November 6th, 2024.

- Sid

 

The Lonesome October.

To—
Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker,
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury,
Robert Bloch, Albert Payson Terhune,
and the makers of a lot of old movies—
Thanks.

 Roger Zelazny, Dedication, A Night in the Lonesome October 

Perhaps it were best to take it day by day.

Snuff the Dog

I spent the month of October reading one book.

Well, I actually finished off four or five books, but I specifically set some time aside to read A Night In the Lonesome October, by science fiction and fantasy author Roger Zelazny. This was Zelazny's last book before his death in 1995, and apparently one of his top five favourite novels from his prolific writing career.

The book's chapters are simply the dates of the days of the month of October (along with an introduction), and as such, fans of the book have adopted the practice of reading the appropriate chapter on each day of the month.

The plot is simple: whenever the full moon falls upon October 31st, the wall between worlds grows thin, and:

 "...a number of the proper people are attracted to the proper place in the proper year on a night in the lonesome October when the moon shines full on Halloween and the way may be opened for the return of the Elder Gods to Earth, and of how some of these people would assist in the opening of the way for them while others would strive to keep the way closed."

The cast of characters (not all of whom are the proper people) is drawn from the standard genre dramatis personae, to the point where some of them go without names: the Count; the Good Doctor and his Experiment Man; the Great Detective, who spends an unexpected amount of time in drag; Morris and MacCab (standing in for Burke and Hare); a druid: a vicar who is very much not Anglican; a mad Russian; Lawrence Talbot, who knows a thing or two about the full moon; and Jack, who apparently has quite a sharp knife and no longer lives in London.  Some of these characters would seek to open the way for the Elder Gods, and some to close it, and so the plot proceeds, day by day.

The story is narrated by Jack's watchdog Snuff - or at least Snuff is a dog at the time of the story, there's a brief comment that Snuff prefers beings a dog to "what I was before he summoned me and gave me this job." Snuff enjoys an unlikely friendship with Graymalk the cat, companion and familiar to Crazy Jill the Witch.

 It's a pleasantly light read, full of little jokes and little references to the history of the genre of horror in text and film, all delivered with Zelazny's usual poetic style and effortless skill - honestly, I can't help but think that it must have been a lot of fun to write, no wonder it was a favourite of Zelazny's.  Suitable illustration is provided by Gahan Wilson, one of the premier weird artists of the 20th century.

And, as you'd expect, at the end of the story, which comes with a cleverly unexpected twist, Jack and Jill run down a hill - and Snuff comes tumbling after.

- Sid

Worldcon: "CONFIRM HUMANITY"

I was a bit surprised to see that the World Science Fiction Society Seattle Worldcon newsletter mailing list demands proof that the subscriber is human - or at least, not a robot.  Personally, I would be delighted to discover that some of my fellow attendees were either robots or aliens.

- Sid

*Come to think of it, I've actually failed this test at least once...

Hugo.

I'm going to the Hugos!

Well, technically speaking I'm attending Worldcon, the annual World Science Fiction Convention, which is taking place in Seattle from August 13th to 17th of 2025 - but in my mind, I'm going to the Hugo Awards.  

In the process of researching a previous posting on the trials and tribulations being suffered by the Hugo Awards, I happened to notice that the 2025 Worldcon host city was Seattle, which is just a hop, step and a jump away from Vancouver.  As such, I decided to do a bit of a feasibility study on attending - given that plane tickets wouldn't be a factor in expenses.  

As it turned out, there's a reduced membership price for new attendees, which brought the price down to something somewhat reasonable, and I decided to go for it.  In addition, Seattle last hosted Worldcon in 1961, the year I was born, so there's a certain symmetry in attending its return to the Emerald City. 

I'm actually a bit giddy about it - it's like being a lifelong fan of the cinema who is not only going to the Oscars, but gets to vote on the winners as well. 

