Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury died earlier this week. I can't say much about the man that hasn't already been expressed more eloquently than others, but like millions of his fans I discovered Bradbury early in life by finding his novels and short story collections at public libraries. I don't remember exactly which Bradbury work I read first, but I have a suspicion it was one of Dandelion Wine, The Martian Chronicles or R is for Rocket. Whichever came first, I gorged myself on Bradbury as fast as the library could collect his works, and when the library had no more I haunted used bookstores in search of what I'd missed.

I've heard some people call Bradbury's work sentimental, the prose mawkish or syrupy. Frankly, I always found his stories lyrical and poetic. Sentimental sometimes, sure, but if the strange nostalgia of, say, "Rocket Summer" is too much for you, consider the uncompromising horror of "The Veldt" or "There Will Come Soft Rains." Bradbury embraced and explored all aspects of the human condition.

For one reason or another I stopped reading Bradbury sometime in the early 1980s, so I missed his comeback period - One More for the Road and other later mysteries and mainstream works. I have several of Bradbury's later books in my collection, as yet unread, still waiting for that perfect lazy summer...you know the one, the one with the porch and the old rocking chair and the scent of lilacs on a perfectly gentle breeze, rocking the decades-old tire swing a few feet away from the weathered oak tree great-granddad planted all those years ago...

Perhaps this summer of transition will be my time to reconnect with Ray Bradbury. The man's work shaped who I am today, and I regret that it's been so many years since we visited.

Thank you for your gifts, Mr. Bradbury.

Back from Mexico

Regular updates (and highlights of our trip to Mexico) will follow tomorrow.

Battered Hat Syndrome

SPF 60 Is Not Enough

Yucatangent

Something New

One of the best things about marriage is the exchange of new ideas and opportunities. Sylvia has dreamed of swimming with dolphins for years, so when the opportunity presented itself today, we seized it.

To my untrained eye, Dolphinas operates a very professional and conscientious program that carefully manages human-dolphin contact in a way beneficial to all. The dolphins seem quite healthy and happy, and the human participants certainly enjoyed gently stroking, kissing and swimming with the graceful creatures.

It's not an experience I would have pursued on my own, but I'm very grateful that Sylvia's adventurous spirit has once again expanded my world.

Oh, and the photos are hilarious. I'll post those later.

Quintana Roost

Joy First, Dignity Second

It's hard to choose which is more regrettable - that huge diaper or the dreadful 70s wallpaper and shag carpet. The TV stand, on the other hand, stayed with the family for decades; I only retired it after moving in with Sylvia.

The Junior High Experience

The idea behind gym class is wonderful: it encourages physical fitness, teaches kids about sportsmanship, competition and cooperation, helps athletically-inclined students discover their gifts...it's a vital part of any school curriculum. Ah, but woe betide those hapless souls who couldn't run, catch, throw, dodge, juggle, jump, rally, climb, volley or hurdle to save their lives. To we unhappy few, gym class was a crucible of humiliation and self-loathing. I particularly hated being forced to change clothes in front of other people, and playing "shirts versus skins" was even worse. I had enough self-image problems without having to play basketball half-naked - and badly. Of course if I had my junior high level of fitness now, I might be tempted to flaunt it a little! Youth. Wasted. Young.

I used to harbour a lot of bitterness about being forced to attend gym class, but a few years ago I realized that other kids had their own struggles. Most classes came easy to me, but I saw some of my peers really struggle with language arts or math or social studies. They felt their share of self-loathing too, and these days I wonder if perhaps I needed gym class to teach me a little humility. If that was how our gym teachers graded performance, I may have wound up with an A+ instead of a C-.

