these boots were made for...

I was Windows shopping recently (what a sad day it will be when I update to Vista and have to retire that joke) and I ran across this:



It's the Women's Nike Glencoe boot.

Nike is clearly branching out from sports to warfare, and about time, I say.

As a Campbell whose own ancestors may have been among those who perpetrated the Glencoe Massacre of 1692, I welcome the appearance of a boot commemorating a time when we were known for more than soup.

A boot whose EVA midsole provides "excellent shock protection," the sort of protection you need when you rise in the middle of the night in the castle where you've been an honored guest for a month, creep down the hall, and stab your host in his sleep!

And yes, I know the whole Campbell-MacDonald rivalry thing was just spin (or at least, I do now, having just Googled it, although I have to admit that everything I knew about the Glencoe Massacre up to now was based on a song, and you really shouldn't trust history that RHYMES) but the fact remains, there was a massacre. People died. (38 people, to be exact, I think there've been more impressive death tolls at Who concerts, but whatever).

They died so that we could have "rugged outdoor shoes with casual flair."

And don't you forget it.

...and we're back

So, as I was saying... I took the entire month of July off and went home and and forced my way into every photo taken so as to avoid a repeat of the "replacement" nonsense from last summer when I stayed in Prague and my place in the sibling photo was taken by crouching man, clutching beer bottle. (Above: Find me in the photo. Hint: I'm under the raft.)

That's my excuse for July, as for August, I seem to have spent it as an intern in a Seattle hospital, and what a crazy time that was. Gosh, between saving people and accidentally scraping their hearts with my fingernail (God I hate when that happens! It's not like I can afford to LIVE at the nail salon!) and sleeping with the boss and performing unsanctioned autopsies and hiding my demented mother from EVERYONE and just generally trying to be sweet and above all CAUCASIAN to balance out all the cranky Asians and bossy black women on staff, I was EXHAUSTED. I think I'm going to go back to being a rock 'n roll undertaker from Los Angeles this fall. At least then the dead people are dead when you get them and there's no chance of relatives pointing their fingers at you and saying, "Hey, if you had paid attention in defibrillator class instead of writing 'Mrs. Dr. McDreamy' over and over again in your scribbler, you could have saved my father!"

Actually, I might try to get out of the death/illness game altogether. It starts to wear on you. Especially in Seattle, where people die of the darnedest things. I thought the most exotic cause of death there was caffeine overdose, or grunge, but apparently it's not unusual in a single day in a Seattle hospital to come across a 120-pound tumor AND a case of Munchausen syndrome. It must be the climate.

I'm thinking of returning to the viewing of my childhood, back when we only had two channels and one, I seem to recall, often showed nothing but the test pattern. I may spend the winter as Nick Adonidas, a beachcomber in British Columbia -- searching for stray logs in my trusty old boat, the Persephone, celebrating my Greek heritage, and counting the days until I get to leave this life behind and go on to host Celebrity Chefs (or what passes for a celebrity chef in Canada -- "And today, we'll be making rice pilaf with the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, Maude Barlow!")

Or maybe I'll just read a book.

looking back

News of the demise of Kurt Waldheim is making me oddly nostalgic for simpler, less invasive times, when one could become secretary general of the United Nations without anyone discovering one's Nazi past.

That wouldn't happen today. Today, someone on the UN hiring committee (in the UN HR department? at the headhunting company that supplies the UN with potential secretaries general? I'm a little fuzzy on process here) would google "Kurt Waldheim" and discover his MySpace page, replete with swastikas and glowing reviews of Mein Kampf and "I HEART Hitler" buttons and it would be game over.

Everything was simpler in my day (please don't ask me define exactly when "my day" was, it varies according to my mood - sometimes I'll swear it was the mid-70s glory years of the Montreal Canadiens). Take Maggie Thatcher's invasion of the Falklands. Now there was a war. No "shock and awe" tactics, no precision bombing, no invasion-justifying whoppers about weapons of mass destruction - just Maggie, smacking Argentinians into submission with her handbag. And when it was over, it was over - no counter-insurgents, no suicide sheep bombers, no nothing. I know she was a little long in the tooth for active duty at the time, but I kind of wish they'd dusted her off and sent her into Iraq. (Of course, she and Saddam would probably have gotten along like a house afire and all thoughts of regime change would have been abandoned in favor of a crackdown on the real enemy - the unions.)

But such times are past, gone the way of rotary dial telephones and glass milk bottles and privacy (other things about which I could wax nostalgic, but won't), and it's probably better to embrace the complications of modern existence than to continually bash one's head against them. So I'm going to google "UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon" and I'm telling you right now, I'd better like what I see.

long time no blog

This morning was a sour milk morning - you know, when you take the time to make coffee rather than paying 40,000 kc for a cup at Java Java Java* but then you add the milk and it curdles because long-life milk lasts until June 2011 only when UNOPENED.