I've talked about the Hugo Awards - and the eponymous Hugo himself, Hugo Gernsback - in previous postings, but I haven't gone into a lot of detail about the process.

Worldcon is the original science fiction convention - the mother of all conventions, if you will.*  The first Worldcon took place in July of 1939, but the Hugos weren't part of the event until 1953, becoming an annual awards event in 1955.  I was surprised to learn that the official title of the awards is the Science Fiction Achievement Awards, I never knew them as anything other than the Hugos** - presumably I wasn't alone in this, as the awards were officially renamed as the Hugos in 1993. 

The Hugo voting process is a little odd. In order to vote, you need to be a member of the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS). But the WSFS doesn't really exist, it's just a mechanism for hosting Worldcons, and you become a member of the WSFS by buying a ticket to a Worldcon.

However, you don't have to attend to vote, and you can buy a cheaper non-attending membership which just lets you vote for the Hugo winners and choice of the hosting city two years hence. There's also a reduced price attending membership for new attendees, staff, and "individuals who would otherwise feel cost-constrained to attend the convention." In addition, if you buy your membership before January 31st, you also have the ability to make nominations for the awards. For anyone desiring to see a detailed breakdown of the process, I direct you to the Seattle Worldcon membership page for more information.

Suffice it to say that as a first time attendee who is very aware of the current exchange rate between USD and CAD, I opted for the reduced rate adult membership, which didn't seem to raise any red flags.

As a sign that the gods were smiling upon my trip, I also managed to find a downtown Seattle rental on VRBO that came in under a thousand dollars CAD for my six night stay - provided it's not a scam (it has ZERO reviews, never a good sign, but it's also a new listing) it's a great deal, not right in the back yard of the Seattle Convention Center but close enough to the Space Needle (and monorail) to make for a reasonable commute.

Note to self - pencil in a visit to the Infinite Worlds of Science Fiction at the MOPOP!

But wait - how does the Hugo awards ceremony work?  Is there a dinner?  If so, is it extra?  Do I need to wear a tux? Make a reservation?  Is it a cash bar? Fingers crossed for a robust FAQ...

But, for now, none of that matters - I'm going to the Hugos!

- Sid

* At this point, the shade of Sir Arthur C. Clarke appears to defend the first UK fan meeting, held in Leeds in 1937, in response to which American fans point to the 1936 Philadelphia fan meet-up with members of a New York group.  Regardless, Worldcon undeniably has the title of longest ongoing event, although there was a hiatus during World War II.  (And the 2020 event was done solely online due to COVID.)

**  Hey, trivia fans - apparently a fan named Bob Madle was the genius who suggested calling the new awards the Hugos.  Madle was also a founding member of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, which hosted the 1939 Worldcon after the dissolution of the International Scientific Association by Donald A. Wollheim in 1937 following the collapse of the Science Fiction League, Hugo Gernsback's Wonder Stories-based group.  (When you start digging around on the Internet, you can end up doing some very deep dives...)

Flashback Friday.

It's been 15 years since I posted about the Voyage In Time website, which offered subscribers the opportunity to travel in time for a mere $18 investment (which, over time, would presumably grow to incalculable value and pay for the trip in a time machine).  

I happened to randomly revisit that posting today (mostly because I was looking for the Robert E. Howard post that came after it, and I wondered why I was asking people to pull on my leg in the preceding post) and I'm sorry to say that the Voyage In Time website is no longer active, and I was not able to find anything that seemed to be related after a search in Google™.

However, let's hope for the best.  I see by the screen grab that I did at the time that one Eugen Weingarten had purchased 10 time travel certificates 18 days earlier, suggesting someone who was willing to share his time travel experience with a reasonably wide circle of friends, relatives or both.  Eugen, if you somehow find this posting, please, PLEASE let us know if the site closed down after the successful development of time travel and a trip to the birth of the universe with you and nine other people!

We eagerly await your reply.

- Sid

Shrödinger's Bookstore.

