Pumpkin Patch

In October (yes, I take a while to get back to posts I start), we went to a pumpkin patch to get our gourd for Halloweeen. If don't know, pretty much any large event that might bring families are large, commercial affairs. Trinkets and goodies of questionable healthiness are sold in every sodden mud-caked square inch of field. There are local bands who butcher rock classics to include the word 'pumpkin'. No, I will not regale you with titles. Let's just say it's like having your nostalgia regurgitated through the candy-corn-crusted nether regions of a gourd from camp hell. It's not a pleasant experience.

It was quite an event. There was mud, and mud on mud, and dirt that looked somewhat dry and not hazardous but just turned out to be convincingly light-coloured mud. There were also corn-mazes, because if there is anything you want to do on a cold October day, it's to get lost in rows upon rows of cow-grade maize and endless trails of, well, mud.

During our tousle getting out the door, we forgot Owlet's proper wet gear. So in the drizzle, we had to assemble a Frankensteinian abomination of Owl Jr's clothes, some stuff left in the drunk, and a small but unwieldy umbrella; it might have been fashioned after a frog. And that's when it hit me, or was reinforced, as I gazed at our friend's children, who were wearing matching yellow slicker of some sort, how much children's fashion isn't so much about looking stylish, at least, for most parents; but more about ensuring your child doesn't look like an unamusing, tragic extra from Oliver!, which Owlet surely did.

It's not like she cared, she just wanted to get going. Going to whereever we were going to run too fast and get ridiculously dirty and have her parents freak out as new parents always do. The thing about dirty kids, is yes, on one hand, let kids be kids and get rough and tumble; but on the other hand, when all they have to get to is the car, they act as these impressive dirt multipliers, getting more things dirty that will surely have to be cleaned faster than you can repeat "OH GOD PLEASE DON'T TOUCH THAT". For me, it's not so much the fact of a dirty child. If she doesn't care, I don't. It's just the eventual time sink of trying to clean from our cloth and pleather seats something that looks like a cross between regurgitated grass and sculpting clay.

Or maybe I'm just a very prissy father, whatever.

During the course of wandering the mud fields looking for the right pumpkin, I saw a bunch of workers drive in a tractor, and unload pumpkins. Because we were in a mud field, not a pumpkin patch. The real pumpkin growing was done in some off-site lot, or imported from Argentina, or grown in a sinisterly lit warehouse with steel drum vats with supervisors who's middle name was 'von'. Or maybe I'm getting my imagination into overdrive because pumpkin-fueled family cheese can only push a man so far.

At some point, the kids were led to a straw field where they threw straw at each other and got the sort of dirty I can get behind, non-transferrable. I took many shots, and eventually got a keeper. So I guess the trip wasn't all bad.

Whew!

So, it's all over, that great spectacle of human striving, that culmination of a nation's hopes and dreams, all on the international stage of sport. A showcase of our country, our culture, yes, but moreso a near sacred rite about competition itself.

I'm speaking about, of course, the Men's Olympic Gold Hockey Finals. Oh, we can blather about ice skating this, speed skating that, moguls, boarder-cross, aerials, but it's all just preamble to talk about the hockey. At least in Canada.

And thank god Canada won eh? Not that I'm any massive hockey nut (even though I did follow the hockey and did watch the gold medal round). But my country is. I've tried and failed to think of comparative obsessions, but I'm not sure they quite match. Japan, for instance, really loves ski-jumping. Malaysia loves badminton. New Zealand is tied to rugby. Most countries are frighteningly involved with soccer. And, speaking with American friends, I can't quite find how to frame a Canadians relationship to hockey. It's perhaps like Texas and football. Or Boston and baseball? I'm starting to lose my way, because I'm trying to talk about sport, and unless are talking about Super Spike V-Ball for the NES, I have very little to say with any coherence.

This is a country that cheered most loudly during the Winter Olympic closing ceremonies when the old theme song for "Hockey Night In Canada" played very briefly, in a montage. A country that has played street hockey since forever, ice hockey if they were lucky, and has obsessed about the sport for generations. A country where all sports pale in comparison, fade to the back.

A country that is assailed with messages from the media (or reflected back, I'm not sure which), that hockey is our national game, is our game, is what makes us Canadian, is the reason we trapped fur, made maple syrup, put our policemen in red and insist they be mounted, stormed Juno beach, invented universal healthcare, and speak two languages.

So, yes, I do say thank god we won gold. Because we do care about the sport a helluva lot. Not that Americans don't deserve to win. But you got so many sports as it is; and hockey, while violent and all that, likely doesn't hold a candle to football or baseball or basketball in whatever region you're from. No American newscaster would ever use a phrase like, "As the nation reels from disappointment.." when talking about a hockey tournament, not with a straight face.