So you drink what's left in the coffee pot black because you don't have time to go to the store for more milk because you have to clean the kitty litter box. The "kitties" in question are busy leaving little black paw prints all over your tub and sink and you can't help but ask yourself "What have they ever done for me?" and the answer is, of course, "Nothing." Nor are they ever likely to do anything. Not like that Golden Retriever you heard about on the BBC the other night, the one who basically gave his owner the Heimlich maneuver when she choked on a piece of food. The dog jumped on her chest until the food was dislodged. My cats wouldn't do that. My cats would polish off my dinner then go live with the neighbors. (Above: My cats, dreaming of a life without me.)

As you may have noticed, it has been a month since I posted and I'm still on about my cats, so you clearly haven't been missing anything. Other than an addiction to the Gilmore Girls, a terrifying new Facebook membership, and an unsuccessful attempt to tidy my house and KEEP IT THAT WAY, there's not much to report.




*Some of the names in this post have been changed so I can bitch freely.

museum piece(s)

A friend who just left town (call him "Pan Shlay," the taxi driver did) has left me his reading lamp and an alarm clock. This is convenient, as the bulb just burned out in my reading lamp and the battery in my alarm clock died sometime before Christmas (I've been using my mobile phone to wake up in the mornings).

Instead of buying a light bulb and a battery, I've replaced the lamp and the clock. I feel like Gabor Zsa Zsa. (I don't actually know if she was extravagant, although I believe her character on Green Acres was, I just wanted to write her name in the correct Hungarian way because it amuses me. Had I not gone to Budapest last weekend, I'd probably be comparing myself to Ivana Trumpova, which is the correct Czech way to write her last name, and which also amuses me. Amusing me, in case you haven't realized it, is the name of the game in any language.)

Pan Shlay's clock and lamp are just the latest additions to my Museum of Modern Expats. Other exhibits include: the bureaus, desk, and clothes rack (Marguerite), the coffee tables (Paul and Casey), the couches (Kat, Willy, Titi), the wall map (Nathan), the standing lamp (Titi), the end table/wine rack (John and Flanders), the folding chair (Allison), the boom box (Lynn), the television (Steve and Camille), the feather duster (Monica), and one of the cats (DJ Assbot, who also left me the "I spell relief F-A-R-T" button).

The monitor I'm sitting in front of belongs to Martha, the speakers were Kat's, the tower was once the property of a screaming asshole from Poland, and the DVD drive belonged to Johnny - the person, not the chihuahua - who also used to own the DVD player.

This doesn't even begin to tally the books belonging to other people that I have "acquired" over the years (I quieten my conscience, which admittedly is never very noisy, with the thought of all the books I've "lost" over the years. I think they about balance out.)

You may think the resulting image - me on Kat's couch under Titi's light next to John and Flanders' table watching Pan Shlay's DVD of Six Feet Under with Assbot's cat wearing the "I spell relief F-A-R-T" pin - is downright tacky (and yeah, the fart pin probably is). But I prefer to think of it as a living tribute to some fine people.

And for the record, I BOUGHT the STARBUCKS coffee mug.

mystic buddha

My old office has become a Thai spa/beauty salon called "Mystic Buddha."

All I can think is that Buddhists must have some equivalent to the Native American sweet grass ceremony or the Catholic Church's exorcism rite, because there would have been some crazy spirits to evict from that place before anyone could start relaxing and rejuvenating. I imagine people going in for a massage and coming out screaming, like me going to lunch in the old days. (below right: me, in the old days.)

The bosses - a husband and wife team I always thought of as Boris and Natasha - once sent around a list of office regulations. A coworker and I spent a happy hour scoffing (scoffing was a regular pastime at my old office) and rewriting the list to include the regulations they would have added had they any idea what went on the office while they were off in Beijing "not seeing any dissidents" or even sitting in their windowed office (affectionately known as the terrarium):

1. Don't drink vodka out of teacups at your desks during working hours.
2. Don't use the office as a coat check when planning to spend the night at the dance club down the street.
3. Don't have sex on the couch in the waiting area. (Actually, I didn't know this had happened, but my coworker assured me it had and she was from Nova Scotia so I believe her.)
4. Don't root through the CFO's garbage to find out how much certain of your coworkers are paid.
5. Don't tell everyone in the office how much certain of your coworkers are paid and you know it's true because you found it written on a piece of paper in the CFO's garbage.
6. Don't knock over the office Christmas tree during an after-hours chair race.
7. Don't make a bong out of a plastic, two-liter Pepsi bottle for in-office use and store it in the kitchen cupboard next to the herbal teas.
8. Don't scratch "NAZIS" into the metal security door installed (rumor had it) to protect the owners from Hungarian loan sharks.
9. Don't continue to check your email on an office computer for two years after you've been fired.
10. Don't sleep under your desk.

I may have to book a massage, just to see if I come out feeling like a new me or like me circa 1998.

and another thing...

