Busy, busy, busy

Back from the ozone again, with a few stories to tell and many complaints about the sad, sad unfairness of life, tow trucks, and automotive maintenance.

Ottawa is a lovely city in the wintertime, when the ground is covered in white and the Rideau Canal turns into the world's longest skating rink. While visiting with Fiend a couple of weeks ago, I surprised myself by making it onto the ice without instantly toppling over. Together, we made our way up the frozen canal for a kilometer or two and back, she slowly but gracefully gliding with only a hint of unsteadiness, me flailing wildly in all directions at once with arms windmilling and legs scrambling. (Or should that be "scrambled legs"?) As I mentioned to her at the time, and later in a comment on her blog, it seemed like a very apt illustration of the differences between the stereotypical female (cautious, graceful, makes steady progress with minimal disturbance or risk) and the stereotypical male (impetuous, reckless, makes faster progress but falls down frequently.)

Quote of the evening: "How do I skate backward? Like this? WHOOAAAHHH...." *thud*

We also saw the National Art Centre's production of Love's Labours Lost, one of Shakespeare's stranger plays, and one that is relatively rarely performed. I can see why. Much of the play consists of rapid-fire, nearly impenetrable seventeenth-century wordplay, like some bizarre blend of John Donne and David Mamet, which seems to prattle on endlessly and, to tell the truth, somewhat tiresomely. The plot involves a comically self-absorbed and misogynistic ruler and his courtiers, who vow to avoid (among other things) the company of women in order to focus on exclusively intellectual pursuits. A female representative of a neighboring kingdom and her ladies-in-waiting promptly arrive on an important diplomatic mission, and romantic complications ensue. I found most of the characters, and the "humorous" pranks they play on each other, to be unappealing. The play ends strangely for a comedy, not with the usual comedic resolution of conflicts and round of happy marriages, but with a sudden, tragic twist that radically alters the atmosphere of its bucolic Arcadia and seems to summarily dismiss the youthful intellectual and romantic hijinks of its pun-slinging, metaphor-twisting, hyperverbal characters as meaningless frivolities, or, at best, as nothing but a shallow prelude to the much grimmer and weightier world that awaits them outside of Arcadia. It's almost as if it's a comedy that deliberately and subversively undermines the idea of comedy itself. Perhaps Shakespeare, in his middle age, became disillusioned and cynical about happy endings?

On the whole, it was a lovely trip, even if I did have to brush some snow and pulverized ice off my pants.

Unfortunately, my return to Y-town was not quite so idyllic. An early morning flight got me to work at Huron State by 9:00 am, slightly groggy thanks to Northwest's failure to provide one of the key necessities of life but with a pleasant memory of watching the sun rise from 30,000 feet. On arriving home after work, though, Your Correspondent could not help but note that something was missing. The city had had its licenced car thieves tow Ol' Whitey while I was gone, for the "offense" of being parked for 48 hours in a legal parking space on a city street in front of the residence of its duly registered and tax-paying owner. While I was mulling this over and trying to get to Suburban Public Library for the evening reference shift, the Land Yacht, after motoring happily from the airport to Y-town and from the University to my home, inexplicably decided that it didn't feel like starting again. Despite feeling somewhat the same way myself, I found this annoying.

I won't bother to describe the rest of the week in detail, except to mention that the Land Yacht seems to have taken a dislike to cold Mondays. I can't say I disagree, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist on more reliable cooperation from it in the future. Nor will I dwell upon the towing company's momentary lapse of memory in which they claimed total ignorance of the existence of both me and my truck after I coughed up the ransom they demanded. Nor the Land Yacht's blown fuses and broken door handle. Nor the money I'm going to have to shell out for repairs for Whitey, nor the lowlife who's taken it upon him/herself to vandalize my outgoing mail, tearing it in half very neatly and very deliberately. (That's a $250,000 rip if the postal inspectors ever catch up with you, bubs.)

More pleasantly, I did get to go to one day of 31 Flavors of ConFusion, a science fiction convention put on by a local fan group, before the weekend blizzard dumped 12 inches of snow on everything in sight and made travel from Y-town to the convention hotel a practical impossibility. A quick summary of information gleaned and recommendations to be made: David G. Hartwell and his wife Kathryn Cramer are astute editors and observers of both science fiction and its fans. Watch for both their recent anthology of hard SF and an upcoming anthology of space opera. The Flash Girls and Steven Brust are wonderful and witty live musical performers. (Check out the lyrics to All Purpose Folk Song (Child Ballad #1) and A Meaningful Dialogue). Bang!, a card game recently released by Mayfair Games, is an entertainingly silly take on the Old West as filtered through the squinty gaze of the classic spaghetti westerns of Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone.

And that's about all the news that's fit, or unfit, to print. Except for one announcement....