I’m off the grid. No laptop, no cellphone, at large and unreachable. It is kind of fun, yet forces me to mooch laptop time and find quarters for the telephone. Totally old school.

This is the second time I’ve typed this post. I’m using a laptop that randomly hits the enter key, which means it randomly lost my first attempt at this post. Like the iPod Shuffle, life is random.

So the first time I typed this I wrote about Hanif, the friendly neighbourhood convenience store owner who is an endless source of information about the transit system. I also wrote about how every time I’m in Toronto someone is on strike. It’s the taxis this time. And it is rumoured the electric company might strike. All entertaining in an inconvenient way.

That’s all you get, I’m less enthusiastic the second time around, but damn it was a good original post.

I’m preparing to go to Toronto next week for BookExpo Canada (BEC). What is BEC? Well, it’s the Canadian version of BEA, BookExpo America. I know, clever name. Anyway, BEC is a book convention. Canadian publishers gather in the convention centre, they have booths, and booth parties, and in the booths are typically sales and marketing folks who talk to booksellers and media about the upcoming season and the fantastic books on the list.

Why do we do this? Some publishers offer discounts on book orders at the show, but in recent years the number of book orders taken at the show has dropped off. It’s not really the purpose of the show. Ok, so what is the purpose? Authors often attend and sign books for booksellers, who already love or know about the author. Signings for unheard of authors don’t draw a crowd so publishers have stopped inviting unknown authors. Unpublished authors sometimes come and try to meet the editors and pass off a manuscript, but generally the editors don’t come or don’t want to carry around manuscripts, which eventually get lost in the booth anyway. So why, why do we spend the money every year to participate in this event? I’m not sure, but I’m going to start asking people who might know.

I was having a poke and stroll through the Google listings for my name the other day. I’m trying to figure out what keywords I want to use to optimize my site. And yes, that turned into a bit of vanity searching. What I discovered was a story I’d written for the Manitoban, the University of Manitoba Student Newspaper. Published in the literary supplement, January 21, 1998 was the following story:

“These perogies. These are the best perogies. Not like those store bought perogies. Those perogies look like they’ve been chewed on. Chewed on by rats. Look at how nice the corners of my perogies look. Smooth, fold edges – no rat edges here.”

I had mentioned that I had perogies for dinner last night. “My perogies,” she’d said. “Boughten,” I’d replied. Now her huge flower-printed frame was lumbering around the kitchen gathering and mashing, blending and mixing the perfect ingredients for her perogies. In Ukrainian, she reminded me that, “these perogies, these are the best perogies.”

Her glasses kept slipping off her nose from the sweat caused by sudden activity. Imagine, my grandmother, who sits for hours engulfed by the lazy boy, enraptured in her soap operas, had abandoned Young and the Restless, which she calls Young and the Rest of Us, not at a commercial break, but in the middle of an affair, where at any moment a secret could be told. All of this, just to make me perogies. To remind me that, these perogies, these are the best perogies. Not store bought, not my mother’s, who had to learn from her, and not mine who weren’t learned from anyone but made in a machine, sealed in plastic and microwaved for convenience sake – not to mention chewed on by rats.

As if there aren’t enough things messing with my brain, the CBC reported this morning that marketers are trying high-tech tools to push the brain’s “buy button.” Now that’s invasive marketing.

Full story CBC.

And why do marketers need high-tech tools? Perhaps they are not as creative as Tod Maffin. Darren Barefoot is reporting that bloggers and podcasters can get a 30% discount from the CBC Online Store. Now that is pushing my buy button.

Visit Darrenbarefoot.com for the coupon code.

Alice Munro has been in the back of my car for a couple of months now, and today she finally left.

Ok, it wasn’t actually Alice Munro, it was a huge banner for Alice Munro’s book Runaway. I kind of liked having Alice rolling around in the back of my car, but it certainly pissed off James. I don’t think he’s a fan, but then again, she was always getting in his way. “When is this leaving?” he’d say, not so much with a question mark, more with an exclamation.

My problem was only partly procrastination. I was going to take her to the library, but then I thought, the paperback is coming out and wouldn’t it be great to give Alice to a bookstore.

So Alice has return to her natural habitat, and now my car, and my heart, are empty without her.

So far 67 attendees at Chuck Palahniuk’s book readings have fainted. They all did not attend the same reading, there’s no chicken salad food poisoning or stuffy room syndrome that can account for the dropping of audience members. And it’s not just the ladies.

Portland, Oregon: 2 men faint
Borders: 2 faint, man and woman
Seattle: 2 more men faint
San Francisco: 3 more people faint
Berkeley: 3 more [apparently the words “corn and peanuts” were particularly horrifying.]
Beverly Hills library, Los Angeles: woman’s husband faints, in the men’s bathroom another man faints and cracks his head on the sink
Columbia University: 2 students fall victim to Palahniuk’s prose
Leeds and Cambridge, Britain: more fainters …

67 people so far have fainted at readings of Chuck Palahniuk’s short story “Guts.”

Palahniuk says in a Telegraph article:
Quote: My goal was to write a new form of horror story, something based on the ordinary world, without supernatural monsters or magic. Guts, and the book that contained it, would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone. Only books have that power.

Apparently carrots, candles, swimming pools, microwave popcorn and bowling balls are also involved, but as far as we know, not as faint-inducing as corn and peanuts.

The story is included in Palahniuk’s new novel Haunted. I suggest reading it with a medical attendant standing by.

