My Moroccan Hairdresser is a Russian Spy

That is the startling conclusion I have reached in recent days: the young, handsome, voluble hairdresser I know as “Khalid” is delivering atomic secrets to the Russians.

Let me begin at the beginning. Brigitte brought home a book from Value Village, entitled “The Atom Bomb Spies,” by H. Montgomery Hyde (how do people get such distinguished names, and why doesn’t “N. John Robinson” have quite the same cachet?) because she knows I like things about atoms and bombs and sometimes, spies.

It’s the story of one Gouvenko, who singlehandedly and of his own volition started the Cold War. He was a minor clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa in 1945. At the time, he was scheduled, with his pregnant wife Anna and their young son, to be returned to Russia, as his period of service to the Motherland was up. Gouvenko, however, saw many things wrong with this scenario. He had come to like the Canadians very much. Through his work at the Embassy, he was privy to many of the intrigues that ordinary Russians never saw. He knew that the Soviets had developed an extensive spy network throughout Canada, the US and Britain; countries, who at the time were considered allies and friends. He was outraged that Canadians were supporting his country with all sorts of aid, freely and generously with no expectation of anything in return. He saw that his government, without the knowledge of the Soviet people, were exploiting this generosity by infiltrating the various governments to the highest levels, with the intent of potentially destabilizing them and eventually, perhaps having the upper hand in the war which Stalin himself was sure to come.

This disturbed Gouvenko so much that, with the encouragement of Anna, he went into the vault and made off with a trove of evidence of the vast spying network that the Soviets had developed. Telegrams, documents, receipts, various papers, all top-secret, with names, places, dates, aliases — a mountain of proof of the perfidy of the Soviet government.

Having made off with these documents, he intended to defect to Canada. He first went to a major newspaper and requested an urgent audience with someone in authority. He showed what he had and told them of his intentions. They were appalled. This was, after all, just a month or so after the end of World War II, and the Soviets were considered to be the best of friends. Anything to upset them was unthinkable. He was dismissed.

Now he was terrified, knowing that when his theft of the documents and his absence was discovered, the Embassy would be quick to send out their men to find him. And he knew what they would do to him if they found him. In a panic, he went to Canadian government offices. There, the top brass was alerted when the contents of his documents were revealed. They too were appalled. They also dismissed Gouvenko, who swore that he would go home and commit suicide.

Consulting Anna, he decided to go to request asylum. He went to the requisite offices and asked for asylum. He was told the process could take months. In a blind panic but now resigned to his fate, he and his wife returned to their apartment. Sure enough, a couple of hours later, there was a banging on the front door. He heard the voice of his senior commander, demanding to be let in. Gouvenko ran out to his rear balcony, only to find his neighbour, a genial officer in the Canadian military, sitting on the adjoining balcony having a smoke and a bit of a read. He asked if the officer could take care of their four-year-old son, and the man immediately agreed. However, when the banging at the door became an obvious attempt to break the locks, he requested that his neighbour admit his whole family. His neighbour agreed and the family was then passed on to another neighbour, whose husband was away.

The Soviet thugs broke into Gouvenko’s apartment, and finding it empty, began ransacking it. However, they were interrupted — by two officers of the RCMP. The government, now having processed what was truly going on, had placed men at Gouvenko’s apartment, and the men had seen the Soviets go in. The police demanded to know what they were doing in Gouvenko’s apartment. They told the police that Gouvenko had ”stolen money” from the Embassy and they were trying to find it.

To cut a very long story very short, Prime Minister Mackenzie eventually decided that something had to be done with the Soviets. Gouvenko and his family were spiriited away to a remote location where the Soviets would never find them. The governments of Harry Truman and Clement Atlee were alerted as to the extensive nature of the Soviet spying, and the Soviets were eventually confronted. The rest is the Cold War.

Which brings me to Khalid.

Among the papers Gouvenko gave over to the Canadians, there was one that implicated a certain Alan Nunn May, a nuclear physicist who was at the time working at a Montreal research center. May, a Communist sympathizer, had been recruited by the Soviets and was passing them information. May had also passed them samples of the isotopes Uranium-233 and 235. He had reputedly been paid with “a bottle of whiskey and $700.”

Alan Nunn May confessed that “ . . . about a year ago, whilst in Canada, I was contacted by an individual whose identity I decline to divulge. He called on me at my private apartment in Swail Avenue.”

“ . . . in Swail Avenue . . . in Swail Avenue . . . in Swail Avenue . . . in Swail Avenue . . . in Swail Avenue . . .” It echoed through my brain as I digested this information. Swail Avenue is not two minutes’ walk from my house! There is only one Swail Avenue in Montreal! It is only two blocks long! And KHALID LIVES ON SWAIL AVENUE.

