bit, how to say, emotionally fraught. There was the time my mother came to visit us in New York and what she really wanted to do was see a play about torture, a museum exhibit about slavery and some public art about starvation. So I was amused this afternoon when I got an email from her:

Just finished reading Christa Wolf's book which I mentioned, One Day A Year. If you want the whole (tragic) history of the world 1960-2000, this is the book for you!

And it was with only a bit of irony that I replied:

Sounds awesome! I'll take it out at SFU once the new semester starts, because then I'll get the full semester loan. I looked it up and it's 600+ pages.

I was chuckling over my mother's tendencies, when I looked in my purse and found the book I had recently recommended to her, Defying Dixie, a history of the precursors to the civil rights movement, most of which were Communist or other far-left movements and which have been completely erased by history. Fascinating book; not cheerful. I also recently made Winnifred and my mother come with me to a play by Dürrenmatt, the guy who famously said, "a story is not over until it has taken the worst possible turn." And both of them plus Future Minister of Discourse were dragged to the Tony Kushner adaptation of "The Dybbuk," which, with its theme of God's betrayal of those who love him the best, makes the original (which is about the betrayal we propagate when we forget old loved ones--a metaphor for first-world Jews' failure to save more Eastern European Jews from starvation during WWI) seem like a walk in the park.

Then I remembered that Writing Sister recently recommended Everything Must Change, a novel about "asceticism and devotion to a cause in a materialistic modern society." That sounds like a hoot too.

Ozzie Sister occasionally sends me reading material from Down Under; most memorably a great book about Holocaust survivors. So beautifully written, almost poetry. You could kill yourself it's so sad.

It seems we've all got the bug: hard art is our thing. Ah, well. Happy families are all alike, anyway.

A Freylekhn and/or Kushern Peysekh Aykh Ale

2008-04-16T20:20:00.000-07:00

The Canadian Jewish Review, April 1954

And neither is my kitchen. Nonetheless, I want to wish you all a freylekhn (joyous) and, if you choose, kushern (kosher) Passover, with plenty of horseradish and enough liberation for everyone.

Spring is Sprung

2008-04-12T21:36:00.000-07:00

The first really nice day of spring, so we decided to walk over to the Sun Yat Sen Gardens and walk around in the sunshine. That is indeed me in the distance below the magnolia flower. I can't remember the last time I just sat and looked at flowers.

We grabbed a cup of free tea from the art gallery in the gardens. Beside the tea urn they had a poster translating some of the advice given in a classical Chinese book on tea culture. I noticed the book suggested it was best to avoid sullen servants in order to fully enjoy your tea. I think I can safely say that I have never been troubled by sullen servants while drinking tea.

As often is the case in the gardens on a nice day, there was a bridal party taking pictures. They had a slew of photographers and numerous helpers, and were taking their time about it. I can only assume they didn't actually get married today, just got the pictures done, because there was no sense of hurry-up. In fact, they seemed to have been there for several hours already. Two of the young women on the groom's side were knitting when they weren't needed to keep the bride's train off the ground. It was easy to keep the sides of the family straight because the bride's side was Chinese and impeccable, and the groom's side was Caucasian and a bit hippyish. They shlepped from one part of the garden to another, as each photographer in turn decided what background he or she wanted for which grouping of people.

They also had a cooler with them, from which lunch appeared. One of the hippyish males in the party practiced his four-club juggling. After that, the bride re-applied her make-up and the whole thing started up again.

What is it?

2008-04-08T21:17:00.000-07:00

Seen at SFU. If you take the stairs under the Rotunda to the bus stop, this structure hangs above you. It appears to be--oh I don't know--unwound videotape? used to create a kind of suspension bridge from one side of the Rotunda to the other--about 10 meters. Christo-inspired installation art? A statement about the accelerated aging of "new media"? Bored/drunken end-of-semester undergrads on a prank?

A Unified Theory of Spinach

2008-04-02T22:02:00.000-07:00

Many of you have worried that it's been so long since I've posted about food. You were hoping this wasn't a sign that we've stopped eating. The truth is, we've been eating, but not as well as we should be. We've both been working too much and not spending time trying new foods and examining unusual fruits, or even just cooking the stuff we like to eat. Today, however, I am attempting to reverse the trend. I am cooking spinach.

Spinach has been observed to have the following properties:

spinach, organic spinach in particular, must be eaten or cooked within 48 hours of purchase
time spent cooking spinach breaks down to 20% making the recipe; 30% cleaning the spinach; and 50% wondering if you've actually got that spinach clean

These observations, coupled with the fact that spinach is one of my favourite vegetables, led me to the following determination:

when eating out, spinach must be ordered

That way, someone else has to worry about the cleanliness and timeliness of the spinach.

However, today all the factors came together. Our food was delivered yesterday, with spinach; and today is my day off, so I can cook it well before the sell-by date; and since it's a day off mid-week (not full of brunches and other social responsibilities the way weekends are), I can take a leisurely approach to the cleaning process. And voila: spinach soup.

Years ago Winnifred taught me her cook-by-colour concept. She finds it aesthetically pleasing on multiple levels to use all similar-coloured ingredients in a dish. So for this soup I used: virgin rosemary-infused olive oil; scallions; celery; spinach; and, it must be said, garlic, which I posit as the mood-ring of savory ingredients. The result was indeed a very green soup that looked very nice in some bone-white Chinese bowls, and tasted just dandy.

Enjoy the books, Marlon!

2008-03-24T08:53:00.000-07:00

Way back in December I got an email from Jen on the Moon, who is part of a librarian social group in New York. Their group decided to adopt a school in New Orleans to send books to. The slow pace of recovery in New Orleans is a huge point of frustration. So this group in New York set up an Amazon wish list; the teachers at A.P. Tureaud Elementary School added their desired books to the list, and then anyone who wanted to could choose a book from the list that would get sent to the school. They started with about 250 books on the list, but you know, you can't stop librarians from buying books. I bought three, and all the librarians I sent the message on to enthusiastically ordered books as well. 250 books is not that many, so as they got close to having no books left on their wish list, but there were still plenty of librarians with their wallets out, they added more stuff: classroom sets of dictionaries, books in Spanish, multiple copies of books by Black authors, books about jazz and New Orleans culture. One of the organizers of the New York group, a New Orleans native, went down to visit her family and took some pictures of the school and the area. It is wonderful to see the atmosphere the school has created in the middle of such devastation. (Here's an example of what the kids go through some days.)

The other day I got a lovely thank-you card from Marlon at Tureaud. I think it's Marlon. Could be Marion or Mylan. (I erased the last name for student privacy). On the front of the card an adult had written ''570 books and counting.''

For most libraries, our number one problem is shelf space. There are so many wonderful, useful, beloved books, and no library can hope to have enough shelf space for all of them. For libraries in New Orleans, there are two problems: a rather more severe than usual lack of shelf space (eight public libraries were completely destroyed), and a serious book shortage. We can't do much about the first problem, but we can get all over the second one. As an added bonus, I just found out that A.P. Tureaud himself, an important civil rights lawyer who won all the most important desegregation cases in Louisiana, worked as a library clerk while putting himself through school. It all comes back to libraries in the end.

Super Plus

2008-03-21T08:42:00.001-07:00

I am now entering the Super Plus phase of my life.

This realization came to me as I looked in a box of tampons I had bought. It was one of those boxes with various sizes of tampons, but the only ones I had used were Super Plus.

In my forties many things have turned from a trickle to a flood to a positive torrent. Dental appointments, changes in glasses prescriptions, and new grey hairs were once occasional irritants. Now they are regular preoccupations. Not that they are all negative! I am actually looking forward to having more grey hair since I have not been able to dye my hair for years. My hair is too dark to put a colour in the way it is. In younger days I double-bleached it with Loreal Super Blondissima to get it light enough to take a colour (it was still far from blonde). When I found out how bad the bleach was for my skin, I decided to wait for the grey. Now the day is almost here. I am thinking of alternating orange and green as my hair colours. Maybe the occasional red.

This led me to ponder the possibility that I could look on the entire post-40 Super Plus phenomenon as a re-branding opportunity. After all, Super and Plus are both positively-connoted words, as the business world knows.

Those aren't bifocals, those are Super Plus glasses.

The Latest in Machine Translation

2008-03-15T18:31:00.000-07:00

The subconscious is indeed a wonderful thing. My shabbes nap produced a very clear image of a voice translation machine. Now someone just has to build it.

Basically, it was about the size and shape of an Etch-a-sketch. The dials at the bottom and the push buttons on the left allowed you to choose input and output languages, using the menu on the right of the screen. Then you spoke into the built-in microphone at the bottom, and the text appeared on the left-hand side of the screen.

In my dream, my real-life Chinese-speaking colleague and I were arguing over the best way to produce Cantonese to Yiddish translation.

This Year at Marienbad

2008-03-08T19:50:00.000-08:00

Well, Reader, we have not been the best of correspondents thus far in March. And why not, you ask? We have been Very Busy. I have an end-of-March deadline for a project at work; and Winnifred's been doing a lot of singing with her various choirs and such.

But we decided it was necessary to Relax and Get Away and Get In Touch with the Healing Spirit Within and stuff like that. So here we are, relaxing.

That's Winnifred in one of the outdoor hot springs at Harrison, this morning when it was raining. Personally, I always prefer the hot tubs when it's raining or snowing or sleeting. That way your head is being cooled off and you don't have to get out as often to avoid over-relaxation.

Just to put that shot in context, the hotel is right under a mountain range. Behind the tubs in this picture, you can see the looming mountain, with the fog up above mingling with the steam rising from below.

This afternoon the rain cleared and we got dramatic sun-rimmed clouds (the sun was already behind the mountains). I took this sitting on the patio of our room, where I was drinking a chai latte and reading Out Stealing Horses.

I don't want to leave you with the impression that it's all beer and skittles, Reader. No, we have been maintaining a gruelling physical regimen the whole time we've been here. We have: walked out of our room, all the way across the patio, and into the hot tub (several times); to the lobby bar to buy chai lattes, and back; to the spa for a massage; and Winnifred went out to the end of the dock on the lake across the street, to take pictures.

Winnifred's pictures will shortly be available via the link on the right (where it says "Winnifred's Photo Albums"). Assuming we have enough energy left when we get home to upload them. This relaxing is serious work.

Aunt Rose, of Blessed Memory

2008-02-27T20:30:00.000-08:00

Aunt Rose would have turned 100 this month. She died last summer shortly before we left New York. We were lucky to have lived in the same city as she did for the last seven years of her life.

She was too sick for a 99th birthday party, but two years ago for her 98th we joined Aunt Rose, her daughter Sue, and a bunch of Sue's friends (when you're 98, your own friends are dead) at a Chinese restaurant near her old folks home in Battery Park City. I was very glad that I had managed to find her mother's ship-docking record from the Ellis Island records online a few weeks before her birthday. She had forbidden us to bring presents, but she wasn't going to turn down the reproduction of her mother's ship-docking record we brought along! In fact, just about every guest turned up with some sort of non-gift gift that Aunt Rose couldn't refuse.

One of the guests was professor of public health at a local college. She told Aunt Rose she would be reporting back to her gerontology class about having dinner with a 98-year-old. Perhaps Aunt Rose could give her some insight to share with her class about how she managed to live so long? Aunt Rose turned to the professor, gripped her wrist with icy cold fingers, looked deep into her eyes, and spit out, "Bad luck."

A little while later we were opening our fortune cookies. Aunt Rose couldn't read hers because the type was small and the light was low. She handed it to Sue to read out. Sue read out in stentorian tones, "You will live to be 100." Aunt Rose got a horrified look on her face. "It doesn't really say that, does it? You're just torturing me." Sue passed the fortune to me. I concurred. "That's what it says." We strung her along for a while. Finally, we acknowledged it wasn't true. What the fortune actually said was, "Never smell the inside of a hat." That is actually what it said, but by that time everyone thought we were just making things up.

That 98th birthday party was one of the most fun evenings I ever spent in New York.

Miss you, old lady.

Now Officially Cranky and Middle -Aged

2008-02-25T20:20:00.000-08:00

I had a genuine old fogey moment on my commute home this evening. I was actually prompted to forgo my Canadian "pretending not to hear what the person beside you is saying in a perfectly audible voice" practice.

Two physics graduate students were talking on the bus, sitting across the aisle from each other in the manner of young men who wish to avoid being thought a fairy by sitting beside--and possibly brushing legs with--another male. As I was sitting down beside one of them, the guy across the aisle said, "And you can't even go study with Schrieffer anymore because he's in jail."

The guy beside me said, "Yeah, I heard that. He got two years for vehicular manslaughter. That's awesome! Well, I mean, not for him."

"No, but it was great for the guy he killed," I said. I honestly don't know where it came from.

