Before I start - that's a bloody stupid thing to say, isn't it? - what I mean, of course, is "now that I've started, and before anything else" - where was I? Now look what you've done. Anyway. HAPPY 40th BIRTHDAY PHIL TWINE!
This week on The Jaysmiths Hit Vancouver is "firsts" week, in which I shall recount a number of new and exciting firsts! Yes. Here comes, appropriately enough, the first one...
This week we got our first Canadian credit cards. It took a while for them to show up, and it only happened because we chased the Jeff guy from RBC and he discovered they'd been left undelivered at the local branch. Nuh. So we now have credit cards. Sarah is unhappy because, despite the cards having separate names, her card is tied to mine and mine's the primary. We applied for them at the same time as our bank account, which is set up in our joint name, so there should be no particular reason why I'm more important than her - except that I'm the man, and I mean that in a purely "that's what gender I am" way. Jokes about her being "the spouse" aside, this kind of sexist crap annoys both of us.
I forgot to mention it, but last week we had our first telesales call. A very stern-voiced man attempted to persuade Mr Smith (and remember, extra points are available for uncreatively getting my first name wrong too) that I wanted to make a donation to, I think, the BC Police Benevolent Fund. Now seeing as how no-one makes donations to my benevolent fund, I can't be having with this, and I said so - although, wary of possible outcomes involving riot police being deployed on nearby rooftops, I didn't put it in quite those terms. He grumpily tried to persuade me further but it wasn't happening and I rang off. Later that evening, after we got home from somewhere, there was a message on the answerphone, and on pushing the button we were treated to five seconds of sirens wailing on the street before the call ended. Sheer coincidence, or the first of a number of inconvenience calls designed to remind me of my civic duty as perceived by charity groups? I'll keep you posted.
Sarah finally had her first tea and toast. This is slightly embarrassing. I've been drinking green tea since we got here, but Sarah's had to go without, on account of our inability to find black tea. We'd assumed this was just a case of The Marketplace (the deli/supermarket across the way) being too upmarket to stock cheap crap tea like we all drink back in England. However, we were similarly bereft of options when we tried Sainsburys (1). It seemed the only options were green tea, various herbal teas, Earl Grey (which is disgusting), and something called "Orange Pekoe", which naturally enough looked orange and therefore likely to be gruesomely un-tea-like. Turns out, as you probably all know and didn't tell us, that "orange pekoe" is just another name for "black". Because that's what you'd call something black, isn't it? Orange. Obvious in retrospect. Anyway we've now bought some of this stuff, and sure enough it's as cheap as it gets (by Canadian grocery standards) and Sarah is now tea-enabled. The bread is kinda tasty too.
Incidentally: men! If your spouse mocks you, throw a teabag at her! She won't be expecting it. My recommendation is to use a dry one, mind you.
I found my first cheap meat pies! $1.39 for a frozen microwaveable beef pie. This plus a few vegetables and I could almost be back home! It's a bit of a relief, because until then, meat pies were looking like a delicacy, at about three pounds for something which would have been a third of that in England. This Canadian health kick is quite something. You can find pastry if you look hard enough, but they seem to tax it.
Computer time!
The first patch for Zen Of Sudoku came out on Steam, and Sarah doesn't like it. It changes how the game looks, as well as giving her heart failure over the possibility that her profile had been erroneously deleted. I grumbled to the author, who to his credit responded immediately (insisting that all the changes were improvements... bah!) and now she's playing something else too, our first (aha!) software purchase in this country. The new game is called Peggle and is a kind of cross between Puzzle Bobble, Pinball and Breakout. She likes it, as she just remarked to me, because it awards her trophies. I dunno, a cheap specular twinkle on a chrome shader and she's anyone's...
I indulged in my first mammoth gameplaying session. I bought the "Season One" package of Sam & Max from Telltale Games. These are relaxed, point-and-click adventure games, very much of the old school, but being Sam & Max, they're hysterical. Sam & Max are freelance police, unlicensed to carry big guns and solve crimes with violence and caustic wit. Sam is a big, suited dog, while Max is an insane bunny. The fourth of six episodes came out at the start of March, but I've been a bit behind, so over the weekend I finished Two, Three and Four... in the course of which, Sam won "Embarrassing Idol" by inhaling helium, a mad TV host said "Blah" a lot, the Teddy Mafia (the Orso Nostro) were tracked down to and kicked out of a theme park, Max ran for (and became) US President, and the Secret Service performed a tap routine about how war benefits everyone. I giggled profusely. Max's dialogue in particular is a lesson in genius: "We come in peace, as far as you know." Well worth a look for anyone with a computer. Telltale also publish games based on CSI and Law & Order.
