Not Quite Rowling Along
09/12/08 22:04 Filed in: Fiction
| Harry
Potter
I sat down the other day to try to begin a work of
fiction involving some of the minor characters from the
Harry Potter series, just for fun. A sort of "what
happens then?" type story.
I've kind of decided (without giving things away) to focus the story on Aberforth Dumbledore and George Weasley, two men who suffered the loss of a brother in the long battle with Voldemort. For Aberforth, it would be a journey of forgiveness and rebirth; for George, it would be the story of how he learns to carry on when half of him, his twin brother, is no longer around.
Doesn't sound like the happiest of stories, does it?
I would hope that the shape of the story will be the movement from sadness and loss (and lostness, as well) to happiness and rejuvenation.
The problem is, after numerous false starts, I finally erased it all and shut down the computer. I guess I'm just not ready yet. Maybe I need to dwell in the world of Abigail Massey and the McAdam Station and Hotel for a while longer. Maybe I need to finish my personal Harry Potter Concordance first. Who knows? But, for now, the story of the lost brothers will just have to wait.
I've kind of decided (without giving things away) to focus the story on Aberforth Dumbledore and George Weasley, two men who suffered the loss of a brother in the long battle with Voldemort. For Aberforth, it would be a journey of forgiveness and rebirth; for George, it would be the story of how he learns to carry on when half of him, his twin brother, is no longer around.
Doesn't sound like the happiest of stories, does it?
I would hope that the shape of the story will be the movement from sadness and loss (and lostness, as well) to happiness and rejuvenation.
The problem is, after numerous false starts, I finally erased it all and shut down the computer. I guess I'm just not ready yet. Maybe I need to dwell in the world of Abigail Massey and the McAdam Station and Hotel for a while longer. Maybe I need to finish my personal Harry Potter Concordance first. Who knows? But, for now, the story of the lost brothers will just have to wait.
On Canadian Politics and American Football
This past week, I've been following two stories that
have featured fairly prominently in the Canadian press,
stories which share, in my mind at least, an
interesting link. The two stories are the current
parliamentary "crisis" in Ottawa and the recent debut
of NFL (American) regular season football in Toronto;
the link has something to do with the Canadian
identity.
The political story should not be new to any thinking person in North America: Stephen Harper's Conservative party "won" the last national general election by electing more members to Parliament than any other party in the land. Though failing to win a majority of the seats (and therefore an unassailable ability to govern), the Conservatives earned what we call in Canada a "strong minority", a stronger minority, in fact, than Harper and his mates had used to govern the land for the two plus years leading up to this latest election.
In simple terms, Harper took this stronger minority as a license to bully. Figuring that the opposition parties would either have to swallow whatever legislation he put in front of them or vote against it and force what would be an incredibly unpopular general election, he set about proposing new legislation to eliminate government financial support to federal political parties on the basis of their share of the popular vote in the most recent election, legislation that would, in fact, further decimate those opposition parties and their ability to challenge the Conservatives in future votes. His thought: either they'll swallow this bitter, bitter pill and pose no threat to me in the future or they'll vote it down, force another election and, when the electorate blames them for having to go through yet another costly election, I'll win the majority government I've coveted for so long. Either way, I win and they lose, possibly for a very long time.
Harper either didn't think of or didn't think possible the third alternative: the other parties would pool their three smaller minority shares into a majority share and take the right to govern away from him. He gambled that the Liberals, NDP and Bloc could not work cooperatively to face down his bullying and start pushing back.
So, like the bully that he is, when his targets stood up to him, Harper went crying to the nation's "mommy" — the Governor General — to make them stop pushing him around. He won a brief reprieve but that may prove even worse for him: not only has he forced the opposition parties to cooperate against him, he's also pushed the Liberal party (the biggest single threat to his power) into speeding up the process of replacing its highly ineffective leader, Stephane Dion, with a much more polished, more capable man: Michael Ignatieff. And now the GG, in granting Harper a six-week reprieve, has also granted the Liberals the time they need to make the change.
The result may just be a highly effective coalition of the left, led by an extremely able, extremely intelligent, extremely sellable man in Ignatieff, that wrests power from Harper and his Conservative bully boys for good.