"Uh, no I guess it sucked for him too," the kid acknowledged. I pulled my book out of my bag and went back to "pretending not to hear what the person beside you is saying in a perfectly audible voice."

I think the guy across the aisle must have agreed with me, because he said, "Yeah, apparently he had a whole long record of being pulled over going 100 miles an hour, and he would say, 'I'm a Nobel Prize winner, I can do what I want'."

They went back to their topic about where to go after grad school, eventually settling on two post-docs as the most they would take before going into industry. I sighed inwardly. Both those young fellows, should they actually complete their doctorates, will accept not only as many post-docs as they can, but one-year 4-4 teaching contracts and anything else that comes their way. If Schrieffer weren't in jail, they still wouldn't be going to study with him, because his in-box would be full of fawning emails from graduate students at small Canadian universities.

I can't really blame them. They're just young and, uh, young. But I wish they'd either sit beside each other, so I'm not thrust in the middle of their conversations, or shut up. Remember that scene in Star Trek IV where they go back in time to more-or-less now, and Spock uses the Vulcan nerve pinch to render unconscious a guy playing loud music on a bus? No? Well, I think of it often.

Moon Falling Into Earth's Shadow

2008-02-20T22:28:00.001-08:00

This evening after dinner Winnifred insisted we go outside to look for the moon. I didn't know what she was on about, but it turned out there was a lunar eclipse underway. Boy was that ever pretty. Red and soft like a water colour. As we watched it got streakier and smaller. It was almost dissolving. We watched for a while from the front porch, and took some pictures. An hour later, when we left the house to go to the gym, the moon wasn't visible. An hour after that, we came out and it was back: whole, white, perfectly undisturbed. As if the whole thing had never happened.

Smoking and Mirrors

2008-02-17T14:52:00.000-08:00

The scene: a suburban grocery store, 9 pm on a Saturday evening

A man and woman, both 40-ish, are at the cashier, where a huge pile of food is being rung in. The man is at the end of the checkout counter piling full bags into a cart. He murmurs something about starting to take it out to the car; the woman nods distractedly. She is talking to the cashier--a young woman I estimate to be 16--about not being able to find liquid laundry soap, only powder. The cashier looks down the closest aisle, ducks her head a little. Spots it, and seeing the recognition on her face, the woman turns around, all but smacks herself on the forehead: oh gosh, right in front of me! Can't see a thing. She walks off to get some, grabs a few other things, comes back and piles them on the end of the conveyor belt, pulls out her wallet--the cashier is almost done--then looks around and says, "oh geez, he's probably out there having a smoke!" and trundles off to wrangle errant hubby back to help carry the rest of the groceries. The cashier finishes the job no more than five seconds later, looks around; no sign of woman or hubby. She waits--we wait--then it starts to seem too long. Something in her manner alerts the night manager, another young woman, this one probably all of 20. A whispered colloquy. The manager shows the cashier how to suspend a transaction, then goes out to the parking lot to look for the missing customers. The cashier rings in our five items; we pay. The manager returns, alone; more whispers. They are examining the amount on the bottom of the receipt.

On the way out to the car, Winnifred says, I bet the smoking ban has been a real boon to the grifter community. Ready-made excuse to step outside.

(No such excuse was available to Ryan and Tatum O'Neal, who, in 1973, when I was eight, introduced me to the concept of the con man.)

Currently Reading

2008-02-12T21:26:00.000-08:00

A few minutes into my commute home this evening I finish the story I'm reading (Avrom Reyzen's "Gvirishe Matse" from his collection Lider, Dertseylungen, Zikhroynes), and while I do have a book in my bag, it is one I've already read and am returning to the library on my way home.

But no worries! I always have my palm pilot with me to get me through just such inkless moments, and I have another 100 pages of Moby Dick to get through. I love reading big books on my tiny palm pilot. It makes me feel particularly geeky. Reach into my bag for my palm pilot... not where it usually is... not in the other pocket... left it at home, it seems. At least, my cell phone isn't there either, so presumably I left both of them charging on my desk. Just when I need it! How irritating. Fume my way through the rest of my commute. I mean, how can a person go 40 minutes without some text? I start looking over the shoulder of the student beside me: she is reading about speciation in a particular kind of conifer. It works for a few minutes, but she reads too slowly and never gets around to turning the page. Oh, I get it. She's not reading, she's studying. We are already at mid-terms. She is committing the speciation of conifers to memory. The guy across the aisle has a newspaper but I don't see a spare section I can ask for. He is going through it very systematically as well, not a good sign in terms of sharing.

I get off the bus at Main and Hastings and walk over to the Carnegie Library. I return my book and ask the fellow to check if my holds have come in. Two have! They are The Myth of Mars and Venus, yet another linguistics book, and, you probably won't believe this, Reader, but the other book is Duma Key by Stephen King. I have never read a Stephen King novel before but something about the reviews for this one made me curious. And the great thing is, if you read American reviews before the Canadian edition has come out, you can get on the hold list early on. So now I have this 600-page hardcover novel to haul around, just when I was congratulating myself on reading big books in a more convenient format. Still, my first Stephen King novel. I will keep you posted.

I know there is still one question in your mind, and I should answer it before I go to bed. Your question is, I assume, "How was the Reyzen story?" Well, I'm so glad you asked, because it was really interesting. It is set in a matzoh factory in, one assumes, Belarus. The workers are excited because the richest woman in town is coming to bake her matzohs at their factory. This is a tradition, for those who have the time and money, where you can actually go into the matzoh factory and take part in baking some matzohs so your Passover table will be graced with the fruits of your own labour. (Perhaps the Chocolate Lady can give us more input on this custom.) Anyway, the bigshot lady is coming to bake her matzohs, she's coming to bake her matzohs--they are all excited about the prospect of the tip she will leave them and the new silk kerchief they can buy for Passover... well, I won't give the whole story away, but suffice to say that Avrom Reyzen knew a thing or two about class struggle.

Gung Hay Fat Choy

2008-02-06T17:58:00.000-08:00

For the 1985 grand opening of a new grocery store in Chinatown, the advertising campaign took the form of a series of hand-drawn images of products, rather than photographs.

Cream Wafers, with the box decoration carefully copied.

Soy sauce, only 79 cents.

We found this delightful ad while sorting out the 1985 issues of the Chinese Times, a Vancouver Chinese-language daily that ran from 1915 to 1992. We're now up to 1987 in our scanning; by mid-year the whole run should be online.

A whole immigrant experience is summed up its pages, even if you can't read a word. The paper gets suddenly larger in 1979, when the community is able to afford more advertising. It stops just as suddenly in 1992, when the influx of Hong Kong immigrants brings with it rival newspapers. Over the years the publication wavers back and forth between left-to-right and right-to-left page order, hovering between worlds, between ways of speaking and organizing ideas, between there and here and between then and now. Advertising acquires more English words; headshots of women begin to appear; addresses move out and away from Chinatown, down the Fraser and Cambie corridors to begin settling middle-class Marpole.

Like most newspapers, there are masthead mistakes. Dates repeat or are different in the English and Chinese headers. English words are inserted by hand or on pasted-in typewritten strips. Pagination is suddenly reversed, with the pages of the middle section running backwards, then just as suddenly rights itself to run forward again. The same ad appears on the same page for months, years, decades; then drops off the page and is never seen again. Another ad runs twice in one issue, even twice on the same page. I imagine a cramped series of offices on the top floor of a Chinatown building; the frantic rush to get tomorrow's paper ready; the search for someone who can type in English but take direction in Chinese. I imagine a new, younger compositor putting a section together Western-style: the editor finds out but it's too late to remake the section. When the same guy goes on holiday for a week, none of the old-timers remember to change the English date on the paper.

The new Hong Kong newspapers can't compete with this. They are more professional, they have more pictures, they get the dates right. But can they tell these stories?

E. E. Cummings vs. Virginia Woolf

2008-02-02T10:46:00.000-08:00

I have been reading and enjoying a fun book of linguistics, with about the best title I've ever heard, Far From the Madding Gerund.

The book is a collection of entries from a multi-author blog I read religiously, Language Log. Even so, the book is useful because it brings together entries topically, and because I have not gone through the entire online archives to find entries of interest that were written before I started reading the blog. Of the book's two main authors, one tends more towards elegance and reasoned argument; the other towards bombast and apoplexy.* I find myself agreeing more often with the first, but wildly enjoying the writing of the second. Is that so wrong?

I bring this all up, reader, because an item from the book caught my eye as I was reading on the bus yesterday. Mr. Bombast objected to this poem by e. e. cummings (or E. E. Cummings--turns out either one is right):

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis

Because I'm not American I did not read this poem in school. Apparently it is widely taught; several web sites refer to it as Cummings' best-known poem. Although I read a bunch of Cummings as a teenager, I don't remember ever coming across this particular poem; more surprisingly, perhaps, I never had to help a student find criticism of it when I was a literature librarian in New York, where it may even be on the syllabus. So you see, I found it a pretty rude shock when I read it yesterday on the bus.

Now, Mr. Bombast disputes the opinion given in the first stanza. "When a grammarian kisses you, you stay kissed," he says. I have no means of evaluating this statement, but I am willing to take his word for it (and frankly, if either he or Mr. Elegant felt like kissing me, I wouldn't object--that's how much I like their book). What shocked me, by contrast, was the last few lines. "[L]ife's not a paragraph," Cummings claims. It isn't? As someone who finds books as vivid and meaningful as any other aspect of life, I can't seem to make this assertion make sense. I toss it back and forth in my head, but no, life still seems a lot like a paragraph. But there is worse to come: "And death i think is no parenthesis"--surely this is a veiled criticism of Virginia Woolf?

You see, in the second part of To the Lighthouse a number of events, both consequential and trivial, take place in tiny vignette flashbacks or flash forwards, marked by parentheses (or brackets in some editions). One such is this:

[Mr Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]

And as if that weren't bad enough, a few pages later one of the daughters, having been married parenthetically, also succumbs thus:

[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said, everything, they said, had promised so well.]

When I first read To the Lighthouse, which I only did well into my thirties because Shmu told me I had to, when I got to Mrs. Ramsay's death I actually gasped. When I got to Prue's I was all but done in. So there you have it. Life is a paragraph; death is a parenthesis. What was Cummings thinking?

_______

* He begins one entry: "I'd like to take a minute of Language Log time to slap [a certain New York Times science writer] real hard upside the head, if that's all right." What follows is more like what I'm used to calling, in scholarly situations, a serious spanking.

Snow Day

2008-01-29T11:02:00.001-08:00

Few things in this life are nicer than a Snow Day. There is absolutely no way to get up Burnaby Mountain today, so I am happily at home, still pyjama'd, looking out at a soft snowy world. Above, Winnifred's picture of the ice on the pond at the Sun Yat Sen Gardens, taken Sunday. Today, assuming that ice thickened up a bit, it is probably under six centimetres of snow. Below, some astonished-looking dead fish at a Chinatown market, gorgeous in their loopy rigidity.

I am using my day of freedom to do some planning for an upcoming conference; to write an overdue book review; to read; to blog; and to do the laundry. Time will also be made to drink hot cocoa and to do sudoku. The soothing sound of Someone Else scraping the accumulated ice from the front walk is just about enough to send me back to bed for a late-morning nap.

Re-Hemp

2008-01-19T18:19:00.000-08:00

Last month when I described a rather odd chocolate bar and its even odder product insert, I promised to follow up once the product had been both eaten and researched.

Just to refresh our memories, this was basically a large chocolate bar made of nothing but chocolate, hemp seeds and almonds. The strange thing about it was that it made a pretty amazing number of health and happiness claims, all of them in 10-point type on a full sheet of paper. That kind of thing, you will recall, lead me to think that it's more of a proselytizing effort than a food source. One of the claims was that one half to a complete chocolate bar should be eaten for breakfast, after which you probably won't need to eat again for quite a while, ergo you will lose weight.

Reader, we ate it. It was absolutely impossible for either of us--generally considered "healthy eaters"--to eat as much as a half of it at one sitting. Hemp seed, I should have remembered from many delicious meals at the table of the Chocolate Lady, sticks to the ribs. I have no doubt if you managed to eat a whole one of these babies you could do without food for much of the day. You might need to take a long nap also. We each ate, for example, a quarter of the chocolate bar before going to the gym, where we worked out for more than an hour, then came home and didn't eat another meal for several more hours. So the first claim, one made by implication, that it is very filling: check.

Also important to note: quite good tasting.

Will it help you lose weight? Well, it's 1220 calories, which is well more than my usual breakfast and lunch put together. It's possible it is filling enough, if you can choke the whole thing down, to make dinner virtually unnecessary. But it would be just as effective to simply make it a habit to eat a salad for dinner every night.

