Stuff and Moonshine

In the process, he took a brief detour down the alley of Burton Cummings

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:56:28 GMT

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

comments

Small Prophets (2026), dir. Mackenzie Crook

Thu, 28 May 2026 17:32:42 GMT

Having watched the first episode a few months back, yesterday we binged the entire six-part series. The episodes are half-an-hour each, so it wasn’t really that outrageous a binge—three hours is the length of many feature films these days.

As a series, and even watched all at once, the pacing is pretty good—leisurely, but I never felt bored. It’s a fantasy story that manages to feel like a slice-of-life comedy even as the weird plot elements start to stack up; and it sticks the landing in the final episode when all the storylines converge on the house at 30 Marvin Gardens.

I’m saying as little as possible to avoid spoiling the story, but just in case you’ve seen the first episode and are worried for the character: Michael’s aged father Brian (Micheal Palin) makes it out to the end of the series still alive and as well as an octogenarian with mild dementia can be, i.e. he wins a Triumph motorcycle in one of the contests he’s always entering and is somewhat annoyed they won’t let him ride it around the grounds of the retirement home.

The ending leaves us with a few mysteries and a “To Be Continued” title, but I’d be just as satisfied leaving the sequel to the audience’s imagination. Though if there’s a second season (reportedly there will be) I’m also willing to watch.

comments

Work Update

Fri, 22 May 2026 13:08:52 GMT

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.

comments

Quiet Day So Far

Thu, 21 May 2026 13:24:53 GMT

Just got a call at work from a woman who said, “This is kind of a strange question” and then asked if the company I’m currently with was in the same building as the [name] law firm. I asked “Are they immigration lawyers? There’s an immigration-law office on the third floor here.”

She confirmed that that was indeed the firm she was asking about, and explained she’d been wondering if they were legit and had decided that a good starting point would be to check if their listed address was genuine.

comments

Art-related show update

Wed, 20 May 2026 16:08:40 GMT

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.

comments

The Bride! (2026), dir. Maggie Gyllenhaal

Sat, 16 May 2026 10:43:17 GMT

We watched this last night and it was just as delightfully bonkers as the trailers had promised. Bride of Frankenstein, 1930s crime film, feminist fable, ghost story, musical, the parts don’t always fit together perfectly but it doesn’t matter because it’s an exquisite-corpse about an exquisite corpse (Jesse Buckley), an escort formerly known as Ida till possession by Mary Shelley’s ghost (also Jesse Buckley) moved up the Chicago mob’s time-table on bumping her off for knowing too much.

As it happens, Frankenstein’s monster (Christian ~~Slater~~ Bale) is in town and wants Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) to make him a mate—one trip to the potter’s field and a jolt of electricity and revitalizing fluid and our heroine is back, still intermittently channelling Mary, and ready to revolt and to dance. I love that Gyllenhaal makes one of the key scenes in the film a tribute to the Puttin’ on the Ritz number in Young Frankenstein. This is a movie that loves all its sources. It rolls around in them.

I haven’t even brought up Penélope Cruz and Peter Saarsgard as police detectives who seem to have wandered in from a completely different movie, Jeannie Berlin as Dr. Euphronius’ walking Otto Dix painting of a maid, or the monster’s fanboy crush on polio-survivor-turned-movie-star Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal). Zlatko Burić, who seems to be making a career of playing sleazebags, is appropriately vile as the mob boss Lupino, but he’s only in a couple of scenes because it’s not really about him.

Apparently this has been a box-office bomb. I hope Gyllenhaal’s directing career doesn’t suffer for it, and I hope the movie gets a cult following in the coming years with midnight screenings and the audience showing up in costume. I know I plan to watch it again.

ETA— Good soundtrack, too.

comments

Video round-up (two videos is a round-up, right?)

Wed, 06 May 2026 15:46:02 GMT

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.

comments

May Day 2026 (edited down from my tumblr posts of early this morning)

Fri, 01 May 2026 13:58:12 GMT

Amazingly, found the morris dancers before they started. One of these years I’ll wise up and take the subway instead of hiking up from the south end of the park. Spent several minutes homing in on what I thought was faint music in the distance and turned out to be the Grenadier Restaurant’s generator.

Above-average number of people in cloaks here. Props to the person in the Metallica Pushead Sun hoodie.

We’ve been informed it’s five minutes to sunrise. Someone is tootling a wild concerto in their car horn.

They’ve blocked off the road this year so we won’t have to yell CAR like it’s a street-hockey game.

Man in Charge: *bellows something*
Man with glasses drawn on his face, carrying a small broom: “He’s saying the next dance is called ‘The Bells of York.’”

The man with glasses drawn on his face has offered somebody a dry leaf. Am beginning to suspect him of being one of the Fair Folk.

"This is going to go on for a bit, so if you want to step away and go for a coffee, or a meal, or to put a child through university, that’s all right. It’ll all look just the same when you come back.”

comments

Meadowville

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 19:59:59 GMT

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

comments

Reading

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 13:35:23 GMT

H. R. Wakefield is mainly remembered for his ghost stories, and for frustrating scholars of the genre by saying he’d had “over a hundred” published, of which only sixty or so are known, and nobody’s sure if he was exaggerating or if there are still a bunch out there.

