ladies and gents, djimon hounsou

With an excellent primer written by Binyavanga Wainaina (a really good writer and journalist) on how NOT to write about Africa (which BTW is not a country).

Quiet on the set…. a-a-a-and action!

not likely

MatchMaker's Great Whale River branch operation??

Isn’t it amazing what you find out on the Internet. I had no idea that Great Whale River, way up on the Quebec side of Hudson’s Bay, was also a super secret rendezvous for singles from all over the world! Who knew?!

tomorrow is marvin the martian day

Whoopee! Yahoo! Yippee! Miami Beach. Yikes! Musta taken a left turn at Albuquerque. Because Saturday, July 24, is… his day.

Do not give him the X-Q-34 Modulator under ANY circumstance!

gonna miss ya, phil

It’s been fun. Nine years, three terms, and you’re taking yourself out of my sights. Oh well. So long, Phil. (snurfle)

(pssssst…. he’s not gone yet… here ’til July)

Oh, goodie. You mean, there’s still time.

What to do?

What to do?

then you must be white

 

Exactly!

I just sent (another) note, a suggestion, a correction, to CBC online about the overuse and misuse of terms like “Aboriginal” and “native.” I get tired of complaining especially as nothing seems to work. How to get it through the thickness.

It was a CP obit on Sam George. It wasn’t a long story but still managed to have four references to “Aboriginal” and one of “native.” I explained that Sam wasn’t Inuit or Métis, and Kettle & Stony Point has no significant Inuit or Métis population. So I told the CBC that the umbrella terms were inaccurate?

Sam was Chippewa. The official name of his community is CHIPPEWAS of Kettle and Stony Point. Why confuse things?

How can I get through to these guys!? 

In another life, with another life partner, she had a funny tale to tell. It was about her trip to some Caribbean vacation spot. Barbados, I think. 

She did the usual things, went to the usual tourist spots, picked up the usual junk. Afterward, she went with her companion poolside to relax. The bartender looked at the two luxuriously tanned women and asked where they came from?

One said she was Mohawk from Canada. The other said Algonquin, also from Canada.  They were native people, they explained, in the vernacular of the times. 

Are you white, asked the bartender? No, replied both ladies, slightly confused by the question.

Well, said the bartender, if you’re not Black then you must be white? That’s just the way it is.

The two women looked at each other. Then one of them, I’m not sure which, asked if the bartender was a native person? No, he answered. He was Black.

Well, they replied, if you’re not an Indian then you must be white.

All of which is to say… I’m not Inuk.  I’m not part Métis (what the hell does that mean anyway?!). If you’re talking to me, in my Mohawk (or insert your Indigenous nation here) community, talking to other Mohawks, about a MOHAWK issue – never, ever write in your story that I’m “Aboriginal” or “native”!

Sheesh!  Be specific!  Accuracy matters.  Journalism should counter ignorance – not promote it.

Rant over.

ctv local snooze

Save Our Snooze poster

Have you seen CTV’s latest campaign – the one where they practically beat you over the head with a club to get more money? Here’s a take from one writer in Winnipeg who shares my skepticism.

But let’s get this straight — local news and news coverage is not threatened. In a city as large as Winnipeg, there are many media outlets, and new ones emerging, to report on what is happening locally. There is already a local news provider on TV, radio and the web that we all pay a fee for — the CBC.

CTV’s desire for cable fees is as much about the network wanting to broadcast Desperate Housewives on Sunday night as it is about anything else the company does.But a blockbuster American TV show does not have the emotional appeal of news from your backyard.

 

"endangered" CTV local reporters

I was fence-sitting on the issue – until I spotted these CTV local reporters on their way back to work after a liquid lunch at the ritzy marina club in Lachine. 

Endangered species? Yeah, right!

ledes i love

It doesn’t get much better than this, as it appeared in today’s New York Times. The slug is: “Starring in True-Crime Tale, an Unwitting Tenant”:

Rumors of a $900,000 stash within his walls suddenly explained the odd events at a man’s uptown apartment.

Now, excuse me, I have to go read that dang thing.

Update: It was the news feed’s story summary – not the lede. Durn it! I liked this one better.

laugh… and the world goes: huh?

A friend makes his living as a humourist. That makes him a comedian who won’t stand up, or a writer looking for yuks. It seems to work. For him, it’s a living, and a good one too.

