DAWN Approaches

The sequel to Tim Lebbon's very successful dark-fantasy novel Dusk is coming soon.
DAWN picks up where Dusk left off, and based on the two extracts up at the Noreela website the story hasn't lost an iota of its intensity or power to dazzle with its vivid world building. It's going to be a wild ride to an amazing conclusion, trust me. If you haven't read Dusk, do it now and be prepared to greet the Dawn.

I Like Purple and Pink

I really didn't like having 13 posts on my blog. More photography. My collection of potted flowers is growing but I was in a purple mood so that's what you get. One day I may be compelled to actually venture off my balcony to take pictures.

The Amazing Race All-Stars began tonight; I'm declaring myself neutral on the issue of Rob & Amber. I'm sure many are hoping for them to be gone quick but I say every game is a new, equal start for all the teams. If they can hang on and win good for them. My heart is with Dave & Mary, though. I'd be very happy to see them go a long way... all the way would be perfect.

Win Teeth

Scott Nicholson is giving away three of his permanent teeth in a contest to promote his novel "They Hunger."

I wouldn't make this up.

Happy Valentine's Day

A bit of floral cheer from a budding photographer. My husband bought me a pot of crocuses a week or so ago...I've been testing my photography skill on them.

Waiting for Leaves

A collage of pictures of the tree top outside my second floor balcony, taken on Monday February 12 and Tuesday February 13. The tree is much like me these days, somber and pensive, full of potential, waiting for the warmth and sunshine of Spring to help it achieve it's full glorious potential.

I'm not any good at Winter. It dulls my mind and my motivation. I'm thinking that watching and documenting the tree reawaken will spark my soul into reawakening too. Look for me to post tree pictures once a week and report on my mood as the Spring approaches.

My Cat and Crocuses in the Future

This is Sneeker. She is our wonderful cat. Most of the time she is very quiet, but when she wants something she can be VERY persistent. She is sitting on the back of our armchair where she has a 'royal view' of everything around her.

I am working on some pictures of crocuses coming into bloom... I will try to do a sort of 'time lapse sequence' of pictures taken once a day at about 4PM. No guarantees but I'm trying.

Stuff on my Desk

This is all Ocean's fault. She takes such great pictures I just had to try playing with the camera my hubby got but doesn't use. I'm just practising with the simple stuff like using the auto-focus and figuring out how to get the pics in to my photo editor and up online. I simply took pictures of what was right in front of me... pretty colours though, right?

Now, isn't that a lush, gorgeous, mysterious image? Can you imagine the story that goes with it? What sort of person is this Lorelei? Would YOU want to love her? What do you think would happen if you did?

I'm waiting to find out. I just spent all of $9.00 to order the chapbook.

If you are curious too, go and visit Steve here and sample some of his earlier work.

Maybe I'll tell you more after I've read it.

Living in a Broken Brain

A couple of weeks ago I taped a movie from the TV. Eventually the time came to watch it. I knew exactly where it should be, what tape it was on, what preceded and followed it, but it wasn’t there. I looked at tape after tape to no avail. My frustration was growing exponentially. Alan was trying to be patient. Eventually the inevitable; I advanced the tape I knew it was on far enough to discover scenes from the movie. Somehow I’d managed to tape over it. I was very angry with myself and Alan was disappointed too.

“Keep better track of things next time,” he said.

“I can’t,” I wailed. “I’m doing my best, but I’m living in a broken brain. I can’t do any better.”

It’s true. Whatever fancy words and diagnoses the doctors want to apply to it something in my brain is broken. They call it depression and they give me pills and platitudes but the pills only do so much and the platitudes are condescending; insulting even. Am I doing everything I could possibly do to improve my lot? Well no, not as far as they’re concerned anyway. But honestly, for me, being told to get out and get some exercise, even a short walk 2-3 times a week might as well be a command to walk to the moon. My mind is stuck in the ‘it-ain’t-gonna-happen’ groove and it’s not just a shallow scratch it’s rivaling the Grand Canyon.