Card Carrying Card Carrier

Welcome to www.earljwoods.com

A few days ago I noted that Facebook has started blocking blogspot.ca, preventing me from sharing this blog with my Facebook friends. I tried a variety of solutions - and thanks to all the folks who made suggestions - but in the end the solution was to take Google up on its offer to register a custom domain for me. So now My Name is Earl (J. Woods) is hosted at www.earljwoods.com. To be honest it feels a little grandiose to assign a custom domain to a blog, but I suppose the new URL is, at least, less cumbersome than the old blogspot address. Other blogspot users affected by Facebook's new spam policy should try this solution; it seems to have worked for me, and registering a custom domain through Google costs only US$10 annually.

Monorail to Monument Valley

Last night I dreamed that I was a student at the U of A again, and that some of my classes took place at the new Strathcona University annex, located in Monument Valley, Utah/Arizona. Luckily Edmonton's LRT system extended all the way to Strathcona U. in the world of the dream, and though the trip took many hours, the scenery was spectacular. I arrived at dawn, a spectacular sunrise throwing the stone monoliths into silhouette as the LRT cars glided into the station.

It was an appealing vision, but when I awoke I realized that winding many kilometres of rail through Monument Valley would probably ruin the landscape. Still, progress, always progress!

Memories of Slime

If  you jump to the two-minute mark of this video, you'll be treated to a vintage commercial advertising Slime: It's Alive, one of a handful of Slime products marketed by Mattel in the 1970s. "Comes in its own garbage can!"

Slime was a pretty unique toy back in those days - a mysterious oozing green compound sealed in a green garbage can, a perfect toy for little boys obsessed with snips and snails and puppy dog tails. Orange Slime quickly followed, then purple Slime with worms and finally the yellow Slime with eyes featured in the above commercial.

While I never owned any Slime, I had friends who did; it made an excellent trap for our Star Wars and Micronauts action figures.

One year our family travelled to Nipawin, Saskatchewan for Christmas with some cousins. My cousin Lawrence had apparently been begging for Slime with worms for some time, and he was initially gleeful when he unwrapped his gifts to discover the promised plastic purple garbage pail. Unfortunately Lawrence was quite squeamish, and when peeled back the lid to thrust his hand into the worm-infested mauve muck, he promptly vomited.

Slime - wholesome entertainment for the whole family!

The Green Earl

While organizing some of the old photos I've been scanning over the last few months, I came across this emerald in the rough - a photo so dominated by green it almost looks contrived. Of course grass is green, and I suppose it makes a kind of sense to choose the colour green for a lawnmower, but even my shirt and shorts are green. Perhaps my underwear was, too; who knows?

I'm not sure why this photo was taken, unless Sean shot it while we were shooting the short film "Mow," in which I mow mom and dad's lawn to the tune of Flight of the Valkyries. It's quite dramatic.

Facebook Blocks Blogspot.ca

Yesterday I discovered that Facebook will no longer allow me to share links to this blog. Naturally I'm disappointed, since much of my readership comes from folks who follow those daily links.

Perhaps I'm paranoid, but I wonder if Facebook has categorized blogspot as "spammy" because blogspot is owned by arch-rival Google. If that's the case, then this seems to be a case of money-motivated censorship.

Many will argue that because Facebook is a business they have the right to censor what they will, but this action certainly seems to fly in the face of their business model, which urges users to share as much detail of their private lives as possible. Besides, if I'm going to be used by Facebook as a source of marketing data, then I think I have the right to complain about Facebook's decisions.

Maybe this is just a glitch, one that Facebook will correct today or the next day. But even if they reverse course, those of us trying to build an audience and a personal brand on the web should remember that we are very much at the mercy of the large corporations that seek to control the web. Blogspot is a wonderful service, but it could disappear tomorrow at the whim of a CEO. All the more reason to save your work offline...

Goodnight, Awake

Warning: Spoilers for the series finale of Awake follow. 

Alongside Person of Interest, Awake was one of my favourite shows of the year. Unlike Person of Interest, Awake suffered low ratings and its first season is also its last.