The legacy of the pandemic shutdown has been surprisingly long-lived. More than a few stores that planned to temporarily shut down never re-opened, and more than a few also discovered that online sales and remote shopping were more lucrative options than they expected. 

And then there was Lawrence Books, a local used book store which closed their doors in March of 2020. When the veil began to lift in 2021, Lawrence failed to reopen, but there were no signs that the business had come to an end - signage remained in place, their sunfaded book display continued to decorate their windows, they just weren't open.  Like the cat in Shrödinger's famous mind experiment, the fate of the store was unknown.

As always, patience is its own reward.  Last week my wife Karli informed me that Lawrence Books had finally collapsed the quantum superposition by reopening*, albeit with a short three-day-a-week schedule, and I was finally able to pay them a visit this weekend.

Located at the corner of Dunbar and 41st,  Lawrence Books is very much an old school used book store: a maze of narrow aisles, unexpected nooks and dead ends, front stacked pine shelving**, and the unique smell of old paper in bulk.  It was obvious that the inventory had gone untouched for a while - when I found the Science Fiction section and started browsing, a few of the books were lightly stuck together.

I found a few things that were of interest - a few Ace Doubles in acceptable condition, a couple of replacement texts for my collection - but nothing extraordinary, nothing unique, which is really what every used book shopper hopes to stumble across. 

However, on my way to the till, I took a quick look at the minimal Fantasy selection and spotted a somewhat worn copy of the 1979 fantasy novel Urshurak, which I instantly added to my handful of purchases. It may not qualify as extraordinary, but it's a book that I've been aware of for a long time without ever having a chance to read it. 

Urshurak is one of those books that is famous more because of its back story than the novel itself. The concept was the brainchild of legendary genre artists Tim and Greg Hildebrandt, better known as the Brothers Hildebrandt.

As visual artists, the Brothers Hildebrandt came to Urshurak with a unique perspective.  Heavily influenced by Tolkien, they wanted to create their own version of Middle Earth, but based their story in art rather than text, creating a diverse and detailed portfolio showcasing the characters and key plot moments from their narrative.

When the project failed to attract any attention (or funding) as a live action film property, it was briefly promoted as an animated option, but ultimately ended up as an illustrated novel written in collaboration with author Jerry Nichols, with both coloured plates and black-and-white sketches of the original concept art integrated into the text.  I'm curious to finally take a look at the result - I don't think of Jerry Nichols as a well-known name in the science fiction and fantasy world, but there are a lot of authors out there, it's not hard to imagine that I could have just missed Mr. Nichols over time.

A final note to potential shoppers: the store's payment terminal was down when I went to pay for my books, which led to a quick game of find the banking machine (my personal pandemic holdover is that I no longer carry cash).  In spite of the sales person's information, there is not actually a cash machine at the nearby Save-On-Foods, and the machine at the Shell station across the street from Lawrence's took two attempts to accept my card - plan accordingly.

- Sid

* Well, actually she just told me that they were open again, I don't think Karli viewed it as a quantum physics situation.

** Why is it that so many used bookstores feature unfinished pine bookshelves? Is it purely a case of economy, or is there something about not having lacquer fumes near pulpwood paper that I don't know about?  

Movin' on up.

Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.

American sportscaster Vin Scully

In the past twelve years of posting to The Infinite Revolution, I've climbed up almost 8.5 million rungs in the global internet popularity ladder, moving from number 23,702,450 in September of 2012 to 15,213,405.  Yay me.

Interestingly, the number of active web sites has remained around 190 million, whereas the number of inactive sites has more than doubled, going from about 430 million to over 900 million.  It's easy to imagine digital avatars exploring the rotted remains of a website: cautiously climbing through corrupted JPEGs, scrutinizing the fragmented pieces of a database, shoring up the remnants of the HTML architecture - perhaps a suitable concept for a short story.

The most curious part of this numbers game is that according to the report, my global standing has gone down by over five million (granted, I don't know since when), but apparently I was briefly in the top 10 million.  Ah, sic transit gloria mundi...

