How would you react if you looked up and saw people flying overhead?

The inimitable (I mean that in a nice way) Colleen Anderson has an amusing post on her blog about the time she met me at a World Horror convention.

Or did she?

Please watch this profound video from Karl Johanson about the proposed new SOPA Bill. Don’t know what that is? Don’t worry… the video will explain all:

Amen.

Yesterday I read an article in the Toronto Star by Heather Mallick about Robert Fulford of the National Post writing a critical review of Margaret Atwood’s latest story in the New Yorker, called Stone Mattress. The Atwood story is about a woman who was raped as a teenager by an older boy who gets away with it. This act sends the woman down a bad road in which she gets pregnant, becomes a prostitute, and then marries older men of ill health so that she can help them die prematurely and get their money. Ultimately she meets the man who raped her and exacts her revenge.

Fulford doesn’t like the story because he thinks it “comes across as a classic man-hating story.” Mallick doesn’t like Fulford’s review because she thinks Atwood is “entitled to fill her fiction with hateful men.” She also didn’t like that Fulford didn’t own up to once having been skewered in an Atwood piece, suggesting that his review of Stone Mattress was simply revenge, as if it’s not possible to dislike a story solely on its own merits, or lack thereof.

Mallick professes to have once adored Bob Fulford, “wisest and cleverest of older male journalists.” Now, she claims that Fulford has stopped regarding life with endless interest and even joy, and turned sour. This seems a harsh assessment based on a single review of Atwood’s story. When I read that line in her article it seemed so disproportionately harsh that I wondered what else must be informing Mallick’s revised opinion of Fulford.

As a reasonably decent man this whole episode struck a nerve. I’m aware that certain women don’t like men, or distrust them, and that because of the actions of some jerks they have good reason to feel this way. I have always tried to conduct myself in a way to give women reason to like men. I have three sisters, a mother, a wife and two daughters and many female friends and colleagues. I like women. I’m good to them. I treat them with respect. So it annoys me when I am confronted with women who think that, as Fulford writes, men are villains except when they are clowns. That’s just a different kind of hatred, and it’s no better than men disrespecting women. Understanding that there are men out there deserving of scorn, just as there are woman deserving of scorn because of hateful attitudes and actions.

So I am sympathetic to Fulford’s take on Atwood’s story, although Atwood is equally hard on women in Stone Mattress. The female protagonist, essentially a serial killer, is certainly no more sympathetic than the male schmuck she murders. But I’m more sympathetic to Fulford himself than I am to his take on the story because I’d like to know why Mallick has come to dislike him so much. Just disliking Atwood’s story, and not owning up to having been a victim of an earlier Atwood story, just doesn’t seem to justify it.

I once spent four days at Atwood’s house recording a series of interviews for CBC Radio. Surreally for me, the entire four days were spent conversing with Atwood and the rest of the crew in French, which I was in the process of learning at the time, having recently returned from several months of living in Aix-en-Provence, France. Apart from Atwood’s assistant at the time, Sarah Cooper, Atwood and I were the only anglophones. On the third night we all went to a restaurant together where circumstances contrived to place Atwood and myself alone together for about twenty minutes, and we conversed in English for the first time. The whole experience generated a certain camaraderie between us, or at least that was how it felt to me – I’ve met her several times since and she has never indicated that she remembers me. Although I consider this last point worthy of mention, I don’t hold it against her. I’m not sure that I would remember her much either if she were not one of Canada’s most famous authors, mentioned time and again on the CBC and in the rest of our national media. Impossible to forget, in other words.

However, I’ve never forgotten her friendliness at the time. She did not come off to me as the least bit man hating. Her characters and stories are fiction, after all, not necessarily representative of the author’s own mind set. The truth is I haven’t actually read much Atwood, apart from some short stories in a book she gave me on our last day together (Good Bones) and the aforementioned Stone Mattress. And a handful of radio drama adaptations of her work such as The Handmaid’s Tale.

No, if I had one bone to pick with Margaret Atwood it wouldn’t be her stance against men, it would be her stance against science fiction, which she seems to regard as less than worthy. Yes, she writes it from time to time, but when she writes it is isn’t science fiction, it’s something else, something better, “speculative fiction” maybe. I find this attitude inexplicable and insulting, and no I don’t feel that way because she has previously skewered me in her work, at least that I’m aware, not that I would be aware not having read much of her work.

