Barkerburgh

Sometime in 1997 (I think….it was during the first smoking ban and my favourite pub had been empty for two or three weeks) I emailed you from CBC, using the pseudonym ‘Deep Pants’ about the municipal government’s looming ban on fatty foods in eating establishments.

You used it the very next day, and it was about one third of your column. I was reading the Sun on the subway that day and barked out loud when I turned to Page Six.

(I’m not bragging. I mean, hell, I couldn’t have done it without you!)

And to prove it’s really me, Deep Pants, I’ll tell you something only you and I would know; I said there would be no second-hand fat lawsuits, but you changed that part.

And to jog your memory a bit more, I mentioned healthy menu items like ‘60 Year Old Swede & Sour Pork’ and ‘Aerobica Coffee’.

I kept the email and the column for years, but have now found it missing.

Any chance you have an overflowing business box in a storage facility in Scarborough you can dig out and sift through?

That’d be real menschy of you.

Miss your columns; some days they were the best part of the paper.

Just found your blog. Working on the passively humorous curmudgeon, are you? Well, good for you and God love ya.

I hate this. I usually get my winter cold around Christmas.

It started in my head, just sniffles and a light fever. Manageable, I thought.

Then it dropped to my chest a few days ago. When that happens I can expect violent coughing spasms in the middle of the night, or even if I just laugh wrong during a TV show.

Two nights now, I’ve woken up twice in the middle of the night coughing uncontrollably for two or three minutes at a time, and I mean coughing uncontrollably, maybe one horse bark a second sometimes. When I was similarly ill several years ago, twice in one night, the attacks lasted for about half an hour and both times when the coughing finally stopped, I couldn’t draw a breath; my diaphragm was seized up or spasmed or some damn thing and all I could think of was that I have about two minutes to fix this, looking around for a good solid chairback to semi-hemi-demi-Heimlich myself. Twice. Jeezes.

Two nights ago it was so bad that my ribcage and stomach actually hurt now.

I feel lousy and I hate everybody and everything.

Rrrr.

Two weeks without Coronation Street because of the 400,000-tickets-shy-of-an-SRO Olympics, that’s why, you bloody stupid wankers!

“But then out of the turgid miasma of Television white-noise video, on the same night he lost Coronation Street for two weeks, there came what were probably the last four episodes of his beloved ‘Arrested Development’, and the blasphemous and heretical South Park episode about the Blessed Virgin Mary. He nearly nearly choked twice from laughing, lost his breath, and his throat kind hurts today a bit….and all is good.”

Thank God for Battlestar Galactica and that there are no sports in space. Nerdal responses to that last phrase go here, God love ya.

Please visit Flame Warriors by Mike Reed.

He describes the types who start, engage in, or perpetuate flame wars in discussion groups.

Now, I would never do such a thing [subliminal] under my own name or known alias [/subliminal] but I (like everyone else) have had to face, deal or mock these types and archetypes many times over the years.

The cartoons are delightful. And outside of the intended context, it reminds of nothing more than (principally) American politics and political coverage.

Stephen David Snobelen on Isaac Newton!

From the Galilean Library : “Stephen David Snobelen is Assistant Professor in the History of Science and Technology at University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is a founder member of the Newton project and author of many fascinating papers on Newton’s alchemy and religious thinking. I was privileged to be able to ask him some questions about his work on Newton.”

And so, here is Stephen David Snobelen: Newton Reconsidered, an interview with Snobelen by Paul Newall about his work on Newton.

Snobelen has put together a website about his own work on Newton, “Theology, Prophecy, Science and Religion”, well worth a long browse.

… the lost consonant of Alanis.

I thought of that a long time ago and just wanted to say it.

It did not come from a dream.

Addendum mere minutes later: only one other Google hit as of this writing.

Last night.

It was in the ’40s, in Vancouver.

There was a large Chinese community hall where gambling was going on but a young woman was going to be married there so the family cleared out all the gamblers and the gambling tables.

Now, in Dreamland, in the ’40s, in Vancouver, a young Chinese girl might be allowed to have three or four boyfriends at a time but once she’s engaged, she has to dump all of them but her intended.

So the young girl in question, who was never named in the dream, called her four boyfriends together in the hall after the gamblers were kicked out and told them she had to stop seeing them and why. They understood.

But a fifth one turns up and doesn’t want to let go - and neither does she. But the wedding’s today, there are obligations to her fiance’s family and things must be as they must be.

There’s a heartbreaking scene as they both decide she must do what’s best for the families and he leaves.

The bride’s mother comes in and starts putting up the Chinese Baroque decorations for the wedding. For some reason, she’s wearing her classical formal wedding get-up now.

I finally enter the scene as a character, rather than merely the observer.

I am a middle-aged Chinese woman, a priestess or wizardess of some sort, in full regalia, and as the bride’s mother finishes each of the decorations, I am wandering around with a small bowl of holy-water, splashing a bit on each object around the room by raising my hand just so with a practiced twist and a jerk to let just the right amount of water splash out.

Suddenly I move around a wide pillar up through which a dumb-waiter runs, to find that the side of it is a floor to ceiling mirror - I realize that this large room is also used for a Chinese dance school.

I shout out “Nobody told me there would be mirrors! I have to start all over again!”

The bride says “I have a mirror in my trunk.”

I say harshly “Everybody has a fucking mirror in their trunk!”

Everybody, the bride, her mother, the Chinese ladies helping her, all look at me in shock at my language. The observer part of me realizes that the priestess just shouldn’t be swearing, but she has reason to be upset at not knowing about the mirrors.

It turns out that there are other pillars with mirrors on them and even some on the walls behind wedding hangings and banners.

I tell the mother to send out kids and bridesmaids to check the whole building, the bathrooms, the offices, even the drug store and let me know where all the mirrors are.

I’m not happy at having to start all over again.

Now I usually have great dreams, usually science-fiction or fantasy epics, sometimes involving flying (at which point I almost always think ‘Thank god, I thought I could only do this when I was dreaming…’) but this is one of the most vivid and internally consistent I have had for a long time.

I had one a few months ago that was quite startling too.

There was an extraordinary ancient city in the mountainous deserts of Cental Asia, with domes of both the Muslim and Russian style, with high walls and broad streets.

I knew that the walls were made of porcelain and the domes were made of paper, because long ago, God had granted the city the blessing that it would never be conquered, why I never learned.

The ruler was called the Soltano, and he was looking for something called the Soltano’s Lyrica, about which he asked all travellers and merchants, including me, but about which I knew nothing, including what it was.

That’s all I remembered, but I loved the imagery.

I’m going to do something writing-wise with both dreams but I don’t know what yet…