Swail Avenue, looking from Rue Gatineau

I was completely knocked for a loop. I knew Swail Avenue well. There was a computer shop in an apartment basement, run by an Iraqi, back in 1995, where I went to print computer documents. Opposite the shop was a hair salon called Dahlia. The words “Black Dahlia” now echoed through my mind as well. “ . . . Black Dahlia . . . Black Dahlia . . . Black Dahlia . . . Black Dahlia . . . Black Dahlia . . . .”

It was here that I first met Khalid. 

I had been looking for a good hairdresser for quite a while. For a long time I’d gone to the same barbershop that my father had gone to when he lived in Montreal, a Greek place at the Cote des Neiges Plaza. The barbers there never tried to talk to you. I hated it when they talked to you. They could never talk and cut at the same time. So a fifteen-minute cut would become a forty-five minute cut. I couldn’t stand that. But the Greeks just cut, never talked. Then, a woman started working there. For some reason, from then on, every time I walked in there, they’d assign me the woman.

She didn’t talk, but she fussed. She fussed and fussed and clipped and curled and smoothed and even when I said ”Looks great, how much do I owe you?” she would continue to fuss as if I hadn’t said a word. This woman took an hour for a fifteen-minute cut. I stopped going there. I was desperate. For months I went without a cut. And then Dahlia opened its doors and there was Khalid. He liked it that I said his name right, with the Arabic “Ccch” for the first syllable of his name. “Ccchalid.” I even dropped the last syllable, just like the Arabs do, emphasising the “Ccch.”  “CCCHA-lid.”

Anyway, Kahlid didn’t talk, but if he did, he also cut. I liked that. And his conversation was interesting. He’d stayed in Vancouver for a while. He had stories about Morocco. And he lived just across the street, above the computer shop. On Swail Avenue.

Did Alan May Nunn live in this building?

But then Dahlia closed. I was devastated! It closed without warning and I didn’t know what had happened to Khalid. Luckily, I met him in the street not too long after. He’d started working at another place just around the corner, on Cote des Neiges, opposite the Metro grocery store.

Fantastic! I thought, and I got his number. Turns out he was just “renting” a chair at the salon, that he came in when his clients called him, and he had a lot of clients. Mostly students from the Université de Montreal down the street. But I’d call him and I’d make an appointment. He never worked till after one o’clock. He said he always slept late.

And I still go to him, although I haven’t been for a couple of months. But when I read about Alan Nunn May and where he lived, I finally put two and two together. When May was arrested and sentenced to ten years’ hard labour, he didn’t leave his apartment on Swail to just anybody. No, he probably let the Soviet embassy install one of their new recruits there . . . for continuity’s sake. And over the years, as the recruit became a veteran and finally was rotated back to Moscow, a new tenant was “grandfathered” in.

And so we come to Khalid. The ball dropped when I realised that the owner of Salon Charme . . . was A RUSSIAN. A Russian woman through and through — the proof was that she spoke the language fluently. I had asked Khalid many times if he understood what she was always chattering about to her coworkers and he said . . . no.

Can you spot the den of spies?

Of course, now I know that Khalid was not being 100% honest with me. He was not even being 50% honest with me. This is because Khalid is a Russian spy.

Khalid, my hairdresser, is a Russian spy passing atomic secrets to the Russians. And he lives on Swail Avenue. In Alan May Nunn’s apartment.

Next time I’ll skip the $4 tip. He’ll just spend it on vodka.
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Postscript, the following day: You will NEVER guess who I ran into walking out of the Metro grocery store this afternoon. He was carrying a bag. The whole scene -- Khalid, the grocery store, the bag -- was extremely suspicious. I made a promise to call him for a haircut. Should I go through with it?

The Grand Experiment

Today will be three weeks and a day since I stopped all alcohol. Yeah, I know, hurray. 

But what I've been doing, consciously, is replacing the alcohol with other substances, mainly sugary. I drink these non-alcohol (well, .05% is no alcohol as far as I'm concerned — kind of like a spoonful of Nyquil a day) wine coolers all day, graduating to orange juice with 50% sugar and calories plus sparkling mineral water mixed in the rest of the day (I start the day with a large cappuccino). 

I rarely don't have a drink next to me. I've been that way since I was little — I remember one day when I was about 12 when I had 12 cups of instant coffee (I don't know what my mother was thinking — obviously nothing). Only these days, they're never alcoholic. But I always seem to have to have something to drink next to me.