I have so much to say today I'm not sure where to begin. I've been saving things up all week for Saturday, when I could give everything a proper airing.

Words

To begin, I had a realization about my job this week. My part-time job. Have I mentioned I'm part time now? I've suspended work on the tunnel. Rather than escaping, I pinned my job to the mat, made it cry out for mercy, and won some important concessions i.e. I only have to work three days a week. (Non sequitor alert! A woman just walked by my window wearing a white trenchcoat and with her platinum blonde hair pulled back in such a tight ponytail that at first glance I thought she was Truman Capote.)

My realization about my job (remember? that's where this all started, before wrasslin' and Truman Capote got into the mix) was that I care about words, even if they are only filling in the spaces between graphs; even if they are describing very dull things; even if they have been arranged and organized by very dull people with only a passing familiarity with my language; even if they are intended for even duller people.

Even, although this is a stretch and I don't always care about them in this circumstance, when the majority are combinations like enterprise software planning, customer relationship management, and voice over internet protocol - groups that make cameo appearances at the beginning of a text then send their acronyms to represent them for the next 150 pages. Like Bush and Condoleeza Rice.

15 minutes of...

I was reading about the former Mr. Britney Spears this week and it struck me that becoming famous isn't so difficult anymore. (And I know what you're thinking, if it's so easy, why haven't I done it? Well, I've been busy.) I am beginning to think Warhol was wrong, and that, in future, we can all look forward to our 15 minutes of anonymity. (And since I have anonymity to spare, I'd be willing to donate some to people like the afore-mentioned Mr. Britney Spears.)

Salon Blues

Is there any place in the world more intimidating than an expensive hair salon? (Do you know the two places that immediately came into my head? Abu Ghraib and Lubyanka. Prisons. And not just any prisons, not the Cape Breton County Correctional Center, for example, which my grade 12 law teacher assured me was a place of spa-like opulence. No, the prisons of totalitarian regimes.)

I'm not even going to write any more about this because I'm guaranteed to end up sounding like Erma Bombeck, and I don't ever want to sound like Erma Bombeck. Suffice it to say, I got my hair cut in an expensive salon recently and I'm still reeling at my own inadequacy as a woman.

Get this: I went in lugging Harold Bloom's The Western Canon in my bag. I had to wait a bit for my "stylist" (who was in the back with the other off-duty stylists watching us through one-way glass and laughing, don't argue with me on this) and was about to haul out the Bloom when I realized I might as well write "UNKEMPT PSEUDO-INTELLECTUAL" on my forehead. So I flipped through a Vogue with Angelina Jolie on the cover. She might not have as much insight into Shakespeare's Falstaff, but she's got great hair. As a juxtaposition, this works well: Bloom loves Falstaff for his "perpetual gaity." And Falstaff may, indeed, be merry but hair, you must realize, is serious.

ukrainian dream

A friend of ours, the chihuahua lady, pulled up stakes and went to Ukraine last summer, in a move that was both bold and beautiful, young and restless, general and hospital, why didn't somebody stop me while I was ahead?

Although we all knew we'd miss her, we wished her the very best, and I for one was convinced that with time and patience she would find HER PEOPLE.

Well, folks, she has. And how. She sent me this snap of her newest Ukrainian friend. He's either a miner from the Donbass region or a male housekeeper, I couldn't quite make her out on the phone, there was a Ukrainian cover band doing a bangin' version of "Losing My Religion" in the background. But one thing I do know - he's FAB:

e! shopping

Not having returned to my native land in two years (and I do mean land, not planet, so I'll thank you all to keep your Pluto jokes to yourselves, particularly since Pluto is no longer even a planet, having been debunked more thoroughly than St. Christopher) the time had come to book a ticket home.

I decided to try and do the whole thing online, as I've never cared for travel agents and, judging by the number of good deals they've found for me over the years, the feeling is mutual. I broke the trip into three parts and here are the results:

London - Halifax, Nova Scotia (return)

I booked this through Zoom Airlines, and yes they do exist, although I will be the first to admit they're improbable (I TOTALLY stole that phrasing from a very funny Brit who used it in reference to Canada which somehow justifies my theft. Somehow.) The process was quick, the price was right, and the only delay was caused by my bank (perhaps you've heard of it - $%#@&!!!! bank?) which has been expecting me to function with a 10,000 kc monthly limit on my debit card. This required a trip to my branch on the other side of town to correct, but aside from that, the Zoom booking was flawless. I plugged in all the necessary information (under dietary needs I tried to select "edible" but it wasn't an option) and BAM! I received an email confirmation and a reference number and I was in business. It was that quick. The reply came back so rapidly, it cracked my my monitor, I had to patch it up with electrical tape to continue.


Prague-London (return)

I booked this through EasyJet and not only was it fast (fortunately, the electrical tape held) it was CHEAP. I'm serious! Even with taxes, which usually hide in the bushes like the five hitchhikers you don't see when you stop to pick up the innocuous looking guy with the glasses and the hemp man-purse, it was still cheap.

