On Hiatus Till Labour Day

Fun fun fun.

The Letter 'F' - Part 2

Here is the second in a series of things beginning with the letter 'F'. Nothing I hold dear, nothing profound, simply two things that were on my mind.

2. Feenie's
We finally made it to one of Rob Feenie's restaurants. It was mid-afternoon on a sunny BC Day weekend, so there was no lineup—if anything, the place was overstaffed. We were seated immediately. We ordered three hamburger platters at $14 a crack, including fries. The kids split an order.

Feenie's (not to be confused with Rob Feenie's upscale Lumière next door) lays claim to the city's best hamburger. We were not disappointed, despite the surprisingly slow service given the high staff:diner ratio. It was the best burger (yep, I ate beef) we've ever had, but I'll have to visit a White Spot again to re-evaluate their Legendary Platter to establish which burger has the bigger bang-for-the-buck.

The fact remains that ground beef can only be so good, thus there's no need to hurry over to Feenie's. Note: if you're a hardcore carnivore it probably won't bother you to find out where a lot of ground beef comes from. The picture is of a partially-eaten Feenie Burger in its "doggy" container.


3. Flowers (For A Dad)
It wasn't until 5:00PM that the first flowers began to arrive at the accident scene. The victim's two teenage sons dropped off the bunch shown here. They were bawling inconsolably.

Car accidents bother me, then, now, probably always. This fear goes as far back as to when I was three and refused for weeks to get into the family car after hearing about a fatality. So my mother tells me.

Keep Me Away From The Bookstore

Okay, I admit it. I leave a big footprint. Sure I recycle, and I'm fully aware of the evils of crass consumerism, but at the close of any weekend, I find myself saddled with two or three more plastic bags and the half-dozen new books or magazines they once contained. I'm of the "having" persuasion rather than bent on simply "being", or more profoundly, on not "being" at all. I'd probably make even a Zen master turn violent. A profane sonavabitch I am.

For instance, I went to the Richmond Chapters this Sunday intent on picking up the Viking hardcover edition of Proust's In The Shadow Of Young Girls In Flower (only $9.99!), before it's out-of-print and hard to find. Well, my mission was accomplished, but augmented by no fewer than 19 other titles— of which twelve were expressly for me. I guess that makes me an obscene size 20 in the Adbuster scheme of things, right up there with Nike and Starbucks.
One of these impulse buys is Sara Nelson's wonderful So Many Books, So Little Time, which, 50 pages in, I'll have to provisionally award **** out of *****. As an aside, has anybody noticed how the Siskel & Ebert Thumbs Up system has of late been running out of thumbs and resorting to dubious ratings like "Two Very Big Thumbs Up", "Two Thumbs Way Up", and "Two Very Enthusiastic Thumbs Up"? WTF?

Any book lover will relate to Nelson's observations:

I choose them [books] the way I choose my friends: because somebody nice introduced us, because I liked their looks, because the best of them turn out to be smart and funny and both surprising and inevitable at the same time.

and

In reading, as in life, even if you know what you're doing, you really kind of don't... If you want to make the book god laugh, show him your reading list.

and completely unrelated to bibliophilia, but a germane answer to a question a co-worker and I have been wrestling with

You have to talk loud to be heard, and if you can develop a sense of humor and insert it into much of what you say, you'll be heard even better.

That's not what I wanted to hear.

I like the book's cover—the balance-defying impossibility brings out the child in me: How would someone get into or leave the centre of such a fortress? What would it take to make it collapse? And look at the colours!

One book I didn't buy (because the store copy's fold-outs were dog-eared) but will order on-line is Mitsuhiro Kurokawa's gorgeously drawn and verdant Dinosaur Valley.

I did buy a book on Zen, which I now keep on my desk at work, just to advantageously tip my karma.

I Had A Dream

Dreams are mysterious.

