Author Archive for Premee

This Never Happens to Me

I sat down in the train last Friday and found a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms’ wedged between the wall and the seat, spine-up. It looked so new I immediately thought, “Oh dang, some English 101 kid is going to be really ticked off when he gets to University station and realizes he left his book here.”

I pulled it out and was extremely surprised to find that it wasn’t a first-year text at all, but a free-range banned book!

There was a sticker on the front that informed me (and yes, I wanted to photograph this instead of transcribing it, but I haven’t seen my camera in weeks):

FREE A CHALLENGED BOOK!

Did you know that someone in Canada is trying to stop you from reading certain books?
Are you shocked?

The book you are holding in your hands has faced a challenge or ban.

It has been freed by a citizen concerned about freedom of expression who would love to know your thoughts.

PLEASE RELEASE ME

We invite you to visit www.freedomtoread.ca to learn more about censorship.

Then there were some instructions on how to report the book on the Bookcrossing site.

And I was like, How great is this? So I hit up the Freedom to Read site as per instructions and was extremely surprised to find that right here in Canada, libraries are banning books that – in my humble opinion, which apparently counts for very little in the world of censorship – are about as innocuous as fat-free yogurt. (To see what I mean, look at the banned book list (pdf). I know, right?)

I am anti-censorship. I would be anti-censorship even if I hadn’t been writing what would have surely been banned books at a stupidly young age. I would be anti-censorship even if my shelves weren’t full of miraculous and controversial Soviet literature. (The Russians, they know censorship. We have no idea in comparison.) I am of the opinion that if it’s written, it was written to be read. (Whether it should be included in public curriculum or not is a subject for endless debate, of course, given my general thoughts on the public school system. But you know how it is. A kid that wants to read will read, and he will find and read banned books regardless of the venue.)

And I think kids need to be exposed to banned books – anything and everything, controversial histories of false events, all the old propaganda, the racist names and idiotic stereotypes, all that. Kids need to be challenged so that they can join the discussion and the debate. Why did people think that this was OK? Why do we no longer think that? What are some ways that we can show that this is wrong, or hurtful, or hateful, or scary, or true? What are some ways we can stand up against this? These are questions kids can’t ask if they’re being fed a steady diet of inoffensive literary pablum.

So I will come clean now and admit that I have never read ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ nor do I know why it was once on a banned or challenged list. I look forward to finding out before I release this book back into the wild.

Readers, thoughts on censorship? Hate speech? Which banned books have you read and loved and/or hated?

Gone Wrong

Having been pinned by a piece of Ikea furniture, I decided to take a short break and clean out my bookmarks. And found a delightful little thing, one of those sites that makes you glad Al Gore invented the internet – Bugs of Chernobyl. This woman goes around to nuclear sites, including the former Chernobyl containment site, and documents the mutated insects there. They are truly lovely and a wonderful testament to the artistic powers of fugitive radioactivity.

And you know, it’s not always the case, is it, that when man messes with nature it turns out better than before? Cane toads in Australia: giant mess. Parasitic wasps in Hawaii, ditto. Kudzu, hey? Oops much?

Which reminded me of those big giant jellyfish in Japan, those nomura. At around 500 pounds they’re bigger than the average sumo; they clean the waters around them of all plankton and they poison fish, they tangle fishermens’ nets, they generally weird out the ecosystem. And there’s more of them every year. But you know why they’re blooming like that? Why the numbers go up every year? (PS. Aren’t they pretty?)

It turns out that a nomura isn’t killed by the average fishing net, so they land on the deck of the boat pretty well intact. Of course, you can’t have that; if you tip the stupid thing off the side, it’ll just get caught in the net again. So the fishermen generally take their work knives and slice it into several large pieces before shoving the rest overboard. But it’s been discovered that if you ‘breach’ a nomura, it’ll empty all its, um, what’s a good term for mixed company, all its genetic material into the water (this happens whether it gets sliced by knives or snagged on a piece of coral). So what are the fishermen doing? Creating a soup of eggs and sperm in the water. Fertilization, maturation, blooms.

Which makes you wonder if there’s anything that we can do, us humans, about the nomura (aside from making more nomura). Things like this, to me, are a pretty solid argument for the preservation of as much biodiversity as we can. Who’s to say that the natural enemies of the nomura won’t come seething up from the depths and take advantage of the bounty? Then, who’s to say that the ten species on which they depend will be there to ensure that happens? Or the ten species that each of those species count on? Or etc ad infinitum.

Anyway, the moral of this post is:
1. Things depend on things, even if we haven’t discovered the relationships yet.
2. Particleboard is heavy.