The second half of my research, into the potential cult-status of the manufacturer, has met further frustration. The business librarian at work helped me search a few databases of Canadian companies. Apparently privately-held companies are not really required to give much information about themselves to anyone. We did not find them listed. We tried to find information regarding their Nutritional Health Claims license number (that's the license that allows them to claim the product cures diabetes and celiac disease) but couldn't get even a mailing address. The company identification number, 299614 Alberta Ltd., gave me the only real insight. One of the things I found was this: www.cannabishealth.com/issue11/Issue%2011.pdf

Well, you don't have to click on that link to see what it's about. The comment left by a few of our readers made a joke about hemp. But perhaps they were all too right. Maybe it's not a cult, just a company with a second product line they'd rather keep out of the limelight. Which might mean the writing style, which I took for an excess of religious enthusiasm, could be nothing more than what happens when you let a stoner write your PR.

Splice "Which": Where You At?

2008-01-12T14:20:00.001-08:00

Among the ways I amused myself when we were living in Brooklyn was finding things I said that they couldn't understand, or identifying things they said which I found odd, amusing, or useful, and previously unknown to me.

Here are some of the things I found myself saying that elicited confusion in New York:

a change is as good as a rest
to tear a strip off of somebody
to go up one side of somebody and down the other
to twig to something/be twigged to something
Bob's your uncle
grotty
SOL
beater (old car)
pastry (pie crust)
take a boo
tickety-boo
heel (of bread)
laid on (provided by the host)

Honestly, I don't know how they get by without these guys.

Some things are simple idiolects but might still be recognizable to other Canadians. Whenever there's any kind of extreme weather, Winnifred and I say to each other, "the wind she blow on Lac St. Pierre," a reference to a poem memorized by generations of Canadian school children and still alive in the popular consciousness. Never mind the poem stopped being taught well before I went to school; and never mind that our "quote" doesn't actually appear in the poem. Somehow, you say, "the wind she blow on Lac St. Pierre" (with a fakey Quebecois accent) and it makes sense. "Gee that's a heck of a wind, eh?" Nobody thinks anything of it. Say it in Brooklyn, however, and people think you're strange.
On the opposite side of the equation are the terms and usages we found exotic. The famous "all right" pronounced with no consonants provided many hours of amusement as we attempted to mimic it. We took tips from strangers on the subway (or "train" as they say) and tried to elicit it from locals of our acquaintance. The New York-ism we have most fully adopted is what Winnifred calls the "splice which." Neither of us can remember if this is a term she heard or read somewhere, or if she made it up. There might be a better way to describe it. At any rate, it goes like this:

She's yelling at me for coming in after curfew, which that's not even fair because my brother does it all the time.

She's yelling at me for never cleaning my room, which it's none of her business anyway.

See how useful that is? It is so much more emphatic than a grammatical "which isn't even fair" would be, and much more urgent and immediate than starting a new sentence. They just splice it together with a "which" and Bob's your uncle. We use it all the time now. I could not say why our examples are both from the realm of teenage unhappiness, except perhaps that teenage distress is a natural breeding ground for linguistic novelty.

Then there are instances where the same phrase means one thing in Vancouver and something else in New York. In New York, "Where you at?" is a request for simple factual information. "Where are you right now?" Where as in Vancouver, "where are you at?" (we're a grammatical bunch) would mean, "what is your psychic/emotional state at the present time?" There are instances in popular culture when both meanings seem to be present, but in New York I only ever heard it used to mean literal geographic coordinates. So last night when Winnifred and I were meeting up with my mom for dinner, I called her as I got out of the train--pardon me, SkyTrain--and asked "Where you at?" and she told me she was just parking in front of my mom's house. Another Vancouverite would be likely to say, "oh okay, you know, hard day at work, etc."

Who Are You and What Have You Done With the Real Students?

2008-01-07T21:33:00.000-08:00

I just need to share that today was the first day of the semester and by noon the library was full--crowded, even--with students studying.

Borscht Of Unusual Size

2008-01-05T19:40:00.000-08:00

Normally we think of our ancestral homelands (those on both the Jewish and Goyish sides of the family) as the locus of large beets that might account for the amount of borscht I just made. But the problem was not in fact the beets, of which I had three (3) smallish ones. The problem was all the other stuff I kept thinking of to put in the pot that would make it good.

In general, I would say a borscht can be said to be any soup which starts with a beet and an onion. All else, you might say, is commentary. But you know, there has just been a lot of eating at my mom's; eating out; not eating; filling up on the obscene amount of chocolate the holidays brought us; etc.; and meanwhile the vegetables in the fridge were not getting any younger. So I thought, I'll make me a quick borscht to use up those beets; plus you can put carrots and potatoes in borscht and I've got some of those sitting around that might want eating.

Then I noticed some celery and green peppers. Then I remembered that some people think walnuts are the perfect thing to go with beets, in whatever form. Then I read on the internet where you can use grated apples as a borscht garnish. Then I thought I might as well try that roasted beet style instead of the regular boiled beet thing. And so on. It got bigger and bigger; it took half the night; anyone want some borscht?

I know I read somewhere about borscht being the food of love, Yiddishly speaking, but I just can't remember where I saw it. No doubt due to the colour and the variety of extravagant presentation styles it engenders.

Breathing Fire

2007-12-31T12:43:00.000-08:00

Fire-Breathing Dragon agreed to give us a command performance of some of her fire tricks. We gathered after dark on a gravel playing field. Here she is lighting her hoop.
This is like hula hooping with consequences. If you ever stop moving, that fire, um, burns you. So you don't. Fire-Breathing kept that thing spinning for about twenty minutes. She had also wet her hair thoroughly before she started, and her girlfriend stood to one side with a literal wet blanket.

Yes, that hoop is twirling around her neck.
Then she added the fire sticks.
She lights her hand on fire, lets it burn for a few seconds, then closes her hand to put it out. Or she runs the stick along her arm, dripping a little oil to burn right off her skin.
Doesn't it get hot? we asked. She didn't seem to think so, though you'll note she's not wearing much and it's December. Afterwards we tried playing with some of the toys while not in flames: I can keep the hoop going for about a minute. There were various other things on ropes you can swing in pretty patterns, and we tried skipping rope but while Aussie Sister could skip pretty well, and Writing Sister could skip a few times before catching the rope, I could not get in even one skip. I am comforting myself with the thought that Aussie Sister has taken circus classes.
We finished up with another demonstration: the fire fingers. Fire-Breathing Dragon referred to what you see above as "the iffy move" because it is heavily abdominal-dependent. She did in the end make it both down and up.

The New Experience Tour of Western Canada

2007-12-27T11:40:00.000-08:00

My sister from Australia is visiting with her New Boyfriend. New Boyfriend, who has never been out of Australia before, is learning a lot of new things.

Among other things, he has learned that he is completely incomprehensible. Last night he said something to my other sister, Writing Sister, who listened, nodding thoughtfully, then turned to Aussie Sister and said, "How does anyone know what he's saying?" She wasn't being rude, she just wanted to know.

Also last night we gave New Boyfriend the experience of Chinatown sweets. Our landlords, bless their wonderful hearts, gave us a package of ginseng candies. None of us can stand them except Winnifred, and she says, "They taste like dirt, but sweet." New Boyfriend gamely tried them, resulting in the facial expression above. That's him looking rather accusingly at Winnifred.

Other new experiences: eating a gooseberry; bagels and lox; going to the gym; and looking at really big mountains. (To Aussies, the Coast Mountains are really big).

Another new experience, one he isn't likely to want to repeat: communal grocery shopping. Since he is going to be cooking for us New Year's Eve, he wanted to pick up a few things at the supermarket, but the three family members accompanying him had conflicting advice and he wasn't allowed to buy some things he needed. Now the mere words "rock salt" starts up a huge debate. I wasn't there so I don't have all the details, but luckily we had some rock salt and could just sneak it to him when the others weren't looking. He's being a good sport about all this.

Dong Zhi 冬至: the Rebirth of Yang

2007-12-22T16:22:00.000-08:00

In most aspects I tend yin, really. Water, earth, and so on. But at this time of year, a little fire and air is not unwarranted. Thus, we spent the solstice evening at the Sun Yat-Sen Gardens, illuminated by an array of lighting devices and a variety of artistic impulses.

This has got to be the single most multi-cultural event I've been to in ten years. There was about an equal mixture of Chinese folks and Everyone Else. There was probably plenty of internal diversity among the Chinese people present, but I am not qualified to observe just how much. Among the non-Chinese-looking folks, there were many skin colours and languages present. I heard Spanish and Russian (lots of Russian). And I'm pretty sure we weren't the only Jewish people there: as we entered the garden walking into this eerie lantern-lit space, a soft lowing sounds drifted across the courtyard. Behind me, a child said, "Oh! They're playing the shofar!" It was not a shofar, though it did sound like one. We eventually made our way to where the fellow was playing the instrument:
That is a huge horn (the bottom of it rested on the ground) made of a single elderberry root. The mouthpiece was from a trumpet and the flare was a bamboo frame with papier mache, thoroughly varnished to withstand possible rain.
I thought it witty that a leafless tree was hung with leaf-decorated lanterns. As we walked on the winding paths we would come to an area with fish-shaped lanterns; then one with drum-shaped ones; then half-moons; and so on. There were also flower-shaped lanterns floating on the pond,
and in a side room there was a menagerie full of pigs, frogs and owls.

Another room and its courtyard had a display of art that used directed light and shadow. Some of it was made by the artist in residence, some by regular folks. I had no idea which was which. This was one of my faves: a burlap hanging which was embroidered, cutaway, and appliqued, hanging heavy and straight. The lamp focused on it spilled an enormous shadow on the sheer linen curtain behind it. When the linen curtain caught a breeze, the movement of the shadow changed your impression of the burlap original. It seemed to shimmer, even though it was standing still.
The art was arranged in such a way as to allow you to go up and touch it. Children were quite uninhibited about touching it, and not one injury was noted to either art or small fingers. Let this be a lesson to us. The stunning work below, which was about a meter square, was made out of the industrial mesh used to make shatter-proof glass and wooden toothpicks. There are thousands of toothpicks inserted into exact squares of the mesh to create this effect.
We bought tea and hot chocolate at various points to ward off the cold, and also ducked into the enclosed rooms to warm up, like one where you could have your name calligraphied. We ended up in the gift shop, watching a little Russian girl (whom we had spied earlier fingering the art) picking out a parasol. We went on to dinner at Foo's Ho Ho, one of only a few remnants of my childhood Chinatown.
Winnifred's full web album of solstice pics (you knew these were her pics, I assume) is here; her web album of the Sun Yat-Sen Gardens at other times is here.

Products of the Religious Life

2007-12-19T20:40:00.000-08:00

No, I have not turned spiritual. I have not decided to be more receptive to either of my ancestral religions nor to join a cult. But I have become interested in the tradition of consumer products coming out of cloistered religious orders.

Someone gave us this rather strange gift, you see. I believe the gift-giver's relationship to this product is entirely serendipitous: she saw it, thought it sounded unique and intriguing, and bought a bunch to give various friends. And like her, I am intrigued. This product promises nutrition, weight loss, the reversal of a variety of middle-age-associated health problems, increased energy, digestive succor, and a sense of purpose in life. Here's the come-on on the outside of the package:

Those who eat at least half, but not more than one unit [of the product] for breakfast will be able to avoid lunch, restrict themselves to a vegetable salad with insignificant dressing in the evening and lose weight.

(Yes, Winnifred said. If I ate chocolate cake for breakfast, then fasted for nine days, I would lose weight too.)

This product, it seems, is made with hemp. Now, I am all for hemp seeds. I do believe they are a great protein option for people who don't eat red meat, and for people with allergies to more common sources of protein. I once met a vegetarian with an allergy to all nuts, beans, lentils, and most everything else that contains a complete protein. I wish I still knew her and could turn her on to hemp. But something about the packaging and typography, not to mention the expansive promises, made me think something else was going on; something non-scientific and possibly a bit fanatical.

Then I opened the package. Here is what I consider virtually proof positive:

The text of this flyer is reproduced here, but you don't need to read it to get my point. In my life as a shopper, I have frequently noted that products with too much verbiage--products that seem to not know when to shut up--are pretty much invariably tied to a strange religious way of life. There is, for example Dr. Bronner's soap products.

These bottles mingle existential messages ("Absolute cleanliness is Godliness! Who else but God gave man Love that can spark mere dust to life! Poetry, uniting All-One! All brave! All life! Who else but God! Listen Children Eternal Father Eternally One!") with more mundane advice about the use of the product ("Dilute! Dilute! Okay?"). Sad to say, while the screed-covered bottles remain for the original "magic soap" product line, new products are housed in tastefully simple wrappers. Dr. Bronner's family still owns the company, but none of them inherited his flair for ecstatic prose.