And now a word on global warming: I realize air travel is the greatest culprit in speeding the melting of the polar ice caps and wreaking general havoc with the world's climate. I know the carbon footprint of the frequent flyer is sasquatch-esque. I realize the days of cheap flights are numbered and I understand why, but I am still happy to have landed one cheap flight before the glory days of cheap travel ended.

Halifax-New York (return)

Having decided to go home for an entire month (a decision I'll be informing my boss about any day now), I further decided to go and visit a friend in my favorite city on earth, New York. Or as I always think of it, STARBUCKS! (Stepan, be prepared to do some serious de-programming on my return. You know how much I love your country.)

And here's where my online shopping experience began to come apart at the seams.

Initially, the booking process seemed as simple as the previous two. I punched in all the relevant info and received an email confirming my booking and containing a reference number. Mission accomplished, I thought, removing my flightsuit and taking down the banner I'd strung across the home office. But noooooo. The next day, I received a second email, requesting me to print out the attached form, fill it out, then either fax it or scan/email it back along with photocopies of both sides of my payment card by 4 that afternoon. I wrote and suggested it would be easier for me to come into their Mustek office and take care of payment in person on my lunch hour, they were agreeable.

I arrived at their office at 12:05 and was served immediately. The travel agent began typing and typing and typing. Then she took my debit card and consulted the other travel agent about it at some length. Then she ran it through the credit card machine, then she photocopied both sides of it. Taking a pen, she completed the invoice in ink, had me sign it, then set it aside for a moment while she went back to typing. I heard a printer activate in the bowels of the office, and she went off and came back with two additional pieces of paper for me to sign. She stapled the first invoice to the second and handed them to me saying, "These are exactly the same thing." Then she went back to her typing. And typing. Then a little vacant staring at the monitor. Then some more typing, then she returned to the printer and came back with three pieces of paper which she stapled together and showed me saying "This is your e-ticket."

I admit, I was impressed. I could have sworn it was a paper ticket, but as I've been telling anyone who will listen (i.e. Shay, god bless him) apparently they use that new "I can't believe it's not paper!" paper.

But this maestro of the online purchase was not yet finished. She now printed me a three-page itinerary, and having folded everything and shoved it into a cardboard ticket sleeve, she once again returned to her computer.

"Now," she said, "I will make your invoice."

By this time, my lunch hour was all but over, and, being already in possession of two invoices, I couldn't really see the need for a third, but I waited, nonetheless.

She typed, then typed, then stared vacantly, then typed, then stared vacantly, then typed...

"I'm sorry," I finally said, "but I have to go back to work."

"I will send it to your email," she said.

"Yes," I replied, "Send it to my email. Now, may I have my card back?"

"You have your card."

"No, I don't actually."

Follows a search for my card which turns up, where she left it, in the photocopier.

And so, I left, staggering under the weight of my e-ticket, knowing that, in addition to the environmental damage I will do by flying, I can add my contribution to decimating the earth's forests. My only comfort is that I didn't also punch the travel agent in the face, adding grievous bodily harm to a service industry employee to my list of sins. Perhaps there's hope for me yet.

NOTE: I've chosen to illustrate this post with a shot of a fighter jet from the Belgian Air Force because I had no idea there was a Belgian Air Force.

angels in the czech republic

For those of you (and I know you're out there) who think I exaggerate the cuteness of my cats, I'm posting this photo, snapped the other morning as they were preparing for a day of angelic deeds - announcing virgin births, rescuing the souls of the faithful at the hour of death, crapping outside the litter box.

Send this photo to 10 friends and they'll think you're just as cracked as I am.

glory days

I was talking to a friend yesterday (and I can prove it, because I was attempting a conference call, and we accidentally recorded 15 minutes' of our conversation on the third party's answering machine. Comedic gold, mind you, so I'm sure she won't be upset. And if she is, well, she should have been home.)

My friend, Man in Kimono (MIK), told me he'd spent the previous evening with a "gaggle of lesbians" (I had a moment's pause there, wondering if "lesbians" should be capitalized, then I decided only if it actually referred to residents of the isle of Lesbos, then I realized the gaggle in question could conceivably have been from Lesbos, but then I thought, why would you leave Lesbos for Toronto in early March? And that's when I settled on small "l" lesbians.). They were in the Laurentian Room (at least, I think it was a room, I know it definitely wasn't the Laurentians, because who would leave a bar in Toronto for the Laurentians in early March?) an old club that has been "restored to its 1930s art-deco glory."

And then I started thinking...(I'm a sucker for this "Sex and the City" format) why can't I be restored to my 1930s art deco glory? You should have seen me, I was something else in the 1930s. Much better than during that embarrassing Soviet Monumentalist period that followed. But I digress...