At Least It Would Keep Edward Away

So Thursday evening I was feeling some pressure in my left ear, but this morning I woke up with undeniable pain, and a persistent stomping throb, or throbbing stomp, the unmistakable call of the wild ear infection. I was all, “What am I, four years old?” So I did what all reasonable four year-olds do and went crying to my mommy, who said, between large mouthfuls of her lunch, “An ear infection? Oh, stick a clove of garlic in there.”

“MOM. NO.”
“But I saw it on that Doctor Oz show! It’ll kill the – ”
“You always told me not to stick anything in my ears.” I paused. “Also, garlic?”
“It’s got antibacterial properties!”
“What if it gets stuck in there?”
“Well, at least it won’t get infected.”

Anyway, ear infections are usually viral, Mom, so just KNOCK IT OFF.

Anyway, though, I got to thinking about my usual cold/flu regimen, which goes like such:
1. Zinc cough drops (preferably cherry flavour)
2. Ibuprofen
3. Lots of whining

Not so much a standard home remedy as a standard drugstore remedy, unlike my crazy mother’s garlic advice. Then I was like, “But how crazy is it?” We don’t necessarily head ‘er to the drugstore for every little thing, we do subscribe to quite a lot of home remedies. Cranberry juice for urinary tract infections, ginger ale for motion sickness, toothpaste on a zit, toast with honey to cure a hangover. For all that we pride ourselves as being a modern bunch with the Better Living Through Chemistry and medicines done up in nice little foil packs, I think most of us would honest-to-Gob rather smear some baking soda on a beesting than drive to London Drugs for one of those Benadryl rub-on sticks. Am I right?

Readers, do you have any family/home remedies you swear by? (Or, in the case of hangover cures, at?)

Reprieve

First, a haiku:

Winter is biting
With gharstly icicle teeth.
Please euthanize me.

Next, the cure for winter: a trip to somewhere non-wintry! By which I mean the newly-renovated, yet still wonderfully familiar, Muttart Conservatory, whence I dragged my half-frozen carcass on Sunday.

A pointy colourful thing:

A delicate yellow thing:

A fluffy pink thing that tried to assassinate me by falling onto my shoulder and tumbling pathetically to the floor:

Can you feel the warmth? The humidity? The churning processes of photosynthesis that have all but ground to a halt outside? Take a deep breath and focus on the plants.

The desert pyramid is also good for dispelling winter blues, albeit less humid.

Just think, guys, only four more months of winter to go! We can do it!

Is Someone Seriously Going to Greenlight This?

I mean, not a single word in this headline actually goes with the other words in the sentence.

Then again, if the Beatles, MC Hammer, and the New Kids on the Block could do it…

For the Record

Now look, people.

Do not make me explain this again.

This is an eyeball.
eyeball

This is my eyeball cupcake. It does not have any eyeballs in it. If I tell you I am eating one of these, please do not call the police (again).
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This is Robert Smith.
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This is me as Robert Smith. I do not sing songs about the Spider Man. I am not in love on Fridays. I have never seen a lovecat.
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Got it? Robert Smith:
robertsmith007

Me as Robert Smith:
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Thanks for letting me clear that up. If anyone else wants to ask me about Halloween, I’ll be in my room crying and listening to The Cure.

Sweets for the Sweet

A buddy of mine went to jolly Eng-a-land and brought me back, as requested, edible souvenirs! Now I frequent the British candy stores in Edmonton whenever I can and have developed, for example, a serious, serious addiction to Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers, but he brought me some stuff that I’d vaguely heard of but never considered, you know, eating.

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This was one of them. “A Flake bar?” I said aloud to my empty condo. “A ‘Flake’ bar? ‘Flake’? What the hell is it made out of, dandruff?”

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In fact it is delicious milk chocolate that turns into strange splinters and shards in one’s mouth and vanishes instantly! Oh, those wacky Brits.

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And these are Vin Diesel mints… either that, or you have to be over eighteen to eat them, I’m not sure. Anyway, I’ve survived rounds of super-sour Japanese candies and entire tins of Altoids, so I scoffed at the ’super-strong’ claim on the wrapper.

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Sorry there’s no scale here. Listen, these are big suckers. It’s about as tongue-stingingly minty as an Altoid, but rougher and huger and yes, it’s like having a burning icecube in your mouth. Seriously, I almost spit the first one out because my sinuses were starting to vibrate. Now I’m addicted to them and I’m nursing the rest of the tube because I don’t know when I’ll get my next fix!

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This one was by far my favourite. I had seen the gaudily wrapped packages of Jaffa Cakes in the stores and dismissed them because my brain somehow went Jaffa = java = coffee-flavoured.

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But there’s no coffee involved at all!

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Aw yeah, that’s the good stuff. Dark chocolate and some kind of fragile processed cake and a layer of resistant, not-too-sweet orange jelly. The entire thing was wadded into my mouth like a Twinkie after the first bite that I took for the benefit of the photo. I could eat a crate of these things.

No more FruitSponge bars for me. All Jaffa all the time. MUST HAVE MORE. MOVING TO ENGLAND BRB.

Readers, got any favourite ‘foreign’ treats or sweets?

Zap

With all the silliness bouncing around re: Nickelgirl, my daytime alter-ego, I thought I’d personify her a little better.

NG

I found this website a few days ago in an old saved bookmark folder and oh my goodness, I’ve been playing with it so long that my eyes are starting to cross. How am I supposed to finish unpacking now?!

Miraculously STILL ALIVE

I don’t have cable, so when I watch late-night TV I get a lot of weird-haired evangelists and obscure movies. Another thing I get is infomercials, lots of ‘em, to the point where I start to wonder – around three in the morning – how I have lived this long in this GHASTLY WORLD, where my life is FILLED WITH INCONVENIENCES like DRIED-OUT TURKEY and UNACCEPTABLY OVERWATERED PLANTS.

Seriously, a few of us were discussing this a few weeks ago, and the common denominator for all infomercials appears to be pointing out how unbearably difficult and Dickensian our lives are without their miracle product. And I know, I know: they’re just trying to sell their product. But take this thing, for instance (LGT video):

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Have you ever in your life shot toothpaste all over the bathroom, let alone every morning? I mean, I’m speechless. What on earth?

It’s the same with all the other infomercials. People slosh water willy-nilly on their plant stands, they spend fifteen hours taping off a room before they paint it, they fill their entire house with produce that rots in minutes. And then the infomercial guys swoop down and are all, “You don’t have to SUFFER ANY LONGER!”

Readers, got any favourite infomercials? Favourite staged suffering in an infomercial? Favourite silly product name?

Not the Anti-Flirt Club

Dang it! I keep forgetting to post to SodaCraze. Somebody come over to my apartment and give me a swift kick in the rear, please.

Anyway, yesterday I had a lunch date on Whyte (yay Da-de-O’s! And judicious use of the toaster oven ensured that my breakfast of leftover oyster po’boy tasted just as good this morning as it did yesterday afternoon) and afterwards we decided to check out that new cupcake place, Flirt Cupcakes.

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My only basis of comparison was Crave Cupcakes in Calgary, at which, of course, I used to find myself about once a week buying a measure of comfort in a little plastic clamshell.

They’re both solid cupcake places, in my limited opinion. The cupcake I got at Flirt (above) was the Basic Instinct, which is just buttercream on chocolate – the equivalent of the Crave-o-licious. Flirt’s actual cake was so much better – denser and more satisfying, with a terrific mouthfeel, and I loved the cake-to-frosting ratio. Crave’s chocolate cupcakes are delicious, but a little bit too foofy to hold up the nine feet of frosting they put on it. (In fact, I’ve lost more than one cupcake on the sidewalk right outside the Crave store as the cake deflated under my first bite, toppled over under the weight of the frosting, and collapsed with a sighing noise.)

The frosting on the Basic Instinct could use some work. The texture was pretty good, and I appreciate that they’re not trying to kill us with sweetness, but a buttercream shouldn’t taste like I just swiped a finger across the margarine tub and stuck it in my mouth. With the addition of the cake and the sprinkles, it was decent – maybe that’s what they were going for. Regardless, I’ll probably get a different flavour next time. I saw that they had some with cream-cheese, coconut, mint, and raspberry frosting.

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I think we got there around 3:30, and all they seemed to have was empty displays, which was a bit of a psychological blow, it seemed very grim and pre-Glasnost for a minute – especially as the two girls ahead of us ordered a box of twelve and emptied out most of what was left. Luckily they brought out a fresh tray of Wild on Whyte, which my young man is holding above (and I would have asked for a lick of frosting if it hadn’t disappeared by the time I put my camera back into my purse). The store itself is mighty cute, if a bit spartan at the moment – I think they should invest in some cupcake-themed art for the walls.

Anyway, we plan to head back there next time we’re on Whyte and try the other flavours. They’re pricey, but I think of it the same way as Marble Slab ice cream or something – it’s a treat that I would pretty much not ever make at home, so a couple of bucks is a reasonable expense every now and then. Just doin’ my part to stimulate the economy!