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When I was a kid I loved the smell. Once my parents took us to visit our American cousins in Maine, and one night we went out and got ice cream. My cousins introduced me to coffee flavoured ice cream. Loved it!
As soon as I was old enough, I was making myself instant coffee and drinking it in my room while doing homework.
A little older, and like many other Canadians, I got hooked on Tim Horton’s coffee, even after the manager of the Summerside franchise, a fellow by the name of Murphy, I recall, threw me and my friends out for no reason that I can fathom to this day. (“Are you going to order anything else?” he asked. “No thanks, we’re fine,” we told him, having already ordered plenty of juice, coffee and donuts. “Then get out!” he barked. “In that case I’ll have another donut,” I told him. “Don’t give me any lip!” he told me, and threw us all out. We were pretty clean cut kids and I at least remain offended to this day. But I digress.)
For many years I drank coffee in the morning, purchased from Ooh La La’s in the CBC Broadcast Centre atrium. At a certain point, when I started having some sleeping problems, I switched to decaf, with great reluctance. Every now and then I would have non-decaf, as a treat.
Lately, to my horror, I’ve found that when I drink non-decaf coffee, it actually makes me ill. A few weeks ago I had a small coffee from Starbucks. I felt lousy for the rest of the day. Two weeks ago I had a regular coffee from a local bakery. Felt ill until suppertime.
The day before yesterday, I had another regular coffee from Starbucks at about eleven in the morning. Half an hour later started feeling quite anxious, and fifteen minutes after that had an upset stomach, and spent the afternoon in the bathroom, quite sick until about 8pm.
What the heck is going on? Is this an age thing? The scientific side of me wants to experiment, figure out what my tolerance is, exactly what coffee chains/beans cause this, is it in fact the caffeine, is it inferior beans, what?
The saner side of me what’s nothing whatsoever to do with coffee anymore. On the one hand it’s quite simple. “Gee, I feel sick when I drink coffee.” “D’uh… so don’t drink coffee anymore!”
More sad news… Phyllis Gotlieb has passed away at the age of 83. I feel greatly for Kelly, her husband… Phyllis was the love of his life. They had been married for 60 years this past June 12th.
It was my honour to present Phyllis with an SF Canada Lifetime Achievement Award last year, which I believe she greatly appreciated. Here’s what I said about Phyllis at the time:
“Everyone here knows Phyllis Gotlieb. You know her work; perhaps you’re fortunate enough to know her personally. You might know that she was born Phyllis Fay Bloom right here in Toronto, and that she was educated in Toronto as well. I don’t have to tell you that she’s written many fine novels, poems, short stories, and that her work spans many decades and genres — that it is an outstanding body of work. You already know that.
Did you know that she’s written radio plays too? Of course you did.
Phyllis is a founding member of SF Canada. Indeed, she is one of the founders of contemporary Canadian science fiction. She has been and continues to be a role model and mentor to many of us who consider her a part of our extended family. In her groundbreaking career Phyllis has been an editor, she’s been nominated for a Governor General’s Award, and she’s even had an award named after one of her novels: The
Sunburst Award. And the award we’re presenting today isn’t her first award – her novel A Judgment of Dragons, published by Berkley, won the Canadian Science Fiction Award in 1981.
You are no doubt familiar with the sheer scope of Phyllis’s work: with her elegant prose, the gritty reality of her fictional worlds, and the vibrant, sometimes tragic characters inhabiting those worlds. Such work has made her a towering figure in Canadian literature, a pioneer in Canadian science fiction. But her reputation transcends our borders – her work is respected the world over.
It’s one thing to be accomplished. It’s quite another to be as
accomplished as Phyllis is and remain so darned friendly. As a
recipient of her generosity and warmth — one of many recipients, I know – I am happy to attest not only to Phyllis’s towering achievements as an artist, but also to her enduring humility.
All of which is more than enough reason to present our very own Grande Dame of Science Fiction with this honour here tonight. Phyllis, on behalf of SF Canada, I am thrilled to present you with the first ever SF Canada Lifetime Achievement Award, along with my sincere
congratulations.”
I was fortunate enough to work with Neil off and on over the course of two or three years. Although they don’t mention it in the notice at CBC.ca, one of Neil’s many accomplishments was starring as Inspector Quentin Nickles in The Investigations of Quentin Nickles , for CBC Radio’s Mystery Project. Working on these plays I had the opportunity to observe Neil’s craft up close.
You had to be a skilled actor working on these shows. Producer/Director Barry Morgan was a one take wonder… rarely did we ever make it up to take two. So the actors had to get it right the first time, and they almost always did. If we had to do a second take it was usually because one of us technical types had screwed something up, or one of the sound effects engineers was caught on tape snoring during a brief siesta (that actually happened once).
Neil also wrote/adapted several radio plays; I remember recording and mixing two or three wild and crazy examples of his work. The names escape me now, but I recall them as full of mirth and inventiveness.
I remember Neil Munro as not only a consummate professional but as a genuinely warm and friendly man. He deserved better than to have died at 62, it seems to me. As Truman Capote said, life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.
In Neil’s case, I’m afraid someone eliminated the third act altogether.
So long, Inspector Nickles.
Addendum: Just received this:
Neil Munro’s recent passing was without doubt a sad day in Canadian theatre, however his talent and passion will live on here at The Shaw and in the hearts of the many Canadian artists whose lives he touched. To celebrate this, The Shaw is planning an event to take place Monday, August 10 at 3:00pm in the Festival Theatre. We look forward to sharing this celebration of an extraordinary man’s life with all our friends and colleagues.
Jackie and Colleen
Colleen Blake
Executive Director
Shaw Festival
No, I’m not talking about my inimical management style. Nor am I talking about the lee side of a baloney sandwich.
