Stuff and Moonshine

I have just been made aware of the Thursday-morning WMBR show Pontoon Palace.

My contract runs out today. I was hoping they'd extend it, like they did for my predecessor, who worked here eight months and only left because she had a better offer elsewhere; but they're merging two offices and making my position redundant. Pity, I liked it pretty well here, and I'd just figured out a way to improve my efficiency on the one really busy day of each month, and was looking forward to trying it out next time it came around.

I've asked the temp agency if they've got anything else for me, and reapplied for EI. The latter should reactivate my claim, which I think still has a couple of months coverage. I have to apply as if it's a whole new claim, but last time I did this (last July or thereabouts, after my "new job" let me go after the first week) they reactivated the old one pretty smoothly and quickly, so I'm hoping there are still live humans at Employment Canada who'll understand the situation.

My only real dread at the moment is that Andrew will go into an anxiety spiral when he hears the news-- it's not his fault, he can't help it, but I low-key hate how whenever a problem comes up I have to worry about his reaction on top of the problem and my own emotions.

The Village Players have an event this weekend, and he'd actually offered, of his own accord, to come along to it with me even if it meant dealing with the stairs at the location. I don't know if he was still going to do that (they're forecasting rain), but we'll see what happens if this doesn't knock him for too much of a loop.

Forgot to mention that I finally watched “Rumpole and the Genuine Article.” Well-acted, and pretty well-adapted from the story*, but it runs up against the difficulty all shows have when the plot turns on a ‘work of genius’ painting, and time and budget prevent the props department from acquiring an actual Renoir or something. Now I need to watch The Christophers, another story about art and forgery and a blurry middle ground. This one stars Sir Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel:

* I was also disappointed we didn’t get to hear McKern and others drunkenly singing ‘Roses of Picardy’ in the third act.

Was thinking yesterday about one of the two main Rumpole stories I can recall reading, ‘Rumpole and the Genuine Article,’ and trying to remember if I’d also seen a tv adaptation. I’m still not sure if I watched it, but it turns out one exists, and furthermore the accused forger was played by Emlyn Williams, so now I’ve got to watch it when I get a moment (it’s on Dailymotion https://dai.ly/x5v2ntf).

Meanwhile, Tom Scott has posted his best new episode since the one last month about the bell foundry: ‘Hello From Inside a Tiny Boat.’
https://youtu.be/cMYYcddinkE?si=_EUtwxOGlSK0ZQWz I love how delighted this man gets whenever he’s experiencing some strange mode of transportation; or even when he’s shut in a miniature aircraft-carrier, horizontal and barely able to see where he’s going, yelling “Oh blimey there's a pedalo coming in at speed"or yelping because there’s a large moth inside the tiny Ark Royal and it just landed on his face.

Final chapter is up: https://archiveofourown.org/works/77509026/chapters/220732166

Songs I’ve recently (as in, the last couple of months) heard for the first time:

Matthew C. Whitaker of Henge also does acoustic, jazzy stuff (one commenter compares ‘Chestnut Tree’ to Jake Thackeray’s work). Sometimes it’s the same songs he sings with Henge, but a different take on them.

Pigeon, ‘Miami.’ Very ‘eighties vibe here. The band is from Margate, but “If you close your eyes, it’s just like Miami.”

Carl M. Zierher, ‘Cis und Trans, Op. 161’ Everyone’s listening to this because of the title, but it’s also quite a nice polka/mazurka. I thought maybe the title meant “Back and Forth” or “Here and There,” but according to the comments it refers to the kingdoms of Cisleithania and Transleithania in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Tinariwen, ‘Sastanàqqàm.’ The band are Tuareg, so I guess this makes them the electric-bluesmen of the Sahara. Petition to make this the new soundtrack for desert scenes in movies.

Northern Boys, ‘Party Time.’ You may want to listen to this one with headphones as the lyrics are decidedly NSFW, probably NSFAnywhere. Critics have called it “a ‘certified banger’ with ‘disarmingly frank, funny lyrics about sex, drugs, partying, and the crippling mental health issues stemming from repressed white English masculinity.’”

The Babalooneys, ‘Soup Surfer,’ I. Jeziak and the Surfers, ‘Night Owls.’ Apparently surf music is alive and well in Quebec and in Poland.

Yesterday was Bicycle Day, and today is 4/20. I looked up Owsley Stanley AKA “the Grateful Dead’s chemist,” and fell down a rabbit hole of 1960s counter-cultural references. I’d only known of Wavy Gravy by name, but his Wikipedia page is impressive. Also in his Greenwich Village beatnik days he sort of looked like a thinner version of Victor Buono as “Bongo Bennie” on 77 Sunset Strip.

Simon Fisher Turner and others talk about scoring the reissue of The Great White Silence.
Plus you get someone from the BFI remarking “Gaumont, one of the (Terra Nova expedition’s) sponsors, had specifically requested footage of penguins, and by God did they deliver.”

Turner’s Wikipedia page is also a rabbit hole.

L.T.C. Rolt's ghost stories are kind of like M. R. James, except Rolt was an industrial historian rather than a medievalist, so a large number of the stories are about haunted railways tunnels, canals and in one case, a car-racing track. It’s a good thing I watched that video of a foundry a few weeks back, or I’d have had a hard time visualizing the climax of  'Hawley Bank Foundry.'

Even more so than James or other ghost-story writers I’ve encountered, Rolt will give the reader just enough information to guess what likely happened, and then end the story very abruptly, implications hanging. He’s also quite adept at something I’d subconsciously noticed with this genre and still don’t have a convenient name for.

See, the protagonist’s usual job in these stories is to be the witness to/victim of events, so he (the characters are usually men) doesn’t actually do all that much. But at the same time, for the story to be believable we need to believe in him, so he’s got to be characterized economically, yet vividly.

Also the supernatural elements are scarier if our protagonist 'isn’t prone to flights of imagination.' In Rolt’s stories, that means we meet a gallery of veteran railway workers, hard-headed retired manufacturers from the Midlands, etc, along with the usual ambiguously-middle-class urban professionals on holiday. We usually meet them rather briefly.

 

By my standards, a luxurious social whirl.

I’d found out earlier in the week that the Yorkdale Mall has a sushi concession, so I stopped on the way home Friday and, after wandering past enormous stores well out of my price range (props to the shopper I saw wearing Gucci wellies, though), eventually found the food court.

Saturday I did my usual trip to the coffee-shop, then the thrift store. Found several nice things, the best one being a 1970s-style three-quarter-length green print dress that makes me look like a murderous guest-star on Columbo. In the evening I had a weed gummy and painted, while Andrew watched a couple of episodes of Columbo.

Sunday Andrew wanted to go to the Scribe bookshop on the Danforth, and we arranged with Don to meet at the pub afterwards. As it turned out, Line 2 was down and we had to reroute, stopping at another bookshop on College—which ended up being a good thing because Scribe turned out to be closed— they were down at the Old Paper Show & Sale instead. Andrew’d already found a Robert E. Howard hardback for thirty dollars, though, so the only downside was having to wait fifteen minutes for the pub to open (turns out The Auld Spot doesn’t open till 2pm, at least on Sundays). I let Andrew have at least one cider more than he should have had, and we taxied home with Don in tow for more conversation.

I checked oceanofpdf in the hope of finding Lou Rand’s The Gay Detective (1960). No dice, but they do have his non-fiction work The Gay Cookbook.