MIK said although he didn't generally approve of art deco in the home ("I mean, let's face it, if I wanted to live in the Chrysler Building, I would."*) he'd been inspired by his evening in the Laurentian Room to return his bathroom to its 1930s art-deco glory. This, apparently, involved a bottle of wine and some mucking about with the electrical wiring, so, if you're reading this MIK, all I can say is, I'm relieved.

*Note to readers: He would.

(Above: MIK. Left: MIK restored to his 1930s art-deco glory.)

down memory lane

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

things not to do

1. Don't ever get into an argument with a friend about whether you should have brought him/her a whopper from Dresden. No good can come of it. Even if you are RIGHT you will realize at some point that you are arguing about transporting beef-based fastfood across international borders and it will depress you.


2. Don't hang your new 2007 "Inexpressibly Wonderful Travel Destinations" calendar on the floor. Your housecat, even the one who has been behaving beautifully for the past six months, will pee on it as if to say "There's no place like home! There's no place like home!"

3. Don't take a job editing market research reports unless they are absolutely not hiring at the plant.

4. Don't stop me if you've heard this one before.

5. Don't try to order coffee from a Czech waiter while he's doing something else - like taking away your empty plate. It will anger and confuse him and you will not see him again for the rest of your meal, not that there will be any "rest" of your meal, but if there were, you wouldn't seem him again during it.

6. Don't look at me like that

7. Don't pull a coat on over your pajamas on a Saturday morning to go to the store for bread, run into a friend at the checkout, decide to go to a pub for a drink, and forget you're in your pajamas until you actually take your coat off in the pub and it all comes rushing back to you in a flurry of flannel.

8. Don't go home just because you're in your pajamas in a pub, especially if you've already ordered a drink. Pull your coat around your shoulders like a fashionable woman of a byegone era (or a recently escaped mental patient) and drink your beer.

9. Don't ask me how I know that.

10. Don't stay up into the wee hours of the morning on your computer when you have perfectly good Yorkshire murder mysteries to read.

Wanted Man

My favorite country song of all time (oh, I just lost most of my audience, didn't I? Well, that's okay, it's cosier with just the two of us). So, as I was saying, my favorite country song of all time is a number I've always thought of as "Bullet in My Shoulder" but which is actually called "Wanted Man," sung by the late, great Frankie Laine.

He died this week at the age of 93 and it was only through reading his obits I discovered that he, like all the best things Western, was Italian. And I mean Italian as in, "My dad cut Al Capone's hair":

Frankie Laine was born Francesco Paolo LoVecchio on March 30, 1913, the eldest of eight children of John LoVecchio, a barber, and his wife, Anna, both of whom had left Palermo, Sicily and settled in the Little Italy section of Chicago. (Al Capone was a customer of Mr. Laine’s father.)

I also discovered that his nicknames included "America's Number One Song Stylist," "Mr. Rhythm," "Old Leather Lungs," and "Old Man Jazz."

For me, though, he will forever be the man who sang "Wanted Man" on an eight-track cassette from a Reader's Digest boxed set of greatest country hits that belonged to one of my Aunts. During the summers, we kids played those cassettes so much we may have helped render the technology obsolete.

Here's where I should link to the song, and let you decide for yourself that it's the best country song ever, but Booger I mean Blogger won't let me do that (in case I've stolen the music I suppose, which is SO unjust; my version of "Wanted Man" was lovingly transferred from eight-track to mp3 by a little process called OSMOSIS, which I believe is still legal.)

Since I can't post a link, I'm going to walk you through the song as best I can. So, ahem, it starts with the spoken bit:

SPOKEN: Bullet in my shoulder.
Blood runnin' down my vest.
Twenty in the posse and they're never.
Gonna let me rest

Then the music kicks in, and it's really upbeat, considering the subject of the song is a potentially fatal bullet wound, and you hear:

Till I became a wanted man I never even owned a gun
But now they hunt me like a mountain cat
And I'm always, always, always on the run

But wait till you hear WHY he's on the run:

I killed poor Jed Kline in bad Laredo fight
Killed him with my bare hands for the girl I loved that night
Jed's brother's out to get me
He's comin' with a gang
But I'd rather shoot it out, by God
Than let 'em watch me hang

And then things really pick up, and you get horns, and backup singers, and I always picture the posse forming a kickline (Laine did sing the theme to Blazing Saddles, after all) and he sings:

Bullet in my shoulder!!
BLOOD runnin' down my vest
Twenty in the posse!!
And they're never gonna let me rest
Till I became a wanted man I never even owned a gun
But now they hunt me like a mountain cat
And I'm always (always), always (always), always on the run

But the VERY best part is yet to come, for even as he knows he's going to die for her, he expresses some rather serious doubts about "the girl he loved that night."

She had spangles on her red dress
She had laughter in her voice
When he tried to put his hands on her
My heart left me no choice
But was she really worth it?
Well, I guess I'll never know
She'll be drinking someone else's rye
When I'm six feet below

She'll be drinking someone else's rye. When I'm six feet below.