But back to the sugar. Brigitte has an Accu-Check — you know, those machines that prick your finger and measure your blood sugar. Well, I found out that “normal,” meaning, of course, desirable, is around 6. Just like your desirable blood pressure would always be 120 over 80, “normal” blood sugar is around 6.

But I found out that any level consistently above say, 8 or so, is doing damage to your system. And I mean all of it, in very ugly ways. Things especially targeted are your kidneys, your eyes and your peripheral nervous system. It seems in that case that the glucose molecules impede the transport . . . oh, hell, I don’t understand it any more than you probably do.

But whatever it is, it’s bad, real bad. Over time, it gets you. Very, very bad things happen a ways down the line that are pretty much irreversible.

Now in general, I don’t have (and never have had) a sweet tooth. I don’t eat sweets during the day, and up till I quit the booze, rarely had even dessert. I didn’t drink colas (still don’t) or soft drinks in general (even diet and no-cal versions of that stuff is pure poison in your body — might as well smoke a cigarette instead). Clamato juice or mineral water, maybe.

But since I started taking my blood sugar with Brigitte’s machine, I’ve become alarmed. No matter when or under what circumstances, it’s high. It’s been as high as 18. That’s like your blood pressure being 200 over 110. I cannot imagine what it’s been like these past 20 or 30 years since I’ve been drinking alcohol, and frequently sugary alcohol, every day. Through the roof, no doubt.

That has resulted in peripheral, alcohohlic or diabetic neuropathy in my feet — choose what prefix you want. That means that my feet are pretty much numb. But painful at the same time. Can you imagine some part of you being numb and painful at the same time? It’s extremely annoying.

So I’ve decided to conduct a scientific experiment. Starting March 1st, a month to the day of being alcohol-free, I will indulge, for a week, in my usual (or recently usual) behaviour. I’ll drink the coolers all day and graduate to orange juice and Perrier. I’ll eat cake and ice cream with chocolate-shell and whipped-cream toppings after my high-carb dinner (usually rice or pasta of some kind) but for a week I’ll document every drink, every teaspoon of sugar, ever crumb of cake and spoonful of ice cream. I’ll eat at the same time every night (I regrettably only eat one meal a day at present) and eat my normal pasta, potatoes or rice. Then I’ll take my blood sugar twice every day at exactly the same time.

The following week, I’ll stop all sugary drinks including juices (but not counting my one cup of coffee and tea every day), change my choice of dinners to more vegetarian/green-friendly ingredients. I’ll eliminate all deserts altogether. Then I’ll take my blood sugar at exactly the same time twice a day.

I hope one week each is enough time to see results. If not I’ll try the experiment for two weeks, the first two pigging out normally and the second two becoming Gandhi. I will, of course, document everything.

If you’re worried about your eating habits and/or glucose levels, you might try this with me, if you have a blood sugar monitor. If so, we have about a week to get ready!

Latest Painting from China

Here's a painting done by my friend Jack Lee from a photo I sent him of my son Taishi (Tai-chan) in traditional Japanese dress. I think it's amazingly outstanding, and not just because of the subject matter! It now hangs on my bedroom wall.

Right-click to embiggen: click on "Open link in new window" and 
then use the magnifying glass to get all the detail!


(N.B. The Japanese characters in the box are his name. They spell "Great" and "Ambition."
Look for that top character in all sorts of Japanese and Chinese words.
 It looks like a man with his arms and legs spread wide.
It's the first character of the name for Ôsaka [Big Hill.])

The New Zealandish Invasion! (The Fab Four 2.0)

This is WAAAAY better than the stuff on the radio these days. I'll buy their album.

Got a Minute?

Dr. Atom's Tiny Classroom!

Flock, I’d imagine that you’re pretty smart. The three of you that are here, I mean, on anything resembling a regular basis. The rest of you are what I’d call “eggressive” (it’s a mix of “egghead” and “regressive”) meanin’ as how’s you ain’t TOO smart fer us fellers but you spends yer time doin’ SMART things, y’know, that the rest of us smart people ain’t got no time and no account fer.

Just kidding. Mike.

So you know what big is. Everybody knows that big is, well, impossibly big. Unbelievably big. Inconceivably big. Like, so big that it goes on for miles and miles and astronomical units (AUs), that Star Trek word that they love so much, “parsecs,” oh, and don’t forget “quadrants” (which are actually just a quarter of something, but I digress knowledgably) and so on until that ugly word that no one understands, not even your house-cleaner-who’s-secretly-Russell-Crowe-the-tortured-genius: “Infinity.”

Can’t quite wrap your pencil-shaped head around that concept, can ya?

Nope. Can’t tell me what “infinity” is. 