Meanwhile, a lot of the stories in the anthologies I’ve downloaded aren’t stories, or even weird fiction or sff, at all. ‘Swim-Ease’ is a lightly comic novella about a woman attempting the first-ever cross-Atlantic swim, on behalf of a bathing-suit manufacturer. It’s a delight, and I wish some studio had turned it into a quota-quickie.

comments

Starting to think about putting together a pre-summer playlist

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 13:22:30 GMT

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.

comments

Music Question

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 23:43:21 GMT

Anyone hear of an indie label called Sarah Records, and/or of a band called Heavenly, from the early 1990s?

I’d never heard of them, although I see their singer, Amelia Fletcher, is important enough that another band have written a song about her:

comments

Weekend Report

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:55:28 GMT

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.

comments

Royal Canadian Air Farce, “The Mad Trapper of Rat River”

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 17:58:03 GMT

Lying awake at 4:30am, I suddenly realized how Goon Show-influenced this episode was. Embarrassing that it took me so long, given that one of the performers is straight-up doing the Bluebottle voice.

comments

Painting Update 2– closer to the Abstract

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 17:29:22 GMT

comments

Painting Update

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 17:26:09 GMT

The lunchroom at my current job:

comments

Meadowville, chapter 10

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:25:12 GMT

In which Hanna calls in a favour, and plays lawyer.

comments

YouTuber Tom Scott is posting videos again

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:46:56 GMT

Yesterday’s was a trip to Taylor’s Bell Foundry where Anthony and Sam, a pair of large cheerful men who look as though they probably have the upper-body strength of medieval long-bow archers, cast and re-cast church bells while discussing what kinds of cheese everyone would be if they were cheese (“I asked Josh. He’s mozzarella.”)

comments

Weekend Report

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:28:19 GMT

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.

comments

Meadowville, Chapter 9

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 11:37:49 GMT

https://archiveofourown.org/works/77509026/chapters/215938916

Walter and Livia continue their adventure underground. Hannah’s search for them takes her to an unexpected place.

comments

Weekend Report

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 20:21:45 GMT

The world continues to be lousy, but at least winter is drawing to an end.

On a self-centred level, I’m happy to finally have a paying gig for a bit. The assignment is officially for about two months, but the agency said it might get extended, and the temp I’m replacing has been there since last August and is leaving now only because she got a permanent offer from a different company closer to her home in Oakville (and in trucking logistics, which is her chosen specialty). She told me it’s a pleasant work environment and the staff are all pretty nice; adding “and I’m a real bitch, so I don’t say that about just anybody.” My first week seemed to bear this out. Also the employee kitchen has good snacks (keeping it stocked is one of my duties): fresh fruit, granola bars, yogurt cups, instant oatmeal packets—so I won’t have to pack or buy myself any breakfasts as long as I’m working there.

comments

Dream Report

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:23:41 GMT

Had several dreams, including one in which sovay and I were watching an old movie titled, iirc, Coral Island, though it had nothing to do with the Edwardian boys’-adventure novel of the same name. I’m pretty sure Robert Newton was in it, though his character disappeared from the plot midway through.

sovay then learnt of some recently-discovered footage in which the camera had been kept running between takes, and the chatter of the actors was audible. In the manner of dreams, the footage was immersive, and we could walk into it. Apparently we were visible to them, though they took us for extras and mostly ignored us, except for somebody from Wardrobe who ran up and handed me some more-appropriate stockings and shoes.

Somehow this then segued into a different dream in which I was editing/writing speeches for the Democrats. I kept telling anybody who’d listen that I was Canadian and I wasn’t sure if I could legally work for them, but nobody paid any attention. Also the speech I was writing eventually turned into a script about the protagonist seeking advice from a magical cat.

comments

Meadowville, Chapter 8

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:05:13 GMT

Livia is Missing

comments

Friday Update

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 23:22:07 GMT

Got a temp contract starting Tuesday, as an admin assistant at the offices of a construction company. I plan to overdye my hair back to brown till I can figure out what the unspoken dress code is—“business casual” can mean just about anything. Mind you, at my last long-term job, also construction-adjacent, the head of Payroll mainly wore hoodies with classic-rock logos on them and had both his ears pierced. In any case I feel like changing up my hair a little. Was going to dye it today but the weather dissuaded me from shopping.

Watched the National Theatre’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest last night. It’s up on YouTube till the 18th if you want to watch it too. Heard of it because Ncuti Gatwa plays Algernon, and he’s excellent, but Sharon D. Clarke as Lady Bracknell is amazing.

comments

Weekend Update

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 03:04:16 GMT

Posted more Meadowville and Gentleman of the Shade.

Watched the first couple of episodes of Bookish, starring Mark Gatiss as Gabriel Book, who runs Book’s Books and solves mysteries on the side in 1947 London, along with his wife Trottie (Polly Walker) and assorted other characters.

comments