Then there is the Biblically-inspired bread. I am not kidding. We found this sprouted-wheat bread in Brooklyn and quite liked it. One day I noticed that the back of the package was covered with tiny print. I had thought is was a sort of patterned color, but it turned out the patterns was hundreds of words. Though not nearly as interesting as Dr. Bronner, it has a certain fervor:

Ezekiel 4:9® Sprouted Grain Bread is inspired by the Holy Scripture verse: "Take also unto thee Wheat, and Barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and Spelt, and put them in one vessel, and make bread of it..."Ez 4:9 We discovered when these six grains and legumes are sprouted and combined, an amazing thing happens. A complete protein is created that closely parallels the protein found in milk and eggs. In fact, the protein quality is so high, that it is 84.3% as efficient as the highest recognized source of protein, containing all 9 essential amino acids. There are 18 amino acids present in this unique bread - from all vegetable sources - naturally balanced in nature.

[As a complete aside, I believe their recipe might be informed by a mistranslation. In my JPS Bible, the verse says "emmer" where they have "spelt." On the other hand, emmer is mighty hard to find, so the translation might be loose for practical purposes.]

Of course, there is a long and distinguished history of religious communities producing excellent items. In Canada we have the Oka cheese of the Trappist monks, traditionally used in tortiere, a pork pie (a treyf fun treyfland, we might say in Yiddish). And monasteries are famed for wine and beer. But while the orders selling these items may have wished that the purchasers would stick around for vespers and become better Catholics or drop something in the donation jar, there was absolutely nothing about the product itself that forced a sermon on consumers. There is just something about that urgency--that sense that they must impart these important life lessons and not allow you to wallow in ignorance for one moment longer than necessary--that they are seizing every opportunity to teach the unenlightened what they have only discovered through a long and possibly tortured road which others need not endure--which speaks to me of a proselytizing earnestness.

So, when I opened that hemp chocolate bar package (that's all it is, really), and that page of single-spaced type accordioned out in front of me, I thought, "cult." Googling up the company, I found lots of product information; several retail operations willing to send the chocolate bars to you; and this:

Rocky Mountain Grain Products (299614 Alberta Ltd) is a small Alberta company with about twenty employees situated in an irrigated, food producing area of rural Alberta. For the past thirty years we have worked with other local farmers to produce specialty crops on irrigated land. We have also designed, fabricated, installed and maintained the machines necessary to prepare a large variety of agricultural products for various markets.

This is far from proof of anything. But the evasiveness of this information (which is not in the package anywhere, their willingness to give lots of unsolicited health advice notwithstanding) somehow only convinces me further. A food-producing area of rural Alberta would be, let's see, anywhere in about 350,000 square kilometers? Twenty employees, thirty year old company, no web site? Hmm.

I promise to report further on the hemp chocolate bar (it's product name is "More Than a Square Meal"--I swear I could not make this stuff up), both after we've been brave enough to eat it and after I have consulted the business librarian at work about finding more company information. I will try eating at least half, but not more than one, unit for breakfast and see what happens.

Numerology of Many Lands

2007-12-17T19:31:00.000-08:00

This is a bad picture (sorry) of the part of our whiteboard at work where we post the numerals in all the languages we're working in. Numerals are really useful when you're working with newspapers: dates and pages can be ascertained and strange collocations corrected. When we work off of microfilm we come across problems caused by microfilming newspapers Western-style (left-to-right) when they were produced in another sequence (right-to-left, top-to-bottom).

Right under the familiar numbers there are the Chinese numbers up to twelve. As it happens, there is a second kind of number used for fancy. Holidays and other occasions requiring gussying up get a more elaborate number. Those are the second line. My student helper is having trouble remembering them, so as we come across them he writes them up. We're missing three to nine.

Beneath that I wrote the Hebrew numbers just so I could feel useful. Of course I had to write them left to right, to avoid confusion, although if the microfilm issue teaches us anything it's that there can always be unforeseen results of compromises that attempt to simplify language diversity.

Then we have the Arabic numerals. You know, I always thought our numbers were Arabic numerals. I mentioned this to the Arabic-reading staff person who I asked to help me, and she seemed bewildered by this idea. Since they bear no resemblance to each other, she can't imagine why we would call our numbers "Arabic." (But I did find this explanation for how they evolved from actual Arabic).

What makes our work a little more confusing is that the language of the newspapers we're digitizing is not Arabic but Urdu, a South Asian language written in the Arabic alphabet. There are apparently some numbers which are not written quite the same in Urdu, or not always, or perhaps they used to be different but now are standardized, or something of that nature. Googling up "Urdu numbers" did not give us the characters we were finding on the newspapers. Consultation with the unicode character set was more helpful: there are two Arabic number sequences, one called "Arabic" and the other called "Arabic-Indic". Even then, that number two is pretty strange. The only thing I can imagine, after checking my sources, is that it's a holdover from using the letter ba' (the second letter of the alphabet) for the number two. This was apparently an earlier numbering system, much like the Hebrew one. In Arabic the ba' points the opposite way the bet does in Hebrew, and could conceivably have led to that c-shaped number two. The stray characters below the line of Arabic numerals are the variations we've found for those numbers. Could it be that Urdu, too, has different numbers for special occasions?

As I contemplated this plethora of numbering systems, I found myself thinking about Passover. I could not figure this out as we are barely out of Hannukah and it is still a good while to go before the season of our liberation. Then I caught myself humming "Ekhad Mi Yodea," no doubt some sort of subconscious result of staring at the Hebrew numbers. Then I started thinking about "Green Grow the Rushes, O," which might itself be related to a Medieval Hebrew song. This led, naturally enough, to trying to remember the verses of "Red Fly the Banners, O" which I learned at the knees of my Communist grandparents. Of the web versions I could find, this one seems closest to what I recall (up to twelve: we were too polite to sing the anti-Trotskyist verses). However, for two we sang "two, two, the opposites, interpentrating, o" as they have here.

And that brought me back to the ba' and the bet, contraposed, both meaning "two." Opposites, interpenetrating.

Seasonal Comestibles

2007-12-11T21:13:00.001-08:00

For a couple of atheists, we somehow end up eating a lot of latkes and singing a lot of hymns during the ole festival of lights. And the season is far from over, as we move on to the dominant cultural paradigm and a surfeit of chocolate, gingerbread and fruit cake. In cases such as these, good vegetables are crucial for maintaining what I call gezunt des kishkas.

This week brought us two carnival squash, with which Winnifred will make a pumpkin kibbeh; and an unusual orange kabocha squash; plus some carrots the size of my arm. I'm not kidding: that bunch of four carrots is as long as my forearm and a bit thicker around. I think part of the fun of getting food delivered is being surprised by how pretty it is when you pull it out of the box. There's something sexy yet refined about the lobes on the carnival squash. The Chocolate Lady calls kabocha the Greta Garbo of squash; I might be tempted to nominate carnival squash as the Katharine Hepburn of squash.

Big Ones, Small Ones, Some as Big as Your Head

2007-12-01T12:03:00.000-08:00

As you know, Reader, I am not religiously inclined, but there are moments when I feel like breaking into a shehekhianu. While far from the first time I have eaten fresh coconut, we recently opened one for the first time.

Research indicated that the first thing to do was to hammer a Phillips screwdriver into at least two of the three soft germination pores found clustered together on one end of the coconut. That way, you can pour the coconut water out of the coconut before opening it. This prevents either losing the fragrant water or getting wet. You need two holes so the air can go in one while you're pouring out the other. There was a lot more liquid in there than you would have thought.

I had always thought this would be the coconut milk, but it turns out to be a completely clear, sweetly but mildly flavoured juice. Coconut milk has to be made by grating and expressing the moisture from the flesh. We did not attempt this.

Once you've got the liquid out, my source told me to gently tap on the seam that runs all the way around the coconut, using the back of a large knife. I tried tapping gently all the way around a few times, then tried tapping not so gently: I could not perceive any loosening or give in the husk.

I turned matters over to Winnifred, who gave the thing three good whacks.

There you have it. Mind you, she started prying it too soon, not realizing that it would open part of the way and then clamp shut on her finger.

I was absolutely amazed at how much flesh turned out to be in there. Each of those quarters looked like I thought a half would look.

This is about one quarter grated. Now I love coconut, but how exactly is one to use that amount of fresh coconut in a week, the amount of time it takes to go off? To the cookbooks! First, we used the coconut water in a fish stew. We used some of the flesh in a stuffed squash. Then Winnifred noticed that we had quite a few chum salmon steaks in the freezer. Chum is not tender or flavourful enough to use in any of our regular salmon recipes. Normally we don't even buy chum, which is primarily used for animal feed. But it has been a tough year for the salmon fishery and chum is about all that's coming in. Winnifred thought a Thai prawn recipe might work as chum fish fingers, both adding flavour and making use of its slight toughness.

You dip the salmon slices in egg, then in flour, then back in egg, then in grated coconut. Stick it in a hot oven for 15 minutes. Could this be easier? It was also pretty good. We ate them over salad.

We both came away with injuries. That's Winnifred's finger where she got a blood blister from the coconut slamming shut on her. My thumb was too gory to blog unbandaged. I was using a potato peeler to take the remains of the husk off the flesh, and managed to gouge a big piece out of my thumbnail. The coconut was unharmed.

This was a good learning experience, and I think next time SPUD sends us a coconut I will try making a stuffed coconut I read about. It's called porivilanga. In that recipe, you open one of the germination spores as wide as you can, and funnel in some nuts, raisins and sugar. You close up the hole with a piece of wood and then you put the whole thing in a fire (not on: in) for thirty minutes. Okay, there are some logistics to work out, but a girl can dream.

Naiad Nymph, Shapeshifter, Possible Lesbian

2007-11-25T20:53:00.001-08:00

You are going to think we do nothing but shop for big-ticket items. That's not true. We spend most days not spending a cent. I take public transportation to work, carrying a packed lunch. Winnifred works at home and doesn't even buy a bus pass. We're just as abstemious as all get out.

Well. So we bought a car. Yes, a car. I know, that was sudden. We've been driving my sister's car but she got back from Wales and, uh, wanted her car. We thought we'd start the car search and take a few weeks to find something. But you know, when it's bashert it's bashert. No point fighting it. We mentioned that we were going to start looking for a car to Winnifred's dad, who went through the newspaper that same day and told us which one to buy. Winnifred looked it up on the internet and found out that this model year there were problems with some transmissions. She took it to John, our old mechanic from before we moved away seven years ago, who carefully spread some transmission fluid on his arm, then licked it. "Taste's good," he said. Apparently that's how you test for transmission problems.

So John gave his blessing, in his own way. John's a phlegmatic sort of fellow, and what he actually said was, "It's not a bad car." He did tell us to replace the struts. The fellow selling the car liked Winnifred so much he talked the price down, and the rest is history. And here she is.

We call her Daphne. I could not say why we are on a Greek mythology female name kick. We just are. I think of Daphne as a sweet, old-fashioned name. It turns out it peaked in popularity in the 1970s, did well in the 80s and 90s, dipped at the beginning of the century but has rebounded again. It was the 533rd most popular girl's name for babies born in the United States in 2003, ranking well behind another old-fashioned girl's name, Faith (52nd most popular in 2003). If we really wanted an old-fashioned name, we should have called her Winnifred, which hasn't been in the top 1,000 since the 1930s. How do I know all this you ask? Why, the Baby Name Wizard, of course.

A few days after we bought her, we noticed a bird had left us an artwork on the hood.

That bird has been eating late-season berries, if I'm not mistaken. We'll leave it there looking pretty until it doesn't.

Moby Dick and the Vegetarian

2007-11-19T21:35:00.001-08:00

Chapter 65: The Whale as a Dish

It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively
unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with
abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the
consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly
murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light.  But no
doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a
murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by
oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if
any murderer does.  Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see
the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead
quadrupeds.  Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's
jaw?  Cannibals? who is not a cannibal?  I tell you it will be more
tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his
cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that
provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee,
civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground
and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.

Indeed, who among us is not a cannibal? I have been reading Moby Dick far too slowly--other books keep intervening--but that is not to say I'm not loving it. It is completely mad, but wonderfully so. I am grateful to Project Gutenberg that has made not one, not two, but three versions of Moby Dick available as plain text, so that I can read it on my palm pilot on the bus. It also makes it mighty easy for blogging.

There are a number of places in Moby Dick where I have been struck by the modern seeming sensibility, wrapped up in elaborate 19th century prose. Certainly the opinion above would not be out of place in an East Vancouver coffee shop, phrased slightly differently. It is also the only time I have seen unctuous used in its literal sense. My that's a nice word, with all those u's.

