Two days ago I had a very bizarre encounter — it was so brief that I could barely believe it happened. I was in the elevator on the ground floor. The button to my floor had been pressed and the doors were sliding shut. Suddenly an older man dressed in a brown coat with one of those wooly caps on his head came in, calling loudly the number of the floor he was trying to get to. He called the number several times, even as the doors closed. I thought he might be blind, because I’d pressed his button already, but he leaned in to verify that I’d done so and then stepped back pleased. Bad vision, I suppose.
He then looked around the elevator and saw my friend, who works with me. He said to my friend in a German accent, “I bet you’re a lawyer. I can tell these things. You always grow up to look like what you are.” My friend was like, “Maybe. Although when I was young I wanted to be a doctor.” The man with the German accent went on, his tall sharp nose twitching beneath his large blue eyes. ”When I was young, I wanted to be a pilot in Hitler’s private bomber division of the Luftwaffe. I looked like one and everything. The only problem is that I was 6 at the time.”
The rest of us in the elevator were quite flabbergasted. We reached his floor and when he alighted, he looked back at us and flicked his tongue several times at us. When the doors had closed again, one woman said, “What the hell was that?” My friend observed, “Well, that floor’s certainly going to have its hands full.” I’m glad I wasn’t trapped in the elevator with that Nazi pilot wannabe.
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elevator
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I had the chance to meet Gordon Lightfoot last week. He’s a really cool dude. I’ve met some celebrities in my day, and they’re usually very interesting. But my encounter with Gordon Lightfoot was unique because he seemed genuinely interested in me and the work that I do. He asked me numerous questions and then asked if there was anything I wanted to ask him. In other words, he isn’t one of those celebrities who spews out stories, even though he did end up telling quite a few stories. One interesting story he told had to do with how he was in a coma for a few weeks. The lesson he learned from the experience was to work out and to cherish life.
Speaking of comas, it’s good to hear that Robin Gibb awoke from his coma.
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Gordon Lightfoot
Robin Gibb
comas
The problem with The Avengers and every other Marvel movie is that they are boring. They are boring because there’s never anything at stake in these movies. The good guys are always indestructible. They can choose to solve every conflict with violence because there’s no risk of them being seriously hurt or destroyed. And when that’s the case I cease to empathize with the heroes and their world altogether. Because in real life, you can’t solve every problem with violence.
The violence in these superhero movies has no consequences. It’s senseless. At the end of the movie, a two-dimensional evil scourge is invariably eliminated, but we don’t see the long-standing pain and hurt caused by the battles. The broken families, the loss of identity, the emotional scars, the never-ending cycle of vengeance, the economic consequences of the havoc.
When the premise of the story is an indestructible force of good fighting against a hopeless force of evil, the movie ceases to have a point. It’s just special effects and exploding machines and buildings, which, frankly, I’ve become desensitized to. I’d like my money back please.
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The Avengers
film
Last Saturday night I went to a restaurant in NYC called Co-op Restaurant with my brother and his friends. The occasion was my brother’s bachelor party. The restaurant does Japanese and American fusion.
The food was delicious. We were a party of 9 people (1 of whom was vegetarian) and to make it simple and fun we simply ordered one of everything in the menu except for the entrées and desserts. We also ordered a hell of a lot of sake.
The result was about 20 different dishes of very unique food, some hot, some cold, some with meat, some without, some with more oriental flavours, others far afield. My favourite dish was the truffle mac & cheese. Every bite was a nice hot gooey rush of flavour. The lobster shots were also really good. Basically this is just an oversized shotglass filled with large chunks of lobster and a creamy bisque. It has all the flavour (and probably all the calories) of a lobster tail, except done in shot-form.
The place is at 107 Rivington Street. It costs a pretty penny but I think we all had a great time.
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Japanese restaurants
New York City
American restaurants
Sometimes I’ll have a moral reaction in my head to something and then just a moment later think to myself, “How could I have thought that? What a terrible person I am!”
Maybe that’s why I’m so slow at writing — I’m always second-guessing myself. I aspire to say what is true and right, and often-times, mid-sentence, I’ll come up with a refutation to an argument I’m making, a counter-example to a trend I’m proposing, or a grammatical error that detracts from my general credibility as a proficient communicator.
Striving for “correctness,” whether it be political correctness, moral correctness, or grammatical correctness, can have a chilling effect on expression. But I also believe in these forms of correctness, because we have to change the way we speak before we can change the way we think, and if you need proof that we need to change the way we think, just read the newspaper every morning.
Still, at the end of the day, as one worthy writer noted, “He who would write a flawless book writes nothing.” Writing an assertive and opinionated piece is more interesting and thought-provoking than straddling the line between saying something about nothing and saying nothing about something.
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morality
reactions
I become a hungry, hungry hippo. This metaphor resonates on two levels.
If you’re going to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh at the same time. Otherwise they’ll kill you.
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