Today I walked 2 miles and worked out at the gym for an hour. Good for me! Hopefully I can keep that up. Although it was drizzling as I was leaving the gym and walking home, I was struck with a feeling of joy and wonder at how beautiful this city is in the fall: little black squirrels foraging around in veritable blankets of colours, reds, yellows, bronzes, purples, each tree more flamboyant than the last, the rain on brick buildings making the red all the more vibrant, the summer fruit stand open with a last vivid kaleidescope of offerings to spite the approaching cold. It put me in such a good mood I bought some bananas at the stand and hummed away on my way home.

I’m sure I’ll be whining about the cold a week from now, but today I am happy. I am even inspired to go to the gym again tomorrow! Let’s hope the weather lasts a bit longer.

Last night at 2:00 am when we came home from S-chan’s and K-rock’s fantastic Diwali party, one elevator, which earlier in the day had been wildly zipping between floors B1 and 2 without opening the doors even when SuperSteve (thus named for his job title rather than any particular ability to do said job) used the emergency call back key, was shut off completely. A second elevator was stuck on the penthouse and the third, which had been moving when we arrived, came to a halt on floor 24 and stayed there, leaving us to walk the eighteen floors to our apartment with twenty pounds of Diwali leftovers in our arms.

This morning, I heard a dripping and thought that Michelle had not completely turned off the tap in the bathroom sink, as sometimes happens, but nooooooo. The ceiling directly above the toilet, and presumably directly below the toilet above us, ruptured and is leaking all over the place. So we have to use an umbrella to take a piss. I have taped plastic bags to the ceiling hoping to stop some of the water, with the expected result of really not helping at all.

Where are Supers Mira and Steve at this moment in history? Your guess is as good as mine.

GAH!

Lots of goings on in the Stark-Michelle household. Most of it had to do with Michelle’s half-marathon, which was exciting.

Friday we went out with a friend of mine whom I hadn’t seen in almost two years, since she visited Toronto from Montreal, where she had been living. In the meantime she had moved back to Toronto and was living here and now is about to move back to Montreal; all of this time I had not even seen her house. I am a bad friend. There were reasons, but they aren’t important now. She lives in the Roncesvalles area, whose demographic make up breaks down to approximately 3/4 Polish and 1/4 granola dykes. Which means that it’s a great place to hang out if you are in the market for perogies or hemp necklaces. I wasn’t shopping for the latter this time around, but I did pick up a big bag of the former. Michelle wanted a carbo load before her big race! We chowed down on those on Friday and Saturday…sooooo goooood.

Look at Michka’s pretty number, with her name on it, too! I got all excited for her. I saw her off at the beginning of the race at some ungodly hour in the morning, then made my way down to a point to which I could cut across in time to catch her on one of the loops of the race, so I could cheer her on.

There’s my girl! I hooted and hollered as she went by and then foraged for some breakfast, not the easiest thing to find in the business end of Toronto on a Sunday morning. I had to make flirty chitchat with a cute cop at one of the roadblocks to figure out where to get some food, poor me.

I figured Michelle wouldn’t be back at the finish line for a another hour and a half or so, so I decided to get a bit of exercise myself by wandering around and taking random photos of the scenery.

I found various pieces of public art dotting the landscape…

And some shattered Plexiglas, which I seemed to find infinitely more interesting. Finally it was time to head back to the race route to cheer my athlete on to the finish. I picked a spot about 500m from the end, where a group of aerial dancers pumped out late 80s/early 90s pop music like Bobby Brown and Paula Abdul at the runners labouring through the last stretch of the course.

I was very proud of my girl! So much so that I took her home and made her Victory Crepes!

These are some special crepes, my own concoction developed specifically for the replenishment of vital nutrients after a lengthy workout: mascarpone provides crucial protein and salts; bananas restore potassium to its necessary levels; and cheese fudge (chocolate infused cheese) replenishes the….chocolate stores–clearly an essential component to the health and wellbeing of any serious athlete. Oh, and there are cherries on top. For vitamins and stuff. Right? There are vitamins in cherries, I am sure of it.