Unemployed Philosophers

2007-11-17T08:44:00.000-08:00

When I began planning my class this summer, many an experienced teacher advised me to show movies and get in speakers. I have taken this advice to heart. So far the librarians who have spoken to the class have each received a charming children's book by a local author who is available for public appearances; and a small token such as chocolate or coffee. This week I have four librarians coming to have a panel discussion. I was in the university bookstore looking for a little gift for each of them and found these:

They are Great Writer finger puppet/fridge magnets. Above we have the team of Dickens and Dickinson, a pairing which honestly had never suggested itself to me. They tend to couple up because of the magnets in their hair. Here we see Jane Austen and Sappho making like conjoined twins, in defiance of the space/time continuum:

I will feel bad separating them when I give them away. I am particularly fond of Sappho with her lyre.

I do seriously hope my guests don't find these gifts strange, or not in a bad way. I can count on the children's librarian among them at least.

I found out from looking up the web site of the Unemployed Philosopher's Guild (which makes these little cuties) that they have a Sholem Aleichem figure, which has now turned into the must-have Hanukkah gift of the season. They also sell, and I'm not making this up, Freudian Slippers. What's more they're headquartered in Brooklyn, and so when I inevitably order more than I really should, their products will literally come from Brooklyn to Vancouver.

Broken in Many Places

2007-11-11T12:49:00.000-08:00

One of the many useful lessons my mother taught me in childhood was to beware of places offering "Canadian and Chinese Food." What you look for is Chinese food alone, she said. If they're offering Canadian and Chinese, they don't really know how to make either. Thus we have not eaten in Smile Restaurant.

This week was marked by a number of situations in which I wished I had such clear instructions. My student M. was admitted to hospital this week with a serious situation that we thought might affect her ability to complete coursework and graduate in December. Thankfully, that has not happened and she is back home now and able to pick up where she left off, having only missed one week of school. At the same time, an enormous, expensive piece of equipment was returned to my workplace after repair, and didn't work. The technicians with whom we have a service contract for this item are in Maryland and Germany. They did not seem concerned because the piece worked when they had it. They kept offering none-too-helpful advice such as, "It sounds like the computer you've got it attached to has a memory problem." In the end it turned out to be two separate problems, one of them a hardware issue with the very piece they had sent us, and our techies diagnosed and fixed both problems, no thanks to the vendor. Thursday night, when both situations were still up in the air, I had the following dream.

My right foot wasn't working properly and I could see the cables poking through the skin, so I called the right-foot technician. He came and looked at it and assured me that, although the problem was manifesting in the foot, it was actually a knock-on effect related to a problem emanating from my leg. He advised me to call the right-leg technician. I called the right-leg technician, but his waiting list was so long that I was referred on to right-side administration. They suggested that the right-foot technician probably should be called back for further testing and consultation, and to re-wire the cables while I waited for the right-leg technician to have an opening. At this point I woke up in a cold sweat.

I have to be grateful I work in a place where the technical staff will work doggedly at fixing a problem until they get it fixed--two and a half days, as it turned out--and where nobody acts as if you're the problem when it's your equipment that dies. "There are only two kinds of computers," one of our IT guys told me: "Those that are broken, and those that are going to break." I never heard this before but when I think back to my lifetime of computer ownership and workplace use, it is literally true. As for my student M., well, next time the cables begin showing through her right foot I will advise her to find a holistic technician who looks at the whole cyborg.

Weather and Transportation

2007-11-05T19:41:00.000-08:00

This morning the world was wrapped in a beauteous, soft-focus fog. Usually Vancouver fog is clammy and bone-chilling, but today it was rather warm. Those car headlights are not even half a block away; the houses across the street were noticeably fuzzy. This is not the thickest fog I've seen in Vancouver. I remember a ten-day fog that descended on the city many years ago, during which you could not see the house next door. You couldn't go to work; the city buses couldn't run. It was serene and dignified, and when it seemed to be letting up a bit you ran out to buy some more milk, then hunkered down for further welcome, enforced rest.

Well, today's fog didn't last but I couldn't give you details because on my bus up the mountain to work we rose suddenly above the cloudline and were in a perfect, sunny, cold fall morning. For the rest of the day, whenever I looked out the window I could see another cloud lifting off the city below, rising to dissolve against the blue mountains across the harbour. There is fog in Brooklyn; but there isn't this fog. However, Brooklyn has great lightning storms, which B.C. generally does not.

Some other differences:

people here wait on the sidewalk to cross the street. If you step down into the gutter to prepare for a dash across the street, you are endangering yourself and others. The drivers will screech to a halt, in the belief that you are beginning your advance across the street.
on the SkyTrain, people are not reluctant to take the inside seat.
in Vancouver, you thank your bus driver.

I was actually sure I had heard people in Brooklyn thank their bus drivers; but Winnifred assures me I had just heard us thank our bus drivers while we were in Brooklyn. Apparently it's a B.C. habit I never kicked. Thank God there's one thing I don't have to relearn.

Late Afternoon Light

2007-11-01T10:54:00.000-07:00

I suppose it's partly a result of my work schedule: I'm working (remotely) in New York, so I knock off for the day around three. I'm sure I'm not the first to notice how lovely the late afternoon light is, but I just noticed how many of my pictures are taken then. One of the wonders of shooting digital that the camera records the time of day you took the photograph. I just took a look at my digital photo collection: almost all of them were taken between 3 and 6 in the afternoon.

I've put up a couple of web albums so you can see what I mean.

Hallowe'en in the Library

2007-10-31T21:52:00.001-07:00

My student employees come prepared. Hallowe'en fell on a work day, so they came with costumes that could easily be stuck on for running around the library on their break scaring their friends. I had not thought about the fact that I was wearing a highly-appropriate black sweater--the sleeves are narrow but bell out a la Morticia--but the students did and thoughtfully suggested I borrow the white wig and witch's hat for my own transformation. Which lasted just long enough to take the picture.

You gotta love a workplace where the Associate University Librarian carves a pumpkin for the office. I was impressed by the Christmas lights he strung through it--they blinked and thus made a good imitation of a candle, but respect safety rules about open flames. I don't know who brought in the TimBits, but I managed to down quite a few of them while making photocopies, so thanks!

Meet Penelope, Hermione's Little Sister

2007-10-27T15:25:00.000-07:00

"Little" in the sense of "younger," that is.

You remember Hermione, of course. Hermione is actively involved in the maintenance of this blog, though she prefers to keep a low profile. Well, we are proud to inform you that this afternoon, Hermione acquired a sister.

It went like this. I was insomniac last night, and in order to keep from waking Winnifred, I propped myself up in the armchair in the living room (where we also have the office). I was trying to read but found myself disturbed by a quite insistent noise coming out of Winnifred's computer. This morning, when Winnifred emerged, pink and well-rested, from the bedroom, I mentioned the strange noise to her. She investigated. It turned out that noise was the death-rattle. Her computer was beyond help.

I caught a quick nap while Winnifred performed last rites over the dead computer. When I got up, we went out to look at computers available for adoption. We pretty quickly settled on Penelope. I mean, she was just so perfectly proportioned. Now we have a full weekend ahead of us while Win loads her up; and after that we can expect several weeks of tinkering before it all dies down.

So Nice, I'm Blogging It Twice

2007-10-24T21:39:00.000-07:00

I just posted this picture to my class blog, but I had to share it with everyone, absolutely everyone, who might even care a little about libraries. This evening Mitch Freedman came to speak at VPL--not, as originally planned, to the VPL Board, which cancelled its meeting, but to a crowd of local library workers. Because VPL has just settled the first strike in its history, after almost 13 weeks, with a less-than-satisfactory solution for the mainly-female workforce, the union brought in Mitch to talk about why pay equity matters.

Mitch has been a tireless advocate for better wages for library workers. As a man in management that is, let's just say, unusual. And he believes that eventually we will be valued for what we do, and that made us all feel a lot better. That's me, Mitch, and my students Andrea and Jon in the picture. LIBR 576 rocks.

SPUD is Ruining My Life

2007-10-20T18:19:00.000-07:00

There was a time when I thought certain fruits and vegetables really should be eaten locally-grown and organic, when possible. Tomatoes, I thought, were a very different animal when vine-ripened, and a very fresh peach had no relationship to one shipped in from across the continent out of season. Other things, in this theory, were not so important to buy organic. Who can tell the difference in a potato or lettuce?

Now I know better. With SPUD, everything is organic, and most things are local. Today, while cooking a soup, I cut up an onion, an eye-watering but sweet, tender onion. Then I added some of the gingeriest ginger: the entire kitchen smelled of ginger. I put in some lime zest and felt my nose fill up with a subtle citrus completely unlike your standard lime. Finally, the roasted acorn squash and garlic. It was hard to put them in the soup instead of my mouth. Good lord, I realized, everything is better organic. I have never in my life liked celery, until I tried the organic, local celery from SPUD. They are ruining me for regular food.

I saw an incredible vegetable in Chinatown. I couldn't tell if it was lettuce or cabbage; and the tiny, feathery fins on the leaves made me think of arranging it on a platter under fish. I didn't buy it. It's not organic.

The Jones Apophthegm

2007-10-15T19:33:00.000-07:00

I feel the need to claim credit for the development of a new axiom that will come in handy for librarians and others who work in social services and non-profit agencies. I was writing my lecture for last week's class, using as a basis many of the students' observations of library governance. (They had all been to board meetings a few weeks earlier). Their descriptions of the various issues facing those brave citizens who sit on library boards swirled around in my mind for a few days, till finally I was able to sum up the situation this way:
On the day someone offers you $2.2 million to construct a building, what you will actually be in need of is $2.2 million in operating funds.

You see, a local library was made a gift of a very large amount of money to refurbish some space. But they are not allowed to use the money for running the space one it's built. I always wonder how people who make these kinds of bequests think the library is supposed to operate without operating funds. Apparently, people with money to donate to libraries have a list in their heads of things they like to underwrite, which in order of preference are:

Buildings
Collections
Computers
Classes
Operations

(Digital initiatives, I should point out, are probably the very easiest to fund, but for such ridiculously short periods of time that it hardly counts.)

I have no data for this list, by the way. Let's call it "observation." But it seems to me donors prefer things they can put their names on, whether a brass plaque or a bookplate. And one of my students pointed out that things that are material and lasting seem to rise to the top of the list too, whereas library work is by its nature ephemeral. What's a library to do? It's hard to turn down that much cash. But when someone offers you $2.2. million, do try to convince them that, having built the building, it would be good if it had heat, lights, staff, and were kept in reasonable nick. This is one of those situations where a library board member's life can't be easy.

The whole issue reminds me of the time some years ago when I had six student employees working for me--I believe they were all in that liminal summer between high school and college--and I came in one day looking, I suppose, rather downcast. One young man asked me if everything was okay.

"Yes," I said, "just take my advice and never sit on a Board."

He looked concerned. "Did you get a splinter?" he asked.

Unlimited Growth Increases the Divide

2007-10-12T19:16:00.000-07:00

That's what the sign on the building in the foreground says. That's BC Hydro looming over it in the next block. In the years we've been gone, there has been a fair bit of unlimited growth, all right, and its ugly stepchild, unlimited demolition. Note that the building in the foreground is surrounded by ... well, empty lots.

I took this picture on a long walk from Strathcona to the Vancouver Community Net offices on Dunsmuir, so I walked past this scene on my way to this scene on the next block:

the tranquil oasis that's the public space in front of that same BC Hydro building. "Unlimited growth increases the divide" is actually art-speak for "the contraditions are sharpening & deepening."

Fast Acting Essence of Kangaroo

2007-10-05T19:19:00.001-07:00

My mind is reeling from trying to figure out what "essence of kangaroo" might be (some sort of hormonal derivative?) and also imagining the situation in which it entered traditional Chinese medicine as a remedy for sexual problems. There are no kangaroos in China. Of course it also made me think of my sister down under, who reports having eaten kangaroo on occasion.

2007-10-01T19:28:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I joined Facebook. I had actually been resisting this because I spend so much of my personal time blogging, maintaining a web site, another web site, and another web site, in addition to the work time I spend populating online content and contributing to my class blog; so I thought, give this one a miss, Faith. Be sensible.

It's all Juliet's fault, really. Her and the Littwomen. The social pressure was unbearable. I caved. And what did I discover? That I have 32 "friends." That I can have a virtual garden that requires no care at all because my friends do all the gardening. That people I haven't seen in ten years are happy to send me messages via Facebook when I'm quite sure an email wouldn't raise much of a response. (Is it the picture in my profile? Does it remind them that they like me?)

And then today on my igoogle home page, the feed from wikihow was "How to Quit Facebook." I felt strangely attacked. But I just joined! I can't quit yet! Not until I've given myself carpal tunnel and spent god-knows-how-many hours during the meat of the semester avoiding marking!