But we would.

Oh, we would. There'd be rending of hair and a measureable dip in GDP. A further dip in the birth rate, car sales, church attendance, community involvement, choir recitals, Elk lodge AGM attendance, you name it, it'd feel a dip.

But we won. There was spontaneous honking on at every intersection, waving of flags, a surge in that little felt emotion, Canadian patriotism. Waves of people flooding downtown with maple leaves on sweaters and hats and shirts and painted in sundry places. Canadians being even more friendly than usual.

God we love our hockey.

Casting I'd Like To See But Never Will

Greg Kinnear
Plays a grizzled ex-cop turned private detective with an ex-wife who hates him, kids who hate him more. When what he learns threatens to break the thin blue line, he's only got his wits, his underground contacts, and a 1978 Seville packed with weaponry from his days in Vietnam to sort things out.

Wil Wheaton
In a world without hope, in a life without a future, Wil Wheaton is B-Line, a down on his luck freestyle crunk artist who survives by his love of the street, and the rhythms that beat in his soul. Featuring a soundtrack by Jay-Z, TuPac, Ice-T, and Lil John, this is the b-boy movie of this generation. And for all generations.

Tom Cruise
Billy Boynton never had much luck with girls. He never had much luck with work. He never had much luck with anything. In this art-house indie film released straight to the web, Cruise plays a poignant, quiet role as a small man, living in a big world, just trying to carve his own little place of happiness.

John Cusack
Conan the Barbarian, a remake.

Michael Douglas
Toddy Michaels works out a meager living as an Assistant Clerk II at megacorp. Not having relations with models and not being the captain of the industry. This film follows his sorry life until death. At some point he tries to start a hobby chicken farm.

Guide To Vancouver #2: The Olympics

It's upon us. The heaving behemoth of advertising, world sport, international goodwill, and backdoor cronyism, The Olympics. The Winter Olympics, so, I suppose, no need to get too excited. Unless you're from a country that is almost as synonymous with snow as Antarctica, Siberia, or Christmas Coke commercials. It's a Big Deal here. This is the Olympics Canada does relatively well at. Canadians pride themselves in living in cold, inhospitable climates. Naturally we'd excel in the Winter Olympics.

Sport, particularly amateur sport, involves getting very very serious about increasingly trivial things. For example:

• Cross country skiiing spiced up with target shooting.
• Jumping, but not by skiers perse, it's more by gymnasts who happen to use skiis to get lift.
  
• Large rocks. Slid very slowly. To targets. Brooms are involved.
  
• Using gravity and ice to go really really really fast. Have a different one for sitting, sitting with friends, standing, short, long, bumpy.
  
• Moving on ice, horizontally.
  

It's not secret I find most sports baffling. Olympics is no exception. But there's another side of the Games that's even more frustrating. The billions of dollars I, as a taxpayer, will have to pay over the coming decades. It seems every budget, for the villages, security, venues were ten times over budget. Ten times. A lot of the uproar from the left and far left has been, "This might not be the best time to pay public money when all our social services are going down the drain.". Hard to argue with that.

However, some people say that the Olympics really will put Vancouver on the map. I'm not sure it really needs to be on the map any more than it is. And it's not like Nagano and Torino are blustering powerhouses of economy now.

I'm not so naive to believe either side, to be honest. This is a massive world party where the most elite athletics get to compete for accolades and glory and whatever it is that athletes compete for. And time for every citizen to feel unbearably connected to some downhill skiier they had not known about until 1 week ago.

I don't mind SO much that we bleed ourselves dry for a massive world party even if it is for negligible, unmeasured benefits. It's a once in a lifetime thing, the Olympics are. A time for Canadians to do something we rarely do (notwithstanding Internet debates about healthcare and backpacking across Europe): be patriotic. My country, right or wrong, type of thing. Glowing hearts, pride.

What makes it a little hard to swallow is that many corporations that will make tons of money, the untold millions that go to the IOC for I don't know what, and the average Joe, stuck with the bill. But it's a good thing it's going on in Canada, since the Winter Olympics is, to be honest, for the vast majority of Canadians: "Large World Hockey Tournament With Some Other Sports".

And you had so many rah-rah millionaires edging to get the Games here, you had corporate backdeals and people in positions of leadership with more ego than sense hoist this cost upon us. That kinda gets in my craw. But then, hey, possibly 2 golds in hockey on home turf. Rah rah.

