Barkerburgh

God help the people of News Orleans…

Long before the Superdome
Where the saints of football play
Lived a city that the damned call home
Hear their hellish rondelet…
New Orleans!
Home of pirates, drunks and whores
New Orleans!
Tacky, overpriced souvenir stores
If you want to go to hell, you should take a trip
To the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Mississip’

New Orleans!
Stinking, rotten, vomiting, vile
New Orleans!
Putrid, brackish, maggotty, foul
New Orleans!
Crummy, lousy, rancid and rank
New Orleans!

But let’s not forget…

You can always depend on the kindness of strangers
To buck up your spirit, and shield you from danger
Now here’s a tip from Blanche you won’t regret
A stranger’s just a friend you haven’t met
You haven’t met! Streetcar!

Luisa is part ancient Roman, part pre-Indo-European Italian aboriginal (maybe related to the Basques), probably part Classical Greek (ancient pre-Roman colonies at Naples, Taranto and Cumae, for example), maybe part Etruscan (it’s a short hike) , possibly part Saracen (invasions), possibly part Norman French (more invasions), perhaps Spanish (even more invasions). She might have the blood of immigrants, slaves or merchants from all over the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, or possibly, just possibly, Phoenicians or Egyptians out exploring for lands or trade opportunities far past the edge of their worlds when Greece and Rome were nothing and nobody.

(Of course, that means her two boys are half all that too, plus half of whatever their fathers have going.)

Well, she’s going back to one of the ancestral homelands for a visit, the central Italian province of Isernia, and the municipality of Macchiagodena.

This is a bit about Macchiagodena, the burg her parents come from, actually a village outside Macchiagodena with the mysteriously delightful name (for an Italian mountain village), Incoronata.

This is the Google map of Italy focussed on the latitude and longitude of Macchiagodena, (because Google Maps couldn’t find it otherwise.) You can zoom in on the mountains and countryside. It must be beautiful to be parallel to it at ground level, instead of perpendicular. I’m sure Luisa will get plenty of pictures for us.

Have a safe trip, dear friend. Bring me back a rock (even a pebble) of geographical and historical significance.

Someone should say something!

The Hudson’s Bay Company, now calling themselves HBC, but usually refered to as ‘the Bay’ is running a commercial right now that is surely a symptom of the downfall of civilization and perhaps even the End Times.

It shows children running around with this clapping song playing, encouraging them to divers sins, luxuries and worse.

“Three, six, nine, the goose drank wine,
The monkey chewed tobacco on the street car line.
The lion choked, the monkey croaked,
And they all went to heaven in a little row boat”

There’s a bit more in the commercial, but this has the worst parts in it.

Let us analyze together.

1> ‘the goose’ - a loose sexual term for an quick, unwanted fondling of the bum, usually by a man to a woman, but not always.

2> ‘drank wine’ - used in a positive context, will no doubt encourage underage alcoholism, resulting in teen riots, car accidents and worse.

3> ‘the monkey’ - again, another loose sexual term, this time for a man’s ivatepray artspay, often used in an extremely vernacular term for onanism or self-abuse.

4> ‘chewed tobacco’ - nothing more than an encouragement to the vice of smoking, or at least chewing, like a common baseball player

5> ‘line’ - an obvious reference to cocaine

6> ‘lion’ - where did the lion come from? or is this word a subtle encouragement for the children to tell mistruths about their sex, drugs and alcohol habits by ‘lyin’?

7> ‘croaked’ - first, monkeys do not croak, second, this is actually a reference to death, perhaps suicide, not as a result of bad habits, but as a way to get to heaven.

8> ‘heaven’ - an explicit reference to the Christian paradisal afterlife, highly inappropriate in this country with all its immigrant diversity and profligate heathenism, proper and good though it may be.

What does it come down to?

Ya got trouble. Right here in River City.

For years, the web has been my long term memory; imdb, wikipedia, the history of mathematics at the School of Mathematics
and Statistics at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and so forth.

For years, when I’m writing, I like to have inspiration, usually background music, mostly instrumental, or if lyrical, then in a foreign language like Latin or Fon.