On June 11th (4pm-10pm), Seamrippers craft collective will be hosting the MOBILIVRE-BOOKMOBILE Project at their space: the pink door at 436 West Pender, Vancouver. (Also the closing day for Seamrippers’ Mini Book Show.)

Mobilivre-Bookmobile Info, www.mobilivre.org

Project Mobilivre-Bookmobile explores the tradition of the travelling library; you know, the book van that used to come down all the rural routes? If you don’t, this is the coolest bookmobile I’ve ever seen.

The Bookmobile is a vintage 1959 Airstream.

[UPDATE: I’m having trouble with the root for this image. Have a look at the mobilivre.org site.]

The MOBILIVRE-BOOKMOBILE project is based primarily in Montreal, Canada and Philadelphia, USA. This is the fifth year of the touring exhibition of artist books, zines and independent publications.

The BOOKMOBILE visits a variety of venues in Canada and the US including community centres, schools, libraries, festivals, artist-run centres, and galleries.

Also Seamrippers is its own damn cool place.
436 West Pender, 604.689.SEAM (7326)
www.seamrippers.ca

James and I entered the world of OS X this weekend. Life is different.

I’m not good at the initial discovery stage, in technology anyway. I like someone who knows what they are doing to show me around, then I’m happy to go off exploring. My first impressions of OS X is that it is not intuitive in the ways I expect it to be and sometimes it is dumb.

Things I don’t like but know I’ll get used to:
I dislike that the sleep, restart, shut down has moved from the right-hand side to the Apple menu.
I dislike that I have no idea what application are running, where do you see that now? How do I switch from one app. to the other? [Wow, I just discovered the little triangles. Ok, but I hate the dashboard, can it go away and only be viewable when you want it? I’m sure it can. I must find that preference.]
I dislike that our monitor goes black with the words “No Input”. It seems this is the sleep mode, but the computer is actually active so why the blank? I don’t know yet.
I dislike the windows. I haven’t figured out yet the logic of where things are. When you double click on the hard drive, you get a left-hand column, then the next column shows the folders in the hard drive. Ok, what the hell are the things in the left-hand column. There’s an applications folder here, but also one in the harddrive folder. There’s the stupid house icon “James” (see below “Things I’ll always hate”), a documents folder (where does that live?), Movies, Music and Pictures.
When I put my music in the Music folder, it wasn’t accessible from iTunes. Sometimes computers make me feel dumb.

Things I’ll always hate:
On set up you define a user. James and I share the computer but I put his name as our first user. That made him Administrator, with a shortname of James. When we realized that we don’t want to be separate users, just one user, we also realized that you can never change the shortname for the Admin person. That really sucks. And why can’t you change it? You can change the user name and password. Our computer is forever James. And there’s a stupid house icon that I don’t understand.
I hate that when we started up the mini, it didn’t have Tiger already installed.

I’ll have to check in after a couple of weeks and see if I still hate these things.

Oh, and we swapped the cube for the mini. Life is different. Smaller anyway, and we have less cash.

Patricia at BookLust was flyin’ hi a couple of days ago and posted a cartoon and commentary about her most recent fear-inspired, drug-induced flying experience. Fear-inspired is modifying drug-induced. [Patricia, if you’re reading this skip the next paragraph.]

I like flying, in fact I used to skydive, but last year on a Russian airplane from Havana to Cayo Largo del Sur, I truly thought I was going to meet my end. I should have known when the booking agent asked if I was British. Apparently Brits are not allowed to fly on rusty Russian aircraft. Canadians? We’re cool with that. The 2 stewards sat on a metal folding chair at the back of the plane during take off. Well, one sat on the chair, the other sat on the lap of the chair-sitter. Twenty minutes into the flight the entire cabin filled with smoke. The stewards passed around candies. As one of 3 English-speakers on the flight, I tried to ascertain whether we were going to die. I speak ok Spanish, but the only answer I could get was don’t worry. The Italians looked worried, and the Germans were looking for the Emergency Exits. I practiced the crash position and my Hail Mary–I figured we were in a Catholic country, it couldn’t be bad to send a memo up to Himself. Turns out it was a malfunctioning air conditioner and I had to get back on for the return flight 8 hours later.

I had an English professor once who hated flying. His theory was that the human body was not meant to fly, and that airports use clever devices so that the body doesn’t know it’s going in the air. For example, you walk down a corridor, sit in a lounge, walk down another corridor and sit in the plane. You don’t really see the plane unless you purposely look out the window. There’s a baggie around the end of the corridor and the door of the plane–look, you’re not going anywhere, just down a different corridor.

“But,” he’d say. “The body knows.”

Yesterday was a big day for the sponsorship scandal. Its first convicted criminal. 18 counts of fraud, 3 withdrawn. Ottawa defrauded of $1.5-million.

The interesting thing is that the Globe and Mail notes “making financial amends won’t necessarily mean that he [Coffin] will stay out of jail.” I’m particularly curious about the “necessarily”. Is that an option? You can buy your way out of criminal status these days?

Here’s a list of conveniently appropriate Latin phrases for yesterday’s political news:
caveat emptor: let the buyer beware
in flagrante delicto: in the act of commiting a crime
persona non grata: an unwelcome person
post mortem: after death
pro bono: done without charge
quid pro quo: something for something
vox populi: the voice of the people

Reclaim your Latin. Try out a phrase.