Presenting an interesting twist on the police procedural, Awake featured Detective Michael Britten's  struggle to reconcile two worlds: one in which his wife survived a terrible car accident but their son did not, another in which his son survived but his wife did not. Whenever Britten falls asleep, he switches from one world to the next, and clues discovered in one world often help him solve crimes in the other. Each world seems perfectly real to Britten; he can't tell which is reality, and which the dream.

The show was at its best when Britten was forced to consider the possibility that he might very well be experiencing profound mental illness; certainly his therapists - one in each reality - struggle to convince him to accept that his wife/his son are gone, and that he needs to move on. But when you can't tell the difference between the waking world and the dream world, how can you possibly make that choice?

I empathize with Britten because my dreams have always been similarly vivid, often fooling me into thinking I have an array of other lives. But there comes a time when you must face reality and awaken - or so convention would say. Up until the final minutes of the episode, Awake seems ready to bow to convention and say definitively which of Britten's two worlds was real, and which a dream. But the series coda - which clearly sets up a new premise for the aborted season two - makes him question reality all over again. After the series' first dream sequence that actually seems dreamlike, Britten seems to awaken, only to find both wife and son alive and well and acting as if nothing had ever happened.

Some will read the finale as a copout - Britten seems to get everything he wants, the entire season was a dream and so on. I think the creators were more subtle than that; hints dropped in the final minutes suggest some more complex resolution. But even if this was an eleventh-hour tacked-on happy ending, it feels more to me like the one that resolved Grant Morrison's groundbreaking run on the Animal Man comic back in the late 80s: after being put through hell, the titular hero gets his happy ending via writer's fiat, and it doesn't seem like a cheat. It seems like mercy. Compassion.

Happy endings are hard to come by for real people. Maybe we need them once in a while for our imaginary heroes. Maybe that's the stuff that dreams are made of: hope for better, happier worlds than this. 

Interest Peaking

I've written twice before about CBS' Person of Interest, which just wrapped up its inaugural season with a stakes-raising cliffhanger. I speculated - and hoped - that the show might both continue its subversive storytelling and further explore the nature of "the machine," the computer that watches over the world of the show. Those wishes have been granted.

While earlier episodes offered only hints that the machine has some degree of self-awareness, the final seconds of last night's finale made it explicit: with Mr. Finch kidnapped, Reese makes a direct appeal to the machine by speaking to it through a street-corner surveillance camera. We see the machine's point of view, with an ominous "operations compromised" alert. Seconds later a pay phone near Reese rings, and Reese picks it up, presumably about to speak directly to the machine...but then of course the season ends.

Earlier this year I asked if another J.J. Abrams production, Alcatraz, might be the next Lost. That show ended on a cliffhanger and wasn't picked up for another season, but oddly enough I don't mind; Person of Interest is far more - well - interesting. Fortunately Person of Interest has done very well in the ratings this year and will be back for another season. I'll be watching.

My Big Fat Geek Wedding Cake

Photo by Yolande Cole

While Sylvia handled most of the preparations for our wedding, I had one very important job: create a fitting cake topper. Since our theme was "My Big Fat Geek Wedding," I needed to create a scene that represented Sylvia and me while staying true to the pop culture iconography we used for the music, decorations and place settings. Putting Captain Kirk on top of the cake was a no-brainer, and I knew that Sylvia had loved her Barbies as a child. But it took weeks of searching before I found a Barbie that was roughly to scale with my Kirk figure. As you can see, however, it all worked out in the end! The cake was delicious, too - a very rich dark chocolate.

The Day I Watched The Silly Remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still

A couple of days ago I finally got around to watching the 2008 remake of the classic SF thriller The Day the Earth Stood Still. Nearly a complete waste of time from start to finish, the film does have one inventive and chilling conceit: that Klaatu Reeves arrives to save the Earth, and that his definition of "saving the Earth" means saving the planet itself, not its people. In the world of the film life-bearing planets are rare and precious, and since people are killing the planet Klaatu's confederation of worlds decides wiping out humans is the only solution. (Shades of "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it!")

