2011.10.15 — The Paris Fushigi* — Small & Trivial

Yesterday [the 14th] I spent some of my allotted time of life wresting with whether or not to blog the tiniest, most trivial of fushigis I've experienced. You would think that this kind of thing would be an easy decision to make, given the time constraints of a busy life, etc: yes or no, piss or get off the can. But I dislike passing them by because I think that the act of registering them as a kind of living scientific experiment. And I think recording them is important because that act validates their existence in my experience of life. And in all likelihood attending them quite likely encourages them or, at the very least, teaches me to notice them, even when they are as subtle as this one. But it was so small.

That wrestling has now become a part of the fushigi because of what happened the next morning while I was driving around doing the Saturday morning chores. [And when continued my writing of this on Monday I was listening to Zoë Keating on YouTube and up popped another tiny little fushigi oddity; and then another one after that.]

I'll begin with the introduction. It began in the form of a Haiku — actually, a pair of Haikus that were written as a part of a Haiku-chain game that for no obvious reason on October 14th devolved into:

My sister’s poodle
is so purebred that he barks
in Parisian French.

Oct 14, 2011 01:14pm by M.

Followed by:

Ah, Paris the place
for lovers, dreamers and art,
but so expensive!

Oct 14, 2011 03:19pm by AMF.

What triggered my itch to blog was when I got around to reading the October 14th e.mail Q sent in response to the October 13th e.mail I sent in which I ask Q about Chris Hedges. I asked Q this because we have previously discussed Chomsky and the issues of media mis-information.

And since I'd only discovered Hedges the previous week (thank you RT for linking me to Inverted Totalitarianism), I thought I'd pay RT's favour forward to Q.

date: 14 October 2011 09:50
subject: Message from Q: re: Chris Hedges

In the rather long e.mail Q writes about the difficulties of getting to web-based information in China, and resorting to books. At some point, out of the blue except as a point of interest in trying to acquire books, Q adds:

This week I'm on a business trip in Paris, for a short training on my work. [My emphasis.]

See, completely small and utterly trivial and most certainly meaningless and about as un-scientific as it is possible to get.

That was Friday.

Saturday rolled around, as it is want to do, and when I returned to my car after doing mall chore stuff I found that CBCR2 was playing an aria I didn't particularly like by someone I didn't recognize and didn't like. I changed to CBCR1, which is something that I have done extremely rarely, perhaps 4 or 5 times this year: talk radio is frequently painful for me to listen to, although RT, again, recently opened my ears to its possibility by linking me to Beauty Will Save the World. (It is an interesting discussion about beauty prompted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Speech Beauty Will Save the World. AS credits Fyodor Dostoyevsky with the puzzling statement.)

Anyway, I turned to CBCR2 and stumbled into a radio show called This is That. The host finished talking about I forget what and then introduced a story about the, as it turns out, world famous Nanaimo Bar. (In fact, as a joke I checked to see if it is famous enough to warrant a Wikipedia page. Yup. And I may have to correct

it's first paragraph, because the lowly Nanaimo Bar is apparently popular across Europe now, too, and not just North America. Oh: I live about 3 hours from Nanaimo, and have been to the small Vancouver Island city many times. Oddly enough I don't think I have actually eaten a Nanaimo bar there, despite them being a favourite I've been eating since the age of five(?) and have made on many occasions.)

Where was I? Oh! Well, it turns out that the city of Campbell River, which is to the north of Nanaimo, has a resident who has taken it upon herself to bump the highly overrated dessert off the world stage with a dessert of her own. The straw that broke the dessert back of Sherri Hickey and put her into fighting mode was when, on a European vacation, a waiter in a good Paris café offered her a delicious Nanaimo Bar.

And so it was that I came to start this Paris fushigi blog late Saturday afternoon. But later that afternoon I left for poker with the guys — which went late! And so I didn't get the blog done. Sunday was also busy, and so I returned to the blog on Monday.

Monday.

I decided to listen to Zoë Keating via YouTube while I was writing. I flipped back to YouTube whenever a song came to end, then picked from the quasi-randomized music clips. I was very surprised to see in the pick-list Zoë Keating, "Lost" @ La Boule Noire, Paris 10.23.08.

So I noted that little fushig and continued to compile my blog's elements — the various links and photos. And I also continued to listen to Keating.

But as I was doing so, it began to appear that my ISP was beginning to fail. Despite that I went to a Keating video with the title Don't Worry. But the video didn't load properly and my browser became locked. Before closing it and trying to confirm whether or not it was the internet that was broken or my pc, I read:

i like how it says paris hilton out of jail
mcxironcresentx 1 week ago [October 11th]

This was so odd to me, that I took a screen clip of it.

With my web function broken I yet again didn't get the blog done.

Tuesday [today].

Before I sat down to write this evening I finished cleaning up after supper and then watched some of the Republican debate — for my first time, ever! [However, the hypocrisy and misdirections that the various wannabes spouted was laughable. For example, the danger of Iran having nuclear weapons was raised to justify defence spending, even as the spending on foreign aid was justified with the example sited of using Pakistan as a country that allows the US to move troops. Pakistan is extremely unstable, religiously and politically, and has nuclear weapons and is quite likely the 2nd biggest nuclear threat in the world behind the USA.]

Anyway, I got tired of the lies and misdirections. TV was so bad that I wound up flipping to watch the end of the new Sarah Michelle Geller show (Ringer Episode 6) to see how it was before settling down to write. (Yup, I was procrastinating!) The show seemed confused and not particularly well written. But the final scene was of the character's 'ringer' setting up, or confirming, some evil plan from a cell phone in, yup, Paris.



Wednesday.

2011.10.19 6:54am — Addendum
I got in the car this morning to drive to work. CBCR2 was playing something I didn't like, so I flipped the station to my second-choice station, Shore 104 FM in Vancouver. I hear the very end of a song, and then:

Sundown in the Paris of the prairies
Wheat Kings have all their treasures buried
All you hear are the rusty breezes
Pushing around the weather vane Jesus.

This is from the song Wheat Kings by The Tragically Hip.
From Shore, here's the play listing: 6:17 AM "WHEAT KINGS" - THE TRAGICALLY HIP.