- Sid

"It is an acquired taste..."

“More rancid yak butter in that?' 'Please,' said Lu-Tze, holding out his cup. ”

“It's the real stuff you got there, Ronnie,' he said, taking a sip. 'The butter we're getting these days, you wouldn't grease a cart with it.' 'It's the breed,' said Ronnie. 'I go and get this from the highland herds six hundred years ago.' 'Cheers,' said Lu-Tze, raising his cup.”

Terry Pratchett, The Thief of Time

"You can get a lot of things in Toronto, yak butter is not one of them."

Tasty Tours food guide Odile Chatelain

This year we're spending my birthday week in Toronto, and for our last day in the city, we did a tasting tour of Kensington Market's eclectic food scene*.  At one of our stops, we were presented with Tibetan black tea with salted yak butter, a beverage option that I would have been unaware of were it not for its semi-regular appearance in the late Terry Pratchett's Discworld fantasy novels. As such, I was probably more excited by the opportunity to sample yak butter tea than the rest of the tour.

How did it taste? Well, as our guide gently commented after surveying the room, it's an acquired taste. That being said, I found that if I treated it more as a broth than a tea, it wasn't that bad - although I couldn't tell you whether or not it was real yak butter.

- Sid

* As an example, during our tour we passed Hungarian-Thai and Jamaican-Italian fusion restaurants. Sadly, we visited neither.  Perhaps a future trip will allow us to sample the cross-over cuisine at Rasta Pasta.

Rising from the flames?

For several years now, I've been travelling to other cities for my birthday.  This year my lovely wife Karli and I have ended up in Toronto - to our relief, given that the threatened Air Canada pilot strike took us right down to the wire in terms of a possible disruption to our travel plans.

As always when I come to Toronto, we paid a visit to Canada's oldest (and best, in my opinion) science fiction and fantasy book store Bakka-Phoenix, currently located on near the University of Toronto on Harbord Street.

Karli generously purchased me a pair of hardcover novels as early birthday gifts: The Mercy of Gods, the first book in a new series by Expanse author James S. A. Corey*, and The Book of Elsewhere, a collaboration between the unexpected duo of actor/musician Keanu Reeves and fantasy-SF author China Miéville.  The Book of Elsewhere takes its inspiration from the world of BRZRKR,  the critically acclaimed 12-issue limited comic book series co-written by Reeves and Matt Kindt, with art by Ron Garney.

I also made a couple of purchases on my own - an autographed copy of All Systems Red, the first novella from Martha Wells' excellent and well-written Murderbot series, and The Folding Knife, a standalone novel by K. J. Parker*.  I enjoy Parker's writing, but I've found that his protagonists are a little too similar in their philosophies and characters - I'm hoping that The Folding Knife will break the mold a bit.

As I was paying for my selections, I noticed that there are Bakka-Phoenix pins available for five dollars, so I added one to my bill.  Given the legendary nature of the phoenix as a bird which is reborn from its own ashes, I do wonder if there's any significance in its addition to the store's name - I'd hate to think that the store might have needed to be brought back from an apparently final immolation.

- Sid 

* James S. A. Corey is actually a nom de plume for authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, and K. J. Parker is actually British author Tom Holt.  I'm reasonably certain that Keanu Reeves is Keanu Reeves.

"By Grabthar's hammer..."

"Unless you wish to poison Potter — and I assure you, I would have the greatest sympathy if you did — I cannot help you."

Severus Snape, Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix

"There were five curtain calls. I was an actor once, damn it. Now look at me. Look at me! I won't go out there and say that stupid line one more time."

Sir Alexander Dane, Galaxy Quest

As part of this year's birthday trip, this time to Toronto, my lovely wife Karli and I were invited to brunch with the family at my brother John's house.