We’ve run into someone else, a standup comic with a serious day job. He likes his job, but he loves his profession as a comedian. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many standup comedians making serious money year-round.

Put these two together and you’d think you’d be rolling on the floor the whole time. They start by riffing each other. Your jaw begins to ache from laughing. Your ribs hurt. Then you realize you’re watching goats butting horns, testing and asserting. Once that dance is over, they settle down to more serious talk – still funny but more serious.

They discuss their similar but different crafts. Sitting there, you see how their shticks work. They both know how to tap dance with an audience. They love the give and take, the snappy one-liners. They like to share a laugh, to make people want to laugh – not make people laugh. “You can’t make people laugh,” one of them says.

Both are great storytellers. In between the zingers, you appreciate that you’re with people with degrees in humour too. They’ve studied with some of the great humourists, comedians, and yuksters on the planet. They believe that humour, the act of laughing itself, can do more than make people feel good at the time. It does that. They believe, however, that laughter can heal, change lives in the longer-term, help people survive the bleakest situations. That’s pretty serious stuff.

I watch the comedian engage his audience. It starts with a story about himself. Physically, he’s up there while they’re sitting down in front. With language, he pulls himself down until he is with the audience. He does it by making fun of himself at first. Self-deprecation. His stories explain what a dolt he is while leaning toward a group of gigglers up front. They are his door to the rest of the audience.

He talks about a trip to a remote community where the elders spend most of the time pulling his leg, making fun of him, turning him into the butt of their jokes. He can’t seem to do anything right. The people in front are nodding. They know what he’s talking about. They know all about those elders.

That’s his point. He usually comes out to face a mixed-race audience with all kinds of things hidden back in their skulls. He describes how he can feel the freeze up when he’s introduced or mentions that he’s Indian, or “First Nation,” or Ojibway. He can feel it. He feels their jaws shift into stiff smiles, their shoulder muscles tighten, their sphincters slam shut.

He’s got to get them to loosen up, to make it okay for them to laugh at his jokes. To make that happen, he has to give them licence to laugh at him first; to smile at the man, to giggle at the idea, and then to let loose from the belly.

He says this doesn’t occur with an Indigenous audience. Comedian and audience speak a common language right off the bat. Sure, he has to show cred, but nothing like the lengths needed to reassure a mixed-race or non-native audience that it’s okay to laugh at what they call racial humour. With the Indigenous audience, it isn’t racial humour at all – it’s everyday life.

You sit there, listening to the humourist and the comic compare notes; one a writer, the other a performer, both amazing storytellers. They compare the tools of their trades, pulling out and confirming that many serve similar uses even if they aren’t exactly the same. They agree completely that what they do is essential to the health of their peoples and communities.

They don’t define their roles in the same vein as doctors or counsellors, but they feel that what they do is just as vital. One deals with the body, the other the mind, while they feed the spirit. Instead of dealing with one person at a time, they’re able to reach out to groups of people, an audience or a community all at once, even bridging cultures and peoples across Canada.

When things go well, they help people set aside their individual problems and share a common humanity, to feel less alone, by sharing a laugh. That’s the serious side of humour. It’s their deep understanding of their crafts that makes them good at what they do.

And now for absolutely no reason except that it seems a fitting way to end…

“Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together…”

- Carl Zwanzig (someone I’ve never heard of)

“Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?”

- Charlie McCarthy (him, I know)

Have a nice day.

cue the spooky music

This morning, CBC Radio’s The Current interviewed folks about the little people on Iceland. Seems Alcoa, the huge international aluminum conglomerate, hired a local expert to ensure that its new plant would not interfere with or otherwise displace the little people at its preferred site. You can listen to the interview at that link.

Seems Iceland affords its little people more consideration and legal protection than Canadian governments deign to extend to Indigenous peoples here… but I digress.

Then, this afternoon, the BBC runs an online story about a contest to find the “most ghostly” photo. A picture of a Scottish castle with a strange figure in period dress gazing out a window won the prize. Read all about it here.

Okay? Done reading?  Cue the spooky music….  

Just so’s ya know, I believe in the little people. There and here. Not so sure about hat picture though.

nooo…. it can’t be

But it is. So many wasted years of self-abuse and at great cost… only to find out that maybe I wasn’t seeing things after all. (sigh)