Comics time!
Not for the first time, Captain America is dead. Probably. For who knows how long. It's telling that one response to Captain America #25, which shipped this week and features the apparently successful assassination of Steve Rogers aka Captain America, included the shocked words: "He's never been dead before." Comics are a strange business. Anyway, this comes at the end of the extremely successful but also spectacularly late-running Summer crossover series Civil War (that's last Summer - it only finished this February) in which the government, shocked at a superpowers-related incident in Stamford where 600 people died, pushed through a superpower registration act, which split the superhero community and essentially pitted Iron Man ("sign up, it's the law, we can work within it") against Captain America ("I'll never sign, this is wrong") with everyone else taking sides as appropriate. Spider-Man, initially on the pro-reg side and persuaded to reveal his secret identity to the world, ended up switching sides when he realised the anti-reg side had a better case, but now Aunt May has been shot and he's gone back to wearing his black costume from the late 80s - pure coincidence, obviously, and unrelated to the imminence of Spider-Man 3 in your local cinema. Anyway, let me tell you, this is all very exciting, and there's never been a better time to be totally confused by Marvel Comics. Get in there, True Believer!
Hmm, I don't really know why I mentioned all that. Oh, actually, yes I do. I was reading some old UK Hulk comics from the late 70s, and wondering why the stories were homegrown rather than the more customary reprints from the US. After a few issues the letter column answers revealed that the stories were being written in the style of the Hulk TV show, which had premiered on UK TV around then. Thanks to the awareness of the Hulk built up by this show, the comic was selling over a quarter of a million copies a week. For a black-and-white magazine with six strips running at 3-4 pages each. A quarter of a million a week! Comics these days would kill for those kind of numbers. Civil War only just managed them. Different times...
Jan (my sister) once had a letter published in a Spider-Man comic. It took a long time but I eventually trumped that - the last issue of Rachel Pollack's Doom Patrol run dedicated to me. Boom!
Music time!
Sarah had her first long look at keyboards. We went to Tom Lee on Granville, where a frankly overeager saleswoman was very enthusiastic about everything until she ran out of facts and had to ask someone else a little calmer for help. We think we've found the keyboard we want; now we just have to wait until we have our new apartment, where there'll be room to put it.
We went to our first event in New Westminister. The Stylus Music School was offering some free talks about the Canadian music business and about techniques in music production. I went to the first night with Sarah but the second didn't seem too appealing so she tackled that by herself. The first speaker on the first night was very dull, wittering on about his nonprofit organisation's grants and loans, and taking a lot longer about it than he needed to. The second guy talked about music production, DJing, and the Reason software package. We thought this was very shiny, but it was clear the rest of the people in the room - a bunch of singer-songwriters if I ever saw them - were angrily tutting under their breath in a "that's not music" kind of way.
What else? We had our first Greek food out. Well, not quite our first, we ate souvlaki at The Main after choir the week before, but based on that we decided to try a Greek restaurant (Kalypso on Robson), and then another (Characters Taverna on Davie). Both featured delicious meat, although the potatoes at Characters were a bit too lemony for me. Big, big meals. Twenty quid goes a long way in a restaurant over here.
We saw our first movie, in the Paramount Famous Players cinema, conveniently located right in our block, although we have to leave our building to reach it - there should be more passageways and catwalks in cities. Our choice was Pan's Labyrinth, which was widely-regarded as the "shoulda" movie at this year's Oscars. I'm sure that it was thoroughly out-hyped in the Oscar voting stakes, but since I don't pay attention to regular hype channels, this is the movie I've heard the most about in the last few months, so for me this was the one with a lot to live up to. Our conclusions: Sarah hated all the slimy and gruesome special effects, and I thought, "Another magical realism film, so what?" For fans of fairy tales commingling with the Spanish Civil War, I'm sure it's the best film ever. For me... just another work of art telling us that we all die. Alone. In the dirt. Great. Rich or cute you have to fight the future, I know that. Sod off, Pan's Labyrinth. Someone make a happy film next time. (I should point out that Sarah and I disagree over the meaning of the film's ending, or at least that she takes it as a happy ending, and I think that that's great if that's how they might have wanted it to be read but it's my dime.) And next time we'll just go and see 300.
No photos this time, for no particular reason - just an unphotogenic week.
Stay in touch.
1) Safeway. OK. Fine. Whatever.
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