But the source of Monday night's (or was it Tuesday morning's—who knows?) dream was unequivocal. I dreamt the following:

-Den and I are talking.
-A black-topped 747 flies by, low to the city.
-It shudders.
-An instant later, its left wing falls off.
-The plane pitches toward the ground and disappears from my view behind some buildings.
-Flames from a distance.
-I make a 911 call on the cell.
-We make our way to the wing. It's pretty much intact. There is luggage everywhere. No people or bodies. I wish I had a cellphone with a video camera.
-We work our way to the resting place of the rest of the 747, a grassy clearing rimmed by trees. I couldn't bear to look any more.

The material for this nightmare was last Friday's Vancouver Sun. I had just read, before turning out the lights, that there are 9.8 million people in Paris and environs, and that this figure was larger than the population of 28 European nations. I also read an article about the commercial impact of the recently foiled UK terrorist threat on aviation (Flying 1000 miles is 65 times safer than driving that same distance. 1500 Americans needlessly died in the one-year period after 9/11 by opting to travel by car than by plane.).

If the above is any indicator, from now on, I'm going to be watching and "reading" only carefully chosen "material" before bedtime

***

Speaking of cellphones, I picked up this new Samsung model last Sunday. A slider model with still and video camera.

It has an MP3 player and uses micro-SD format memory cards.

That meant a trip to the local shop yesterday to pick up a card reader. My word, was it ever a positively embalming experience. The guy who served me looked like some failed 60s British rock star, with a name like Nigel or Martin. He had big teeth, his blond hair was parted to one side, and he was in serious need of vitamin D supplements.

It Was Four Years Ago Today

Matthew turned four today. We all ate pizza and had for dessert a DQ ice cream birthday cake. Now if only our daughter's birthday party were this simple: family only. Matthew is still too young to have real friends, there are no neighbours with kids his age, and preschool is not in session, so Betty and I have this birthday-party thing under control for the time being.
Matthew is shaping up to be a sensitive, responsible young man, head butts aside. No complaints from me or Betty.

BTW, we've just pulled him out of the coming year's preschool—it's just not feasible to transport him to and fro three days a week. The refund should help pay for our upcoming trip to Oregon.

Head & Shoulders Makes For A Poor Facial Soap

I thought it was a pretty smart idea at first. I read recently that dandruff shampoos like Head & Shoulders (my staple) containing pyrithione zinc promote hair growth and re-growth because of their cleansing action on the follicles and the accompanying sebaceous glands.

So it wasn't a stretch to apply some of the shampoo onto my face while lathering my hair, and better yet, let the stuff sit for a while for a deep-pore clean.

The first intimation that something was amiss was when my eyes started to burn. The stuff somehow managed to seep under my shut lids, a veritable Drano for my light pipes. Then it was my cheeks, specifically, around the cheekbones. Last was my nose, red and looking like I'd been out in the sun for too long.

This happened last weekend. Even now, you can see still see the scars.

BTW, I used Head & Shoulders for Dry Scalp.

***

When we discover the true lives of other people, the real world beneath the world of appearance, we get as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which inside is full of hidden treasures, torture-chambers, or skeletons.

—Marcel Proust

It's Not Right To Do This To Other People

I had to stop on my way to work to take a look at the aftermath of a deadly car chase, curious to see how mangled the innocent victim's van was.

I only caught a glimpse of both vehicles as they were being trucked away. The van, of North American make, had a deep groove in the front, a point of impact at the driver's door, and another midway along the side. The windshield was intact. I couldn't see the other side of the vehicle. The small import that was being pursued by police was crumpled front and back.

The road and a grassy curb area were marked in chalk with double circles and opposing semi-circles. The two traffic light standards on the northwest corner were damaged; one is noticeably askew. Perhaps this was what killed the 50 year-old man.

The two workmen responsible for sweeping up the mess left behind quite a bit of debris: two front or tail light housings, a bottle of Calgon body mist, an expired SFU parking sticker.

While I expected to see a vehicle torn in two, it wasn't so.

While I was deciding on my coffee, a family was grieving—the van could seat eight.

It doesn't take much to die.

[Update: I went for an afternoon walk back to the scene. It's clear now that the victim had been ejected.]