Yum! And speaking of yum, and moving away from the marathon talk, I was in the market for those vitamin-rich cherries earlier in the week for another reason: PIE! As I mentioned some days ago, I received my Twin Peaks DVDs in the mail recently and Michelle and I have been watching it fervently. Michelle now understands why I love Kyle Maclachlan with that love reserved for those who were acquainted with his work prior to Sex and the City. He’ll always be Agent Cooper to me. Yummy!

So in celebration of the new DVDs and to set the mood for the viewing experience, I decided to make some cherry pie.

Let me tell you, it was damn good.

Yes, so in sum, while Michelle trains and runs marathons and grows increasingly athletic and ripped, I keep cooking and baking and feeding and growing increasingly Ukrainian Baba shaped. What can I say? I am before my time. Someone fetch me a babushka.

As the final section of this series of reviews I would like to write about the book that put me in the mood to read so much speculative fiction in the first place.

Imagined Future: Nicola Griffith, Slow River

I read Slow River for the first time in 1996, when I worked at a feminist/progressive bookstore, which has tragically closed since, in Edmonton. I credit Nicola Griffith with singlehandedly instilling in me a love for science fiction that I had at that point not discovered, as well as with torturing me with her refusal to write more of it…Oh, why, Nicola, whyyyy?! Not that Aud doesn’t deliver in her own action-packed way, but Ammonite and Slow River awakened a hunger in me for good, queer-centred and female-centred sci-fi that has rarely been sated since. I know it exists out there, but something about this book really touched me in a way that few others have. Recently I decided to re-read Slow River to see if it still held the same power for me that it had over a decade ago.

As I mentioned in my review of Holly Black’s Ironside, I like fiction that takes off from the world I know into a world I can reasonably imagine and Slow River has done that. In fact Griffith was able to see very clearly the direction of the future; Slow River has suffered very little through the passage of time as a speculation on the possible future. The technologies are similar; the wider societal issues remain relevant. It’s quite interesting to read a book written in the not-so-distant past that is set in a not-so-distant future because you get to see what has come to pass and what was way off, as well as being at an even closer vantage point to see what may still be in store.

I remember when I first read this novel there was a lot of speculation, in fiction and in everyday life, as to the possibility of an increasingly panoptic and decreasingly intimate society in which people would be known by biometrics and implanted cybernetic identification systems, microchips in the hand or the head, retinal scans, etc. etc. Much of it was wilder speculation than has thus far come into usage, but some of it isn’t far off. While we aren’t implanting ourselves with microtechnologies yet (are we?), it still doesn’t seem outlandish upon second reading, the idea that someone would be able to renew her identity with a new PIDA chip in the hand and a new set of fingertip falsies.

Griffith is able to present a world close enough to this one that it seems almost as though the practices that have become familiar to the characters in the novel are already familiar to readers as well. And those that are not familiar are explained only to the point that they need to be, throughout the action in the book, rather than being bogged down by over-explication. The water treatment systems, for example, are very integral to the book and thus require more explanation than some of the more banal technologies, but Griffith weaves the explanation into the story, giving characters reasons to explore the workings of the technology.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I should start with the story. We follow the main character, Lore, along three stories of her life told in parallel segments throughout the book: the story of her childhood leading to her kidnapping; the story of her escape and subsequent underground life of crime and deception; and her present attempts to leave crime behind and become a legitimate member of society, although not as the person she was before her kidnapping.

The action begins with her escape from a brutal kidnapping through a change of identity aided by Spanner, a low-level criminal who will become her lover and her captor, sort of. They operate together in a mutually destructive codependent (yet sometimes kinda hot) relationship based more on exchange than love or even lust. They need each other; Lore wants to escape who she is and depends on Spanner to use her criminal connections to make that happen, and Spanner knows that Lore, heiress to a famous family business as well as a fortune, will be useful to her both as a partner in crime and as a possible pawn for future prosperity. Somewhere in there they sort of care for each other, as well, but you have to look for that. They both become addicted to an erotic drug that leads them to perform less and less savoury acts in order to feed their habits, until Lore decides that she won’t be party to that level of deception and cruelty anymore.