I laugh when I read the hyperbole in the conservative media as they argue that Harper's minority gives him any more right to govern than the Liberal minority or, for that matter, the Liberal-NDP-Bloc majority. Or when they suggest it's unconstitutional or undemocratic or un-anythingelse for the coalition of the left to take power without another election. That's what our system is all about. It's a multi-party system that contemplates the distinct possibility that no party will earn a majority in an election and that some sort of coalition — whether informal or formal — will have to rule. The fact that Harper's policies are so distasteful that the MPs who represent the majority of Canadians cannot accept them makes it obvious that Harper does not have the democratic right to govern.
If the coalition can do it, more power to them. And we may just end up with a more conscientious, more thoughtful, more balanced government for our troubles. And that's what Canada is all about: quiet, passionate compassion in government.
The other story also says something about Canada's identity. This past Sunday, in a blatant cash grab, Buffalo Bills owner Ralph Wilson brought a regular season American football game to Toronto. Wilson turned his back on his ultra-loyal blue-collar fan base by literally stealing one of the best games and best rivalries of the season — the Bills versus their divisional rival Miami Dolphins — and selling it to Toronto.
Toronto, they say, is starving for an NFL team. The fans there would do anything, pay anything, to see the best football in the world, as opposed to the drivel served up on a regular basis by the local CFL concern, the Toronto Argonauts. Plunk down any two NFL teams in the Rogers Centre on a Sunday afternoon and the fans will line up in droves to pay $200 per ticket and watch the excitement unfold.
Only something went wrong. The game wasn't a sell-out. And loyal Bills fans who actually live in and around Buffalo got angry. They refused to come to Toronto for the game. And the Canadian crowd was quiet. They didn't cheer much. They didn't go crazy like all those great American fans do. The players complained. The Bills felt like they were playing another road game, especially since the game was played indoors, away from the arctic blast that gives the Buffalo squad such a huge home-field advantage when they play at Ralph Wilson Stadium in Orchard Park, New York. The Dolphins were happy to play indoors, happy to win the game, but felt the crowd was too quiet and unenthusiastic.
The explanations offered by the media for the lukewarm reaction to the NFL in Toronto range from laughable to downright offensive and patronising. Some argued the ticket prices were too high and the real fans couldn't afford to come. Actually, that one might be true. Others argued the tailgate party outside the stadium beforehand wasn't wild enough. In some cases, the media actually argued that the Toronto fans did not understand the game so didn't know when to cheer. Patronising as heck but, you know, kind of funny too.
Let's face it — the problem isn't with a lack of understanding of the game, a lack of a party atmosphere, a lack of "real" fans. It's with the game itself: the NFL is boring. There I said it. The only thing more boring than watching NFL football on TV is watching NFL football in person. The reason the crowds in the US have to have huge tailgate parties and get rip-roaring drunk is so that they don't notice how unbelievably tedious the product on the field is.
Four downs to make a first down. 45 seconds between plays. Three timeouts per team per half plus all of the TV timeouts. TV timeouts take place after every score, whenever a player is injured, after every punt or kick off, and when a play is reviewed through instant replay. Did I mention instant replay? Every time that swings into action, we sit and wait for another two minutes or so.The average play lasts, what, 10 seconds? So we get 10 seconds of action (if you can call it that) and then between 45 and 105 seconds of standing around before the next 10 seconds of action.
Tedium. Absolute tedium.
And oh so American. I mean, just look at the most popular spectator sports in the nation to the south: football, whose tedium I have just described; baseball, which features more standing around on the field than in line for the refreshments; golf, which moves at the pace of an injured snail; basketball, which again offers brief bursts of action, followed by the inevitable foul shots; and finally, wait for it, NASCAR motor racing, a sport where, yes, the movement is continuous but the "athletes" aren't the ones doing the work.
Oiy vey. What does it say about the nation when their favourite spectator sports are 90% standing around?
Is it possible that the crowd at the Bills-Dolphins game were so quiet because they were bored to tears? Because, as Canadians who love their (continuous, high-speed, often brutal) hockey and tolerate their (thrill-a-minute, 24 seconds between plays, one time out per team per half, clock keeps running except in the last three minutes of the half, not many TV timeouts, smaller players, bigger field, fewer downs and way more scoring) CFL football, the fans in the Rogers Centre on Sunday were stunned by the slow-as-molasses pace of play?
We're a bizzare bunch, we Canadians. We like our politics and our sports the same way: complex, confusing, and with plenty of non-stop, high-speed action.
The political story should not be new to any thinking person in North America: Stephen Harper's Conservative party "won" the last national general election by electing more members to Parliament than any other party in the land. Though failing to win a majority of the seats (and therefore an unassailable ability to govern), the Conservatives earned what we call in Canada a "strong minority", a stronger minority, in fact, than Harper and his mates had used to govern the land for the two plus years leading up to this latest election.