So neither Robert Fulford nor Heather Mallick have done anything to alter my opinion of Margaret Atwood. I’ve never given Robert Fulford much thought but I feel rather sympathetic toward the man now. As for Heather Mallick, who’s work I have read from time to time in the Star, and to whom I haven’t given much thought either, I am now unduly curious about.

Just what the heck does she really have against Robert Fulford?

For thousands of years hardly anything changed.

Spears used by humans tens, even hundreds of thousands of years ago stayed the same for millennia. You could learn how to use it as a kid and the skills you learned would last a lifetime. Hundreds of lifetimes. Even in the last thousand or so years you could learn a trade from your father, or a particular skill, and trust that it would still be applicable years later to teach your own kid.

Not anymore.

Now everything changes. Constantly and quickly.

My parents grew up with no running water or electricity. Now that’s practically unthinkable, in this country at least.

I learned analog broadcast production skills in school. Now it’s all digital. I grew up with three channels to choose from on television. In black and white. Now there’s hundreds, all in colour. When I was a kid I had a real dog. Now I have a robot dog. No wait, sorry, that’s my future grandkid I’m thinking of. You think I’m joking? Just wait. (Imagine a dog smart enough to pick up his own poop… worth inventing! You’d make a mint.)

Much of this change is positive. Me, I’m all for hot showers and coffee at the flick of a button. But the sheer pace of all this change is starting to irritate me. Should it not be possible to purchase a computer with a particular operating system and trust that you won’t have to mess with it for ten or so years?

Apparently not.

I’m writing this on a MacBook I purchased in August 2006. It seems like yesterday to me. It’s running OS X 10.4.11. And all the new software I want won’t run on anything less than 10.5.x. So I have to go through the rigamarole of upgrading to Snow Leopard. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Do you have any idea how hard it is to catch a Snow Leopard? (There’s a great episode on Snow Leopards on the series Earth… took them weeks if not months to find one.)

Anyway, I guess you have to take the good with the bad. Hot showers and instant coffee = constantly having to upgrade your computer.

Okay, I know that once every five years isn’t exactly “constantly”. But if they could make a spear (or at least, a type of spear) that didn’t need to be upgraded for one hundred thousand years, why not a computer? And here’s a good question: might the day not come when we’ve gone as far as we can with computers? When they’re as good as they can be, and there’s no point in upgrading them further? And they stay that way for one hundred thousand years? Just doing what you need them to do without having to fuss over them constantly. Imagine! Bliss? Or boring?

Doesn’t really matter. Cause one thing’s for sure.

It ain’t gonna happen in our lifetimes.

I just finished watching the series Michael: Tuesdays and Thursdays.

First a disclaimer. I used to work with the two stars of this series, Bob Martin and Matt Watts, back when I worked in Radio Drama for the CBC. Bob Martin was usually a voice down the line on Steve the First and Steve the Second (we would record him from a remote location) so I never got to know him. But I worked very closely with Matt Watts on Steve the First, Steve the Second, and then later on a show called Canadia.

A few words about Matt. We got to be pretty good friends working on these shows. In fact working with Matt on these shows was a dream. I have never felt so creatively in synch with anyone as I did with Matt. We almost always agreed on creative approaches and we both worked extremely hard to make the shows as good as we could possibly make them. We dreamed of a return to the golden age of radio drama, of content so entertaining and well produced that it could not be ignored.

Our dream never quite came true, but we did make some damn good stuff together in the time we had.

So now I’ve moved onto management at the CBC and Matt has moved onto TV. I regret that we may never be able to work together again creatively and that I may never again experience the creative synch that I experienced with Matt with anyone else. But I remain a huge fan of Matt’s work, and am delighted to discover that the move to television has in no way diminished that work. On the contrary, it has simply allowed a wider audience to experience the fruits of his labors.

So I’m obviously biased. But I think that any discerning critic watching Michael: Tuesdays and Thursday would agree that it is one finely honed show. The writing is superb. The direction is polished. The acting is note perfect. Even the music is appealing.

I wrote Matt at one point early in the season that I didn’t find the series exactly to my taste after watching the pilot episode. This feeling went away fairly quickly. The feeling was engendered by the prudish part of me, which responded somewhat negatively to the (initially) frequent sex between a couple of the main characters. I have some kind of a weird double standard thing going on there too, I have to admit, as I don’t have a problem with HBO fare like Rome or Game of Thrones. It was just seeing it on CBC, and the fact that it meant that I couldn’t watch the show with my eleven year old daughters, which would have made it infinitely easier to watch as the episodes aired.