Thus she leaves Spanner, using up one final favour from a former friend to create a new identity, as whom she finds a job at a water treatment plant. We learn throughout her time there that her family holds the patent to the current system of water treatment, so she knows much more than she should about the system and receives some suspicion from her coworkers. We also learn that her family is full of secrets, from shady corporate dealings to tragic abuses within the family itself.

The story is part mystery, part techno-future speculation, part ecological dystopia, all of which meld really well together. Lore begins by seeking a new life, an escape from who she was, and then another escape from who she became. Throughout her journey she comes across a set of mysteries—linked to her family—regarding who kidnapped her, who has now kidnapped another water industry heir, what happened to her sister that would lead to her suicide, and how these things, corporate and personal, are linked together. The world in which she lives is a very foreseeable future to our own world, in which the water supply has been almost irrevocably annihilated by pollution and some of the world’s richest families are those that found ways to make it drinkable again. Water is central to the plot, both as a metaphor and as a palpable character in the novel. It is full of danger and mystery as well as salvation.

Griffith doesn’t rely heavily on shiny electronics and blinking descriptions to construct her technologically dependent future, yet it is present, sometimes subtly and sometimes not as much, throughout the story. Her world of electric track cars and PIDA IDs is woven deftly and without heavy handedness that would make the world seem constructed. It feels like this world to me, just… a few years from now. Sure, some of the technology she imagined would be integral to living, such as the “slates” (much like a Palm Pilot or perhaps a Blackberry), have fallen a bit by the wayside; people use them but not ubiquitously. And maybe the TV news hasn’t entirely been taken over by uber-sensational pay-by-story online versions of the same, but beyond such small details, her vision of the world of a few years from now doesn’t really seem too far from what it is already becoming. Part of the reason is that she doesn’t go into too much detail; she hasn’t constructed a world in which every last new innovation has been fully explained. She leaves some details open to the reader’s imagination and leaves us with a construction of the future that is largely adaptable.

Another part of the reason that her future has held so well is that she keenly picks out issues that have been and continue to be very pertinent to our world. The water supply has been at risk for a long time now and the idea that it might become an issue of great importance (read: to be exploited) by large corporations is already something of a reality. I liked that her approach to water as an industry embodied not only the potential for corruption but also the idealism behind it as well. Identity, too, is something that has come to mean so many things and Lore’s fragmentation into different identities, in the action of the book and in the way the story is told with three parallel narratives going on simultaneously, makes a powerful demonstration of the power of identity as well as its limitations.

What else, what else? I love this book, I could go on for pages. Maybe I should talk about something I don’t love about this book: I want more sex. Nicola Griffith is a big tease. There are suggestions, moments that make a girl all flushed, and then… It’s the next chapter. More sex please! Also, and this is actually something that Michelle pointed out when she read the book, the build up between Lore and Magyar ended rather abruptly. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely ready for the book to end at all upon my second reading. I think that Griffith could possibly have drawn out a wee bit longer both the building of a relationship between Lore and Magyar, and the resolution of Lore’s discovery and subsequent pursuit of culpable members of her family in various nefarious acts. She solves the mystery and boom, Dad shows up and it’s all just sort of…over. A tiny bit dissatisfying. I could have read another chapter or so on those things.

Nonetheless Slow River remains one of my favourite spec fic novels, nah, one of my favourite novels of any genre. It remains relevant even a decade plus since its release and no less satisfying a read on the second go around. Or the third!

As the second part to this series of book reviews, I am going to look at a young adult novel I read recently. It isn’t my usual science fiction spec fic, but fantasy instead. I am not usually that big on fantasy but Holly Black has a unique take on it that draws me in.

Imagined Present: Holly Black, Ironside

First I should point out that Ironside is the third novel in a series, of which I have not read the first two. I had read one of Black’s short stories, called “Going Ironside”, that blew my mind. I mean really. I loved the mixture of the world I know with the world she imagined, I loved the idea that a faerie, stuck in this hard world, would seek comfort and find addiction instead. I loved the hardness of the “real world” aspects and the believability of the fantasy aspects. If I am going to read fantasy, this is exactly the sort I want to read. So I decided to find some more.