I might have a movie playing without the sound to provide visual stimulation, like Harry Potter, 2001 or Totoro.

There’s also random ideas, free association, Rorshach inspirations, irrational trains of thought that nevertheless get somewhere interesting, like a Samuel Delany novel when you’re fourteen.

So now there’s this! Liveplasma.com!

Basically, it lets you specify a movie or a musical group/artist and then provides you with a graphical display of all the other items in its database that can be linked to your choice, with more distant items being less related.

I picked “The Poseidon Adventure” out of the blue and this is what it gave me. Notice the way the nodes are positioned.

You can drag the title pane out of the way, or you can click on the surface to recenter it, sort of like dragging in Google Maps, click on a related item and see where it floats, relationship-wise, in plasmaspace.

You can click on Legend and other items on the title pane for an explanation of the various things. On this Pentium ][ at the public library, it’s irritatingly slow, but no worse than Google Maps.

I’ve seen a similar (3d?) designs touted for internet search engines where the link and the relevance are indicated by distance, colour and node-style and you can change the focal point of the search by selecting another node, similar to this.

For me, this isn’t just a cool toy, although it certainly is that, but only among other things. You may notice that when you look at my Poseidon Adventure page, off to the left, behind the title pane is “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”. Part of the back of my mind is hamster-wheeling like hell trying to figure out the path from Upside Down Ocean Liner to Boy Wizard in Trouble Again. Inspiration, association, apparent randomicity (or is it?), spontaneous generation of grey matter, all the good stuff.

Don’t diminish me, it’s holding off the Alzheimer’s.

Play with the site yourself, try it with musicians, have some fun.

And hey, all praise Saint Timothy Berners Lee while we’re here.

Amen. Awomen.

I have not properly expressed my appreciation of the Canadian TV series Corner Gas. I have mentioned it before with appreciation, but I don’t even have a category for it, as I do for both Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, without which life would mean nearly nothing. But for Corner Gas.

So here it is. Wait, I have to mention Robson Arms too, even though I’ve only seen one episode and it was funny.

Okay, Corner Gas. It takes place in the small town of Dog River, Saskatchewan, which, like the New York City of Friends or the Los Angeles of Blade Runner, is entirely fictional.

It’s make-me-laugh funny, even when I least expect it. They’ll say a line that’s funny, in, say, a scene five minutes into an episode, and I’ll laugh. Then, say, ten minutes later - or even right at the end - they’ll use the line again, out of the blue, out of left field, but still durn funny, and there I am blindsided, larfing again at the same line. Well, really the same joke in a slightly different context.

Now, there’s two kinds of jokes (for this comparison: there are at last official count, eight hundred and thirty seven kinds of joke in English alone - of the living languages, Hindi and Elvish have over a thousand each) . There’s the joke you see coming because of the setup. If you have a clue, the setup is like an answer on Jeopardy. “Aw, jeez, the question’s right there.” If you’re not paying attention, then good comedy, good jokes, depend as much on misdirection as anything fancy by David Copperfield or Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin (1805-1871). It sneaks up on you over here, when you’re looking over there. Good comedy - good jokes - are as delightful and manipulative as good magic. Whaddayano.

Corner Gas is as nearly perfect a TV comedy as there’s ever been. And it’s Canadian. And it stars a lot of Canadian stars - well, people who should be stars. Now I enjoy them all, but two of my favourites are the cops; Lorne Cardinal as Davis and Tara Spencer-Nairn as Karen. Not giving too much credit where credit is overdue. It’s an ensemble show, and the cop gags are always funny.

So that brings us to Brent Butt. Yes, il s’appele Brent Butt. He’s the creator and, inspired, plays the lead character of the show, Brent Leroy, who runs the gas station cum corner store that names the series. (See, I avoided the term eponymous, for no good reason.) His delivery is priceless.

Years ago, I remember thinking that the American cable stations were producing really cool stuff, outside the Hayes Code, the Mann Act and the Ten Commandments. This was before you could say ‘boobies’ and ‘underpants’ on Canadian TV.

Now you can, and when you have a nearly perfect situation comedy, you don’t have to. Although they skirt that ‘don’t have to’ sometimes.

Watch it and see.