Barkerburgh

I’m a Coronation Street fan. I watch it on CBC every weeknight at 7:30 but Thursday, and usually, all those episodes together on Sunday morning, especially if I missed any episodes or parts thereof the previous week.

Well, as I’m sure you all know, just about two weeks ago (in Canadian Coronation Street time, since we’re something like seven or eight months behind the UK airings - we used to be three years, and don’t get me started on how CBC caught up and what abominations they committed to get there…) 18 year old Katy killed her dad Tommy with a big pipe wrench in the garage, just like a Clue solution.

Now, Tommy was a prick but he didn’t deserve to die like that and you wanna know what else?

Katy hasn’t stopped crying since. Her mum, Angela, helped cover it up and first they blamed Martin, Katy’s fortyish boyfriend, who Tommy and Angela thought was having an affair with their neighbour and Martin’s own old flame Sally, but he wasn’t, - she was having an affair with someone else - only Katy, pregnant with Martin’s baby, believed her parents and she broke up with Martin and got an abortion, which broke Martin’s heart and gave the cops earnest to believe that Martin could have done it but there wasn’t enough means and opportunity even if there was motive in spades, and then Angela, who’s IDing of the perp in a pub killing got the whole family on witness protection to hide them from those Morgans in Sheffield, (which isn’t really all that far from Manchester, but where are they gonna go, Detroit?) tried to get the Bill to believe that it was the Morgans, but after investigating they decided it wasn’t them, and now Angela’s going to try to get them to suspect someone else but we don’t know who yet because that bit was just last night, and maybe this will finally stop Katy from bawling and whining and whinging and squeaking and weeping and generally making every freaking episode a bookie’s paradise for when Katy’s going to start blubbering again.

I just wish Les and Cilla would get back from Spain - but they told Roy and Hayley, who are looking after young Chesney, that they were going to a renewal retreat in North Wales - or even that Karen would return, if only just to raise a little more hell with Tracy or break Steve’s heart yet again.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, Coronation Street has in fact done the North American soap opera cliche of the Evil Twin, only she wasn’t evil, just another housewife from down Rosamund Street somewhere, I think.

And they have a transexual, the above mention Hayley - but Roy’s not gay, he didn’t know when he fell in love with her - but, as befits a character in this show, she’s short, dumpy and plain, with small hair. And played by a woman.

Laugh blah blah Beau Bridges as Earl’s dad blah blah Brett blah blah Dog River blah blah

I saw part of a remarkable episode of National Geographic on TVO last night.

I was surfing past when I caught a reference to the Buddhas of Bamiyan, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. I’m a Silk Road junkie, witness the Samarkand story in my previous post, so this grabbed my attention.

I watched a little bit more and they were talking about how the Afghan Film Archive was saved from the Taliban censors’ destruction in two phases; when ordered by the Taliban Thought Police to surrender the film library for burning, the keepers gave them only the prints, not the negatives, and there was a great burning. Then the keepers took some drywall, using it to block off the door to the room where the negatives were kept, then disabled the light fixture in the hallway near the hidden door to lessen the chances of their subterfuge being discovered. It wasn’t.

The episode told this wonderful story too. The Taliban had ordered all paintings in Kabul’s National Gallery that portrayed living things to be destroyed because such portrayals were un-Islamic, the same doctrine that ‘allowed’ the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas.

Doctor Mohammed Yusef Asefi took matters to heart and proceeded to try and rescue as many paintings as he could by - get this - painting over the oil paintings with water colours to hide any living creatures in them. Soon the National Gallery had a vast collection of ‘dreary landscapes’ that ‘few Afghans visited’.

After the fall of the Taliban, the paintings were restored to their original appearance.

I like this quote from the above article: “Some of the paintings that Dr Asefi saved are not that good. But looking at even a second-rate painting in the same way is difficult after you know the pains and risks taken to preserve it.”

These stories made me very viscerally happy for no logical reason. Howzabout you?

Anneli’s husband, the redoubtable Tim, brought me back some cool rocks from his part of the same trip as the wife. They are a simple handful of stones from what looks like an old fishing town, Clovelly on the north coast of Devon, England. Here’s the Google Maps link. Here’s the Joint Nature Conservation Committee link for the natural history of the region.

I couldn’t remember the name of the town yesterday so I couldn’t write it up with Anneli’s story. (I was thinking Gravelly, probably by association…) Here are some pictures. My stones came from the beach there, where the boats get pulled up from time to time.