Not realizing that Ironside was part of a series, I started with that. I feel that I probably would have gained some extra insight into the characters, their histories and their relationships to one another, had I begun with the first two books, which I do plan to buy and read soon, but honestly I don’t think my appreciation of the book suffered too greatly for that lack. It’s a good stand-alone novel and I will review it as such rather than as part of the series.

Ironside is a great book for a misfit! If I had been reading books like this when I was a YA, well… I may have been a very different reader. This is great stuff, the perfect mixture of magic and drama. It’s a story of a pixie changeling, Kaye, disguised as a girl in Ironside, or the human world, who fits into neither the human nor the faerie world. She and her best friend, a queer boy whose past dealings with the faeries have ended in tragedy and bitterness, embark on a quest both to find the human girl whom Kaye has replaced and to find a way to save Kaye’s lover, a sort of dark prince of faeriedom, from being destroyed by the leaders of the Bright Court.

Now if I had just read that paragraph I probably wouldn’t pick up this book. I don’t read much on faeries and I don’t tend to veer far outside the world I believe could exist—which doesn’t often involve faeries. However, Black’s characters are complex and moody, neither good nor bad in any fixed, fundamental way. Kaye is a changeling, part of the human world and living as a daughter of a human mother, yet full of deception, willing to use her magics on humans to get what she needs if necessary. Her best friend Corny is a true and supportive pal, yet he distrusts, for very good reasons, the faeries, including Kaye herself, and resorts to cruelty and violence with them, at times in order to gain information and at times simply to enact revenge. Kaye’s lover, Roiben, is a leader of a dark realm, shaped into his role through a cruelty so intense it leaves him almost unable, at times, to remember another way to function in the world. Humans and faeries alike are susceptible to addiction, vanity and vengefulness. Everyone is flawed and everyone suffers for it.

I love that.

The plot itself is also complex. It starts out like a love story in which Kaye must perform an impossible task for her lover in order to prove her love to him. He of course has set such a task because he cares too much about her to let her become part of the darkness he rules, but she sees it only as rejection. From there the plot quickly turns, however. Corny is cursed by a faerie with a sort of disintegrating Midas’ Touch, Kaye’s human mother discovers Kaye’s identity and freaks out, demanding her real daughter be returned, Roiben’s former lover, now the queen of the Bright Court, sets a course for extreme violence between the Dark and the Light in the faerie land. There is a lot going on, all tied together in intricate and engrossing ways.

The lines between the faerie world and Ironside are thin as onion skin and always shifting, so it is easy to imagine the one world lurking, not necessarily under the world we know, but within it, at certain locus points stronger than at others, almost woven. I think this is the greatest strength of Ironside as a concept. It isn’t a separate world from this one where the faerie folk live; it is this world and it is intimately linked to the people in it. Although the courts of the faerie world suggest an adherence to a medieval history, some of the characters themselves question the court system, suggesting that perhaps the faeries adhere to it only to keep themselves separate from the humans, to preserve something of themselves. It’s a conversation that brings up ideas of colonization, difference, us and them. I was delighted.

If I had to complain about anything with this book, it would be more of a statement as to my tastes than on the novel itself. It’s a young adult novel. It touches on things I want it to touch on, difference, belonging, hatred, love, cruelty, addiction, Otherness… But it doesn’t go quite as far as I want it to go or get quite as dark as I want it to get. It gets pretty dark, though! And the characters have such believable voices. I can really feel these characters, their struggles and angst as well as their victories. I can’t wait to read the first two books!

Recently I have been reading—and re-reading, in the case of Slow River—a lot of speculative fiction. My literary tastes are all over the map but I frequently find myself craving some good sci-fi in the vein of Nicola Griffith’s Slow River, which I read for the first time soon after it was first released in paperback in 1996. Having failed on many occasions to find a book that hits the particular vein that the novel first tapped in me those years ago, I have usually just gone back and read Slow River over again. However, I am now trying to broaden my spec fic horizons, because you can only read the same book so many times in a month.