We'll see how this all works out. I'll keep you posted. Juliet will be called to account if my right arm falls off.

Unrelated picture, above, by you know who. Hens and chicks courtesy Shirley and Lachlan, who are also on Facebook. Damn it, did everyone jump on this bandwagon before me?

Well That Explains It

2007-09-28T18:40:00.001-07:00

Walking at SFU the other day, I passed two professorial types deep in conversation. One was saying to the other, "You mean to say, 60% of the lawyers in the world are in the U.S.?"

I did not overhear the answer, nor have I checked this factoid independently, but if true it would explain a lot.

Picture of fish for sale in Chinatown, above, by Winnifred.

Unintentional Art Installation

2007-09-24T18:48:00.001-07:00

Guess we overloaded the sheet-fed scanner.

You see, students with visual impairments are entitled to an "accessible PDF" of their textbooks. This allows those with some vision to blow them up huge on a computer screen, as well as to have the computer read it to them out loud. This is actually one of the few legal uses of reformatting of in-copyright works that we are allowed under Canadian law. The problem is, with technical or scientific textbooks, such as this precalculus tome, which has a lot of symbols and formulae, the OCR software doesn't know how to interpret them. Adding to the problem is the use of coloured ink to separate parts of the equation from others. This is probably a great teaching strategy for fully-sighted students, but really bites when you've got a visually impaired student struggling to read the symbols in the first place. Textbook publishers: could you put a sock in the coloured ink thing?

Anyway, we were trying today to figure out some alternative scanning practices that might make the formulae machine-readable. The textbook had already been sliced to allow us to sheet-feed it through the scanner; later it gets rebound in spiral for the student as a back-up to the electronic version. But the student's got a test in a few weeks so we really had to get this to her soon. We stuck the whole thing in the sheet feeder and set it up to capture high-res, high-contrast colour scans. An hour later when I emerged from my office, I saw what you're seeing above in the scanner's out-tray. I guess when the tray gets full the rest of the sheets bump into each other, creating the cornucopia effect. It was so beautiful I left it there to enjoy. Tomorrow some poor student employee is going to get stuck re-ordering those pages.

Meteorological Dissonance

2007-09-21T19:19:00.000-07:00

Thursday I had my first real taste of the Burnaby Mountain weather syndrome. You're going along thinking you know what the weather is, then you get exactly half way up the mountain and you're inside a cloud. It was very wet and clammy at the top of the hill.

Unfortunately, Thursday was also the annual Terry Fox Run (although most people walked). This is a very worthy event raising money for cancer. Terry Fox came from nearby Port Coquitlam and attended SFU. I stepped out of the library to run an errand on the other end of campus, and found a hundred adorable children singing to about 1,000 people who were signed up to run. You couldn't actually hear the kids over the canned music pouring from the sound system, but they sure were cute. I'm guessing they came from Terry Fox's old elementary school.

It turns out that rain is the B.C. analog for "mad dogs and Englishmen." British Columbians go running in the pouring rain, yes, carrying umbrellas when necessary.

They were urged on their way by a bagpiper, an SFU tradition. There he is by the statue of Terry Fox. SFU has had the world champion bagpipe team for as long as anyone can remember.

The statue of Terry Fox isn't the only art on campus. A short distance away I came across this enormous avocado, which put me in mind of the Geostationary Banana Over Texas, which, sadly, appears to have been stalled for about a year.

Power Substation

2007-09-18T19:12:00.000-07:00

Sorry I've been missing in action this week. Things are catching up with me. Have had many adventures commuting between
the two universities at opposite ends of the universe; and other adventures involving involving the fact that neither of the aforementioned institutions of higher learning feel much urgency when it comes to paying people they've employed. Today I got word that SFU will almost surely pay me this week, but as for UBC, "after the September rush is over" is all they're willing to commit to. Guess September came as something of a surprise to them. It's not as if it happens every year. Doesn't matter, the students are great, and the UBC paycheque is going to be pathetic anyway.

I did start meeting my student employees this week; one of them is going to teach me how to read Chinese characters for the numbers up to ten, to facilitate the Chinese newspaper scanning project, in which page numbers loom large. She also promised to teach me a few phrases so I can say please and thank you in the Chinatown stores. The Chinese newspapers are especially fascinating because I live in Chinatown. The ads usually give the store name and address in English, and it's amazing how many of them are still around: Ming Wo, Dollar Meats, and Hon's, but when it was still on Main Street.

And when it was on Main Street, which is where it was thirty years ago when my mom used to take me there on nights she couldn't face cooking, it was about a block away and across the street from the Main Street Power Substation, above. Shabby, but still impressive. Picture by Winnifred, of course.

Morning Smoke

2007-09-12T19:05:00.000-07:00

My new commute to work takes me by this backpacker's hostel. This morning I glanced over and saw there was a guy on the top floor sitting on the window ledge with his feet dangling out. My first thought was of a jumper. Our current neighbourhood is the only place I actually saw someone standing on a window ledge contemplating jumping. That was years ago, when I thought I could never live down here. I guess seven years in Brooklyn reset my tolerance level to social chaos. Anyway, I realized a second later that this guy wasn't a jumper. Jumpers don't sit, for one thing. Also, he looked quite comfortable, and was taking in the morning scene as we all rushed to the SkyTrain* station a block away. Then I got it. He was having his morning smoke. Smoking in most indoor places (other than private homes) is illegal in the city of Vancouver. He managed to go "outside" for his first smoke by situating his body almost completely out of the building, and his cigarette entirely so. I found myself perversely delighted that the backpacker's hostel--which seems to provide short-term housing for a variety of near-homeless folks--was the kind of place where people uphold the bylaws of the City of Vancouver. So civilized.

*New Yorkers: the SkyTrain is what they call the subway here. I imagine that's in light of the fact that it's 90% above ground.

Make the New Yorkers Jealous

2007-09-11T18:54:00.000-07:00

This is the view from the staff room at the SFU Library. I'm just saying.

An Honest Day's Labour

2007-09-10T18:50:00.000-07:00

I started two new jobs within the last week, neither involving unearthing rocks from gardens in Langley. Yes, that's a rock, not a shovelful of dirt. Win and I offered to help Winnifred's step-mother plant her cedars, because they were getting root-bound in their pots. She had already called three handy-guys there in Langley, "no job too big or too small", but this job must have been too in-between because they all ended up begging off. Thus a rare shot of me doing some real work.

But back to my actual gainful employment. Thursday I began teaching "Public Libraries" at UBC. So it turned out I like teaching, and I'm totally enthralled by the students. Check out our class blog, to which they are posting news stories of interest to public librarians.

UBC itself, unfortunately, is sort of a French farce. Nobody seems to be able to figure out why I can't get a campus-wide login, without which you really can't do much of anything including use a computer, but I've decided to simply barrel along as if it's all going to work out. Below, my favourite sign at UBC, in the bathroom of the upscale cafe (used to be the Faculty Club, now democratically open to everyone, but of course students can't afford it. We managed to be invited to a reception there after Renata's husband's talk last week. Thanks for the invitation, Renata!)

Then today, I started my other new job. Working in digital initiatives at SFU, and boy are there a lot of new things to remember. They do theses, newspapers, audio cassettes, on-the-fly public requests, and this interesting thing where they convert textbooks to accessible PDFs so visually-impaired students can get the computer to read them out loud. All very cool. Don't have too much staff yet as they're students and get hired fresh every semester. Found myself (in t-shirt, linen slacks and loafers) hopelessly overdressed. Note to self: buy jeans this weekend.

Facts: www.cupe391.ca

2007-09-07T14:22:00.000-07:00

It's incredible to me to contemplate that Vancouver's public librarians and library workers are still on strike. It's a sign of how really fucked this city is going to be by the 2010 Olympics that our mayor and council would rather have the city without its services (garbage pickup, parks maintenance, community centres, as well as libraries) than give his workers the same terms of employment that every other Lower Mainland municipality has found acceptable and affordable. The employer hasn't responded to the union's last offer, made 22 days ago.

Pickets continue upbeat and inventive--below, they are forming the words "let's talk" on the north plaza of Library Square, with photographers on the 14th floor of the office tower shooting them from above--and they are getting lots of honks and support from the public. But it's got to be demoralizing. One picketer told me he's expecting to be out until Thanksgiving (in Canada, that's early October, New York readers). Every pay period of strike pays for one year of the union's demands. Five year contract/ten week strike = cancel each other out.

How Do You Work This Thing?

2007-09-05T20:32:00.000-07:00

Meet Hermione (Yiddish name Henye)

2007-09-04T08:43:00.000-07:00

I left my desktop computer with a friend in New York and have been borrowing Winnifred's second best computer for the nonce, but the reality is, I don't like Macs. I know, God will strike me dead, but I just had to say it. In spite of everything about the Evil Empire and its hideous buggy programs that they release with major security flaws and then later say, oh, just download the patch, then the patch makes half your other programs stop working, and that's assuming you haven't gotten a virus in the meantime... um, where was I? Right, no big fan of MicroSoft or anything, I just find PCs easier to use. I mean, how do they get by with only one mouse button? And I really don't need the computer to be so simple to use that I have no control over it. I'd rather have it complicated and flexible. Long story short: yesterday we went out, plunked down the old credit card and bought me this lovely Toshiba. Isn't she beautiful? Winnifred chose her English name, from which I deduced her Yiddish name.

We did take care of the major issues first (installing software, including various patches to the brand new operating system), which is to say, I made a list of what I wanted and Winnifred did it, but by late last night we were ready to try the built-in webcam. Here we are trying it.

I didn't realize that the touchpad was so sensitive, so I kept taking pictures by mistake when my hand hovered over the left-click for an instant. We kept getting these reaction shots to the pictures, then reactions to the reactions, and so on.

Finally, gasping for breath, I lifted my hands off the keyboard, which is the only reason this madness ever came to an end.

Tomorrow: videos.

Lundland

2007-08-30T17:57:00.000-07:00

Winnifred's pictures of the trip to and from Lund last weekend. Includes a waterwheel now being used as a roadside advertisement for a campground; banana trees (she didn't see much evidence of it, but there's a reason they call it the Sunshine Coast); and lots of louring clouds.

Must-Have Soap and Summer Fashion Advice from Felix

2007-08-29T13:36:00.000-07:00

You know how you don't know what you're missing until you see something that fulfills a need you didn't even know you had? Win had to go up to Lund last weekend, so she missed my birthday. She brought me back some home-made soap from the ferry lineup in Saltery Bay. In B.C., waiting for the ferry is a summer ritual and local craftspeople make the most of this captive audience. It's like buying Mexican blankets at the border crossing at Tijuana. This particular soap has a feature I've never seen before: there is a piece of loofah embedded right into the soap.

I can't seem to find "Heaven Scent Soap Works" online, but a big thank you to them and Win for this great product, and for a new addiction which will dog me for the rest of my years. Just what I needed.

Earlier this week I had the chance to visit the aquarium with, among other people, Felix. Here he is admiring some coral. I liked the way the blue and pink of his shirt mimicked the blue of the water and pink of the coral. Felix showed me his flip-flops, one of which is stripey and the other of which is polka-dotty. Felix wanted me to know that they "came from the store like that." Felix is about to be five and has one of the better-developed fashion senses I've run across.

For a change, the Vancouver Sun had a decent editorial on the city strike yesterday, still stalled and looking like it'll be a long one.

Librarians, Again

2007-08-25T11:13:00.000-07:00

Call me a naive, library-loving fool, but I don't see any reason why Vancouver's striking public library workers shouldn't be given every single thing they want. It is 2007, so you'd think you could go around assuming that nobody really believes female-dominated professions are worth less because they are, well, female-dominated? Apparently municipal governments think just that. You might also think auxiliary workers, who do the same work as regular employees, should be entitled to earn pro-rated benefits, but apparently they, too, are second-class citizens. And when you consider that the mayor and city council give themselves pay increases automatically (apparently in Vancouver they don't even have to vote an increase for themselves, to avoid embarrassing publicity: the increase just kinda shows up in their paycheques every January)--and this year the mayor gave huge raises to all his cronies, the senior managers in Vancouver's city bureaucracy, well, you get the picture. Meanwhile he's been claiming library workers don't need a pay increase because they get 50 days of holiday a year. What's he smoking? They get about 20.

I will say, though, that this is the most creative picket line I've ever been on. People bring kids and dogs, they have speakers, music, and literary events right on the library steps. What a great idea! I'd like to think this little guy was engrossed in Stan Persky's outstanding reading Friday afternoon, but I think he was concentrating on getting every drop of juice out of that box.

They get support from the Button Lady, Melva of Bablyon Buttons. The scene above took me back in time. Melva's been making buttons for, if I'm not mistaken, 22 years. She made the first ones in her bedroom in an apartment we shared on Victoria Drive.