John is the family genealogist, and I had some questions regarding our maternal grandmother that I had been unable to answer when they had come up in conversation with my wife.  As part of the discussion, he explained that although our maternal grandfather Harold Coulson had been born a Rickman, he was raised by his grandparents and as a result had taken their name.  

He then casually mentioned that while researching our grandfather, he had discovered that we were actually related to the late British actor Alan Rickman, arguably best known for his portrayal of Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies, as well as his epic performance as frustrated ex-Shakespearean actor Alexander Dane in Galaxy Quest.

Now, this is certainly cool, but honestly, even if I had known this twenty years ago earlier, I don't think it would have changed my life - even then it would have ridiculously presumptuous to reach out to him.  However, it's fun to imagine an alternate reality in which I could have sent Alan Rickman a text that said, "Hey, cousin Alan, how's it going?  Sorry to bother you, but any chance of a couple of tickets to the premiere of The Prisoner of Azkaban? If not, no big deal - good luck with the movie!" 

- Sid

"O my precious!"

First editions, original dust jackets, mint condition...and $63,000 USD, before Buyer's Premium. Sigh...  Although, just in case Bill Gates is still reading the blog - hello, Bill, I do have a birthday coming up this month... 

- Sid

Update: final sale price $95,000 USD. It's okay, Bill, that does feel like a lot of money to spend on someone you've never met, even for their birthday.

Comfort Food.

I've been working on a large and somewhat stressful deadline-intensive project for the last month or so, and as such I've found myself gravitating toward lighter reading selections - the literary equivalent of comfort food, if you will.   

Right now I'm just finishing up S. M. Stirling's General series from the early 1990s, which perfectly suits my definition of science fiction comfort reading.  This five-book military SF series is a collaboration between Stirling and fellow SF author David Drake, who created detailed story outlines for the books which Stirling then completed.

The series takes place a thousand years after the collapse of intergalactic civilization, commonly referred to as the Fall.  In the wake of this apocalyptic event, civilization on the planet Bellevue has fallen to a steam-driven level of technology, as per Europe circa the mid to late 1800s, and any remnants of the old world are worshipped as religious objects.

Raj Whitehall, an officer in the Civil Government army, is chosen by Center, a sophisticated pre-Fall quantum AI, to act as its agent in unifying the planet and beginning humanity's climb back to the stars.

Center forges a telepathic link with Whitehall and, with its guidance, he ascends through the military until he is the grand general of the Civil Government forces, which he commands as they conquer Bellevue's various splinter colonies, descended from a variety of Terran cultural backgrounds.

Outside of their well-written military trappings*, the books are just fun little reads. Set on an alien planet where the imported Terran ecology and the more primitive Cretaceous-era native biosphere have intermingled, and cavalry rides gigantic dogs rather than horses**, the dialogue is full of topical references, like talking about the sheep at the carnosauroid's congress, or referring to cavalry as dogboys, rather than cowboys. 

The various polities come from a wide range of Terran antecedents:  the Civil Government culture and language is Hispanic, its Military Government opponents, the Brigade and the Squadron, are North American (Namerique), the first-landing Colony is Islamic, and the barbarian Bekwa Skinners obviously owe a debt to Stirling's French-Canadian Québécois background, up to and including a character named Pai-har Tradaw, fils d'Duhplesi.

The overall storyline is simple but dramatic, and painted with an epic brush - heroes and villains, battles and escapades, feats of daring, court intrigues, honourable enemies, evil allies, and a cast of thousands, as they used to say in Hollywood. And there are dinosaurs - how can you not love a science fiction series with dinosaurs?

- Sid

* David Drake's knowledge of military history and service background combined to provide a solid foundation for the battles that form the backbone of the books, as well as the weapons used in those battles.  As an example, the Civil Government arms its soldiers with something very close to the Martini Henry breechloader rifle used by the British army in the colonial wars of the late 19th century. whereas the opposing army of the Colony uses repeating lever action rifles similar to any number of examples from the late 1800s. 