Ooph.

Repeat chorus.

A wanted man
A wanted man
On the run

Fade out.

As my cousin Catherine said, upon hearing of his death, "I suppose that at the age of 93 it's unlikely he went out in a hail of bullets, but that's the way I like to picture it."

degrees of...all descriptions

I've been thinking about degrees of separation. Basically, wondering whether they're measured in Celcius or Fahrenheit. Which led me to wondering about Fahrenheit himself and whether he ever got a degree and if he did, did anyone look at it and ask "What's that in Celcius?" Because I would have. And then he would probably have punched me.

Which got me to thinking about Sonny Liston (punching always makes me think of Liston, to the point where I'm surprised to discover that some people hear the word "punch" and don't think of Liston; they think of a British humor magazine, or one half of a two-puppet team, or a fruity beverage mix named for the 5oth state, it's nuts, really, the way people's brains work). I've been thinking about Liston - pictured here on the cover of the December 1963 Esquire ("The last man on earth America wanted to see coming down its chimney," as Sports Illustrated later put it) - since reading about him in a Vanity Fair article about the heyday of Esquire magazine. (It's okay for a magazine to write about another magazine's heyday if it's made quite clear that not only is that heyday over, it's been over for some time). Coincidentally, it turned out that my sister, who lives in Quebec City, had read the same article. It reminded her of her love of, and ambition to write for, magazines. It reminded me of my once cherished desire to be the world heavyweight boxing champion. Ah, the dreams of youth.

I first learned about Liston at the age of eight when I read my father's "Boxing Champions of the World" book cover-to-cover. I also learned about the great John L. Sullivan, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tuney, and Archie "The Old Mongoose" Moore. My father was (and still is) a big boxing fan, and he did his best to turn all of us (three girls and a boy) into boxers, with varying degrees of success (degrees of success, by the way, are always measured in Celcius). I can't say I really like watching boxing, but I love reading about it. More to the point, I love reading about boxers. Their stories are always grittier than those of hockey players, or golfers, or rhythmic gymnasts. And I like gritty. I used to drink the afore-mentioned fruity beverage mix without water.

Liston stuck in my memory because he was a true badass, complete with a police record and mob connections. He came as a shock to the American system, becoming champion by creaming the gentlemanly Floyd Patterson(prior to Mike Tyson, the youngest man ever to hold the world heavyweight title). Both were black, but they represented opposite ends of the spectrum of public black personas. Think Michael Jackson (back when he still had a nose) vs. Prince. Think Condoleeza vs. L'il Kim (a boxing match I'd pay to see anyday). Think Punch vs. Judy. No, wait, don't think that.

These meditations on Liston and black persona came from a book on Mohammad Ali by David Remnick, by the way, not from my eight-year-old brain. At eight, a lot of that boxing book went over my head. For instance, I remember reading about the world middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel, the "Michigan Assassin." He was of particular interest because my grandfather, also a boxing fan, had named one of his sons after him (my uncle, Michigan Assassin Campbell). Ketchel was murdered on a ranch where he was training for a fight by "a jealous farmhand." I thought the farmhand was jealous of his boxing title, which made sense to me. A boxing title seemed like a pretty awesome thing to have - and I imagined Ketchel wearing his championship belt around the ranch, just to rub it in. I had no idea there was a woman in the mix until years later, when I'd learned to cherchez la femme, as they say in French boxing circles.

I'm ready to end this now, but I'm not really sure how to do it. I could follow my own advice on writing and "end abruptly," but that seems particularly lame in a posting that started with a discussion of degrees of separation. So let's see if I can bring this back to where I started: Farhenheit to Liston to Ketchel to my uncle who is now in Florida where the temperature, when he last checked in, was in the '70s. FARHENHEIT.

sunday vows

It's SUNDAY and I've been relaxing with a cup of coffee and the Vows section of the New York Times. You may remember that I often turn to the Vows section when the squalor of my own life becomes too much to bear. Today has been particularly trying - my French executive assistant, Francois, has decided I own too much stuff. This morning, he's helped me divest myself of two coffee mugs, a large glass vase of dried flowers, and a ceramic teapot. He also seems to feel I have no need for my Internet connection (he keeps knocking the modem off the desk) or my headset (he's trying to chew through the cord). While I appreciate his concern, and do, in fact, have some sneaking leanings towards a more minimalist lifestyle myself, I'm also tempted to tie his ears in a knot across his nose.

And so, surrounded by bits of broken glass, ceramic, and the odd sprig of dried baby's breath, I turned to the Vows section for comfort.

Today's edition features the marriage of John W. Warner IV, son of Senator John Warner of Virginia. As a child, Mr. Warner "loved explosions, cartoons, army uniforms, pranks involving frogs and ice cream — he called health food 'seeds and twigs.'" He also "loved wearing kilts because of his Scottish heritage."

