"Je ne regrette rien."

You Know You're a Geek When, Part 4.

Gimli: Legolas! Two already!

Legolas: I'm on seventeen!

Gimli: Huh? I'll have no pointy-ear outscoring me! [kills another one]

Legolas: [shoots two more arrows] Nineteen!

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 

My workplace is currently going through a process of reviewing and optimizing our procedures in hopes of improving efficiency and creating a more streamlined system.  This isn't an easy process - among other issues, we're ridiculously paper-based, considering that it's 2022.  And I do mean ridiculously, I personally print over a million* pages of training support material on an annual basis.

As part of the review process, everyone has been tasked with logging their productivity on a daily basis.  It's not as onerous as it sounds, but there have been some challenges in establishing appropriate scaling for metrics.  We were discussing this during one of our morning productivity meetings, and I raised the problem of measuring quantity rather than size in terms of productivity.  Sadly, it turned out to be a bit of a weregeek moment.

"It's like the second Lord of the Rings movie, where Legolas the Elf and Gimli the Dwarf are competing to see who has the higher kill count in their various battles, right?"

Silence and blank faces.  Undeterred (and obviously unwilling to read the room) I continued:

"And at one point, Legolas takes out a huge war elephant, this gigantic tusked monster.  He slides down the trunk of the fallen creature and hops off to stand nonchalantly in front of Gimli, who frowns at him and shouts, 'That still only counts as one!'  It's the same sort of problem - we have to look at scale rather than just counting events."

More silence followed - I think that the other attendees were either puzzled, confused, embarrassed for me, or all three, I've never had more people avoid eye contact. Well, too bad, I regret nothing, it was a perfect analogy for the problem, geek reference or not - muggles.

- Sid 

*Yes, ONE MILLION, to quote Doctor Evil.

"I create myself."

Rose: I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself. I take the words, I scatter them in time and space. A message to lead myself here.

The Parting of the Ways, Doctor Who

In the first season of the 2005 Doctor Who relaunch, writer and showrunner Russell T. Davies started the idea of introducing Easter Eggs for the show's finale that would appear throughout the season.  For that first season, it was the phrase "Bad Wolf", that appeared as a project development title*, in conversational references, on posters, as a TV channel, a corporate name, and several times as graffiti. 

In the final episode, Rose Tyler, the new Doctor's first companion, gazes into the Time Vortex and becomes temporarily omnipotent.  She names herself the Bad Wolf and then broadcasts those words into her own past as a signal to herself in the future.**

Yesterday I saw bad wolf painted on a brick wall in Gastown, and a small part of me asked, "Rose...were you here?"

- Sid

* Albeit in Welsh.

** Wibbley wobbley, timey wimey...

Bakka at 50: Memories

Bakka: In Fremen legend, the weeper who mourns for all mankind.

Frank Herbert, Dune 

It's been 50 years since the Bakka Science Fiction Book Shoppe first opened its doors in 1972 under the ownership of Charles McKee, a dedicated American science fiction and comic book fan who had originally moved to Canada in protest of the war in Vietnam. The store's name comes from an obscure reference in the glossary at the end of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune - it's a bit of an inside joke, based on the fact that the term never actually makes an appearance in the novel.

The comic books section split off to its own store in 1976 as The Silver Snail, which has just recently returned to Queen Street.

My first visit to Bakka would have taken place only a couple of years later, when I was attending high school in Muskoka, Ontario's cottage country. A friend's father had some business to conduct in Toronto, and we went along for the ride, with the specific goal of making our way to Queen Street West and shopping at Bakka and the Silver Snail.  In those pre-internet days, I wouldn't have known that either store existed were it not for an article in the Toronto Star, and we looked up their addresses in a Toronto phone book at a booth on the corner of Queen and McCaul.

I did Saturday Greyhound bus shopping trips to Toronto every few months until 1983, when I moved to Toronto to attend university.  Other than a brief return to Muskoka (just long enough to buy a house, get a divorce, and sell the house) I lived in Toronto until 2005, when I relocated to Vancouver.     

That period of time saw the purchasing of the bulk of my science fiction and fantasy library.  I visited Bakka almost every weekend and bought a handful of used or new books on every visit, it would have been a rare event to have left empty handed. You could say that Bakka was my Cheers - everybody really does know your name if you shop in the same bookstore once a week for over 20 years. 

I think of the constants from that era as being John Rose (left) and Jack Brooks, generally seen shelving books in his distinctive coveralls.  John was originally hired to manage Bakka in 1979, but purchased the store a year later, and his thoughtful, knowledgeable and intelligent leadership was responsible for transitioning Bakka from something of an amateur business into a superb independent genre book store. 

After owning Bakka for over 22 years, John passed the baton to Ben Freiman in 2003, who added Phoenix to the store's name to indicate its reborn status.  Freiman moved the store to its current location on Harbord Street near the University of Toronto in 2010.
 

The cautionary truth of any sort of independent retail outlet is that it exists not only on the basis of its success in the marketplace, but as an expression of its ownership. The fact that Bakka has managed to survive for 50 years is a testament to the quality of its service, the loyalty of the science fiction and fantasy community, and most importantly to its great good fortune in the succession of dedicated and engaged owners who have kept the business going through recessions, relocations, megastore competition, digital books, and COVID-19. 

A very happy 50th birthday, Bakka - and best wishes for another 50.

- Sid