** Oddly, dogs are the only Terran animals that seem to have grown in stature, which strikes me as a missed opportunity.  Imagine if, say, the chickens had evolved to a similar scale...

Ephemera.

The door swung inward and she led him into the smell of dust. They stood in a clearing, dense tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur back into the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled dish antenna, a brown fiber canister stuffed with corroded lengths of alloy tubing. An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring blindly up as he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted scrap. He heard the door close behind them. He didn’t look back.

William Gibson, Neuromancer

My lovely wife is away in Victoria this weekend with her sister, and I'm taking advantage of her absence to do a low pass reconnaissance of the Vancouver Flea Market, located on the evocatively named Terminal Avenue at the south edge of the city's infamous Downtown East Side.  I'm hoping that it will prove to be a suitable venue for used book sales, giving me a starting place for liquidating most* of my book collection in preparation for retirement downsizing. 

The web site for the Flea Market claims that it offers almost 40,000 square feet of shopping with 360 tables for your shopping pleasure.  Frankly, it doesn't seem that large - although, to be honest, it never occurs to me to count the tables once I'm there.

For the most part, the sales stock is the standard flea-market selection of worn clothing, mismatched antique china cups, obsolete media - battered vinyl record albums, VHS tapes, and so on - musical instruments, porcelain figurines, wooden carvings, and one table with a corner featuring an attractive selection of reasonably-priced rocks: it's exactly the kind of place you visit if you're desperate for an affordable copy of Kenny Rogers' Greatest Hits. A surprising number of tables feature tools of varying vintage - there must be a substantial community of budget-minded tradespeople in the lower mainland to create this kind of demand.

Some of the tables are almost artistic in their disarray, giving parts of the market a surprising sort of Gibsonesque feel, like visiting Akihabara Electric Town in Tokyo, or paying a call to Metro Holographix from the Sprawl Trilogy, but without quite the same degree of otaku sophistication. (There's certainly no suggestion that there might be a sophisticated criminal cyber-fencing operation going on behind the scenes, although, really, it would be more than a little amateur of them if that was evident to the casual shopper.)

It's not all tools and emphemera, I do manage to discover a couple of sellers with objects of interest to the geek shopper. If I had wanted to start a vintage robot collection, I would have had an opportunity to jump start the process from one table, and another booth contains an astonishing jumble of unboxed toys and action figures, but they're solitary glimmers of light in the darkness, at least as far as my shopping interests are concerned. The booth with the toys is almost frustrating in its lack of organization - there might well be some incredible bargains hidden in there, but I can't help but feel that it would require a lot of sifting through the dross to find any gold.

Ultimately, as far as research for a location to sell my books collection goes, the Flea Market didn't ring the bell at all.  It just didn't seem to be the sort of location that would bring in book buyers, I think I need something with more of a collectors vibe - once again, it's a shame that Canada doesn't have a tradition of outdoor book vendors à la Paris.

- Sid 

* Obviously I'll keep a few things, although it will be challenging to triage my little library.

"Time may change me."

More than 90% of the Canadian population lives within 150 miles of our border with the United States.

Imagine if the situation was reversed, with almost the entire population of the United States living within 150 miles of the same border. Viewed from that perspective, it becomes a ridiculous prospect, with 10 percent of the American population scattered thinly through the vast area south of that limit, punctuated only by the isolated state capital of Los Angeles and its token population of only 7,700 people.*

And yet, that's the reality of Canadian geography - and society, that we have millions of square kilometers of wilderness. To be fair, northern Canada is a punishing environment during the winter months, and it would require a massive investment to create the missing infrastructure that the continental US takes for granted:  power grids, roads, dams, airports and so on.

However, we live in a changing world. Unchecked climate change may lead to parts of the world, such as the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, being uninhabitable by 2050, and much of South Asia, Eastern China, and Brazil by 2070.  As such, northern Canada's frigid environment and relative emptiness could well become a silver lining in a world of rising temperatures**.

With that as a starting point, what would the map of a future Canada be, 100 years from now? 

