Barkerburgh

How long has it been since my last post? Mere minutes.

In that time, I’ve lost my glasses. No, they’re not on top of my head, as they have often been when I’ve thought I misplaced them, even at home. First place I check when I lose them; top of my head. Not today. Not in someone else’s house. I’m typing this by luck and squinting.

I”ve also misplaced this family’s cable remote and my own cellphone I don’t know how many times in the last week. Can’t find their cable remote right now, too, either. I’ve had to watch judge shows. Bad ones.

How do you people live in such a big home? Three floors? Four? Really. How do any of you manage? Oh, it must be nice.

“Oh, we’ve twenty pairs of glasses. Each. We just pick them up on any of our floors when we need them.”

“Oh, I’ve got all my many remote controls velcro’ed to a board so I can always find them.”

“Oh, we have ten universal remote controls. Doesn’t everyone? You never know when you might need one.”

“Oh, my man Geoffrey knows where all my glasses and remote controls are. So I never give him a day off.”

Yes, well. I don’t have a universal remote or a board or Geoffrey.

I still don’t know where my glasses are. Or the cable remote.

But wait, there’s a complete “Vicar of Dibley” DVD set sitting right there. And the DVD remote. I’ll just move back a bit.

Never mind.

…and I’ve got diagnosed osteoarthritis in both hips so I figured, for Wetstock this year, I’d just go easy.

But my people do not go easy into that good night. And this was in the afternoon.

I didn’t run around too much with the general ruck and rumble of the water-gun fight itself, although I wanted to. Luisa came to be, with water balloons, in the upstairs john which is always a target as it is overlooking the backyard wetting-fields, and I went up to tag her, but I got suborned to her side. We got Jeff R. and a couple of young people who I’d just met that day, (and bravo for the next generation, God bless’ em), and we won the day. We did. We did so.

Reid, with a high-powered water-rifle, employed a ladder to climb up to the bathroom window, in spite of the absence of one of our dear family of friends, partly, in part I’m sure, due to a ladder accident a few weeks back, with a head thing. And Baby H. Jesus, Reid, what were you thinking? But since he didn’t fall. it was genius, and hilarious. And he pulled open the window nearest me and I took the brunt of his humid and humorous assault.

This was Simon’s first Wetstock, and he needs experience, God love’im, he’ll be three in November.

Later, in the round backyard pool, we did the traditional whirlpool, with two reversals. K. A.

As always, the company was great, the food was great and I look forward to several next years.

What’s hilarious, seriously, is, that right now, two days later, when I was expecting one or both hips to be almost literally killing me, WTF and NGOOHA, it’s my thirty year old chronic back condition that’s bugging me, not my hippage.

At this same age, my parents did not have this suite of experiences or concomitant consequences. But they didn’t have waterguns.

It’s pronounced as ‘Four Double-Six Six Four” and it was Nelson Mandela’s prison number, indicating he was the four-hundred-and-sixty-sixth person imprisoned in 1964, this according to Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith who were hosting

Mandela has turned that number around (not literally, c’mon) and created an HIV/AIDS charity organization for which this concert was a fundraiser/benefit.

Himself is 90, and when he came out on stage, he needed a cane, and an arm from (I assume) his wife. He looked great, for an actual, true, real superhero, even though his frailty was heartbreaking.

(FY yer I and just so’s ya know, I don’t follow a lot of modern popular music…)

Peter Gabriel was there. Amy Winehouse made it. And Queen showed up; with Doctor May, and the new lead singer is no Freddie Mercury, but he’s really good. There was a children’s choir called Agape (three syllables, the Greek word, not the English), and lots of African singers and performers. I think I might like (not African that I know of) Josh Groban. What a voice.

What got me was this. At one point early in the concert - I had the sound off between numbers - this middle-aged white woman came out on stage. I thought maybe she was like a housewife from like Slough who’d won a contest to introduce an act or something. She’s kinda ordinary looking, but pretty, and very earnest and enthusiastic, which I could tell even with the sound off. I wonder why a housewife from Slough gets to introduce an act at the 46664 concert. Enh, the English. Who’s like’em?

So I turn the sound up to hear this woman. She’s got that light, delightful Scottish accent that I like (and can do), and I’m thinking she now looks maybe familiar, and sounds familiar too.

She introduces the Agape Children’s Choir and starts to hum along with them and a tag jumps up on the screen; my middle-aged housewife from Slough is Annie Freekin’ Lennox!

I know.