In simple terms, Harper took this stronger minority as a license to bully. Figuring that the opposition parties would either have to swallow whatever legislation he put in front of them or vote against it and force what would be an incredibly unpopular general election, he set about proposing new legislation to eliminate government financial support to federal political parties on the basis of their share of the popular vote in the most recent election, legislation that would, in fact, further decimate those opposition parties and their ability to challenge the Conservatives in future votes. His thought: either they'll swallow this bitter, bitter pill and pose no threat to me in the future or they'll vote it down, force another election and, when the electorate blames them for having to go through yet another costly election, I'll win the majority government I've coveted for so long. Either way, I win and they lose, possibly for a very long time.
Harper either didn't think of or didn't think possible the third alternative: the other parties would pool their three smaller minority shares into a majority share and take the right to govern away from him. He gambled that the Liberals, NDP and Bloc could not work cooperatively to face down his bullying and start pushing back.
So, like the bully that he is, when his targets stood up to him, Harper went crying to the nation's "mommy" — the Governor General — to make them stop pushing him around. He won a brief reprieve but that may prove even worse for him: not only has he forced the opposition parties to cooperate against him, he's also pushed the Liberal party (the biggest single threat to his power) into speeding up the process of replacing its highly ineffective leader, Stephane Dion, with a much more polished, more capable man: Michael Ignatieff. And now the GG, in granting Harper a six-week reprieve, has also granted the Liberals the time they need to make the change.
The result may just be a highly effective coalition of the left, led by an extremely able, extremely intelligent, extremely sellable man in Ignatieff, that wrests power from Harper and his Conservative bully boys for good.
I laugh when I read the hyperbole in the conservative media as they argue that Harper's minority gives him any more right to govern than the Liberal minority or, for that matter, the Liberal-NDP-Bloc majority. Or when they suggest it's unconstitutional or undemocratic or un-anythingelse for the coalition of the left to take power without another election. That's what our system is all about. It's a multi-party system that contemplates the distinct possibility that no party will earn a majority in an election and that some sort of coalition — whether informal or formal — will have to rule. The fact that Harper's policies are so distasteful that the MPs who represent the majority of Canadians cannot accept them makes it obvious that Harper does not have the democratic right to govern.
If the coalition can do it, more power to them. And we may just end up with a more conscientious, more thoughtful, more balanced government for our troubles. And that's what Canada is all about: quiet, passionate compassion in government.
The other story also says something about Canada's identity. This past Sunday, in a blatant cash grab, Buffalo Bills owner Ralph Wilson brought a regular season American football game to Toronto. Wilson turned his back on his ultra-loyal blue-collar fan base by literally stealing one of the best games and best rivalries of the season — the Bills versus their divisional rival Miami Dolphins — and selling it to Toronto.
Toronto, they say, is starving for an NFL team. The fans there would do anything, pay anything, to see the best football in the world, as opposed to the drivel served up on a regular basis by the local CFL concern, the Toronto Argonauts. Plunk down any two NFL teams in the Rogers Centre on a Sunday afternoon and the fans will line up in droves to pay $200 per ticket and watch the excitement unfold.
Only something went wrong. The game wasn't a sell-out. And loyal Bills fans who actually live in and around Buffalo got angry. They refused to come to Toronto for the game. And the Canadian crowd was quiet. They didn't cheer much. They didn't go crazy like all those great American fans do. The players complained. The Bills felt like they were playing another road game, especially since the game was played indoors, away from the arctic blast that gives the Buffalo squad such a huge home-field advantage when they play at Ralph Wilson Stadium in Orchard Park, New York. The Dolphins were happy to play indoors, happy to win the game, but felt the crowd was too quiet and unenthusiastic.
The explanations offered by the media for the lukewarm reaction to the NFL in Toronto range from laughable to downright offensive and patronising. Some argued the ticket prices were too high and the real fans couldn't afford to come. Actually, that one might be true. Others argued the tailgate party outside the stadium beforehand wasn't wild enough. In some cases, the media actually argued that the Toronto fans did not understand the game so didn't know when to cheer. Patronising as heck but, you know, kind of funny too.
Let's face it — the problem isn't with a lack of understanding of the game, a lack of a party atmosphere, a lack of "real" fans. It's with the game itself: the NFL is boring. There I said it. The only thing more boring than watching NFL football on TV is watching NFL football in person. The reason the crowds in the US have to have huge tailgate parties and get rip-roaring drunk is so that they don't notice how unbelievably tedious the product on the field is.