Although the last few books I have read are very different in theme, scope, and genre, they each deal with an imagined period of time, whether a mirror of the present, a reimagining of the past, or a prophetic vision of the near future, so I decided to review them in a short series, beginning with the past.

Imagined History: William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine

I wanted to love this book. The concept of The Difference Engine was fascinating: how different would the world have been had Charles Babbage successfully completed his Difference Engine and put it to use in the early nineteenth century? Apparently not very, if this book offers any answer. Sure, Victorian England is replaced by a radical rationalist leadership, with lordship awarded according to knowledge and scientific contribution to society rather than by birthright. Scientists and thinkers take the place of the old Lords and Dukes in positions of power, with Lord Byron (inexplicably, since he, as I know it, was something of an anti-automation thinker in his time, no?) as the Prime Minister. The advent of the engine-run society brings changes to every administrative system, from policing to governing to gambling. There are a few moments when characters make the sorts of observations or pose questions about their society which we still pose and posit in our current technological present, such as lamenting the rise of bureaucracy or musing on the anonymity of citizenship and the possibility for errors in records that could have devastating results for an individual.

Sadly, most of those moments were better explored in Brazil. Gibson and Sterling simply don’t go far enough with the changes they propose to the society they have envisioned. If Victorianism is left behind, why are revealed ankles still scandalous? Why are women, including the Queen of Engines herself, Ada Byron, only shadowed characters on the sidelines? They are depicting a moment of great societal change in England, marked by a rise of a new form of thought which women, in the history we know and the history Gibson and Sterling present here, helped to shape and create, so why are the four women even mentioned in this novel either silly “dollymops” (prostitutes), gambling drug addicts, or Lady Macbeth figures who are afforded very little character exploration and no more than a sentence or two of subjectivity among them? I find it insufficient to argue that this was just the way of the times, because moments of great societal upheaval are the precice moments when women have been able to find the gaps in a restructured social system to have a voice, to create with impunity.

I found it highly disappointing that Sterling and Gibson were unable to include any of that in this novel, particularly because much of the action revolves around the protection of Lady Ada Byron, who in the history we know was one of the few people in the world who understood and synthesized Babbage’s theories in such a way as to have created a whole programming system. If Babbage’s Difference Engine had been built, surely she would have been a leader in designing ways to apply it. Instead, she is depicted as an addict, a gambler and a sometimes-tart who is really only mentioned at all as someone whose reputation must be protected by the men in the novel.

The other female characters are no better off. Sybil Gerard, daughter of late Luddite agitator and fallen woman, is led around for the first seventy pages by Dandy Mick who assures her that he can make something out of her, which of course he does not because he dies. Sybil subsequently disappears until the end of the novel, when she resurfaces with little more knowledge for her troubles in exile. Her ex-roommate and fellow dollymop seems to like sex a lot, as long as it pays. And she’s got legs up to here. Ada’s mother, Lady Annabella Byron, receives one page of note near the end of the novel, in the “Modus” section of footnoted materials, in which her thoughts about her newly dead husband reveal her to be a powermonger who suffered her husbands beastly affections and scandalous affairs in order to manipulate him into a position to exert her will. You know, this may have been an interesting angle—I do love a good Lady Macbeth provided her motivations are made satisfactorily complex—if the authors had introduced her as a character at some point within the main text of the book. Without any further complexity to her character, she remains a useless depiction of an overly ambitious “Iron Lady” behind an impotent leader. Well that’s original. *eyeroll* I don’t know about Bruce Sterling, but Gibson has been known to write much better women than this.

I was also very dissatisfied with the envisioning of the technology itself. If the last half century has been any indication, computer technology rolls and grows like a snowball. Yet Gibson and Sterling opted to envision machines of various sizes and lengths of tubing, while not imagining a further influence of the Babbage machines on the creation of other technologies. Steam gurneys became more streamlined, or “line-streamed” as they preferred to write, but there was no real change to the technology that already existed in that time period. I would have liked to have seen more speculation in that area.

Finally, the language of the novel was just…annoying. I have read my share of novels that imitate the nineteenth century style of writing, some of which have been more successful than others. Sterling and Gibson read like they are trying to fit in every known saying of the time just to set the scene. We. Get. It. It’s the mid-1800s. Stop with the dollymopping already! No really, I found that the language jolted me out of the story on numerous occasions. And by numerous I mean on almost every page. It was not seamless; it did not read like a nineteenth century novel, but like an imitation. And a crappy one at that.

It was disheartening to have disliked this book as much as I did, because I am very fond of William Gibson and loved the idea behind the book. Had I never read Gibson before, I probably would never have been inspired to do so by reading The Difference Engine. I actually had to go and read Idoru afterwards just to remind me why I liked him in the first place (forty pages in and I have already forgiven him). I’m afraid I’ll probably never pick up Sterling again.

So I have this idea for a script. Having G in town got me thinking about how I used to think about film. She was getting on my case for having given all of that up, and although I sat there and defended my choices, it still got me thinking. The same thing happened to me the last time she was in town, but this time a couple of other things happened that inspired me toward a specific idea.

First, I read one of the scripts that G was shopping at TIFF. She is the script’s only real champion, while others, including me, have misgivings. It’s a very tried-and-true theme with an odd execution. Basically I think that as a vanity piece it would be great but as an investment… I don’t know. It would take some great casting and directing. It could be done, but it would be hard to sell. G is a great pitch person though and just talking to her about it really made me think critically about what I had read. It also gave me some ideas about what sorts of things I would want to write about, were I to get back to that sort of writing.

Second, Michelle and I went to a gig for $100 at Sonic Boom with our friend D, whose brother plays in the band. That Simone Fornow has such a distinctive voice, very folk, very unique. I really like these people together on stage; they really have a feel for each other and each member is really great at what he or she does. Anyway, so they played a song, one that isn’t on their album, that gave me some massively mixed feelings. On the one hand, it was a fantastic song, a great country/worker’s song in the vein of Tom Waits. On the other, it dealt with subject matter that touched me in forgotten, painful ways, borne of my history, my experience with the place where I grew up and all of the reasons I left that place.

All of that history has been running through my head since I heard the song. Along with it crept in a story, based partly on a maybe-true rumour about an incident, something that may or may not have happened at some point involving the subject matter of that song. It was a story I had heard third or fourth hand a few years ago and it has disturbed me to this day. It will probably continue to disturb me for years to come. At the time that I first heard it I thought of doing some sort of documentary on it, but I was afraid to pursue it and also didn’t really know where to start.

Re-inspired by this weekend of events, though, I think I may take a new approach to the story: fiction. I think it’s a story that could use some light outside of my own head, if only because I need not to be haunted alone. Also because it is a story of my home and history, something that says something about the people who live in that place and live through that place. The trick will be to write it in a way that honours the people even as it exposes the injustices that go on unpunished daily. But that will be something I have to deal with as I go. For now I am just really excited—and nervous—about embarking on this project.

So Premiere season is slowly rolling in here and I haven’t yet finalized my spreadsheet. What? doesn’t everyone keep a spreadsheet of their TV schedule? I seem to have missed out on this year’s previews for the new and returning shows on each network, so I am sort of making decisions as I go. So far this is what we have seen:

Bones
Well this show started as a guilty pleasure for me. I had skipped season one because, well, it pretty much sucked. The characters hadn’t developed into any consistent arcs and they needed to figure out how to make a real team of these people. By season two they had done so and I became rather addicted. However, last year’s finale and the absolutely ridiculous “logic” they applied to Zach’s decisions and his subsequent departure from the show made me bitter over the summer. Their season premiere was okay, I guess, but the stupidness of the Hodgins/Angela breakup was a reminder of the desperate leaps of character continuity these writers will resort to to advance their stories. It makes me lose trust in the writing which makes me feel a bit meh about the show. Case in point: I actually forgot to watch it this week. Oops! Somehow I am not too depressed.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Good start, people. I would have liked to see Cameron stay evil for awhile. Even though I am not a shipper on this show in any way, shape or form, not even the femslash—I know, I am weird—I do like that they are further exploring that question about what makes the difference between humans and machines in terms of feelings. If it can feel fear, how far is the leap to love? Are both not expressions of survival? Yadda yadda. I would like to see a little more of that exploration in between the extensive action scenes, but what can I say? I am a bit cerebral and I like my TV to be the same.

Let me just say one more thing: SHIRLEY FUCKING MANSON! *ahem* I thought she was lovely. A bit toned down in the Scottish accent department, but still lovely. And the surprise T-1000 appearance! I am well pleased. Did people know that was going to happen? I had no idea! I love, love, LOVE the T-1000s. Pretty molten metal effects. I am very excited about this season. I hope John starts respecting his momma soon, though.

Fringe
I want a new sci-fi show to watch. Something sort of X-Filesy but without the damn ship (sorry, shippers). Of course every show has a potential ship, because who else bumps those ratings up? But I just want the weird. I don’t know if this show is going to fill that void for me. I don’t expect it to be as good as the X-Files; shows like that come along but very rarely. I just want some weird, unexplainable scientific phenomena that aren’t rationalised away with bad science that the writers think their audience will be too stupid to understand is bogus and inconsistent, to boot (I’m looking at you, Heroes).

The first twenty minutes of the hour and a half premiere of Fringe had me and Michelle both convinced that this was not the show to give us what we wanted. But then, then, John Noble showed up and made the show really fun! Not perfect, but fun. His character is a mad scientist who has been locked away for decades for questionable ethics. He is temporarily released to help with a case that mimics something in his old research, and it is revealed at the end that someone, perhaps the now-billionaire CEO of a new Big Pharma/medical technologies (or something?) company, who used to share the mad doctor’s laboratory, has been conducting experiments of that same questionable nature. So the premise of the show is that the woman fronting this investigation will now head up a crew set to investigate and bring these experiments to a close.

There is a lot of weird gore and some funny dialogue with the doctor, some hints of conspiracy, not only in terms of the maybe-evil CEO but also the questionable leadership of the governmental organizations, as well as my favourite thing ever: a powerful woman in charge of the tactical operation. Oh, and the cast includes a number of HBO alumni, including Kirk Acevedo and Phillip Broyles. I have some hopes for this show. The pilot had a slow start for me but it improved, and it was a pilot. Pilots are never as good as the show can get to be. I will definitely give it another watch!

So You think You Can Dance Canada
Oh my dog, how much do I love Mary Murphy? I am so pleased that she has been on the initial judging panel for SYTYCD Canada and wish that she wouldn’t have to leave. What will we do without her insane outbursts, “YOU ARE RIDING THE HOT TAMALE TRAIN, YES YOU ARE!!!!” I love her. Even more than I love her, I love imitating her, much to the *delight* of Michelle, who sits laughing and plugging her ears on the couch.

Okay, well what else can I say? I don’t love audition sequences for any show so I doubt I will tune in regularly for this until the top whatever-the-first-amount-of-top-dancers is chosen. But it was fun last night when nothing else was on. Plus we were feeling gloomy and my Mary Murphy impression is a sure pleaser.

So my friend G works as a film producer in Vancouver, which is where the L Word is shot. She has worked with Ilene Chaiken before (apparently she’s actually really nice) as well as “EZ”, Elizabeth Ziff (apparently she is really a pain in the ass—no surprises here here here here here…). G’s close friend worked on the show’s production team for a few years and offered G a position there long ago, which G turned down for film. Nonetheless, she sees the L Word girls everywhere. I mean Vancouver is full of people who work for the L Word. So the other day G was telling me this funny story about Leisha Hailey and Kate Moennig:

G: I always see that one who plays Shane and the other one, the blond one—
Stark: Leisha Hailey? [Perks ears at the mention of her crush.]
G: Yeah, her. And they’re always out shopping in Kitsilano [The roll of her eyes is implied in the tone of her voice.], wearing these tuques and dark glasses and hoodies, so that nobody will recognize them. [Again with the implied rolling of the eyes. Punctuated by a giggle.]
G: And like, this is in, like, the middle of August. In Vancouver. Like, wow, you’re so incognito, girls. Nobody wears that stuff! [Another giggle.]
G: Like, first of all, everyone knows it’s you. I mean who wears that? Nobody wears tuques and sweaters in the middle of the summer in Vancouver, so you really aren’t hiding. Second, nobody cares. People in Vancouver don’t care about the L Word actors. They really don’t. They see them all the time and they’re over it. And third, everybody already knows where to find you. Everyone knows that Jennifer Beals does her morning run up that mountain every day at 6:15 on the nose, if they really wanted to stalk her, they could go run up a mountain with her. [Takes drag from a cigarette; shrugs.]
G: But that’s fine, hey, if you want to sweat your asses off in dark hoodies and tuques, that’s up to you.

So Michelle has been running a lot lately, tuning up to do a half-marathon in September. To get into things, she also joined the Beaches Jazz Tune-Up, a run/walk event that included 20, 10 and 5k distances. Being an avid walker myself, I figured I would join her that morning by walking the 5k while she ran the 10.

The run went well for Michelle, albeit not so much for me. She started with a specific time group and then ended up outpacing them, which was neat-o! I was really proud of her on her first 10k. Then, after she had already finished, she came out to join me in finishing the last 100m stretch of my 5k, which had started after her run. I was doing the running man dance and throwing my hands in the air and she was doing the Chariots of Fire pose as we crossed the finish line. Fun stuff.

Thankfully we had that, because my walk/run was otherwise not very fun at all! I have been to many a walk/run event before; usually the 20k and 10k events are filled with runners and the 5k is half and half or so. This one was put on by the Running Room, a (mostly) Canadian chain of stores made by and for crazy running cult people. However, they also have products and clinics for the “walking room”, and I saw a number of folks there with their little pedometers and other assorted gadgets that are meant to indicate how seriously you take your athleticism. So I figured I would be among walkers…but no.

When the walk began, the megaphone dude only really referred to the runners while announcing, and suggested that we would finish in 20 minutes or so. Um… I don’t think so. I dropped back to the area with the pedometer people. Then the run began, and the front people started running while the back appeared as though they would walk, but then, as if a wave ran through the crowd from front to back, people started to jog, even the ones that clearly weren’t there for that. It’s like they were afraid of being last or something. There was only one other woman walking, and she was a power walker, and then there was me. At the very end. Taking my sweet time.

I thought I would up my pace and keep up with power walker lady, maybe make a buddy, so I amped it up. But as soon as I caught up to her, she jogged away from me! Then went back to her walking. So I tried again, and again she jogged away! So I was like, fuck this, and I jogged, leaving her behind. Then I saw some joggers that had finally given up and gone back to walking and tried to catch up with them, maybe make some buddies. Guess what happened when I caught up to them? Yeah, they jogged away. Apparently I smell. So I just walked faster than their jogging and left them behind. I didn’t try to make any more buddies, but I did jog about half the distance and my muscles are “thanking” me for it today.

I’m just glad I had my iPod, and I am glad Michelle showed up at the end of the race just as the Ting Tings were coming on, so I could dance around in circles instead of walking or jogging and show these crazy Running Room people how to put the “fun” in Fun Run.

So then after the race we wanted to go to the Jazz Festival in the neighboring park, but we were sweaty and stuff so we had the bright idea to pack along some equipment for swimming at the free community pool right next to the beach. What a great pool! I was shocked. Olympic size, clean, not too crowded, separate kids’ pool and rules keeping minors out of the big pool until they pass the deep water test, and did I mention it’s FREE? Of course swimming after running more than you are ever used to running (I don’t even run for the bus) was a bit of a bad idea. Muscles! Tired! But it was still really nice.

Then we went off to see Lady Son y Articulo Vientes at Jazz Fest and she was fantastic. I have a big crush on Lady Son. The acts that followed were crap in comparison. But we stayed and drank beer all day anyway.