So I tried to watch Oliver Stone’s Alexander the other night. There was so much about it I wanted to like, and so much that was good about it, but what a synergetic suckfest. Almost as bad as Star Trek:Enterprise.

Colin Farrell was good, surprisingly. Angelina Jolie as Olympias was good, even with the 1960s “Mission:Impossible” generic Eastern European accent. Rosario Dawson was achingly beautiful as Roxane. Stone even handled the gay thing between Alexander and Hephaistion better than I expected. The battle scenes were glorious and splendid, and just what you want battle re-creations to look and sound like. If Stone had had Smell-o-Vision(tm) - which the Japanese have been working on for 30 years - the battle scenes would have been perfect.

But you know that really burned my ass? (more…)

(Does anybody else empathize with how hard it is to use the correct HTML spelling for ‘center’ when you’re Canadian?)

I’m just sayin’.

And if you could too, that would be great.

Visit Chez PLJ

I just discovered that Buffalo’s PBS station, WNED, broadcast 17, cable 61 (Rogers, downtown) is rerunning The Vicar of Dibley and the exquisite mid-1980s Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett in the title role.

Dawn French is almost flawless in The V of D, (en passant, closing credits include “Dawn French supplied by: Saunders and French Productions”) and Jeremy Brett is the best Sherlock Holmes ever. Ever.

There’s this cool show on Canada’s History Channel called “Cities of the Underworld“. It’s on Friday nights at 8:00pm, and repeated during the week.

The current host is an enthusiastic amateur name Dan Wildman, who keeps up a level of excitement as he crawls through 2,000 year old sewers or hangs in a sling over a 10 storey deep tufa mine.

Aimed at the armchair archaeologist or crypto-historian, it’s all about the simple fact that any city that’s old enough has layers. Sometimes those layers are caves or quarry-caverns, or once ground-level ruins that serve as the base or foundation for more recent or modern structures like churches or even just apartment buildings, whose tenants may know nothing about what exists only a few metres below their building. In Rome there’s Maecenas’ villa. In Naples there’s underground tufa quarries dating back to the city’s founding as a Greek colony (They’re not called Neapolitans fer nuthin’, ya know.) In Paris there’s ancient sewers. There’s tombs and cisterns, graves and catacombs, cult sites and strange (sometimes really strange) ossuaries.

And it’s not just ancient history. There’s subways and bomb shelters, secret labs and secret lairs, access tunnels and escape routes. Cool stuff often unknown today, and inaccessible to everyday tourists.

Lotsa, lotsa fun. It’s even got an IMDB entry, with discussions.

Leslie and Peter (and Simon)  invited me to join them for a Sunday afternoon on the Oak Ridges Moraine at the former Koffler estate known as Jokers Hill, now a U of T biological reserve.  It was a horse farm once and the outbuildings still stand.  There’s an overgrown race-track overlooking the Holland Marsh on one side of Dufferin and hectares and hectares of beautiful forest on the other

As you all probably know, Peter is an Indiana Jones biologist, (the Tibetan Plateau, the California coast, Western Australia…but just let him loose in Pellucidar or on Skull Island) and he’s worked a lot at Jokers Hill so he knows the ecology and biodiversity of the area.  And where to find newts, one of which Simon found fascinating.

(I have a picture of the newt he found that Wordpress won’t let me upload…)

What I got was an amazing natural history tour of the area, from the bedrock up, the moraine being about 100 metres of glacial sediment topped with that beautiful forest.

The day was warm but neither hot nor humid.  There was a light breeze even in the forest and, lots of sand.

We saw many patches of white trilliums ranging from one or two in number to a dozen or fifteen or more.  There were several lone red trilliums, patches of different kinds of violets, of little blue wildflowers, of yellow ones, a patch of dog-tooth violets (leaves only, no flowers) in a shaft of sunlight, small streams, swampy seeps, a lovely stand of quaking aspens demonstrating the reason for their name in a mild breeze, the scent of sun-warmed hay off a small feral meadow, a low stone wall made from glacial erratic boulders (probably from back in the olden days when settlers tried to farm the moraine), an old-fashioned stubby beer bottle which I snagged, many cool rocks which Simon found and carried around until we found a pond or a stream, and only one (that I noticed) patch of good old jack-in-the-pulpits, one of my favourites when I was a kid in Georgetown nearly forty years ago.

We must have walked about fifty kilometers - or like three or four

We had a nice French farmyard lunch of baguettes, cheeses, sausage, pate, oranges, and water - not local, from a water-cooler

When I got home, I napped like crazy.