Check out those pictures, that town, those houses. Look where the town is built and how. Imagine looking out to sea past that fog hanging over the beach, wandering when the last tourist launch from Tintagel would be getting back - it’s only forty or so kilometers south - it’s late and the sea’s a little rough. The women worry about the birdwatchers coming back from Lundy Island, the innkeepers and the souvenir sellers alike; t’was ever thus.

Now here’s the stone-soup blessing of getting a small box of pebbles from halfway around the world. I start looking up just the bare facts based on the story they tell me and find those pictures, then I find the town’s own website, then I find the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, and that means I can check out stuff there on other regions of the British Isles I’m interested in. Later I decide to look up the Google maps view, see some cool stuff there.

So some kind souls carry those stones along on their trip, then back across the sea through the upper airs, tell me interesting stories about where they came from and how they picked them, I get on the Internet and am enriched again.

So when people go away, I usually ask them to bring me back a stone or pebble from someplace interesting.

Why? Funny story. So here goes.

Years ago, I used to ask for big, expensive presents, but that never worked.

Then I started to ask for water, maybe from a lake or stream, or an ocean. I had little glass vials with black lids that I got in bulk, and I would give one or two of them to someone for their trip. At one point I had water from either Tahiti or Tonga (I forget now), or maybe American Samoa. I had a tiny hotel shampoo bottle from Cancun with Isla de Mujeres beach water in it. And so on. The water always evaporated over the years, but it was voodoo mana anyway and it was the thought that counted.

Then somebody saw me giving an empty one to a friend who was going away and asked if I had any hash oil to sell him. Blank stare from me, subsequent explanation from him. Ah. Stopped giving people little glass vials with black lids.

So then I started asking for dirt or soil from exotic places. A waitress at a pub I liked to go to said she was going to visit her dying grandfather in Northern Ireland, so I asked her to bring me back some dirt.

She comes back, gives me a baggie of peaty, loamy dirt from somewhere in Northern Ireland near the border with the Irish Republic. It was cool. She told me, laughing, how she brought it through Customs in her fanny pack, which was never searched, which was a good thing because the fanny pack containing the loose brown substance in a baggie had a big green cannabis leaf stencilled on it.

Later, I found out that importing anything dirt-like from the island is illegal, and dangerous, for obvious reasons. So I threw the bag of Irish dirt in the freezer, as an eminently sensible precaution. Later I mixed it with raw bleach and flushed it.

So the next free souvenir idea I thought seemed to be the most safe. Rocks. I asked for rocks. And got them. One fellow brought me back bits of rubble from the restoration of the Registan mosque in the ancient Silk Road city of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, and pebbles from a streambed in the Tien Shan range of the Himalayas. They were on a day trip and he just reached into the stream and picked them up. Very cool.

Luisa brought me back a mysterious piece of stone from the Molise mountains of central Italy, that might once have been architecture, with fossils and weirdness. Very cool.

Now, as you all may know, my friend Anneli recently returned from a trip to Europe, visiting such interesting places as Stonehenge, Helsinki, St Petersburg, Moscow and Platform 9 3/4.

Stonewise, she brought me back a pebble from Red Square, a pebble from the Viking graves at Uppsala in Sweden and a pebble-like rock from the Suomenlinna Fortress in Helsinki.

Earlier in the year, she and her family brought me back interesting rocks from the shores of Lake Huron near Grand Bend.

Asking for stones turned out to be a good idea. A few pebbles are light in someone’s luggage. They don’t carry viruses and Customs aren’t going to do a full body cavity search if they find you carrying. And I get to take them out of the cool little box they came in (because nobody wants to give somebody just a handful of rocks…), and look at them, reminiscing about someplace I’ve never been under clouds I’ve never seen, feeling breezes that have never blown, imagining adventures I never had.

Win-win.

I was over at Chez PL&J (the real one) the other night for a fine chicken pot pie dinner and no brownies.

Haven’t visited for a while even though I can practically spit from my back window to their front door, although I wouldn’t.