How about small, though? Well, even I have an idea of what the fermions (and don’t sweat the fermions!) are all about. They’re reeeeeeeelly small, smaller than even George Bush’s single brain cell (called a neuron). (It means that if he ever starts drinking again he’d immediately have permanent Alzheimer’s). 

But anyway, there’s an end to smallness — they think. Anything smaller than a neutrino had better start singing the blues, cause ain’t nobody going to be finding YOUR ass for another half-million years.

But what about time . . . yes, time. I know you think you know what time is. A second is a short time. Eternity is a long time. (It’s also my nickname for Brigitte’s favorite soap opera, The Old and the Toothless.)

But anything faster than a second is pretty fast, right? Well, that’s fast, but light goes 186,000 miles in that instant — that’s more than halfway to the moon.

But what about a femtosecond? Or an attosecond? Well, the former is about the time it takes a hair to grow one atom. And your hair grows billions of atoms at a time. In fact, it grows a nanometer in the time you take to lift the scissors to cut it. Well, in comparison to that time, a femtosecond would be about a billion years. 

An attosecond? An attoscecond is about the time it takes an electron to fly halfway around the nucleus of an atom. How do we know this? Because an atom walked into a bar and said to the bartender “I think I just lost an electron.” And the bartender said “Are you sure?” And the atom said “I’m positive!”

The Cake That Almost Ate Me

Now, Flock, you know that I don't tend to do things half way. If I did, you wouldn't see them posted here, at any rate. Well, since I've been off alcohol (loud hurrahs, please, three weeks today!) I've been substituting like mad — mainly sugary things, which is not at all good for my blood sugar, which I've been measuring rocketing through the roof (17, anyone?)

Yes, it's been cake, then ice cream after dinner (dinner is my only meal of the day — strike one more for bad eating habits) and lots of orange juice/Perrier coolers.

So natch, I decide to go the whole way and make my OWN Death By Chocolate cake, having tired of having my eyes bug out at the prices of these "Opera" cakes from places like de Gascogne and Duc de Lorraine (no English, the arrogant bastards). We're talking $40 for a decent medium-sized chocolate cake (I forget the name) from Duc, and I didn't even bother exploring Gascogne.

But Brigitte pointed out that these places make these cakes so we don't have to, and I grudgingly have to admit that she's right. Let me just state for the record: making multi-layered chocolate cakes from the best ingredients is NOT DIFFICULT. However, it's finicky, messy, time-consuming and expensive. It's the same with baking your own bread, minus the expensive. Why bother making four baguettes, taking about a day and a half, what with all the buying, the prep, the kneading the waiting, the rising, the baking, the waiting — to chew on a fairly mediocre piece of bread that you can get better for $2 at the grocery store down the street?

The forces arrayed against you are numerous: you have an oven that is predictably the right temperature only if you consider "give or take 100 degrees" a precise recipe instruction. The kitchen equipment you have on hand is about as useful vis-a-vis constructing a gourmet cake as is a rabble of fifteen and sixteen-year olds going off to fight the Battle of Vimy Ridge.

And it's mighty costly. Unless you just happen to have a bagful of 50% cacao Callebaut chocolate callets from Boutique Chocolats Privilège on hand, along with a half-pound of Valhrona cocoa powder, you're looking at maybe $50 right there. Add in the $25 bottle of Triple Sec that you had to buy because they have no taster-size bottles, and that you're actually lucky because the Cointreau that's called for in the recipe is actually $7 more expensive, and your wallet is looking decidedly floppy. Plus the springform cake pans and the cake spatula and the almond slivers . . . it makes that Duc de Lorraine Mousse Royal look like a Lada instead of your Prius in terms of expense.

And . . . it only took two days to make this cake when they probably churn out one every two hours but on that score, if I'd been expeditious I'd have been able to make it all in one day. At any rate, here it is in pictures; recipe to follow.

Butter and flour (left) and cocoa powder mixture

Cake batter divided among three unequal springform pans

Baked cakes; note supremely even baking in my professional GE Mark Zero oven

The frosted cake. This thing is heavy. I'm praying it's just the serving platter.

The first slice. It was delicious!

Recipe coming shortly!
======================================================================
Some Tasting Notes, Feb. 22


Brigitte noticed it first: "It tastes great, but it's dry!" It is dry. It's extremely tasty — don't get me wrong. But it's crumbly. In other words, if you try to cut a slice, at least two days later (it may have dried in the refrigerator) it crumbles under the knife as you cut.

I douse it with home-made whipped cream, so it all comes out okay, but now I'm wondering what puts the "moist" in a cake. No doubt more chemicals! More butter? Dunno. Maybe a pastry type out there will have a suggestion.