Are you as enchanted as I am? Could there be a more winning combination than a guy in a kilt putting a frog in your ice cream? Doesn't he sound dreamy?

But wait, it gets better! "After Mr. Warner graduated from the University of Virginia, where his fraternity, Chi Phi, voted him 'hellmaster' four years in a row, he became a professional race car driver, naturally."

Naturally. The path from hellmaster to professional race car driver is deeply rutted, so many have trod it.

Said his father, “He wanted his own identity and he found it.”

He decided to become an ASSHOLE.

Mr. Warner spent the late '90s living in Westport, Connecticutt sitting on 17th century furniture and selling NASCAR memorabilia on ebay (or something, I started skimming here). He remained, however, a "diehard and distinctive bachelor" (I'm guessing it was the kilt that earned him the "distinctive" label.)

But he "grew to dislike breaking hearts as much as he hated eating tofu." And here - TEN paragraphs into their wedding announcement - comes the bride:

"...in November 2004, Jodi Edmonds, another old friend of Mr. Warner’s, set him up on a blind date with Shannon Ford Hamm, a first-grade teacher at the Spence School in New York, who had taught her two daughters. Mr. Warner, who still loves frogs and other slimy creatures, suggested that they meet by the reptiles at the American Museum of Natural History in New York."

Okay, I have to admit, I wondered where they were going with that sentence - "Mr. Warner, who still loves frogs and other slimy creatures, was immediately smitten."

He wasn't, though. In fact, after their natural history museum date, he didn't call for a year, when, tired of his "tempermental beauties," the "fashion models and party girls" he usually dated, his thoughts returned to Ms. Hamm.

This time, realizing they had both "grown up with wealth" (hers a Minnesta brewing fortune) and watching her with children, he fell in love with her "simple and guileless" ways.

Their wedding reception was on a beach, in January, in a tent done up like a "chic new Manhattan hotel lobby" (the first plan, to do up a chic new Manhattan hotel lobby like a beach, having been nixed by the concierge).

"The bridegroom, whose back still hurt from a recent motorcycle crash, greeted guests à la Truman Capote, while lounging (in a kilt) on one of the couches. The bride, meanwhile, looked completely natural in her sleeveless gown and her hair pulled back as if for tennis."

Can you say "DOOMED," children?

I can. And just did.

Pictured above left: The hellmaster preparing one of his trademark frog/ice cream pranks

S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y NIGHT!

I'm taking it easy tonight. I got a little carried away last evening celebrating the end of the week that was - but so would you have, had you accomplished half of what I did over the past seven days: editing a 160-page report on photocopier sales in the Levant AND coining the term "homeless grade" (for toilet paper, but clearly possessing potential for wider application).

I'd tell you more about Levant photocopiers, but I know how it sucks to pay US$18,000 for a market research report only to have some asshole in editing give away the ending. Let's just say, it's a page-turner.

As though this weren't enough, I also read 400+ pages of Anna Karenina. Nice, but it paled in comparison to the photocopiers; I really fear my days of reading fiction may be over. I just don't see the point anymore - 800 pages of unbroken text? PUHLEASE. Throw me a bone, give me some bullets, or a table, or - better still - a graph. Below, for instance, is a graph I've made out of data concerning the height and popularity of four of the main characters in Anna Karenina (Anna, Vronsky, Kitty, and Levin), based on the 400 pages I've read so far:

See? Wasn't that easier than all that foolish READING? You can grasp, in an instant, everything there is to know about these four. Of course, I still have to read the book in order to generate the graphs, but then, somebody has to count the photocopiers in the Levant, too.

And so far, I'm happy to report, that somebody is not me.

crazy cat lady

Lately, as in, since my household went two-cat last October, I've been giving a lot of thought to the exact location of the line between conscientious pet owner and crazy cat lady.

To date, I'm happy to report, I'm leaning far more toward "conscientious" than "crazy" in the estimation of the only person whose opinion matters to me - that is, me.

And yet, when you find yourself monitoring cat bowel movements, or cleaning up after said bowel movements, or cleaning up cat pee (both events referred to, by cat experts, as "inappropriate eliminations," a euphemism that could apply to anything from accidentally deleting an email to shooting the wrong South American socialist dictator) you start to wonder... Wait, I can turn this into the beginning of a Sex and the City episode. "And then I asked myself, 'Does cleaning cat shit off the storage room floor make me a crazy cat lady?'" (This would be followed by a half hour of cat-related hijinx - Charlotte would embroider one, Miranda would sue one, Samantha would f...ind one - at the end of which Carrie would conclude, "And then I realized, it's okay to be a crazy cat lady, as long as your friends are all batshit too.")

I think any woman acquiring a second cat has a moment's pause. A moment when she pictures herself in an apartment with 30 cats, each of whom is named for an actual member of her extended family and for all of whom she's knitted slippers.