I know it’s getting deeper because last week Alan set aside some time and encouraged me to take some of the money and gift certificates from Christmas and go shopping. Alan was willing to go with me for support and encouragement. I didn’t want to go. I don’t like to shop. Mostly the clothes are ill fitting; too long in the leg or sleeve or beset with horizontal stripes which are the last thing a short overweight woman wants to wrap around her chest. But Alan was persistent and soooo, patient, so I summoned up something (or maybe forced something down, in to hiding?) and made myself go.

In to my favourite store to look for the sweatpants they had on sale. The side wall was full of them; limited in colour selection but I didn’t care. I was heartened at probable success. Every single pair of pants was either a Large or something with additional X’s. The store was empty but for Alan and I and the clerk behind the counter fastidiously not looking our way. With every item I checked the anger-o-meter was rising, the success-o-meter falling. Alan was checking every single label in case I’d missed something.

I knew it was useless, and I almost lost it; hissing under my breath to Alan at the cruelty of the clerk for letting me look, all the while knowing I’d not find my proper size; in mental anguish at myself for standing in a store having a hissy-fit I seemed not able to prevent. I wanted to go home; like an elastic band pulled to its limit I wanted to spring back to my normal position. But I was in the mall and it had taken a huge effort, and damned if it was all to be for nothing. In the end I found a nice long-sleeved shirt. Alan was happy and trying to be supportive and optimistic.

On to store number two…a department store. Couldn’t even find any sweatpants. By now my leg was sore from walking on the travertine floors and my body was sweating and my hands were like ice. Don’t ask me! It’s what always happens when I go shopping. My hissy-fit was more protracted this time, likely enabled by the fact that there was not a sales clerk to be seen in the whole of the women’s wear department to hear it. I didn’t want to be there any more. I told Alan so, but he said try one more; the low end department store…which was a 10 minute walk (at my bumbling pace) to the other end of the mall.

He negotiated; said we could stop and rest along the way and he’d even go and bring the car up to the exterior exit of the store so I’d not have to walk all the way back. I did it because he was trying so hard and somewhere in me I was astonishingly grateful that he was making such an effort.

Once in the store I discovered they’d rearranged the place. When I actually found some sweats… all the wrong size.

“Keep looking,” Alan says.

“Hhhiiisssssss,” says I, and now tears are starting to want to appear. Yards away on another rack, sweats that will actually fit. No hurrah just anger that the underpants I decide to get are half way across the store beyond stuff not related to women’s clothes. My leg hurts and I just want to NOT be there.

But I am and so we make it to the underpants wall…and everything is sized by a NUMBER: there are 7’s and 12’s and 11’s and I don’t have a clue what any of it means. Underwear is Sm., Med., or Lrg. Numbers? “Fuck and shit and hell. What the hell is going on why can’t I just find a package of plain old underpants size Medium??? “Help me Alan, pleeeassse help me.”

Which he is of course; trying desperately to decode the numbers in to units meaningful to my purchasing experience.

“Look for the 6”.

Which I can’t find, in part because I don’t have my glasses on and in part because I’m at the point now where I know what blind rage means. I can’t seem to extract any meaning from what I do see. There seems no organization. Bikinis beside Boy Cuts; 7’s next to 12’s, next to Hip Huggers. I want a fuckin’ pair of panties not a MENSA test!

“Here’s a 6”

“Those are Boy Cut!!”

“Well, what do you want?”

“Just normal underpants. For fuck sakes, can’t you go into a store and find underpants without all this crap? I can’t do this. This is stupid.” Tears are close but I deny them.

“Look lower down.”

“What do you mean? They put the smaller sizes at the bottom and worked up? What shit head thought that was a good way to do things?”

“Just keep looking.”

“I AM LOOKING I can’t find them I don’t want to do this.”

“Here; what about these?”

“They’re BIKINI.” (I’m extracting this from the picture on the package. A code Alan hasn’t had the time to figure out with all the temper tantrum he’s been fighting to keep at bay.”

“OK, these then?”

He’s almost afraid to show me.

“Ya, good; get me out of here; I want to be out of here NOW.”