I won't be making this thing or anything like it again any time soon. We figure the cake cost about $50 in all to make.

Make next time it'll be a Dutch Apple Crumb pie! Yeah! I like that idea! But I'll still post this recipe soon.

My Weather Channel

This Weather Channel does everything for me. I rely on it for all my weather-related decisions.

How Would You Like Your Chicken, Sir? Lobotomized or Conscious?

There's some evil microcephalic dwarf trolling away at some nameless university who suddenly got it into his head that we're pretty much putting farmed chickens through Hell already, so what's the diff if we just take it one step further?

He suggests, in effect, lobotomizing them so they're not aware of anything, and since they're not aware of anything, what do they need their feet for? Just remove their feet so we can pack them into a smaller space.

I wish I were kidding, but I'm not.

Of course this shall not come to pass, but in an evil, perverted, Nazi-like logical next-step, it makes horrific sense.

Like one commenter says, if he knew he was either going to go through Hell with all his functions intact or Hell with no awareness at all, he'd obviously choose the latter.

Obviously, this is all assuming that a chicken has any awareness at all. The problem with this assertion is, awareness compared to WHAT? Just because it doesn't recognise itself in a mirror, does that make a chicken a walking mindless lump of meat  that won't mind having its head cut off or watching a companion's head getting cut off, that it doesn't feel fear or pleasure, or indeed, have its own entirely different perception of its journey through life than we could imagine in our wildest dreams?

100 years ago, I must remind you, we put people with bipolar disorder into institutions. We even lobotomised them.

My proposal is altogether different: give them regular doses of fine wines and champagnes, enough to send them into the stratosphere. I'm serious. Not only would it dull their senses as to their horrific conditions, but it would make their meat overall tastier.

Towards the end, when they are are about to be despatched, up the dose to, say, fine cognac, so they're absolutely blotto when the time comes (and very tasty indeed). That would benefit liquor companies and boost general productivity of cooks, freeing them up from waiting for their chicken to marinate as it would arrive already marinated in the package.

"Houston Seen Drinking Heavily"

Funny, I've seen this headline all around the Web for the past couple of days. When I googled it, all I came up was this Google Maps shot of Houston from space . . .

Craigslist Montreal: an Appalling Site

Betcha didn't know I met Brigitte on Craigslist. Yep, back in August of 2008, bored out of my skull one afternoon, I went to the "personals" section -- Men seeking Women, Women seeking Men etc.

I usually went there just to see what looney-tunes posts were up there -- and no, I'm not making the standard "I read Playboy for the articles" excuse -- I really am amazed at some of the stuff I've read, so very, very occasionally, I go read the "funny pages."

Anyway, that day I was reading some of the "Men seeking Women" posts, and I was appalled, disgusted and outraged. I fired off a post in that category excoriating the posters with blistering invective (there, two new words for your vault). Somewhere along the lines of (and I believe Brigitte still has the post squirrelled away somewhere) "I can't believe some of the things I'm reading here. Do you morons really believe a woman is going to be attracted to you after seeing a picture of your penis? Do you really think a woman is going to be attracted to you after reading all the "hot things" you are going to do to her, described in almost surgical detail? Do you really think a woman is going to be attracted to you after reading that you like "long walks by the ocean, cuddling on the sofa by the fire with a bottle of champagne, eating fabulous meals made by me" etc. etc.?

Anyway, I went on for quite a while, quoting some posts verbatim -- some so ludicrous that I could hardly believe that these were real people writing this shit -- real people standing next to me on the bus, in the line behind me at the grocery store, serving my meal at a restaurant.

To cut a long story short, Brigitte emailed me, we got into an email conversation which lasted about a week, made The Phone Call, and the rest is history.

But that's not why I'm writing this. The other day, bored out of my skull, I went on "Men seeking Women" just to see if anything had changed. Boy, had they not. If anything, they were even more ludicrous and unbelievable, but this time bordering on actual dangerous insanity. One guy posted "Watch me die".

His plea, this from a 42-year-old man, was for a woman to "come over to my apartment, have sex, get drunk and then watch me kill myself."

A couple of days later, I looked, and it was still up there. No one had flagged it, removed it, responded to it on the board . . . in short, it was business as usual at Men seeking Women.

I'm not asking you to go read these posts, but I was absolutely horrified at what some of these men were saying. Not just a few of them, but ALMOST ALL OF THEM. Mostly, it was graphic descriptions of sex acts, a lot of them in words obviously lifted from pornographic movies, but some of them were indications of very seriously disturbed minds. I would have to say that any woman actually responding to some of them would be in some serious trouble if for any reason they hooked up with these people.