I suppose the re-imagination of Gort deserves some kudos as well. While evocative of the original films' classic robot, the 2008 Gort is composed of millions of nanobots capable of disassembling any matter they choose. In fact, only the scenes with Gort show any life at all; there's a rather chilling vignette in which members of the US military imprison the robot in a holding tank, only to discover that Gort was never a prisoner at all.

Unfortunately one clever moment and a half-decent recreation of an SF icon can't save this limp, fearful remake. Grievous errors in science, leaden performances, by-the-numbers direction and editing and an uninspiring score sink what could have been a worthwhile remake. Stick with the timeless original, and say "Klaatu Barada NIX!" to the 2008 version.

Domain of Earl, May 2012

I've always loved maps, particularly political maps. I also love exploring our world. I thought it might be fun to combine these two geographic obsessions into one amusement: what if I carved an imaginary empire by drawing straight lines between the farthest-flung cities and towns I've visited thus far?

Thus I present the Domain of Earl, a benevolent but unrecognized empire composed of borders drawn between Fairbanks, Alaska; Dawson City, Yukon; Lynn Lake, Manitoba; Timmins, Ontario; Hull, Quebec; London, Ontario; Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona; Los Angeles, California; Honolulu, Hawaii; Singapore; Seoul, South Korea; and Tokyo, Japan.

The nice thing about an empire of this nature is that I can vastly increase its size with a simple trip to the Mayan Riviera or the UK. Also, I have no pesky subjects to worry about or wars of conquest to manage. Eat your heart out, Napoleon.

Skyfall Teaser Trailer

After MGM's financial difficulties I was concerned that we might never see Daniel Craig in the James Bond role again. He's looking a little gaunt here, but that may very well be a consequence of the story.

It's hard to glean much from this brief teaser, but it appears as though Bond may be fighting some personal demons. I wonder what Bond would have said during the word association test if the words had been, oh, "martini," "Walther," "eggs," "gold," "Q," "casino," "love," "kill" or "spectre."

Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village

On a whim, Sylvia and I decided we needed to get out of the house.

"Where can we go for a drive?" Sylvia asked.

"How about the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village?" I suggested. I've heard of the place, but never visited, and it turns out their season starts on the May long weekend. So off we went.

This young lady informed me that while there was no train today, there will be service to St. Paul tomorrow and Edmonton the day after.

"Really?" I asked.

"Ta!" she said.

Having never visited a grain elevator before, I was curious about what lay within.

I don't know what any of this stuff does, but it looks important.

Inside the grain elevator. It looks like trucks drive through here.

If I had to guess, I'd say that grain flows down these chutes into some kind of hopper.

A different view of the grain chutes.

We visited the home and office of the local constable.

The holding cell is conveniently located a mere metre or two from the living quarters.

The constable's home features a makeshift tennis court for his two daughters.

Several new exhibits are currently under construction.

The hardware store is my favourite attraction.

A working International truck resides in the hardware store's service bay.

Guns and ammo were sold alongside soda pop, rolling pins and other necessities.

The proprietor informed me that the radio behind him could be had for $15. Too rich for my blood, but perhaps one day Sylvia and I shall have means enough to afford such a luxury.

The lens of history.

Fulfilled in the Landfill

Sean is moving to a new condo, so today Dad and I made a trip to the landfill to dispose of Sean's old sectional. I admired the cheerful defiance of the festively orange Home Depot barrels, seeming relaxed and carefree despite their bleak new surroundings. 

In Memory of Maurice

Yesterday the father of one of my best friends died. I'll say only that I was fond of the man and I'm glad that as a teen I helped out on his first mayoral campaign. Writing with remarkable eloquence on a difficult day, Stephen Fitzpatrick remembers his father.

Let That Be Your Last Rumination