I can't knit, which could save me. But the slippers aren't really integral to this type of madness - it could also take the form of baking them little cat-size lasagnes, or raising mice to feed them. Just because you don't think you're God doesn't mean you don't think you're Napoleon, if you know what I mean.

Sheer numbers seem to be the obvious warning sign of impending cat mania, and as long as I stick to two, I think I should be fine. I will ask a friend - probably a dog-person - to intervene if I show signs of acquiring a third. Or a 15th. Dog people would happily step in. They never get the whole cat thing anyway. They think you'd be just as well off keeping your Christmas carp year round as getting a cat, for all the affection you get, but this shows just how wrong they are because 1) cats are VERY affectionate, they just need everything to be on their terms, like Israel; and 2) carp must be kept in the bathtub which means ownership of even one would immediately catapult you into crazy (not to mention smelly) carp lady territory.

running (shoe) commentary

The adidas company, purveyor of fine running shoes, posted 9M 2005 sales of EUR 1.924 billion (up 9% year-on-year). Sales were up in all regions EXCEPT EUROPE (the all-caps are mine, adidas apparently doesn't announce its quarterly results like a 14-year-old girl writing in her diary, which is - as I'm sure you've noticed by now - the way I write this blog).

I should really save this insight and sell it to adidas for top dollar, but I've always been profligate with my insight, so why stop now? adidas' sales are not increasing in Europe because its salespeople at the Na prikope store in Prague 1 ARE CRAP.


Did you get that, adidas-Salomon AG chairman and CEO Herbert Hainer?

CRAP.

I should know. I've been shopping there regularly for the past 10 years.

I have never dealt with the same person twice in the Na prikope store, which is always a bad sign (management obviously does not know the secret to employee retention i.e. TAKE THEIR PASSPORTS) but the shoe-buying scenario is always exactly the same. I walk in and find the model I want to try (the falcon or the cheetah or the hungry housecat - this last doesn't exist but it should, in terms of land speed, few animals can match the velocity of a housecat that's been waiting since 5 p.m. to be fed while you've been out gallivanting). I pull out my telescope and scan for a salesclerk. I spot one, half hidden, eating a crocodile sandwich behind a cardboard cutout of Martina Navratilova. I ask if it would be possible to try this model in a size 38. And that's when the fun begins, because the clerk, male or female, old or young, mildly autistic or full-on retarded, always responds in the same way: he (or she) checks the tag on the display shoe to see if it's the size I want.

Dear readers, I am not blind nor do I have difficulty recognizing numbers and figures: I have read the tag on the display shoe myself. I know it is not the size I want. I know it is two sizes larger (or smaller) than the size I want, but I also know that if it's anywhere within a three-size spread, I will be invited to try it on, just to save our special little adidas friend a trip to the stock room.

Now that I've grown wise to their ways, I will sometimes, if the shoe actually is a 38, try it on. It's a start, but trying one shoe just isn't enough for me. I'm demanding that way - if I'm going to BUY two shoes (and that's generally the way I buy shoes) I want to TRY two shoes. I also question the value of trying on a shoe that the clerk has forced on every customer who has expressed interest in that particular model since it's been introduced. I imagine whole families taking turns: Dad forcing his size 44 foot in, the baby fitting both feet in with ease, the dog having an exploratory chew on the heel.

If (and it's not a given) I succeed in convincing the clerk to get me a pair of shoes in my size, he/she will return with one pair of shoes (remember shopping in North America where the clerk would return with the shoes you wanted in your size, the shoes you wanted in a larger size, shoes you didn't want but perhaps should consider in your size, a garden rake, and a box of roofing nails, just in case? Gosh, sometimes I miss North America!).

The clerk will then carefully remove the paper stuffing and lace ONE SHOE, which he (or she) will allow you to try. Should it fit, the second shoe may be forthcoming, if the clerk hasn't retreated behind the Navratilova cutout. (Sometimes, you can coax them out with bits of crocodile sandwich. I often bring a crocodile sandwich with me when I go shopping for shoes for just this purpose).

BEST CASE SCENARIO: The clerk has stuck around, for lack of anything better to do, you're given the second shoe, it fits, you say you'll take them, the clerk tags the box (with a pen, although I'm sure they're the same people who tag the front of my building with spray paint) to be sure to reap the rewards of his/her stellar salesmanship, and you get the hell out of there.

WORST CASE SCENARIO: The shoe doesn't fit and you - tiny fool - ask to try another size. Or another model. The clerk will look at you as though you've just demanded he/she give you his/her own shoes and go barefoot for the rest of the day. He'll (oh, whatever, let's assume it's a "he," being inclusive is exhausting) look puzzled and try to hand you back the shoe you've just tried. He'll look longingly back toward the display wall, hoping there's a size 38 SOMETHING that will keep you happy. Anything, anything, just DON'T SEND ME BACK TO THE STOCK ROOM!

I usually give up at this stage and leave.

But one day...