The sorry thing is, there ARE women who will respond. I posted some joke ads in the forum, one with the title "Short, balding 43-year-old Sultan looking for woman to share palace" or some such, and I went on to describe (in obviously foreign-sounding English) that I was a lonely sultan living in Southeast Asia -- Brunei, to be precise -- who was short, balding and impotent, but that I wanted a woman "to share my yachts with me and fly in my private jets to destinations all over the globe and shop at Cartier in New York" blah blah blah, and that I would buy mansions for her and her extended families and give her an allowance of $100,000 a week to spend as she wished.

If you can believe it, I was deluged with replies, almost all 100% serious. Only a couple of people emailed me with a "Good one"-type of response.

I'm very shocked and dispirited -- I thought people in Montreal were a little more sophisticated and intelligent . . . but I guess I was wrong. I fear that if I went to Craigslist San Francisco or Cragslist Paris I would find much the same thing . . . it's utterly horrifying to know that there are so many very, very disturbed people out there and that they represent a real danger to themselves and others.

Those forums are a nightmarish window on the sad, insane state of humanity that have me becoming even more protective of, say, my son, but indeed, everyone I care about.

The real monsters are not the ones in books and horror movies. They're the ones delivering your mail and delivering sermons at your local synagogue or church or mosque (take your pick) . . . the ones you elected or are about to elect to public office . . . your workmates, your classmates, your cousin . . .

The only message I can draw from this is, be afraid. Be very afraid.

The Meaning of Pain

The good dentist who operated on me last Thursday was kind enough to send me the results of his butchery.

Believe me, it hurt as much as this looks. He gave me $90 for my 3-gram gold crown. Now I have no rear molar to eat steak with. I'll have to relearn the whole method of eating. Ow. I just ate a "Boulle de rhum" I got at Duc de Lorraine. It was disgustingly sweet and woke up the spot where my tooth used to be. I think I'll pop another Neurontin.

It took him four minutes to do this

Lord of the Rings: Trampled On, Trashed and Terrible

All you nice Flock who never got Lord of the Rings and the hysteria and who didn't read the book 50 times as a youngster and who doesn't have the latest Director's Favorite Dog's Cut box set ($123.98 at Amazon) might consider reading another example of my legions of illustriously-worded verbiage.

The rest of you unruly dwarf-brains can stick around.

Before there was Peter Jackson, there was some stoner named Ralph Bakshi. Now this guy must have walked around in a continuous cloud of marijuana smoke. It was the right time, after all -- the 70s, a decade that should never have seen the light of day, a decade that reeks like the stench that wafts from under the wet carpeting you stowed in the shed three years ago and is now home to centipedes and earwigs and patches of grey, slimy fungus.

Ralph somehow got it into his head that he was an artist, and also an animator. He somehow got it into his head that he could animate the Lord of the Rings -- the whole damn thing. That alone is sheer arrogance of breathtaking proportions. Actually following through is just plain stupidity.

To cut a long story short, Bakshi somehow, after a ream of rejections, finally got someone to actually share his fantasy. Now don't get me wrong. Bakshi was not out to make a quick buck. He appears to have honestly wanted to do the best he could to bring the books of J.R.R. "Pops" Tolkien to life as faithfully as possible. He didn't want it Disneyfied or become a musical or change the storyline to be easier to understand, and he actually consulted with members of Tolkien's family, who gave him the go-ahead.

His first mistake was to get the funding off Saul Zaentz. I had a friend who worked for Zaentz at Fantasy records; she was working there when Zaentz was feuding with that Fogerty guy from Creedence Clearwater Whatever and she said Zaentz was a Category 1A Dickwad with a capital D.

So naturally, Bakshi ran into trouble very quickly. He discovered that yes, animation is hard to do well. If you have four characters in a scene and you want it to look semi-good, you have to do an INSANE amount of work. I briefly worked at a company that was doing a movie called The Plague Dogs. I got the job airbrushing backgrounds through a friend of mine that I'd gone to school with, Tom Bertino, who went on to work on such films as The Terminator (strange how Wikipedia doesn't list his work on that stinker, Howard the Duck).

But just to animate a bunch of dogs takes months and months -- one frame of the movie can take up to three days to produce, and there are 24 frames in a second. This was before computers, and it all had to be done by hand.

Typical non-scene from Bakshi's Lord of the Rings

Anyway, so Ralph started off well; the opening scenes of his Lord of the Rings are really well done, as you can see on YouTube. But it couldn't last. Doing all those characters by hand would have required a team of hundreds of animators working around the clock for at least five years to produce an entire film on the level of his opening sequences.

