Having proved last month during the Winter Olympics that February around here is as unpredictable as anywhere else in the world (Calgary also had to truck-in snow in 1988), let us put to rest the stereotype that Canada is nought but wind-swept tundra with today’s photos, preceded by a topical quotation from the Bard of Avon:

Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty.

–“The Winter’s Tale” [1610 – 1611]; Act IV, sc iii, 118

I wonder what the people in the Canadian Maritimes are doing right now…?

Stunningly, the CNIB and other Braille-formatted books in Canada receive no financial support from governments at the Provincial or Federal levels as I had thought they did.

No, honestly, none. All they get is money from the generous individuals who send it in on their own.

Needless to say, making books in the format of little bumps is a tad pricey.

Doing something decent today will only take about one minute. Go here: http://righttoread.cnib.ca/default.aspx

Thank you.

So… what’s the deelio with me then? What have I been up to? What, if anything, have I been accomplishing lately? What do I want to / will be accomplishing?

Good questions, all.

Well, let’s see… Over at Atomic Fez, I’ve been happily prepping four books for release at the end of March / beginning of April! Read about that here.

That’s… pretty much it, actually. Books are consuming all my daily life, really. Well, waking life, certainly.

Other things have occasionally taken place. Sleep, for instance. That seems to be a once-every-twenty-four-hours pass-time. Food, also, seems to be recurring, but with more frequency than sleep.

The bathroom has finally been completed – hooray! – thanks to the fact we “got a man in”. The final stumbling block to me doing the job was when I realized that today’s tiles are made slightly different a dimension than yesterday’s tiles were, so the new tiles wouldn’t fit perfectly in the space the old tiles were in. The result of that was that all of the tiles needed to come off the wall, with the probable need of repairing yet more wall-board, plus having to trim a big whack of tiles to weird shapes around the window in the wall [image, left], aaaaaand who knows how much else in the way of complications. Merely trimming the tiles to fit around the window was enough of a complication to make my head spin, so we called a guy for an estimate, accepted it, and he started last Monday.

By the time yesterday arrived, he’d re-built some of the wall at both ends of the tub, removed the inner sliding window in the wall and tiled the inside of that hole, replaced all the wall-board, removed the shower doors with a curved rod and shower curtain, replaced the shower head, and repaired some of the wall outside of the existing tile area as well as extending the tiles so they better cover the area which gets wet. End result: what feels like a brand new bathroom!

So that’s excellent.

One of the oddest things discovered during the process of readying the wall for the new tiles was the fact that cardboard was used as a construction material.

You see – and this is starting to sound like an episode of Holmes on Homes, isn’t it – the wall surface of the gypsum board was a bit different than the surface of the wallboard behind the tiles might have been, were the shower wall-board attached directly to the studs. So, behind the thinner shower wall board some 1/4″ cardboard was placed to fill the gap to maintain a flat wall surface.

No, really. That’s what someone did [see image, left]. Probably it was my (now late) Father-in-Law, as this was the sort of “good enough without spending any money” approach his work around the house took on from the mid-1980s or so.

Anyway, it’s all done properly now.

Preparations are nearly complete for attending World HorrorCon in Brighton at the end of March, and then onwards to the SF-based Odyssey 2010 (aka: “EasterCon) the next week-end.  How the hell we’re going to pay for it is something we’ve not solved, but it’s nearly impossible to make a go of it selling books without proving to people they actually exist by having them on a table at a convention somewhere, so there we are. There’s a few days I don’t have to stand in a Dealers’ Room selling books, so I’m planning to hit the British Museum and the National Gallery again, plus possibly a pub or two. Look to see daily summaries here again covering that in all its glory.

So… that’s about it for me, I suppose.

What’s new with you, then?

For a start, you’re not moving from your chair for an hour. You’re going to watch this entire show, that’s why. It aired possibly only once (twice at the most) way back in the late-’80s on CBC and I don’t think it ever surfaced again. As far as I’m aware, it’s never been made available for purchase, either (or it certainly wasn’t ever advertised properly). The one time it definitely ran was during New Year’s Day, when people typically aren’t able to make sense of anything.

The following is the ‘mock-umentary’ about Canada’s secret plan to take-over the USA through our own Lebensraum programme turning America’s greatest weapon upon itself: the Entertainment Industry.

Some of the performances are inspired, some genius, and all with complete and enthusiastic co-operation. All those individuals identified as Canadians are, in fact, Canadians, no matter how easily you recognize them from American movies and TV. That’s just how successful ‘the Conspiracy’ was, you see.

The fact that the ‘news’ of this ‘conspiracy’ was disseminated on a day when most of the world was a bit hung-over, only leads to further PROOF of an attempt to COVER-UP ‘the TRUTH’!!

Profuse thanks to Sean for locating this on YouTube. You are a Rock Star, sir!

The rest of you: enjoy. The following may explain something of why I’m often seen sitting in corners of foreign rooms quietly listening to your conversations: a plot is being formed… Mwwaa-ha-ha!!

We’re known in this land for being polite. Painfully so, actually. ‘Fair play’ and ‘good manners’ are something that often are ridiculed on the World Stage, but given we’re next-door to the Yanqui Bastards it’s a bit of a challenge to not look polite in contrast.

Here, thanks to YouTube’s ability to serve up any bit of video which was broadcast in the last forty years or more (no matter if it was cleared for web-distribution or not), is Antony St. George apologising to the USA for so very many things.

Note the firm placement of his tongue in the side of his cheek doesn’t at any time hinder his ability to speak clearly! Ah, the benefits of the Canadian accent.

Don’t forget about the Paul Magrs contest in the post below this one. Worthwhile reading is always something worth… doing… while… you’re… never mind.