Four downs to make a first down. 45 seconds between plays. Three timeouts per team per half plus all of the TV timeouts. TV timeouts take place after every score, whenever a player is injured, after every punt or kick off, and when a play is reviewed through instant replay. Did I mention instant replay? Every time that swings into action, we sit and wait for another two minutes or so.The average play lasts, what, 10 seconds? So we get 10 seconds of action (if you can call it that) and then between 45 and 105 seconds of standing around before the next 10 seconds of action.
Tedium. Absolute tedium.
And oh so American. I mean, just look at the most popular spectator sports in the nation to the south: football, whose tedium I have just described; baseball, which features more standing around on the field than in line for the refreshments; golf, which moves at the pace of an injured snail; basketball, which again offers brief bursts of action, followed by the inevitable foul shots; and finally, wait for it, NASCAR motor racing, a sport where, yes, the movement is continuous but the "athletes" aren't the ones doing the work.
Oiy vey. What does it say about the nation when their favourite spectator sports are 90% standing around?
Is it possible that the crowd at the Bills-Dolphins game were so quiet because they were bored to tears? Because, as Canadians who love their (continuous, high-speed, often brutal) hockey and tolerate their (thrill-a-minute, 24 seconds between plays, one time out per team per half, clock keeps running except in the last three minutes of the half, not many TV timeouts, smaller players, bigger field, fewer downs and way more scoring) CFL football, the fans in the Rogers Centre on Sunday were stunned by the slow-as-molasses pace of play?
We're a bizzare bunch, we Canadians. We like our politics and our sports the same way: complex, confusing, and with plenty of non-stop, high-speed action.
Ponderings on Lehane and other things
07/12/08 12:16 Filed in: Mysteries
At the urgings of my b-in-l Gavin, I have finally
started reading Dennis Lehane's first effort at
historical fiction: The Given Day. Set in the
early part of the 20th Century, this book includes
real-life historical figures like Babe Ruth, the famous
baseball player, as well as political figures of the
day. I haven't gotten very far yet but Lehane's
description of the Babe watching a negro-league
baseball game (complete with the historically accurate
but now considered offensive terminology to describe
the black ball-players) is quite exceptional.
I am looking forward to reading more but have so many other projects on the go (including Christmas, of course, and other related tasks) that it may take me some time to finish the book. I'm hopeful that it will be more about the history and less about blood and gore than some of his other books but we'll see.
In the meantime, of course, I continue work on the Harry Potter Concordance. It's slow work but I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I've set up a table and computer downstairs in what we call our "White Room" so that I can leave the stuff out, ready for me to come back to it whenever I have a chance. Our dog likes that room too since it's nice and cool and she has plenty of space to lie down and sleep.
I have also finished another Abigail Massey at McAdam Station story — The Circus Comes to Town — available through the McAdam link to the left. Right now, it's still a bit of a draft since I'm not entirely sure I like the relationship between Miss Pierce and her brother. I'm awaiting feedback from my sister, mother and partner to see what they think.
And I really have to get back to the Phillip Gold short stories I've been working on; they've kind of gotten left behind but one is ready to be sent out for consideration. I think that's a worthwhile cause upon which to focus in the coming weeks.
Especially with snow falling and Christmas looming!
I am looking forward to reading more but have so many other projects on the go (including Christmas, of course, and other related tasks) that it may take me some time to finish the book. I'm hopeful that it will be more about the history and less about blood and gore than some of his other books but we'll see.
In the meantime, of course, I continue work on the Harry Potter Concordance. It's slow work but I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I've set up a table and computer downstairs in what we call our "White Room" so that I can leave the stuff out, ready for me to come back to it whenever I have a chance. Our dog likes that room too since it's nice and cool and she has plenty of space to lie down and sleep.
I have also finished another Abigail Massey at McAdam Station story — The Circus Comes to Town — available through the McAdam link to the left. Right now, it's still a bit of a draft since I'm not entirely sure I like the relationship between Miss Pierce and her brother. I'm awaiting feedback from my sister, mother and partner to see what they think.
And I really have to get back to the Phillip Gold short stories I've been working on; they've kind of gotten left behind but one is ready to be sent out for consideration. I think that's a worthwhile cause upon which to focus in the coming weeks.
Especially with snow falling and Christmas looming!