I’m talking about posting advertising on this blog.
The obsessive compulsives among you (like me) who scour the links section of blogs for links to your own electronic havens will no doubt have observed the addition of a curious link to my blogroll. A link called “Sports Apparel” which, if you click on it, will take you to an online store called “Outersports“.
How much am I raking in for the scandalous addition of this link to my blogroll?
That remains to be seen.
In the meantime, here’s how it all went down:
A charming young lady named Lisa wrote me suggesting that if I added the link to my blogroll, I could choose a piece of merchandise from the online store in question. (Actually I have no idea if Lisa’s charming, young, or even in fact a lady, but she gave every appearance of being all three, in print at least.)
Initially skeptical, I asked for information about the store. Cause to tell you the truth it seemed kind of weird, at first. If you click on the link, you will discover that Outersports sells an unusual combination of merchandise. Wedding rings and climbing gear, mostly. Target audience soon to be betrothed mountain climbers, I guess.
Turns out Outersports is operated by a couple of brothers, one of whom was interested in selling rings, the other climbing gear. So they joined forces and formed the store that really ought to have been called Mountain Weddings, or Marriage Climbing, or Nuptial Wedding Climbing Mountain Gear, or something, anything other than Outersports. Anyway, it sounded like a small, family owned operation, and what with these being difficult economic times, and me being such a swell guy, and the possibility of getting a free hoodie worth about thirty bucks for my wife, I thought, what the heck, why not go for it.
So I did.
And now everything seems really dark.
But that’s just because everybody’s in bed, except me.
So we’re supposed to get the hoodie in a week or so, if this Outer Mountain Bridal Sporting Ring store is actually on the up and up.
My wife and I have watched a lot of excellent television in the last few years. We generally only watch one show at a time — all we have time for — so we prefer that time to be devoted to something good. We’ve watched Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Rome, Being Erica, X-Files, Journeyman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Carnivale, Six Feet Under, and so on, and enjoyed them all to one degree or another.
Recently a friend gave us the first season of Roswell on DVD. We enjoyed it well enough, so when Season One concluded we picked up Season Two.
I doubt we’ll be watching Season Three.
If a story works, I get lost in it, and afterward might admire the craft involved. If a story doesn’t work, my story editor instincts kick in, and I find myself wishing someone had asked my opinion before producing the darned thing.
Such was the case with Season Two of Roswell.
I’ve often thought about starting a blog specifically geared toward story editing. Even with good shows there would be plenty to write about.
One such blog entry might go something like this:
Roswell Season Two started off well enough, but it quickly became evident that either someone didn’t have their hand on the tiller, or just plain didn’t know what they were doing. (This is where the spoilers come in, though I’ll try to write in general terms.)
The writers were at their best in the first season when they only hinted at science fiction. But in the second season they went astray with full frontal science fiction that displayed a naive take on the genre, and some surprising inconsistencies. For instance, four of the main characters were supposed to have lived before on an alien planet. I took this to mean that their minds, or essences, had somehow been transposed into human form, which would have meant that the characters we were watching really had lived previous lives. They would have been reincarnated, in effect. And then along comes an episode in which there is another version of the four main characters. So according to this episode they’re clones. Well, clones don’t have previous lives. Dolly the sheep’s mind was not reincarnated from another sheep. Sure, physically she’s identical to a sheep that has lived before, but for all intents and purposes she’s nothing more than a twin to another sheep.
It’s perfectly fine (sort of) if the writers wanted to make the characters clones. Except that they also gave the characters memories of their previous lives. So they’re not clones! I would be surprised to learn that Dolly the sheep had memories from the sheep she was cloned from, because she was never that sheep. So the writers had a fundamental misunderstanding of the science they were basing their writing on, a cardinal sin of writing science fiction.
Was there wiggle room? I suppose. Maybe the true essences of the characters were in one physical set, and the other physical set were nothing more than clones. But this was never made explicit. So… nice try.
Another misstep. In the third last episode, one character becomes ill. She’s pregnant, and there’s something wrong with the baby. In the next episode there’s no mention of this, and all the tension generated in the previous episode dissipates. To me, the second last episode smacked of an episode that was supposed to have aired previously in the season, but was sandwiched in here late in the season (perhaps because it was an exceedingly weak episode) in the vain hope that it wouldn’t seem too out of place.
Well, it was.
And now the final major problem for me. A story arc through the latter half of the season involved a character who may or may not have been murdered. Turns out he was (hey, I told you there’d be spoilers). Virtually all of the information pertaining to his murder was revealed in the season finale.
Big mistake.
The story arc generated precious little tension. Hitchcock’s rule of suspense (gleaned from the classic Truffaut/Hitchcock interviews) is to reveal as much information as you possibly can without giving away the ending. Following this tenet, I would have advised the writers to reveal the murderer early on, during the third last episode (probably near the end of the episode). Once the audience learns information characters in the story do not know, dramatic irony is produced. They can watch in horror as the murderer cosies up to the other characters, wondering when the innocent characters are going to catch up to what they know. Or wondering when and how the murderer is going to turn on the other characters. The more information revealed early on the better, resulting in much less exposition getting in the way of the action later on. Without the necessary information, the tension is diluted, the ending expository and clunky.
It’s a shame. I had the sense that the executive producer, Jason Katims, is not without ability. He pulled it off in the first season. He wrote some standout episodes (the second season Christmas episode, while shamelessly sentimental, is a standout), but he appeared asleep at the switch during the second season. I’m afraid to even look at the third.
Yeah… I really need to get a job on one of these shows (he wrote, grievously over rating his own meager ability) (ouch! How Canadian of me…)
