CSotD: Random Short Takes
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Let's begin with a delayed comment that might have made the blog on August 31 but is equally relevant today. When this Between Friends strip ran back then, it struck me that, Canadian Thanksgiving being tomorrow, freshmen there barely get through their clean underwear before they can bundle it up and take it home to be washed.
It's a good reason to postpone Thanksgiving for another five or six weeks, though I don't think it came into the thinking when we were setting our holiday calendar down here. Still, Susan's "We won't have seen you for months" should be "weeks" and is a pretty funny commentary on her desperation to keep the chick in the nest a little longer.
American Thanksgiving was soon enough. I went home freshman year and felt so changed by my 10 weeks at college that I expected some kind of Rip Van Winkle sense of disconnection, but it was the opposite: Although I had changed, nothing else had.
That was the last year I went home for Thanksgiving, not because I didn't like the holiday but because the hassle of crossing half the country for a four-day weekend wasn't worth it.
Which reminds me that nearly everything I know about Newfoundland is because of Canadian Thanksgiving, since my uncle's roommate at the University of Toronto was from St. John's. It made no sense to go 1300 miles back home, so they made the shorter 300-or-so mile trek to our house, and repeated it yearly with a growing crew.
It made for a jolly houseload each year, but I'm also impressed by Emma's offhand comment that she may not be coming back anyway.
"Wings and Roots" being the goal of good parenting, Susan and Harvey have done all right.
Speaking of distances
I've just ordered Sarah Laing's new graphic memoir, "Mansfield and Me," which is taking a bit of a risk except that I've followed her blog and the random cartoon memoirs she has posted there, as well as occasional updates on this major project and I don't expect to be disappointed.
Ordering from New Zealand required a little more thought than popping it in from Amazon or going down to the wonderful local bookstore full of thoughtful books like this that I haven't lived near in some 30 years, but it appears that, with postage to the US, it will run me in the neighborhood of $34 US, which isn't cheap but, based on Laing's track record, will be worthwhile.
Plus, it was blurbed by Dylan Horrocks, so there ya go.
“Sarah Laing’s gorgeous, playful drawings and self-deprecating humour lightly mask a complex meditation on writing, celebrity and the conscious construction of self. A very New Zealand coming-of-age story: brilliant, funny, thoughtful and smart.”
Now, given that I'm more concerned with how I will get it than how I will like it, the next matter is to see if they stick it on a jet and get it out here by next week or simply strap it to the back of a penguin and toss it into the South Pacific.
I'll let you know, particularly if it arrives in time that you could replicate the effort in time for the holidays, those being the same in the US, Canada and New Zealand.
While we wait for the mail …
Today's BC reminded me of one of my favorite columns ever, in part because the piece was an instructive reminder of how the terror of the "new" gets exploited, and partly because it was such a ridiculous, but not atypical, example of the phenomenon.
Well before anyone was harvesting clicks, they were still anxious to lure in the readers with scary stories about the latest threat.
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