Anyway once I got past that little peccadillo and was able to focus on the other elements I began to thoroughly appreciate the craft that went into this show. My rather egotistical appraisal can be summed up thusly: it didn’t require my involvement.

I should explain that a bit. I frequently watch shows and think, my God, why did they do THAT? Could they not see that the story required THIS? If only I had been allowed to participate in the creation of this show!

In fact, this is how Matt and I originally became acquainted. I recorded the pilot of his first ever radio show, episode one of Steve the First. My involvement was limited to recording the episode. Then someone else took it away and butchered the mix. When I heard it I was appalled, and I wrote Matt to tell him so. I told him exactly how it needed to be fixed (in my not so humble opinion). Matt complained to the producer, and I got to remix it to my satisfaction. I remained as opinionated throughout our working partnership, and as I’ve mentioned earlier Matt, to his enormous credit in my view, always took my opinions seriously.

Matt, Bob, Don McKellar and everyone else associated with the show got Michael: Tuesdays and Thursday right all on their own.

Well done guys.

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

Spectacular… I wish I’d been there to see it myself (though I did see something similar, if infinitely more modest, once…)

Yesterday — two days after Christmas — one of our cats died.

Brandy was named after the song by Looking Glass called Brandy, just because I liked the song, and the named suited her, somehow, or came to.  We can’t remember exactly when we got her, but it was something like fourteen years ago.

About three weeks ago we noticed she wasn’t looking great.  She had an unusually skinny tummy.  Her chest looked slightly enlarged, but perhaps this was just in contrast to her tummy.  We attributed her looks to her not eating her food, which consisted of crunchy pellets.  We thought she might have sore teeth, and just wasn’t able to eat the food.  So we switched her to moist food, which she took to right away, and we thought okay, now we’ll see some improvement.

But while she continued to eat the moist food for awhile, she eventually started eating less and less and started spending virtually all of her time sleeping in her cat bed.  Still, we didn’t really think the end was nigh, because she still moved throughout the house, upstairs and down.  But perhaps that was my own naivete.

So far a relatively straightforward story of the death of a cat.  Here’s where it gets slightly more complex.  It did occur to us to take Brandy to a vet.  We have friends that are vets.  But we didn’t want to, because we were afraid that it would cost us a fortune.  A fortune we do not have, especially after Christmas.

We were afraid the scenario would play out like this.  We’d take Brandy to the vet.  The vets are our friends, but they do not give us a break.  We wouldn’t expect them to.  It’s a business, after all.  There would be a fee for examining Brandy. A fee, or several fees, for a series of tests.  Maybe something could be done for Brandy, maybe something couldn’t.   But our collective gut told us that Brandy was fourteen years old, she clearly was not well, and we could easily envision spending a fortune having her looked at only to have her die anyway.

Our decision meant that she died at home.

Well, actually she died en route to the Emergency Animal Hospital where we took her when it became evident that she was in obvious distress.  And my intent there was just to do what I could to reduce her suffering, had she not died en route.

Ultimately her death cost us just over forty dollars.

As I stood in a private waiting room with her lifeless eyes staring reproachfully at, well, not exactly me, but somewhere near me, I had to ask myself if we’d done the right thing.  Initially I thought no, we screwed this up.  The cat suffered needlessly.  It had been dying for days, probably lamenting its inability to speak English, thinking you fools, can’t you see I’m wasting away here, don’t you care, DO something, HELP ME!

But apart from switching its food and petting it more than we usually did of late we did nothing concrete to help our poor cat.

I was angry with the vets, because we could not count on going to them for assistance with incurring potentially exorbitant fees, with little or no hope for a positive outcome save assuaging our guilt.

I thought of my grandfather, who once gave me a potato sack full of kittens and asked me to take them down to the cow trough to drown them.  I was eleven, the age my daughters are now.  Thinking that I had to do as he asked, I dutifully tried to drown the kittens through a veil of tears, but I didn’t think to put a heavy rock in the sack with the kittens, so when I placed the sack in the cow trough the kittens just cried piteously and scrambled en masse to stay afloat.

“Can’t do this,” I told my friend June Forrest, and I freed the kittens and ran away to hide until my sister found me and brought me back to my grandparent’s farmhouse, where my mother and grandmother asked my grandfather what the hell he was thinking before baking June and me a cinnamon apple to make us feel better about the whole unfortunate episode.

My grandfather clearly had a completely different attitude toward the fate of animals on his farm, and almost certainly would not have paid the forty some dollars I paid the Emergency Animal Hospital to dispose of my poor, dead cat.

