Category Archives: Books

vid: aurora borealis over BC

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Welcome to my world. Well, actually the mountains get in the way most of the time, but I’ve seen the Northern Lights two or three times here in Vancouver, and they can be seen throughout most of BC when the sunspots align just right and all the polar bears are facing north north-west, so the light reflects off their silvery backs.

This video is timelapse photography from Fugly.com, and it’s kind of a shame, as one of the things I adore about the Aurora Borealis is the magnificently unhurried way the curtains of light wave in the sky. Also, this is all-green, and the purples and reds and indigos I know and love are sadly missed. My parents used to wake me up when I was little (and lived in Winnipeg) to watch the Northern Lights, and the self-evident magic of it, the middle of the nightishness of it, and the fact that it was considered important enough to wake us up for always associated it in my mind with Christmas. I didn’t even read The Father Christmas Letters till much later, but they explain plenty.

paging Boris Johnson

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 the foundation of Mike Nesmith's fortune

I’ve always been a fan of corrections. I think my all-time fave is from the formerly-amusing, now rather sad Tatler, and being the oldest magazine in existence it has, over the years, had to issue some doozies.

I think my favorite was the one that apologized for “errors” in a celeb schooldays reminiscence…one that characterized two boys as the sons of a “Costa del Sol gangster” and who entered said celeb’s room greasing a baseball bat with Vaseline and yelling words to the effect of “Who’s first? Bend over!”

And who were actually named by said celeb. Said later apologetic and corrective celeb. Rupert Everett, I think? If so, a much more promising debut in fiction than his subsequent unendurable novel. Everett is at his best doing straightforwardly hallucinogenic nonfiction, as some of his work for VF proves.

In any case, one of my longtime favorite sites is Regret the Error, which publishes corrections with a particularly good eye for the amusing. Amusing crow-eating warms the bitter, shrivelled cockles of my heart, and so I am going to give you an example of their choice choices in the correction field.

A correction from The Orange County Register, Sept 23:

Cannabis is a synonym for marijuana. Because of a reporter’s error, the word was misspelled in an article on Page 15 of the News section in the Sept. 22 edition of the Register.

The original sentence:

The pot growers had tapped into an irrigation line for landscaping around the gated community of Stoneridge, and had rigged up a network of white, 3/4-inch PVC piping to grow the cannibals.

separated at Photoshop: Ann Coulter and Susan Estrich

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Estrich-Coulter, menopausal on menopausal action

Yep, it’s hot-flashing menopausal-on-menopausal action as my favorite lefty harpy Susan Estrich brings out a book whose cover bears a stunning similarity to the latest from Republican plagiarist Ann Coulter, 45.

Susan Estrich has, as I’ve commented many times before, an unusual gift: even her fans hate her. She could polarize a tub of Jello. She could throw a hot tub full of Care Bears into a teeming caudron of steaming gore and tearing fangs in seconds. I don’t doubt for a moment that it was the mere presence of someone reading Galleycat on Estrich‘s book on set that provoked Dr. Burke to throttle Dr. McDreamy.

Yes, at last, someone with whom I have something in common. Also, I bought her diet book. And both of us are still chubby.

Lucy Gao, meet Aleksey Vayner, the man of your dreams

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Dance, monkey, dance!from IvyGate, the States‘ own version of Oxford Gossip, via Gawker.

This is Aleksey Vayner, Lucy Gao‘s soulmate, the perfect Also-Descended-From-Former-Commies-But-So-Way-Over-That, soulless, careerist golem.

Someone please set them up on a date immediately and give them a reality show.

Given a good stylist and continued coverage, they could be the Posh and Becks of Wall Street in no time!

Mr. Vayner identifies himself on his resume as a multi-sport professional athlete, the CEO of two companies, and an investment adviser. The video depicts him lifting a 495-pound weight, serving a tennis ball at 140 miles an hour, and ballroom dancing with a scantily clad female. Finally, Mr. Vayner emerges enrobed in a white karate suit and breaks six bricks in one fell swoop.

Between athletic bits, Mr. Vayner takes the opportunity to opine on success. After being described in the opening lines of the video as “a model of personal success and development to everybody,” Mr. Vayner says, “Failure cannot be considered an option.” He adds: “To achieve success you must first conceive it and believe in it. Remember: impossible is nothing.”

It is also, according to Mark Duffy, the tagline for Adidas. According to IvyGate, Vayner‘s plaguarized a book on the Holocaust, invented a charity, and has listed himself as CEO of an investment company which appears to exist only in his imagination. What a charmer; Donald Trump should be looking over his shoulder!

But that’s only the tip of a huge and hilarious iceberg. Turns out Aleksey is somewhat infamous among Yalies as the “Crazy Prefrosh” profiled in 2002 by Yale‘s Rumpus tabloid. If you thought Vayner’s credibility was shaky after seeing the video, wait til you read the profile. It is devastating.

For starters, his name back then was Aleksey Vayner's Model Mayhem shotGarber. He claimed to have spent much of his childhood in a Tibetan monestary in post-Soviet Uzbekistan before moving to the United States, where he was employed by both the Mafia and the CIA. He was also a tennis instructor whose students include Harrison Ford and Sarah Michelle Gellar. And oh yeah: he met the Dalai Lama along the way and is the second greatest martial arts fighter in the world.

Let us now take a good, long look at how the second greatest martial arts fighter in the world and no doubt future father of Lucy Gao‘s squealing brood, wants the world to remember him:

Black humour

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Che Black

from Rick Mercer‘s blog, and to which I cannot at the moment add anything (because when you turn the television off these Ontarians‘ ears become incredibly sensitive and they cannot abide typing of any nature whatsoever, not that I’m fucking bitter, of which more later).

When I saw the headline in the newspaper I swear to God I heard angels sing. “Conrad Black wants Canadian Citizenship back”. Cue the trumpets – it just doesn’t get much better than this.

Seeing that headline made me so excited I couldn’t even read the bloody thing. I picked up the paper and brought it home like it was a box of chocolates. I didn’t even glance at the first sentence until everything was perfect. The coffee was brewed, my feet were up the pillow behind my neck was just so. This was a moment to be savoured.

And it was a great moment.  As I read that story I don’t think I ever felt more Canadian, because I knew that for the first time in perhaps our nation’s entire history, everyone in Canada was on the same page. Every man woman and child in this nation was united and together. We were gloating as one.

Amen, brother. Amen.