First Ride

I grew up surrounded by rich Taiwanese and Hong Kong kids who drove Integras and Supras and RX-7's. Well, maybe not surrounded. There were plenty of normal Canadian Asians in my highschool and university, but the unbearably spoiled ones were damn conspicuous. Maybe it's this that influenced me to get something that, under a dense fog and a few shots of whiskey, might be construed as a sports car.

Then again maybe I tried to get a sporty car because it was my first damn car and I was young and dumb(er).

It was a 1985 Honda Prelude, white. It was an SE (slow version), not an Si (not as slow), but the people who sold it to us painted the damn bumper white (only available in the Si) so it looked like, well, an ass-ugly Prelude SE with a painted bumper.

They were as shady as an Italian in any film depicting 1930's New York and were very, very Russian. They might have been Ukranian, actually. All I knew is they had a thick accent and that far away look that made every day cruelties and injustices not something that bothered them overly. Thick hide, is what I'm getting at. Like maybe they were involved in illegal military action in a country whose borders hadn't quite been resolved or or maybe their closest friends went blind drinking methanol. Something hard went down in their lives at some point. Or maybe they were just gangsters. Just hard because that's what the work required.

I'm not sure how I remember it, but I do remember my dad remarking how they were 'trying to sell quite a few cars'. Which seemed odd. If you are selling several used cars and you don't, in fact, have a Used Car Lot and a garishly sterotypical coat then you're likely operating in the gray zone of everyday commerce.

Luckily my dad was an immigrant too. Maybe not from the same part of the world but I think immigrants all over North America understand each other a little better than they understand Westerners. To wit, life is Hard. Money is money. Haggle with both hands and don't blink.

I was left in the car, sitting in the drivers seat. It sat low. Real low. Vertebrae snapping low. Low enough that one had to get used to gauging the speedbump height. So I sat there, admiring my first real Ticket To Freedom. They haggled for about an hour. Later I found out it was over about 25 bucks. I did not find this unusual.

It eventually broke down. That's how I learned about timing belts. Our family isn't much into cars, so all my car lessons are expensive and fraught with confusion.

But all in all it was a good little car. It had a stick shift, which, to be honest, was pretty much the only thing I cared about. It cornered pretty well, not that I raced it at all, or have enough skill in driving to know what a really good cornering car does. But I knew It wasn't a floaty mass of turgid springs and body roll like my uncle's Mustang, or the family Dodge Caravan, so that was enough for me. It also, I guess, went from 0-60 in slightly less than 10 seconds, but I drove that thing like your great aunt drives her Toyota Tercel, carefully, worringly, with the softest and most gentle hand possible. Because to me I realized it wasn't a SUPER RAD FAST CAR WAHOOO, it was A Way To Get Out Of The House. Which is really far more exciting.

Things My 11-Month Old Can Do That Is Unacceptable For 47-Year Old Accounts Manager Brad Diaderod Currently Enjoying a Stopover In Muskegon, Michigan

• discover leftovers in folds of clothes, proceed to eat it.
• with slow, deliberate precision, find an unidentifiable piece of lint on the ground, then contemplatively eat that too.
• drop Cheerios™ on the ground, one by one.
• be startled by vacuum cleaners.
• obsessively hold onto furniture while walking.
• hesitantly reach out to every dog he sees.
• giggle uncontrollably for apparently no reason at all.
• expect strangers to smell his head.
• eat like Robocop.
• lean violently away or towards someone, depending on his disposition to that person.
• cry when sleepy.
• slowly approach the TV until face is squished against it, ensuring 129% of daily radiation intake.
• stare at strangers, unblinking, while drooling.
• continue doing whatever he was doing when others attempt small-talk.

Things I was pretty sure everyone did until I found out no, it was just me.

Thanks metamonk, for the idea.

• Beat-box to musicals
• End every order to a waiter with 'etcetera, etcetera, etcetera'
• Mistake Halloween for Christmas.
• Flip off crossing-guards.
• Hold an undying suspicion that peanut brittle is really dehydrated peanut butter.
  
• Regularly behead all the Animal Crackers™, make a hunter's trophy room from the box.
  
• Pronounce Pterodactyl with a 'p'.
• Use cowboy placemats.
• Wonder why everyone on The Office lost their accents.
• Use the e-brake when braking foot gets tired.
• Talk to infant son exclusively in the voice of Soundwave.
• Use CB conventions when using cell phones on the road, over.
• Think PETA was a celebrity softcore channel.
• Think Kinkos was something else entirely.
• Give directions to bus drivers.
• Play Sudoku with letters.
• Watch anime muted, with Happy Days audio playing over.
• Write down favourite bumper sticker slogans.
• Drink whiskey in the shower (during the summer).
• Watch the LPGA with the volume cranked.
• Laugh during Pulp Fiction.