Tate.
Things that make you say, "Yes, but is it ART?":
The Telegraph Online reports that the Tate Gallery has awarded this year's Turner Prize to Wolfgang Tillmans, "a German whose special line is taking pornographic homosexual pictures."
The Telegraph finds a silver lining in that "there were no sliced cows, elephant dung or dirty beds this year, although many people's favourite to win, the Japanese artist Tomoko Takahashi, entered a room full of junk - a reflection on failing her driving test."
At this time I'd like to state for the record that the condition of my apartment and of the interior of my car is a reflection on the inability of the art world to find any worthy sliced cows or elephant dung upon which to bestow this years' Turner.
Amelia.
On Wednesday we drove to Wheeling via Buffalo (the day after the big snowstorm) to pick up our daughter for Thanksgiving. It's usually a six-and-a-half hour drive; this time it was nine hours.
We picked her up, turned around and drove back - the return trip took only seven hours. "Only seven hours" only sounds good if it's four a.m. and you've just finished driving.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
We do it again on Sunday to get her back; I'm hoping it's an easier drive, "only" 13 hours round-trip instead of 16.
She's worth every second of driving and every kilometre of tire wear.
Politics.
I've resisted as long as I can, but I can't let it go anymore.
First - The US election
They're talking about lawsuits because people are saying they voted for the wrong person. Not that they changed their minds, but that they didn't understand the ballots. I can see why they're confused:
Name ARROW---> dot
dot <---ARROW Name
Name ARROW---> dot
dot <---ARROW Name
Second - The Canadian election
Yes, we're having one. Tonight, the second of two debates between the 5 leaders of the contending parties is on TV. It's a scary little show.
Gilles Duceppe, the Bloc leader, appears to have used two different hair dyes tonight. The right side of his head is a distinguished-looking silver, but the left side is a sickly gray. There's an incredibly well-delineated separation between the two, like the line between the dark side of the moon and the illuminated one.
Joe Clark looked very statesmanlike. He'll be lucky if the PCs get enough votes to keep official party status.
When my wife first saw NDP leader Alexa McDonough, she said, "She doesn't look so good." That's about right.
Stockwell Day had a little sheet of paper on which he'd written "NO 2-TIER HEALTH CARE." I was expecting the audience and the panel to hold up their own: "YEAH, RIIIIIGHHHT."
Jean Chretien talked about how much the Liberals care - about health care, about Canada, about puppies and kittens and sunshine. I didn't notice anyone ask him about him assaulting citizens, ordering the RCMP to assault citizens, wasting billions, polluting the air, water and earth and nobody made fun of his face, either.
Bah.
Third - The Toronto Municipal election
Who cares? Our choice for mayor is between Mel "Gimme Some Ritalin" Lastman and a slate of various loons. And that's not including the transvestite supermodel - at least she's making the thing interesting. Get it over with already.
Politics. Bite me.
Defrocked.
In today's London Telegraph Online there's a story about misbehaving monks. I quote:
Senior Thai monks in sex scandal
By Alex Spillius in Bangkok
SENIOR Buddhist monks have been put under surveillance in Thailand after sex and financial scandals.
An abbot from a temple near the capital Bangkok was arrested last week after an undercover television crew filmed him during a two-day stake-out masquerading as an army colonel, driving a Mercedes Benz car and spending a night in a private house with two women.
Wanchai Oonsap, 43, was defrocked the next day and later admitted having sex with one of the women. Police confiscated a toupee, whisky, lingerie, condoms and pornographic material from the house where he regularly spent the night. He claimed that 10 other senior monks had "secretly indulged themselves in worldly affairs".
Angry locals now refuse to give alms at his Tha Chang temple in Suphanburi province, in a country which is 95 per cent Buddhist and where insulting religion is a crime.
With due respect to the authorities, I'd say the good abbot was defrocked a few times before the authorities got to him.
Darwin.
I'm not sure that this constitutes independent corroboration, but the story below showed up in my Darwin Awards newsletter and on their website.
Arrowhead.
On Saturday nights I play hockey with the guys; four or five of them are doctors (they were really handy the night I broke my collarbone), and this week one of them told me a story he swears is true.
According to him, there were two guys who were amateur archers had just purchased some expensive new arrows. They were eager to try them out, so they set up a target on the edge of the woods.
It wasn't too long before an arrow missed the target and disappeared into the woods. Being expensive and new, one of the two would-be Robin Hoods went looking for it. After some fruitless searching, he remembered the time-honoured method of finding lost balls.
"Hey! Shoot another one!" he yelled.
We must assume, if the time-honoured method is to be believed, that Little John was within a foot or so of the missing arrow, for the tip of the second arrow pierced through the orbital bone above his eye and bored through to the back of his skull.
Little John remained conscious and alert and his friend attempted to remove the arrow. When it broke, still lodged in his head, they called 911.
My doctor friend says that when the neurosurgeon told the archer that he needed to see another arrow like the one lodged in his friend's brain, the man went to his car and returned with an arrow utterly unlike the one protruding from his friend's skull.
"This isn't anything like the other arrow," the neurosurgeon complained.
"Well, no," explained the archer. "Those arrows are, like, five bucks apiece."
Dumb AND cheap.
Hogan!
From the October 25 Globe and Mail Facts And Arguments column:
"Jaw-dropping stories have long flowed from Reinhard Spitzy's pen, but when he publishes another volume of wartime memoirs next year he is likely to cause a sensation," writes Tony Allen-Mills in The Sunday Times of London.
"The former aide to Joachim von Ribbentrop, Adolf Hitler's foreign minister, has decided to write a book about the funny side of the Third Reich. . . .There will be many people who will see nothing funny about the regime responsible for the Holocaust. But 55 years after Hitler's suicide, Spitzy believes he owes it to posterity to record the jokes and blunders that were part of Nazi life."
The 88-year-old has said: "There were so many hilarious stories from that time. The plans that failed, the mistakes, how we roared with laughter." (italics mine)
Wheeling
"Go home!"
So we've just pulled into the parking lot at the CVS drugstore in Wheeling, West Virginia, when a woman in the parking lot stops in her tracks and stares at us as we stop in our parking spot.
My wife sees her first - waving a Canadian flag keychain - and the woman says, "You're one of us!"
It turns out she's from Ontario but has lived in both the US and in Canada at different times, and is now living in lovely WV. And she doesn't like it too much. She misses her horse, her government-sponsored medical care, and especially the cold, cold, winters.
"Don't take this the wrong way," she tells us, when we say we are waiting for the INS to roll out the welcome mat (or whatever it is they do) for me, "but GO HOME!"
