Chess XIXXMC

By the way, if any of you nice lurkers out there would like to have a friendly game of chess,facebook has a pretty good chess interface. I can show you how to set it up if you want.

I hope this link works, but if it doesn't, just go to facebook and do a search term "Chess" and it should lead you there.

And then prepare to be demolished!

Quelle ayirre?

God, sometimes I just don’t think I can hack it in Quebec. Some guy that I'm calling about replacing a screen was just on the phone and I was having major problems understanding him. My French is very good but it’s French, not Québecois. So when we were talking about what time and he kept saying “Quelle ayirre? Quelle ayirre?” I just couldn’t figure out what he was trying to say. Finally figured out he was saying “Quelle heure.” Duh.

I should have switched to English but that’s a major faux-pas here . . . I should just ditch the French and learn Québecois instead.

Fodder

There’s a Star Trek: Next Generation episode about some guy who, on his home planet, was raised from birth to be a killing machine, to go to war and kill with no regrets. Can’t remember the episode name, but it serves my point. He’s a nice guy, just with the fault that he’s been so trained to defend himself (and kill in that defense) that he’s remarkably unable to settle down and is basically a human time bomb.

Well, just look at this article.

How reasonable is it for us to train someone to kill, put him in a situation where at any time he could realistically be blown to bits of flesh, and then expect him to put on a suit and tie and go to work on his return to civilisation?

Can you sense the paradox here? He no longer has any place in our society, and knows it. Very few people have been where he’s been and he feels abandoned. People go to work every day, they eat at McDonald’s, they argue and go to sleep. That has not been his world for perhaps years. He’s been constantly under pressure in a foreign land, with people who most definitely want to see him as a charred corpse, a place where you most sincerely can’t be messing around. Even here, being a policeman is a relatively safe endeavor. At least there aren’t a bunch of idiots with you in their crosshairs just for sport. How many of us have been through that? Huh?

“Hi, I’d like to apply for a job. I’ve been trained to kill people.”

There’s no huge support group. The rest of the country is preoccupied with a downturn in the economy, not a forgotten war thousands of miles away.

No, I’ve never been in the armed forces, but I’ve spoken about it before and I’ll say it again: these boys (and mostly they are only boys, cannon fodder) are shoved into an environment as alien to them as it is to you and me and then are expected to just come back like nothing happened.

Well, excuse me, something happened.

And you and I should make it our business to take care of those who take care of us.

Écrasé

I’m just not understanding the fact that 800 bicyclists per year in Quebec are having encounters with traffic. Why can’t they just ride on the sidewalk?

People aren’t dumb. Obviously you can’t go as fast on the sidewalk, but if you’re in a hurry, take the bus. In Japan, where I lived for five years, cyclists use the sidewalk. Housewives, schoolboys, elderly men, everyone uses the sidewalk — and no one gets hurt. Bikes have little tinkly bells that warn you they’re coming through and you just develop an instinct to move aside. It really isn’t hard. Walkers are never harmed.

In a city like Montreal, where I fear to tread as a pedestrian, let alone a cyclist, I think it’s ridiculous that bikes are confined to the roadway. I will never ride a bike in Montreal unless it’s on the sidewalk; it’s simply too dangerous.

Conductor of Conversations

Hate the awkward pause? Despise the faux-pas? Come to me. I’m the conversation expert. Since I hate being uncomfortable in any situation, I’ve developed the talent to rescue myself.

Ever sat at a table of people eating and then suddenly everything descends into the scraping of forks, clearing of throats, napkins being wielded?

That’s where I come in. “Hey, what do you get when you cross a rat with a weasel? A very small lawyer.”

I’m Mr. Pausebreaker. I’m Mr. Fillin. I come up with the transitions from one topic to another.

Think about it. In a group of human beings, SOMEONE has to take the helm to prevent anarchy. Even if anarchy in this case is silence.

“My grandfather used to lock me in a closet for five minutes every day. He said it was elevator practice.”

It never fails to work. If no one is conducting the conversation then it will always be awkward. So I volunteer.

Val-David

I’ve been helping doing renovations to a “cabin” (it’s actually a house, don’t know why they call it a cabin — probably the old connotations) in Val-David, a place about one hour’s drive north from Montreal. It’s a big ski area in the winter.

At any rate, I tried to summon what creative energy I could come up with. Plumbing or fixing doors is not my forte (by the way, just in passing, that word is not pronounced “fortay” but actually “fort,” but I digress) so I volunteered for the painting. I used to paint houses in my youth.

To my surprise, it all came back to me (well, it’s not neurosurgery) and it was unbelievable fun. Rollering a wall and smelling those latex fumes is, well, a gas.

I didn’t finish the room and I look so forward to going back to Val-David as soon as possible.

At night it is as black as a coffin and there are millions of stars. I’d forgotten about stars. (They’re those funny lights above your heads sometimes. Sometimes, if you’re like me and live in a big city).

And quiet as the grave.

I’ll try to take pictures for next time. The one below is from the perch at the end of that crazy climb.

Stair-o-phobia?