Tuktoyaktuk becomes the gateway to the North for cargo shipments from China and Russia, as the challenges of the Northwest Passage vanish with a diminished Arctic icepack - a timely alternative to the gently steaming waters of the abandoned Panama Canal, slowly being filled by the blowing sands of the scorched, lifeless Central American Desert.  

The Mackenzie River replaces the St. Lawrence River as the trade conduit to central Canada. Great Bear Lake and Great Slave Lake become the new Great Lakes, and home to the waterfront cities of New Phoenix, New Houston and New Miami, as we open our doors to a wave of American climate refugees - along with Nuevo Monterrey, Bago Manila, and Nouvelle Dakar.  The good news is that we have a lot of room for these heat-seared immigrants, along with a long-standing tradition of a tolerant cultural mosaic.***

And we need all those people, as the Canadian North turns into the world's biggest boom town, a bonanza of construction, development and expansion. This will be a challenge for the federal government: strict controls will be necessary to avoid having uncontrolled exploitation destroy the already heat-damaged ecology of the muskeg and the taiga, at a time when much of the world would be in the middle of an environmental disaster.

The Canadian government will also be faced with another challenge: indigenous land rights. It would be far too easy to sweep the existing indigenous population of the northern territories aside under the guise of necessity in the face of climate change.  Hopefully there would be a strengthened commitment to the current policy of indigenous reconciliation, making Canada a stronger country at a time when unity and cooperation would be of the utmost importance.

- Sid

*The approximate population of Iqaluit, capital of the territory of Nunavut.

** Ignoring for a moment the disastrous and unfortunate consequences for the Northern Canadian ecosystem itself.

*** Does everyone still learn about the Canadian Cultural Mosaic versus the American Melting Pot in high school?

Really though, shouldn't that be the Wade Wilson Wilson Wade Deadpool?

Vancouver loves Ryan Reynolds, and Ryan Reynolds loves Deadpool.

That's why we are launching this petition to honor our local hero and his iconic character by renaming the Port Coquitlam Community Centre Wading Pool on Wilson Ave to The Wade Wilson Wilson Wade Pool.

Wade Wilson is Deadpool’s real name and Deadpool is one of Ryan’s most popular and beloved roles, and also one of the most successful superhero movies of all time.

Ryan Reynolds is not only a talented actor and a hilarious comedian, but also a generous philanthropist and a proud Canadian. He has donated millions of dollars to various causes, including health care, education, and social justice. He has also supported local businesses and artists, and promoted Vancouver as a film destination.

So, what do you say? Are you ready to join us in this fun and creative campaign to celebrate Ryan Reynolds and Deadpool? Please sign and share this petition to show your support and demand that mayor Brad West make this name change official. Together, we can make history and have a good laugh

Change.org petition: Rename the Port Coquitlam Wading Pool to The Wade Wilson Wilson Wade Pool

In a long overdue initiative to recognize Ryan Reynolds and his many contributions to Vancouver, local radio stations Jack 96.9 has launched a petition to update the pedestrian and unimaginatively named Port Coquitlam Wading Pool to something a bit more exciting:  The Wade Wilson Wilson Wade Pool. Given the existence of local landmarks like Dude Chilling Park, it's not that odd a suggestion, and Reynolds is certainly a local treasure - please use the above link if you want to support the petition!

(By the way, early reviews suggest that the Deadpool and Wolverine movie is excellent, although I suspect it's excellent for a specific definition of the word: if you're not a fan of Ryan Reynold's Deadpool persona, it probably isn't going to be to your taste.)

- Sid

In other news...

Speaking of plots for post-apocalyptic stories - although after the COVID-19 pandemic, this qualifies more as contemporary fiction.

- Sid

Although I think that the analogy fails at some point.

The real joke is that in ten years, people will think that this was actually about Alfred.

- Sid 

 

July 21 update:  well, that makes sense, you give it to Batgirl instead.