So he quickly started reverting to shortcuts. One of these was to take live actors, film them and then make them so high-contrast that they were either black and white (no shades of grey) and then fuck with the actual film by painting on it -- an animation crime of the highest order, if you ask me. The result looked terrible, but Bakshi became enamoured of it. Later he whined about how much work and money it would have taken to animate the film properly, but he was right. Zaentz surely drew the purse strings tighter and tighter, and the result was that Bakshi eventually all but abandoned animating any characters and chose instead to rotoscope everything (you can quickly spot rotoscoping because the animated figure looks unnaturally real -- because it is! It's taken directly from a live human doing the action. Nowadays they do that with fluorescent dots painted on a human and then translated into movement by a computer).

The result was a complete disaster. The last 20 minutes of the film is a visually hideous mess that makes no sense whatsoever, and abruptly ends with the suddenly animated Gandalf raising his staff and proclaiming that the end of the quest had finally come. He failed to mention that there was a complete other book after the story we'd just seen. It was never produced. Bakshi was catapulted into obscurity and thank the lord, so was this movie.

However, another animated version was produced, this time called The Return Of The King. I'm at the beginning of it, but it already looks Disneyfied and bombastic, again, un-understandable by small children, too cheesy for teenagers and unwatchable for adults who love the books (those annoying American accents!!)

Anyway, sorry for the rant and let's all look forward to Peter Jackson's The Hobbit.

Did YOUR Mother Drink and Smoke?

. . . while she was pregnant with you? My mother almost certainly did. I don't know how much, but judging by memory and her later lifelong patterns, I'd say she smoked at least 10-30 cigarettes a day (there were no "light" versions then, not that it would matter one bit) and probably drank a minimum of four and a maximum of perhaps 6-8 "standard" drinks per day (they measured them with shot glasses -- that much I know for a fact). The 6-8 drinks would have been on a "party day" or perhaps every weekend, but their normal was at least 4 per day.

This would have been the case with all four of us children. My eldest brother died of muscular dystrophy 11 years ago but that had nothing to do with fetal alcohol syndrome, but the rest of us?

Here are some facts. I won't bother linking some of them because they're easily findable.

1. Alcohol damages the developing cells of the fetus.
The brain and central nervous system are particularly sensitive to alcohol and can suffer permanent damage.

2. Any amount can have some effect, so there is no minimum amount of alcohol in pregnancy that is safe. The developing fetus can't break down the alcohol as quickly as an adult, so its exposure to alcohol is actually higher than the mother's.

3. Signs of central nervous system abnormalities include delayed development, behavioural problems, or learning disabilities and intellectual impairment. For example, children with FAS may develop the ability to speak or walk later than normal. Behavioural problems may include hyperactivity, nervousness, anxiety, and short attention spans.

4. Cigarette smoke contains more than 4,000 chemicals, including truly nasty things like cyanide, lead, and at least 60 cancer-causing compounds. When you smoke during pregnancy, that toxic brew gets into your bloodstream, your baby's only source of oxygen and nutrients.

5. On average, a pack-a-day habit during pregnancy will shave about a half-pound from a baby's birth weight. Smoking two packs a day throughout your pregnancy could make your baby a full pound or more lighter. While some women may welcome the prospect of delivering a smaller baby, stunting a baby's growth in the womb can have negative consequences that last a lifetime.

I wonder what lasting consequences my mother's smoking and drinking had on me. I get irritable easily and always have. I'm more susceptible to addictive behaviours than other people I know. I had trouble concentrating in school -- my grades were rarely more than average. I get anxious easily, sometimes destabilizingly so. Now, if this applies to you or someone you know, you may just say "but everyone's like that to a certain degree."

Perhaps. But what might I have been like if my mother (and father!) had not smoked and drunk while I was in the womb? My sister, who is closest to me in age, agrees that we must have suffered consequences.

And that, my friends, is just the tip of the iceberg. What, may I legitimately ask, were the consequences of growing up with parents who smoked and drank every single day of our lives? I shudder to think.

I like very much to know that through a fluke of chance, I completely gave up drinking at least a year before my son was born and my ex-wife neither drank nor smoked, nor were we ever around anyone who did, so he got the best possible springboard to jump out into this life.

Thanks to Jim Donahue whose link made me think. And also glad that I no longer drink.

Cricket Explained: Bournemouth vs. Jutland

Haven't you often wondered about how cricket is played? Here's a marvelous example (or "test") match between England and the Orkneys.

Watch This

These were two watches I got for Christmas. I decided to photograph them. Right click "link in a new window" to see them nicely!

This one has no face

Who needs all those dials?