Then there's the knitters. About 40 members of CUPE 391 have been knitting with donated yarn on the picket line. Most of the hats are being sent to homeless shelters in the Downtown Eastside, but some are being sold to benefit the hardship fund. I bought one for Winnifred, who is surprisingly fussy about the kind of wool hat she will and will not wear. I thought this one fit the bill, and apparently so did she.

I didn't manage to get a picture of the bike pickets, a bunch of library workers who go from one branch to another spreading energy and good cheer; or of the skateboarders, handstands, and other stuff for amusing the kids. Sometimes there are guitar lessons and there's been at least one accordion. They do tai chi in the morning and have laptops to answer directional questions for lost tourists. So Vancouverites: get out on the picket lines and give your librarian a hug. After five weeks they're getting awfully sunburned out there. Drop a few bucks in the hardship fund pushke. And remember to write city council and the mayor to voice your displeasure.

Weekly Food Allowance

2007-08-23T19:42:00.000-07:00

Given that we didn't set out to write a food blog, I've decided to limit our blogging about it to once a week. Once a week shows a healthy appreciation of the importance of food in our lives to provide nourishment, enjoyment, and sociability. More than that might mean we lack other interests, have little imagination, or are only able to experience culture via the stomach.

We haven't actually experienced that much non-stomach culture since we got here, but we've been unpacking, okay? And on that topic, since we have been quite busy these past few weeks, it's good Vancouver now sports a phenomenon that did not exist when we left it in 2000: the Indian fast-food place.

It used to be that Indian food in Vancouver was expensive and an all-evening affair, which was great but obviously could not be done frequently. I often wondered why Chinese food could be had at any band in the economic spectrum, but not Indian food. The curry take-away is a British staple. Why not us, God? I used to plead. God seemed to be ignoring me just because I don't believe in him/her.

Yesterday body and mind were both fed robust, stimulating meals in the Oakridge neighbourhood of south Vancouver. I started the day by meeting my new Yiddish study partner in the library at the Peretz Centre. I was meant to be helping him improve his Yiddish, but as usually happens, I learned more than I imparted. Afterwards, I went across the street to the Oakridge Mall, and found Curry Express where none used to be. Huzzah! Next time I'll know to get the one-curry special for $4.95 instead of the two-curry special for $6.95. So much food! Delicious, cheap, filling: one of you Believers has been petitioning God while I was away, haven't you?

There were no pickets at the Oakridge Library, so did my shopping on Commercial Drive and walked by Britannia to sign their petition. Vancouverites: please stop by a library and sign the petition. As you know if you've been paying attention, Librarians Fix Everything. Which makes it doubly horrible that they are being treated so badly by the city. Since this is our weekly food round-up, I should probably mention that getting enough to eat can be a struggle for those who haven't had income for a month: contact CUPE 391 to make a donation to the hardship fund.

Then came home to discover the SFU library calling. Why was the SFU library calling? Why, to offer me a job, of course. So now my "To Do" list reads:

donate to CUPE 391 hardship fund out of first paycheque
get haircut
find ride to SFU
find decent food on campus

Unrelated picture below, by Winnifred, of some of our neighbours resting while shopping in Chinatown earlier this week.

Librarians Fix Everything

2007-08-21T21:47:00.000-07:00

I want you to know I'm not one of those chauvinists who thinks the kind of person she is is likely to be superior to everyone else. For example, I'm Jewish, but I don't think Jews are automatically smarter/better/more cultured than others. I know, the people of the book: tell me about it. The people of the goddam book. When I was a Judaica librarian all this translated into was, they kept sending us books and we had to catalogue them and put them in the collection and nobody cared. Nobody was reading most of those things. So okay, Jews write a lot of books, but I have no illusions that it translates into much in the way of intrinsic value.

Similarly, I'd like to think that lesbians are better, nobler people than others, but in fact I find we run the gamut. My girlfriend, of course, comes out on top of pretty much any scale in terms of overall fabulosity; but otherwise, you can't jump to any conclusions.

But when it comes to another group to which I belong, I feel I can make some generalizations, to wit:

1. Librarians Want You to Get What You Want
2. Librarians Have Heard It Before and Thought of a Workaround
3. Librarians Fix Everything

The occasion for this rumination is the acquisition of my temporary Faculty Library Card at UBC. Here's the thing. You can't get a library card until you have a Campus-Wide Login (CWL). You can't get a CWL until you have an employee ID. You can't get an employee ID until Human Resources says so. Human Resources goes to sleep through August, apparently.

This means that for a lowly adjunct such as myself, I might not get a library card until well into the semester in which I'm teaching. (Apparently I also might not get paid in September, but one battle at a time). This would be dire at all times, but especially during a public library strike. Do people normally prepare lectures around here, or what?

Librarians to the rescue. Barely had I launched into my tale of woe at the circ desk at Koerner Library when the librarians were explaining to each other how to make me a temporary card and how long it could last. I showed them my letter of appointment, and five minutes later I had my card. It has a purple stripe and says "Faculty" on it. I love my library card. I took out two books and recalled four. Probably some future students of mine are using them. I don't care! I'll see your lousy graduate student card and raise you one faculty card!

In the picture above (mmmwa! I love my camera phone) I am standing contentedly in front of Koerner. I had to position the sun behind my head and use a flash so that you would be able to see both me and the library. While I was standing there two groups of tourists went by and one member of each group explained to the others that the library is shaped like an open book turned face down on the table. The rounded atrium is the spine of the book and the two wings are the pages. Since I heard the same thing twice in five minutes, I have to assume this is something in either a guidebook or on the UBC web site. In two years of graduate school at UBC shortly after the construction of Koerner I never heard this story. If it's trying to look like a book, the proportions are all wrong, for one thing. And for another thing, I hope they aren't giving the impression that turning a book face down is an acceptable way to treat your library books. People! I beg you! Use a bookmark!

In retrospect I feel a bit bad about complaining of too many Shadbolts in Koerner Library. They actually may only have one Shadbolt, but any Shadbolts are really more than I care to contemplate. But in the end, what's the defect of a Shadbolt--even a relatively large one--compared to the incredible joy the Koerner librarians brought into my life today?

Our Talented Friends

2007-08-20T22:23:00.000-07:00

Not sure if I remembered to mention that my sister is now a published children's author. Her book, appropriate for 6 to 8 year olds, is called Theodora Bear and can be ordered through Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, and from the publisher. Congratulations are accepted at any time. [Librarians and bookstores: it is also in Baker & Taylor.]

While I'm waiting for your congratulations (and book orders) to come pouring in, I thought I'd send out a few congratulations of my own.

Three of our New York friends have great music web sites to check out. Faron recently posted some of his drum solos online. About the time I was getting to know Faron, when he was 9, he got his first drum kit. Now he gets gigs. Life is so confusing that way. Unknown to Faron, across the city in Queens is JHM, who has an entrancing, evocative style on guitar and vocals. You can hear some of his tracks (like this one) on his sophisticated, arty blog.

Meanwhile, electro-groove fans should take a gander at Shoshke-Rayzl's web site. Shosh is a huge inspiration to me: smart, gorgeous, she speaks a mouth-watering Poylish Yiddish, and far from resting on these laurels, she's doing all the things she wishes she'd done when she was a teenager. "You see, you really don't have to grow up," she told me once. Wish I'd listened much sooner, but I'm doing my best now to be half as awesome as she is.

The New York Wanderer, Ben Feldman, branched out recently with the publication of his first book. Butchery on Bond Street is hot off the presses, and fascinating. The New York Times said Ben "brings the texture of 19th-century New York to life in a tale punctuated by cameos and full-fledged appearances by, among others, A. Oakey Hall, the Tammany crony who prosecuted the case and would become mayor."

We've also got a million klezmer and Yiddish buddies with CDs and books out. Two that are coming soon are Wex's new language primer for people with a sense of humour; and Anita's long-awaited book on Yiddish culture in post-war America.

Unrelated picture above by Winnifred. Now go out and buy Theodora Bear.

Scoffer to Addict in 24 Hours

2007-08-17T20:55:00.000-07:00

Today's trip was to SFU with my mum, and we found ourselves in the middle of an anime event of some kind. There were many capes and swords in evidence. I could not fathom the meaning of this scene, in which two young women appear to be to be buying some fish. They don't seem big enough to eat (the fish, I mean) and they seemed to be arguing with the young man (the women, I mean) about either the quality or the quantity of fish they were getting and kept making the young man empty the plastic bag and scoop up new ones.

Getting into the car this grasshopper-like cutie was hanging out on the back windscreen.

Later we found him on the front windscreen while we were driving. Wonder why he liked my mum's car so much?

And then I noticed a yellow ladybug on the window beside me, and thought I could get a shot of its lovely dottiness by gingerly lowering the window a smidge, sticking the camera phone out the window and shooting back in. But all I got was me with a fuzzy blob. I suspect it of being a Multi-Coloured Asian Lady Beetle, but with this photographic evidence it's going to be hard to prove one way or another.

But of course the most galling thing about the whole day was realizing that I love my camera phone. I mean, do you care about that grasshopper thing? I don't even care about that grasshopper thing. But there it was, and there I was, and there my camera phone was. Stop me, before I shoot again.

Never Place Your Phone in the Path of a Steamroller

2007-08-16T20:57:00.001-07:00

There are a few things I want to mention. First of all, when you have a librarian in the same room with some technology, at least the kind of librarian I am, she will continue to fiddle with it until she gets it to work. A certain person (you know who you are) mentioned pownce to me, and now I just have to get an invitation to it, even though I think it sounds totally unnecessary to my happiness.

Similarly, I did not want a camera on my cell phone. Hell, I didn't even want the cell phone, but it's turned out to be central to my game plan of working various on-call and contract jobs until a real one appears. These days, it seems, you cannot get a phone without a built in camera. So what did Ms. Librarian Geek-Face have to do? She had to spend hours figuring out all the functions on her camera phone, didn't she? I would consider this a stupid waste of time, except that it filled in many minutes on the bus to UBC (see self-portrait above) and, once there and working in the library, waiting for Library Literature to execute searches. It would be the professional librarian database that is the very slowest thing you've ever used, wouldn't it?

Among the better parts of my afternoon spent studying the LG 245 user guide was the ceremonial reading of the Important Safety Precautions, which in this case runs to three pages. Highlights include:

*never place your phone in a microwave oven
*make sure that no sharp-edged items such as animal's teeth or nails, come into contact with the battery [unnecessary and somewhat bizarre comma in original]
*an emergency call can be made only within a service area. For an emergency call, make sure that you are within a service area and that the phone is turned on.

Figuring out how to use my camera phone meant that I could document a question that has always bothered me. One of the things I had forgotten about living in British Columbia is that everywhere you go, or at least everywhere with any pretensions to culture, has Shadbolts. Could someone explain the appeal of the exploding-zebra-butterflies to me? Perhaps one of the art librarians I used to work with?

Just to give your eyes a break from those gooey pictures snapped with my phone, here's an unrelated photo by the fabulous Winnifred. Not entirely sure what this structure is, but it's two blocks from our house and it sure is pretty.

Food obsessed, us?

2007-08-15T17:36:00.000-07:00

I don't want to point fingers, but I just want to point out that not one of our eco-tree-hugger-mother-earth-green-sustainability friends here in Vancouver told us about SPUD. Oh nooooo. We had to read about it on The Group News Blog.
And you know, we only recently started reading The Group News Blog, because we were so upset when Steve Gilliard died we just didn't think another blog would do it for us. See, Gilly (whom we didn't know personally or anything) was this awesome left-wing blogger who ran The News Blog, and when he died earlier this year at the age of 42, we just kinda thought, well, it's good we're leaving America because without him we just won't stay sane.

But recently we decided we should support those friends of Gilly's who are now producing The Group News Blog in his memory, and on the very day we decided to do so, there was a post by Sara Robinson about SPUD.

What is this SPUD, you ask? It is Small Potatoes Urban Delivery. It's kind of a cross between a CSA and FreshDirect. You get a bunch of seasonal produce based on a profile you set up in advance: I like avocadoes, don't like cabbage, *really* like apples, etc. Then you set up your standing orders for groceries and household products you want all the time: toilet paper every week please, nuts every second week, olive oil once a month. So that stuff just comes, you don't have to do anything once you've set up your account. Then starting on Thursday evening every week, you can start ordering other food or products you want just this week.

Last week we set up our account and ordered. I spent the whole weekend thinking of more stuff and adding it to the order. Most of their food is organic, and when possible it's locally grown. Imagine: no standing in line, no humping the stuff home. People come and bring you organic, locally grown food! What could be more lovely and caring than that?
Frank arrived with our tub Tuesday morning, but didn't want to be photographed. Here's his van standing in.
Opening it was like getting a present. A bag of mushrooms! I love mushrooms! How did they know? Oh yeah, I told them.