I have a fear of stairs. Not always, just sometimes. It all stems from one night when I lived in Japan. The stairs there tend to be quite steep, because the normal Japanese foot seems to be smaller than ours (but that’s just conjecture; it could just be because of lack of space).

At any rate, one night after work I was travelling the train system and yet again having to walk down an interminable flight of steep stairs with my usual insouciance, both hands in my long-coat pockets, and guess what: I tripped at the top of the stairs.

It hurt. Lots. There was no blood, but imagine a log rolling down a hill covered in boulders and you get the picture.

So yesterday my ultimate nightmare came true: climb a mountain in Val-David. It was actually a walkable path, but in places, steep — very steep, and lots and lots of stairs with no balustrades or handholds. I wasn’t very worried about going up. It was coming down that I was worried about.

Because think about it: when you’re going up a flight of steps, they’re clearly delineated, silhouetted against each other. But going down, they all seem to blend into one entity. And besides, you can never fall up the stairs.

So after I reached the top, a ten-minute-or-so trek, I was seized with anxiety. I could not concentrate on the brilliant vista. All I wanted was for it to all be over with, that I would be at the bottom again, but there was that extra anxiety factor: I had to do it by myself. No one could do it for me. Like a 40-story subway staircase, all going down.

That’s a long way to fall like a log rolling down a hill covered with boulders.

But what ended up being extremely funny was that one woman, some brash New Yorker bigmouth who was quite happy to put me down because of my spoken fear of stairs, was the only one of the party who fell flat on her ass on the way down. "I've got blood blisters on my hands," she whined.

It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought it would be.

I might even do it again after witnessing her humiliation.

Yes, I think I might. This could be the end of my fear of stairs.

Rad, Phil and Madeleine

I'm just like, making new best friends all over the place.

So disappointed in not getting to jam today, I contacted Radoslav, someone who had responded to my post about musicians.

And it turned out he, his brother and his bro's girlfriend were heading for the jazz fest.

Meeting complete strangers is always a trial. But this wasn't. All three of them turned out to be complete darlings -- we met up at PDA metro and then inexplicably ended up at St. Hubert drinking semillon and mojitos. Talking about everything from Beethoven to the Beatles.

The Earth will live. The young people will save us. If these are who they are, have no fear. The kindest, most intelligent, pleasant people on this planet are who I encountered tonight.

Gods bless us all.

Green, Red, Yellow, Cream and Orange

Al Green last night was a blast. As you my know, Salle Wilfred Pelletier is not my favorite venue — I’ve listened to my friend Jacques Beaudoin play there in the OSM many times and though it’s “pretty” good for unamplified classical it just shuts down with rock or anything approaching volume.

Rain was hurtling down, the taxi company didn’t send the promised taxi and we had to wade into the torrent. Luckily we found one.

But the streets near the Place des Arts were all closed off. So we had to rush through a veritable deluge (we were late because of the taxi fiasco) and barely made it to will-call, drenched. Only to find there was an opening act, Lizz Wright. We were wet and exhausted from running, so we opted for another solution: sit out the opening act with a couple of scotches in the lobby. That worked. And we met Lizz Wright’s bus driver . . . he was sitting right next to us. Very cynical guy.

And then went out into the now-dry evening and sampled some wines at a tent near PDA. I must say, the whole area was packed. Unbelievable.

And then, Al Green. Who is Al Green? Apparently many people except me know, because the crowd was rapturous, devout. they knew all the songs and I knew not a single one except for Dock of the Bay, which was only performed as a snippet, but these people, mainly 50ish but not necessarily, knew all the songs, all the words, and just went into hysteria when one or another Al Green specials commenced.

And to tell you the truth, I was actually concentrating on the musicians. The show was seamless. Obviously extremely-well planned. Green would launch into some patter and some instrument would be playing gently behind it and even the patter was great. A master showman, this dude.

So I felt rather left out while everyone else was swaying to the tunes they knew, but it was very revival-like, very gospely. (If that’s a word).

Very nice show. After that we retired to some funky lounge nearby where EVERYONE was under thirty and the DJ actually came up to me and asked what I wanted to hear. He was using an iBook and turntables, or maybe they were fake turntables, but when I told him we had just come from the Al Green show he apologised for the awful hip-hop that was currently playing and in less than 20 minutes, lo and behold: Al Green.

So it was a Green, red (for the wine), yellow (for the scotch) cream (for the Kalhua and milk) and orange (for the Long Island Iced Tea) night.

Cheers all round.

No Jam. Toast.

Wrestled with the public transportation system today in order to get to the prodigal jam but just gave up in hopeless despair. Pointe Claire is VERY far away -- clear across the island -- and to get there there are dozens of options, none involving anything easy.

Add into that a hot day, hot sun, lugging a guitar, a three-hour wait for a commuter train (okay, I should have checked the schedule before I left), a nice bus driver's wrong directions and another wait for a bus that never came and I'd had it.

I'd have taken a $50 taxi ride but after 20 minutes, not a single taxi came by that was unoccupied.

So . . . just to jam with a bunch of guys? Verdict: not worth it. The dude who set it up must have known that there were many people near downtown without transport and could have set up some kind of carpooling but obviously didn't care very much.

So neither do I.