Moon Above Cote-des-Neiges

XIVth in a series . . . I'm stuck here on this balcony but the moon does oblige from time to time and I get the urge to photograph it. I really must purchase some new kind of night lens . . . something to enlarge Her Majesty and get some details out of her.

In this one I messed with the colors to produce something somewhat ethereal. This might make a nice Chinese hanging scroll . . . I might run it by Jack to see what he could do with it, perhaps a Chinese-style watercolor on a gold scroll background.  What do you think?

Blogger is being a jerk. Clicking on the photo barely makes it any bigger. Right click to open in a new window, then use the magnifying glass to get a good look at it.

Sauce With That? No Thanks

Well, well, well. Seven days off the sauce, and feeling great. I had my last drop of alcohol at 2:43 a.m. last Wednesday morning.

How about your efforts to start, Knattie? We're all waiting with bated breath to see if you can pull it off!

No worries for me here (and don't worry, I'm a cracked shot!)

New Photo Technique

I put the tripod on the balcony and used the remote control cable for the camera and put it on Aperture Priority. Then I took about five shots, from about 2 in the afternoon till around 8. I combined the photos, massaged the layers and blended each layer with various opacities and blend patterns and this is what I got. I want ultimately to get a really striking weather day and somehow get a continuous blend of the Oratory in daylight in one portion of the photo but nighttime in another portion of the photo. Still, this is a good first experiment. Looks like the Hand Of God up there on the right!

Right click to embiggen in new page

I Wrote it for You, Dear . . . Do You Like it?

Here's a little piece I wrote for my wife. I wasn't feeling well that day, so I had my player piano play it instead of me. Isn't it soothing?

Won't Be Cooking This Shrimp

Talk about "jumbo shrimp." Somehow I don't think I'll be sautéeing this in a little butter and putting it on my spaghetti any time soon.

The fucking thing could eat my cat. This makes my skin crawl and makes me wonder how I can stand to eat its smaller cousins.

Alicella gigantea

Earthrise

Watch this in full 1080pi HD

Are You a Chinese Worker? You're Fucked

Doesn't it positively amaze you what's made in China? C'mon, admit it -- it's almost a game. "I'll bet you that's made in China." "I'll bet you it's not!" (In unison): "Holy fuck, it's made in China!"

The more pertinent question is, what's not made in China? The probability is, if it's less than ten years old, no matter what it is: sports shoes, barbecues, guitars, coffee mugs, couches, batteries, pet products, curtains, MacBooks, pianos -- they're all made in China. And when you go through your local dollar store, can you believe what you can get for a dollar? And if you're paying a dollar for it, how much was the person paid to make it? More like, how much was the person made to make hundreds of thousands of "it", day in, day out, from dawn to dusk, probably six days a week, probably living in a company dorm three hours' journey by train from their home town?

When I was a kid the joke was "Made in Japan." That usually meant "cheap, unreliable, waaaay inferior to made in America . . ." and sometimes that was true. But it's no longer true. Supercomputers, or at least all the parts for them, are made in China, by people who normally couldn't tell a solenoid from a refrigerator. They're ultra-high quality: the furniture from Ikea, which bolts together exactly like it says in the instructions -- not even half a millimeter off.

Those paintings that I buy, painted in China, for a fraction of the price I would pay if someone painted them in Canada or America (if, indeed, anyone that talented would stoop to painting them) -- it's just downright amazing.

But of course, there's a catch. There's always a catch: people are just dying to make your stuff.

And there's a big difference between Made in Japan then and made in China now: in Japan, chances are that even in the 50s and 60s, there were laws in place to protect Japanese workers and people to enforce them. In China, it's the wild, wild West of corruption and exploitation. No, not by armed gangs of thugs who get a cut of everything you do, but by OFFICIAL armed gangs of thugs who get a cut of everything you do.

Much as I like him, my friend in China takes great pains never to tell me who's painting my paintings or how much he's paying them. I probably wouldn't buy them if I knew that he pays his painters $20 a day (which is probably a gross exaggeration on my part -- but don't tell me that).

Going to Cuba was an eye-opener: hearing what doctors and teachers made a month (about $35) -- it blew my mind.

So am I going to boycott all products made in China? Hmm, guess I'll have to stop buying anything at all. I fool myself that if I don't buy them, someone else will, and anyway, the cost of living in China is one-fiftieth of what it is here, so $1 an hour is a fortune for the average Chinese girl, who's lucky to have a job anyway . . . you know how that song goes.

I just wonder which is worse: two billion peasants under the giant fist of Communism or two billion employed peasants under the giant fist of Communism?

The Funniest Commercial Ever Made?