A woman and her chard. Check out those beautiful multi-coloured stems.
Beneath the green leafies, the harder and heavier stuff, like a litre of juice and some gorgeous fruit. A re-used piece of fruit-packing cardboard separated the dry from the wet: our fish came with dry ice packs in case we weren't home and it had to sit on our porch for a few hours.
And our mangosteens had some mangoes to frolic with in the fruit bowl Shmu made for us. The brown and purple bowl is a perfect match for the mangosteens.

The packing slip tells you things like substitutions, the name of your apple (we got Sunrise, new to me even though I'm an apple addict), and how far each item traveled to get to you. I'm a bit worried by the 10,000 km* the cashews came. On the other hand, the salmon only came 7 km**. On the back of the packing slip are some recipes and some information on food politics. And: a $25 off coupon for one lucky friend. If we refer a friend, you get $25 off your first four deliveries, and we get an unspecified gift. So, Vancouverites, the first of you to post a comment gets the coupon, but you have to promise to use it because I want that gift! Apologies to our New York friends that we can't extend this offer to you. We'll think of a way to make it up to you.

*6,213 miles
**4 miles

Self-portrait with Mangosteens

2007-08-12T17:27:00.000-07:00

This blog is in danger of becoming a food blog. Which would be a bad thing because we already have a favourite food blog and we wouldn't want to compete, even if we could. But we promised to report on the mangosteens, spotted in Chinatown last week. Little did we know that in our former home these items would until recently have been considered contraband; and even now, to the extent that they are available, cost $10 each. But we've noticed that in New York there is a tendency to pump prices up as a form of circular self-regard: if it costs more, it's better; and I'm better because I paid $10 for a piece of fruit. Meanwhile, the Chinatown markets have also begun displaying rambutans, another Asian fruit we'd never seen before. Winnifred coveted a bunch for purely visual reasons. She thought they'd be fun to photograph. I have no information on the availability or price of rambutans south of the border or east of the Rockies.
The Seasonal Asian Fruit Taste Test

Cousin Mark arrived yesterday on a short visit, so the three of us sat down today with mangosteens, rambutans and lychees (for comparison), and began the taste test.
Research revealed the proper way to open a mangosteen:
first by cutting all the way around the shell with a serrated knife,
then by pulling the bottom half away
to reveal the white flesh inside.
I was surprised by how thick the shell was. I also loved the lipsticky streaks it left on the knife.
It's not that easy to pry the segments out. They're delicate and sort of dissolve as you touch them. But that quality seems to be what lends it the most divine texture in your mouth. And the taste... what can I say about the taste. "Like the freshness of spring," Cousin Mark said. It's sweet in the way a fruity white wine is sweet. None of us have ever had a piece of fruit quite like it.
Next we moved on to the rambutans. The process for opening them was similar but much less time-consuming.
The apparent "spikes" are pliable and gradually soften and darken as the fruit ripens. The skin is thin and opens easily to reveal an egg-like fruit inside.

You chew the flesh away from the stone inside, like a lychee. The flesh is firm but smooth, lightly sweet and very, very juicy.
In fact, it turns out the rambutan is a cousin of the lychee. We ate a good number of lychees, but taking them as common we didn't bother to document it. I now realize that our New York friends might not find lychees as everyday as we do. The way you eat them is by peeling them by hand and popping the whole fruit in your mouth, then spitting out the seed.
The final tally

Winnifred and Cousin Mark both liked the mangosteen best, followed by the rambutan, with the lychee bringing up the rear. "And this is not to imply that I don't like lychee," Cousin Mark pointed out. I, on the other hand, have never been overly fond of lychee, but I liked it's relative the rambutan even better than the heavenly mangosteen. Cousin Mark felt that the rambutan is subtler than the lychee: in a lychee you taste rose, whereas the rambutan is a bit nutty. Winnifred describes the lychee as just as sweet as the rambutan, but more cloying. For photographic purposes, Winnifred ended up liking the mangosteen better than the rambutan; Cousin Mark, from a purely aesthetic point of view, put the rambutan above the mangosteen. I myself am torn between the soft, sparse hairs on the rambutan, tenderly curling in their variegated colours, like an old lady's dyed hair with the roots showing; and the purple solidity of the mangosteen shell which lives in apposition to the ethereal white fruit inside. Even the bumpy brownness of the lychee husk and the smoothness of the dark nut you spit out at the end have a certain hold on me.

When I looked a bit further into the relationship between the rambutan and the lychee, I was surprised they weren't more closely related. Apparently they are in separate genera in the sapindaceae family. They are as far apart from each other as they both are from the maple tree and the soapberry. I ate another one of each with this in mind, and I fancy I can discern a trace of the taste of maple syrup. I think the lychee is beginning to grow on me.

Total cost of the Seasonal Asian Fruit Taste Test was $26 for four mangosteens, one large bunch of rambutans and a small bunch of lychees. But at less than the cost of a movie for the three of us, it provided at least as much entertainment.

Us + Stuff: ReUnited at Last

2007-08-11T09:36:00.001-07:00

Apparently, when you move long distances, the folks who move your stuff all work for different local companies that are associated with a big international company. In New York, I contacted Liberty, which is an agent for United Van Lines. But the guy who actually moved our stuff--all the way from Brooklyn to Strathcona--was Chess, who works for Howard's Van and Storage in Brandon, Manitoba. On each end of the move, he was helped by swampers from the local affiliate.

This is our stuff in the back of the truck. You gotta love a guy who picks up your steamer trunk and carries it up two flights of stairs.

Here's Chess hamming it up for the camera. These guys were cheerful all the way through the move. That includes through 37 boxes of books. Out of 67 boxes in total. We have our priorities.

Locally, Chess was assisted by two apple-cheeked Irish lads--and when I say lads, that is not a manner of speaking.

I don't normally feel much loyalty to the companies I do business with--I mean, I'm paying for it, they're not doing me a favour--but I was amazed at how great every single transaction has been with these movers. New Yorkers: allow me to recommend Liberty. They kept me apprised of every aspect of the move, answered many questions, advised me on labeling and documentation for crossing the border, and changed the pick-up date to give us a few more days to finish packing. On the day of the move, they arrived on time, were pleasant to work with, and got us out and into the van in just over an hour. Also important was the Vancouver end: because the company is bonded, Chess could drive the stuff into the city to pass through customs here, and we didn't have to shlep out to the border. And finally, I could hardly believe it when they called to tell me our load was lighter than expected and the move would be $600 below estimate. It's not like I would've known the difference if they'd kept the 600 bucks.

In Manitoba, call Howard's; in Vancouver, look here for a local United affiliate.

Benny's Food Market

2007-08-09T08:07:00.001-07:00

This is the store at the corner of our block. From the outside it looks like any other bodega, with the Pepsi sign and the lottery dealership, and the bars on the windows because we're so close to the Downtown Eastside, that troubled and fascinating neighbourhood about which I will surely write more. Benny's is the only commercial enterprise on our block, which is a mix of houses and townhouses. In the blocks around us are a few small apartment buildings, seniors housing, and art studios, but it's mostly just houses. I figured Benny's was a typical corner store, selling candy to students after school and single cigarettes the rest of the time.

Boy was I wrong. These pears are from Washington State, because BC pears haven't come in yet. The produce section is small, but consists largely of local produce lovingly displayed.

In addition to the six kinds of dijon mustard and the marinated asparagus tips shown here, you can get Ahmad English Tea #1, a pleasant afternoon blend to which we were introduced in New York (thanks, Twinski), when we were far from Murchie's. Benny's also offers sour cherry juice, home-made cream-filled doughnuts, a deli counter and a selection of prepared foods for those nights you can't face cooking. I've had the Italian grilled cheese for lunch every day this week, and see no reason to change.

Another nice aspect of the place is the variety of people in there. Because of all the renovation and new construction in the neighbourhood, there are plenty of plumbers and framers around. They seem to have chosen Benny's as their lunch spot. A woman with multiple tattoos who drives a post office truck for a living (it's a chatty place) and a couple of realtors in high heels were choosing sandwiches yesterday. Since it's Canada, the fact that there isn't really room for a line doesn't matter. Everyone just remembers who was there first, and cedes in order. We're working on remembering that.

The Orthography That Dare Not Speak Its Name

2007-08-07T16:14:00.001-07:00

Questions have been asked. Remarks have been passed. How can it be, our American friends are asking, that we have embraced Canadian Spelling with such alacrity, barely waiting to get over the border before reverting to centre and cheque. Even the spell check on this blog thinks they're wrong. Surely, you think, the years we spent pronouncing the last letter of the alphabet "zee" count for something?

The time has come for complete openness. I never believed in that "zee." I only said it to fit in. The truth is, in my heart a "neighborhood" was never as friendly a place as a "neighbourhood." A "color" is to me a pale imitation of a "colour." For seven years, I lived a lie. My spelling is Canadian, and always will be.

Unrelated picture, above, by Winnifred. Most of the pictures on this blog are and probably will continue to be. We may occasionally prevail on her to add a word or two.

Italian-Welsh Tricolore Lasagne

2007-08-06T15:09:00.000-07:00

When my sister cleaned out her apartment and headed to Wales, she left us her canned goods, non-perishable food, and one half-jar of spaghetti sauce. None of this is stuff we cook with. Among the stranger discoveries--and frankly, any time you look closely into another person's kitchen, there can't help but be surprises--was the fact that my sister considers lasagne noodles to be a staple. She had three partly-used boxes of lasagne noodles, all of them different. There were regular white ones; green spinach ones; and red whole wheat ones. Thus was born my idea to make a tricolore lasagne with a different color of noodles for each layer. Then somehow I became convinced that a great art project would be making this lasagne with only "found ingredients." Sort of a simultaneous homage to my sister and a way of using up her food. The only question was, because we are a cheese-free household, how to best create the consistency that a firmish layer of lasagne requires.

Win noticed these nuts. We had recently been inspired by The Chocolate Lady to make squashes stuffed with ground cashews, and they are perfect for holding stuff together. Plus they are delicious and proteinaceous.

As per instructions found on the internet, we soaked the noodles rather than boiling them.
Tomatoes, salmon and a variety of herbs made the first layer.
Corn, ground cashews and horseradish (yes, horseradish) made the second layer. It does look more yellow than white, in the end.
Green beans with ground pepitas and balsalmic vinegar made the final layer.
The layers did rather well at remaining distinct. The two invited guests made polite comments such as, "it's not really a lasagne, it's more of a casserole." They did have seconds, however.

Although I possess a natural disinclination to use things from cans, I was pleasantly surprised by the corn, which retained a considerable corn-like flavour. The same can not be said of the beans. There remains also a project in figuring out how to use the clams and pineapple. I'm thinking I won't attempt them in a single dish.

Interestingly enough, although I conceived this tricolore lasagne as an homage to the Italian flag, I find that it shares the colours of the Welsh flag. Also, August 5, the day on which we cooked this lasagne, is the anniversary of the establishment of Plaid Cymru, a Welsh political party promoting the Welsh language. Thus, in double honor of Italy and Wales, we offer up this lasagne.

Some things about Vancouver

2007-08-04T20:57:00.000-07:00

The transition has taken place. Last Tuesday we moved into my sister's apartment in the Strathcona neighbourhood of Vancouver. That's the residential part of Chinatown. It's also right beside the neighbourhood with the worst drug problem in Canada, and very close to the famous gelateria beside the railroad tracks. It's a yin/yang thing.

We have noticed that, drug neighbourhood notwithstanding, it's really, really quiet at night here. Also, stores close at 6 pm. You gotta be organized about whatever you might need for the evening. We observe Chinatown's transformation into a yuppie haven, which means we probably won't be able to afford to live here once my sister returns from Wales and reclaims this decidedly un-yuppie 1960's reno (in a 100-year-old house). For the time being, however, there are still enough of the traditional residents to provide interest. The Chinese old folks' home nearby comes with its own pagoda. And a neighbour we take to be Italian (note fig tree) has trellised her squash plant up and along the top of her garage. Winnifred discovered in the Chinatown fruit stores something called a mangosteen (sounds like the beginning of a Jewish joke to me, but apparently it's for real).

Today was lesbian day--Vancouver has its Pride festival in August, for some unknown reason--and yes, there sure were a lot of lesbians out on Commercial Drive. We were surprised at how few kiosks and consumer opportunities this afforded, but we are assured that at the more mainstream, more male event in the West End tomorrow, there will be dozens of caterers, florists, and photographers exhibiting. Now that gay marriage is legal in Canada, a whole new market has opened up for the wedding industry. Just what gay liberation is all about.