We sat around and yacked and laughed and, later, while they were tucking Jon in, I watched some (if not all) of the hilarious “Sacrilege Moments” made by P & L’s buddy Brad Birch (Himself corrected this, thanks Pedro, I even meant to type ‘Birch’ the first time and overcompensated in reverse…) for the Comedy Network a few years back. They’re a parodic yet patriotic riff on the Heritage Foundation’s “Heritage Moments”, broadcast several years ago to goose Canadian spirit. All I can hint at is ‘Windy the Poop’, and the soldier’s ‘hometown of Windsor’. And I won’t even mention ‘potato flakes’ or ‘Broadway Joe’.

Later, we watched some cool trailers and videos I hadn’t seen. One of my two favourites was a faked up trailer for a movie called “Shining” with Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, about a boy, his writer father, and Family, with ‘Salisbury Hill’ playing in the background. You had to be there, so perhaps you should be.

The best trailer was for Peter Jackson’s “King Kong“. God almighty, it looks awesome. I’m a tad worried about content and substance, but even if it’s shallow as Julia Roberts, it’ll still be just as pretty.

(The title of this post is original, but as usual when I am that clever, I googled it and got this. Imagine that; all them folks smart as me. Still darn funny.)

Jeepers H. Jingling Cripes.

CNN reports that stupid fncking Fox has cancelled both Arrested Development and Kitchen Confidential.

Rrrr.

What is it with Canadian shows like The Rick Mercer Report and Popcultured?

They’re not the only culprits but they shall stand as exemplars. And to be clear, I am definitely not including Corner Gas in this group. Good old Corner Gas.

Simply put, if you have three minutes to fill and you need say twenty jokes, you don’t just write the twenty jokes.

It’s standard theory that you write fifty or sixty jokes and then pick the best twenty. Look it up, it’s been that way since the 15th Century, although there are enigmatic references in Saint Augustine, not the one in Florida. Hold da Vinci up to a mirror, you’ll see.

I’d been waiting for The Rick Mercer Report to premiere and when it did, about five minutes into it I just flipped the channel.

Now, Popcultured apparently wants to be the Canadian Daily Show, but it suffers the same problem. Sometimes it comes across as the result of a bunch of high school buddies sitting around stoned on cheap weed laughing like hell at the first twenty jokes that come out of their mouths. “Oh, man! I hope I remember this tomorrow!”

Shemp is hemp backwards, indeed.

Popcultured’s only true emulation of American television is the perpetuation of the tradition of Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen De Generes as lesbian comperes.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I suppose I should point out, in all fairness, that you can also steal other people’s jokes that you know work, if you can’t come up with fifty or sixty of your own.

My friend Anneli went off to Europe for seven weeks and took lots of pictures and had lots of fun.

The best thing is that she went to King’s Cross station in London and took a picture of the actual Platform 9 3/4. It exists! There’s even a luggage cart halfway through the wall!

This means that Rowling didn’t invent it!

I have a copy of the photo Anneli took herself, which I shall scan and post to show you all!

It should be pretty obvious to everyone that if Platform 9 3/4 exists, then so must pretty much everything else; Hogwarts, Dementors, flue powder, the lot!

I am so relieved.

I’m sending my resume to Hogwarts.

I cannot remember a sitcom season when I laughed out loud so heartily and surprisedly as I have this fall with Corner Gas and My Name Is Earl.

Earl was new this week and was so goddam funny I pretty much didn’t stop laughing the whole half hour. The ketchup! The ashes! The knives!

It was funnier than Battlestar Galactica, the old one I mean.

Starting with a cameo by the Prime Minister, Corner Gas on Monday was just great, and I mean funnier than any Canadian sitcom ever was. Partly because the competition is mainly things like Mosquito Lake and The Trouble with Tracy, but even if those had been any good…

And if you care, Stephen Colbert’s own show ‘The Colbert Report’, apparently pronounced ‘The Cole-bear Re-pore’, is going to be on CTV at 12:35 am (Himself corrected the time to am from pm because he always gets them confused…) after ‘The Daily Show’ starting next Monday.

I hope it doesn’t suck as much as ‘The Daily Show’.

Just when I was thinking that Canadian politics was boring, along comes the Gomery Report and I’m nailed to the TV, bouncing between Newsworld, Newsnet and CP24 just to see who’s saying what.

Then the American Democrats, those competitive Yanks, have to go and lock down the Senate for two hours in order to force a resolution to the whole buggered and butchered pre-war intel thing, promised for a year by the Republicans.

Ya can’t laugh for cryin’, my friends. And, thank god, vice versa.