Somehow I negotiate the cashier and get out of the store to wait for the car to show up. I’m waiting and trying to understand the person who was in the stores. Because it wasn’t me; not any me I’ve ever met before. I don’t have hissy-fits and temper tantrums no matter how awful an experience I have looking for clothes. I don’t know that person and she scares me. I don’t like her. Not even a little bit. I don’t even feel empathy for her travails. I want to get away from her as fast as I can. I want Alan to show up with the car. The elastic came dangerously close to breaking.

And the groove in my brain just got another mile deeper…digging in; breaking more of the stuff of Me in to unrecognizable bits of a stranger I’m deathly frightened of.

And let’s not forget the condescension of the medical profession, just to make the tale complete. It happened that I had an appointment with my doctor a few days later for my prescriptions. I tried to tell him about my shopping experience.

“Oh, well but that’s not a new Pathology or anything…”

Forget the Grand Canyon. We’re talking The Valles Marineris, folks.

Lawyers and Brains: Mutually Exclusive?

So the thing I keep thinking about this week is the episode of 48 Hours Mystery I watched last Saturday night. (January 13) The man on trial is absolutely the man who committed the murder and sexual assault he's being tried for. This not a who done-it, it's why done-it. The fellow claims no real memory of the actual deeds he did, only that he remembers being 'provoked' when a lit cigarette was flicked in to his face near to his eye. He next remembers being in the shower and then finding his victims. The link can tell you the rest of the story.

It's the defence that interests me. Defence claimed that the accused was 'insane' at the time of his crimes and that they could show the jury exactly what is wrong with this fellow's brain to 'cause' his 'insanity'.

"His defense team, for the first time in South Carolina’s history, would try to show jurors an actual picture of what insanity looks like."

Out came the PET scans which showed, at least to the defence's expert witnesses, damage or lack of development in a key area of the brain:

"Looking at images of Stanko's brain function, Dr. Sachy explained that one region of the brain directly above the eyes and behind the eyebrows is less functional as compared to a normal brain. Asked why this is significant, Sachy says, "Well, it's very significant, because it is this area of the brain that essentially makes us human.” "

Naturally the prosecution saw it differently:

"Prosecutor Greg Hembree dismisses Stanko’s defense with just two words: "junk science." "

The defendant was found guilty and sentenced to death. Jurors did not believe he was insane or that only an insane person could commit such acts. Given the imprecise and fuzzy definitions for insanity in the courts, including the notion of 'temporary insanity' it's no wonder jurors find the concept untenable as a defence.

It seems to me that this defence team was at least moving in the right direction in it's pursuit of what should be considered as the basis for an 'insanity' plea. They were trying to link mental processes to brain function. Pretty basic stuff. People seem to understand well enough that a heart pumps blood, and a stomach digests food, and an ear hears, so why should an intelligent person, with the education of a prosecutor, call looking at a brain and and trying to see how it functions and what ultimate purpose it has 'junk science'?

Prosecution witness said Stanko had a Personality disorder. Please, someone, come forward and point to my personality. If I have a hearing disorder you're likely to point to my ears, if I'm visually impaired you'd point out my eyes, so come on, point to my personality...

'Mind' and all that the word suggests is a product of brain function. This is not junk science. We know what parts of the brain do what ; PET scans allow us to watch what the brain is doing in real time.

With such scans it becomes possible, perhaps, to point to one's personality; we could surely watch what goes on when someone is told a joke that makes them laugh. We could show a serial killer photographs of his victims and watch what his brain does...

Does any of it belong in a court room? I say yes. Our current criteria for trying to understand criminal insanity is based on little more than subjective evaluations of what constitutes a knowledge of right and wrong. For a jury it's down to whose opinion they want to believe. Putting the brain into its rightful position as the generator of Mind can only enhance our understanding of why people do what they do. How much weight the legal system decides it will give to this new perspective remains to be seen but at least we can begin the process of trying to talk about the root causes of human behaviour in all its complexities.

My first Titillation

Little Mosque on the Prairie debuted on CBC tonight. It was fun. I liked it. I'm a people person through and through and when I watch TV I'm looking for the characters, the people, to be interesting.