Forty some dollars.  I was upset.  Not at the forty dollars, but at the death of my cat, and at the way I felt I had failed her, and as I stood there wiping my tears away I was fairly certain that when I die it will be equally miserably, or ought to be, because this was a living, feeling being, and why should I get to die any better?  Having failed her.

While I was wallowing in my abject misery a representative from the Emergency Animal Hospital came in and tried to sell me my cat’s ashes for eighty bucks or so.  And when she failed to sell me my cat’s ashes she tried to sell me my dead cat’s pawprints in an attractive memorial ceramic tile for something like two hundred bucks.  WTF?  (I suggest pronouncing the preceding out loud in full for the complete effect.)

They blatantly tried to profit from my cat’s death and my sorrow and my guilt.

I paid them the forty bucks to dispose of my cat and that was all.  I donated two towels to their cause.  Two towels that I had brought along ostensibly to make Brandy more comfortable, but really so that we wouldn’t have to touch her soiled body as we placed her in the cat carrier to take her to the hospital.

I was mad at the Animal Hospital for trying to profit from my cat’s death, and I was mad at our vets for creating a climate where we were afraid to take her in to be checked out for fear of being bankrupted.  And I was mad at myself for not being willing to do that and for feeling guilty about it.

It’s only a goddamned cat, my grandfather would have told me.

But dammit, I had liked that cat.

That afternoon we bought pet insurance for our dog, because we don’t want to go through this with him.  We didn’t buy it for our surviving cat, because she’s also fourteen, and also because we can’t afford it.  It’s over forty bucks a month for the dog alone, and there’s STILL a five hundred deductible for each accident/condition the dog suffers!

My grandfather would no doubt have a word for sentimental, animal loving folk like myself.

That word is fool.

Rest in peace, Brandy.

I’m sorry I wasn’t able to do more for you when you were alive.

You were a fine girl

And now time for the Mahoney Family Christmas Letter, a Mahoney Family Tradition for two solid years in a row:

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Where did we leave off after last year’s letter?

Let’s see, we celebrated Christmas, and then it was January, and we took the Christmas decorations down (or at least, Lynda took them down, which is only fair, considering she put them all up), then it was February, and Keira and Erin turned eleven, and suddenly our children seemed all grown up.  How grown up?

Here’s an example.  Last summer we took them Tree Orienteering in Moncton, New Brunswick during our bi-annual Maritime trek.  Or rather, their father took them Tree Orienteering.  Because their mother would know better than to ever do such a reckless thing.  What their father didn’t know until he got there was that tree orienteering takes place thirty feet above the ground, on ropes and old tires and rickety wooden platforms.  There was NO WAY the girls were going to do this.  Or ought to be allowed to do it.  But they insisted and completed the entire orienteering course with panache because somewhere along the way they’ve morphed into brave adventurers.  Which also probably explains why they barely squawked during their annual flu shot this year.

The girls continue to develop their artistic side, writing and illustrating their own impressive stories and comics, and they’ve joined the Glee club at school.  We have heard them perform, and we are impressed.  Oh, and they’re really smart and pretty, if we do say so ourselves.

On the animal front we continue to own and operate the Mahoney family zoo, now in its twelfth year.  You may be pleased to learn that we plan to open the zoo to the public soon.  There’s plenty to see.  You’ll be awed at how much vomit the cats can produce in a week.  You’ll marvel at how far our guinea pigs can fling their poo.  You’ll relax as our dog licks (and possibly pees on) your foot.  You’ll wonder why anybody would ever own a frog.  I should mention that the dog, Maxwell, is currently enrolled in a tricks class where he is learning to wave, roll over, spin, bow and make odd grunting noises (oh wait, he already knew that one).

A bit about the so-called grown-ups: Joe continues his dubious work for the Canadian Broadcorping Castration, where he toils as Chief Peon of A Bunch of People Who Fix Things.  Lynda continues her noble work dispensing pharmaceuticals to the suffering masses.  On the home front Joe continues to demonstrate a remarkable inability to fix things, although he did enjoy ripping up the carpet this past summer.  And Lynda continues to impress with her uncanny ability to make our home a wonderful place to be.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays Everyone!

Joe, Lynda, Keira, Erin (and the zoo: Maxwell, Chloe, Brandy, Lexi, Speedy, George, Canyon, and Storm)

In my last post I talked about reading a story I wrote as a kid at Grownups Read Things They Wrote As Kids.

Here’s a recording of my reading from that event , courtesy of organizer Dan Misener.

It runs about five minutes forty seconds: