Soda Craze

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?

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?)

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…

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.

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?”

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.

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.

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!

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.

But there’s no coffee involved at all!

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?

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):

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?