And the folks of Mercy, Saskatchewan are interesting. I was struck by how easily I came to be comfortable with these folks. It was easy to see that the actors were at ease in their 'second skins'. The episode didn't feel like a 'pilot'; it came across as polished and confident, something everyone was ready for and happy to be participating in. The plot wasn't trying to say 'this is the first episode' it said 'here's what's happening in Mercy today and guess what? it's always been this way, Mosque or no Mosque.'

These people are going to be doing interesting things; things that may or may not always be funny but will always be fun to peek in on.

If you were waiting to see what others were saying about it before tuning in that's OK. The first episode will air again tomorrow night (Wednesday) at 8PM, which is to be it's regular time slot.

I'll be visiting Mercy next week. Hope to see you there.

''Mosque see'' TV?

If you live in Canada and aren't a hermit, you've probably heard that the venerable and much maligned CBC is premiering it's daring and cutting edge comedy Little Mosque on the Prairie tonight at 8:30PM. What's that you say? Never heard of it?

Well maybe you don't have to be a hermit not to have heard of it; maybe it's more that if you hang out on the web with TV types, especially Canadian TV types you can't help but have heard about it. I've been doing that lately; in particular over at DeadThings on Sticks, the blog of Canadian TV writer Denis McGrath. He's really excited about this new undertaking by CBC. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.

Little Mosque wants us to look away from the constant negative depictions of Muslims proliferating on virtually every news broadcast we've seen since 9/11. ( And if you don't think you've been inundated with negative depictions, ask yourself how a date, or, more consicely, an arrangement of keystrokes - 9, /, 11 - can come to be so full of images and feelings and opinions and motivations and stigma and fear in most of the Western world.) Little Mosque wants to try and 'lighten things up a bit', remind us that, as in the immortal words of Art Linkletter*, People are Funny.

Picture small town Saskatchewan; should be easy, just think Corner Gas. Now put a Mosque and its congregation next to Ruby's. It's close enough to give you the idea, right down to the big city person coming to town and starting a new life.

The idea is to show that it doesn't matter who you are or what you believe, as you go about your daily life thing are going to happen that are funny. It's just that in this case we're going to be running into situations we're not so familiar with... and sometimes when that happens the laughter can be for the 'wrong' reasons; because we are nervous or uncomfortable or because we don't want to show how ignorant we are of other peoples lives.

It's going to be very important that we are laughing with these characters, the small town yokels and the Muslims, as they try to get through the day, not AT them. If we laugh with them the show will have done what its creators and supporters want it to do. If too many people tune in to laugh AT the unfamiliar customs or the problems of integrating two very different ways of life into one healthy and productive community we'll be left with an embarrassing mess and those who proliferate the negative, destructive stereotypes will be able to walk away, shake their heads and say 'we told you so'.

* and no, I had no idea that Art Linkletter was born here

It's been a LONG While

It's been over a year since I did anything with this blog. I spent the afternoon updating it and trying to figure out the new voodoo it's got to make it all more user-friendly and all. As to why I've not touched it in so long, well, the post right below this one is pretty much the reason I stoped working on it over a year ago. My hand is still pretty much as it was then though not as intensly painful. At least now I have a reason for the problem. It's a by-product of a spinal cord injury I had as a child. "...there is severe narrowing of the cervial cord..." says the result of my MRI. I have two options: live with it or let a surgeon go digging around in my spine and see if he can fix things. For now I opt to live with it.

Anyway the whole typing is excruciating thing sort of put me off the whole blogging thing, and for that matter my reviewing, too. But it's a new year and all so I'm going to rededicate myself to trying to get some reviews done and keep this thing sort of alive. Lord knows I have the books sitting here; my conscience is driving me nuts. I know that being sent a review copy does not mean I must do a review but I asked if I could do reviews for these folks and they said yes, so I need to make a better effort. That effort will begin after I finish the book I'm currently reading; The Water Wolf by Thomas Sullivan. I came to know 'Sully' as he likes to be called over at Storytellers Unplugged. He's a cool seeming dude so I'm giving his latest release a try. So far so good I'm pleased to report.

Well hubby says he's on the way home so I guess it's time to go and put together a pan of good old Hamburger Helper! I'm capable of better but I spent the afternoon fiddling with this for you...

Cheers!

Terry