RON 'ANCHORMAN' BURGUNDY'S YOUNGER BROTHER, OR 'CANUCKINASIA'? YOU BE THE JUDGE...

WHY WORKING WITH KIDS ALLOWS YOU TO BECOME THE TERMINATOR WHENEVER YOU DAMN WELL CHOOSE

One of the marvellous assets about working with people under the age of, oh, eighteen is that you can see them in the hallway, and smile at them, and wave at them, and make your finger into a little gun, pointing at their heads while stating flatly in your best Schwarzenegger: "I have come from the future to terminate your existence."

You can then mime shooting them in the face, and they will most likely fall half-way over the stairway railing, managing, in the process, to unleash their own imaginary uzi whose rapid fire bullets strike you in the chest. At which point you can fall to the floor, and they will laugh, and ask if you are alright, and you can stand up, nod, smile and be on your own way to the next class.
And they will think nothing of it. Such goofiness is second nature. Their reaction to your idiotic lunacy will be the same: idiotic lunacy. Kids are hard-wired into avenues of creativity and play that seem like foreign countries I used to visit. They remind me of how I used to think; how I can still think, if I choose. The colours of life can become more vivid, and the gaps between hours richer, fuller, less stolid and adult.

The problem with adults is that we pass each other in the hall, and nod, and smile, and ask how's it going, and pretend to hear the response. We interact without imagination or flair or colour. And our everyday attempts at levity often feel like those old black-and-white movies from the forties that Ted Turner colorized in the eighties-- creepily static and oddly tainted.

Much better to greet somebody you know by pretending to be The Terminator sent from the future to eradicate their existence, only to discover that they, in fact, have turned the tables on you for once and for all, and that you have to fight to maintain your grasp on the here and the now by eluding their invisible arsenal of destruction.

Makes the day go by quicker, is what I'm saying.

LIFE AND DEATH: THE NEW UNDERARM DEODERANT

The ruler I found lying around the large white plastic desk at work has Joy emblazoned across the side. The whiteboard marker I use to erase my messy scrawl is Valiant, or so it says. Inanimate objects have been christened harbingers of the finest human emotions, apparently.

I mean, c'mon. Who's kidding who here, right?

We're talking rulers. We're talking whiteboard erasers. If these puny, functional objects wield the greatest sensations known to man, then what hope is there for us, the rest of us, the human ones I mean?

It reminds me of a Jerry Seinfeld appearance on the Regis Philibin show a few years back. He was riffing as only Seinfeld can, talking about how he was eating LIFE cereal a few days back, wondering who the genius advertising execs were who named this particular product.

"I don't know," Seinfeld said. "If it were me, I would have called them 'Wheateos', or 'Toast-eos'. But somebody sat in a meeting and actually said: "No, this is bigger than that. This is life."

(It's, um, probably funnier when he does it. I swear.)

What's next, is what I'm asking. Pencils marked Ecstasy? Staples labeled Orgasmic? I can see it coming. (No, uh, pun intended.)

Everything has to be happy and bright and shiny and heroic. Things can't be just what they are, otherwise life would be revealed to be, well, mundane. Even difficult.

If we feel the need, as a species, to label office stationery with such superlative endorsements, life itself seems to become cheap and trival and somehow tainted.

In my opinion, anyway. It's all irrelevant anyway, I guess. Excuse me, but I've got to go eat a chocolate bar, Mars, named after a massive planet, a wonder of the universe. And read a magazine, Time, named after the unstoppable hunter that hunts us all. While slapping on a cologne, Eternity, a notion encompassing all the past and the future, but designed essentially for the purpose of making me stink less.

JUNIOR HIGH INDUSTRIAL ARTS AS THE NINTH LEVEL OF HELL

Tall, with slicked-back red hair, constantly clad in a white lab coat, Mr.Stapleford made morticians seem downright exuberant. Hell, undertakers were fucking riots compared to him. His movements were slow and deliberate, as if he were tired of life, or pacing himself towards some ultimate violent outburst, like the Terminator, but without the payoff of carnage. (Only the possibility of it.)

"This machine will not chop your finger off," he said. "It will slice it off. Slowly and painfully. And I don't want to clean up the blood."

Followed by a physical demonstration of a hunk of wood sliced (not chopped) by a swirling, whirling blade. And me, twelve years old, having recently been introduced to the blood-soaked words of King and Barker, Straub and Slade, suddenly confronted by my own potential for mayhem. Me, gulping, thinking: I'm now supposed to use this fucking thing? Thanks for the pep talk, teach. Mr.Chips ain't got nothing on you.

I've since seen first-hand Khmer Rouge killing fields and the ruins of Hiroshima, but nothing in life compares to the fear contained within the walls of my junior high Industrial Arts classroom. Everyone worked at their own pace, which usually meant that everyone else would move through steps one, two, three and four while I still struggled to somehow fit my plastic goggles over the bulky lenses of my Robocop glasses. (The cardboard kind used for 3-d movies were downright cozy in comparison to those protective lenses.) The ultimate end-result being, at the conclusion of one semester, a slew of barely begun projects littering my locker: blocks of misshapen wood, small slabs of ragged steel, never to be completed. Good-bye, metal box. Perhaps in another life I will make you mine.

I didn't actually give a shit about not completing the projects; I knew from the get-go in life that mastering carpentry would not be my ultimate destiny, that Bob Villa would never have anything to fear from me should we somehow, someday meet at high noon on a dusty street while tumbledweeds tumbled on by and the powerdrills in our hands began to pulse. No, what pissed me off was being made to feel like a spastic loser for not understanding how to operate a lousy lathe.

What saved me from failing the class -- both years -- were the tests. Tests, I could handle. I fucking hated them, yes, but I would study my ass off and end up almost acing (or at least passing) most of them.

Before each exam, good old Stapleford would slide giant wooden rectangles into pre-carved slots in our desks, so there was no conceivable way we could cheat. Jesus Christ! I remember thinking. This guy's a loony! What is this, Harvard? We're twelve-year old St.Catharines kids!

When handing back my first test, which I did quite well on, Stapleford held my eyes to his own, as if judging my competency and reliability, then said: "You were so incompetent with your projects that I was stunned to see you do as well as you did on this exam."

Was he waiting for me to admit to cheating? Was he hoping for a confession? I smiled a sheepish smile and took the paper and looked at the floor. I wanted to say: "How could I have cheated?What, do you think I burrowed a fucking hole into your dividers during the test? Is what you said supposed to be some kind of a compliment, you fucking prick?"

(And if you doubt that twelve-year old kids thought like that or spoke like that, then you must have forgotten what it was like to be twelve years old in the first place, in command of yourself and your language for the first time in your life. Willing to step outside of the parameters of enforced childhood etiquette into the liberating realms of vulgarity and scorn.)

But I survived. I didn't think I would but, I did, as most kids do. There were times during those days, lost in my own incompetence, when I would stare out the window at the freshly cut grass and deep blue sky and wonder when, or if, it would ever end. I didn't know that Toronto and Tokyo and Phnom Penh lay beyond the realms of those suburban streets. I couldn't have imagined it. All I had in front of me were projects that would be stillborn and mutant.

Eventually, it ended. Good-bye, wood chips. So long, metal box.

And now, whenever I feel the urge to criticize one of the Korean kids I'm teaching for some boneheaded error or another, I try to get myself to stop, and breathe, and chill. In their eyes, I may very well be their own version of Mr.Stapleford, white and foreign and speaking in a strange tongue only half-way comprehensible. I am big and they are small. They may remember my words, and those words might sting, even years later. And really: who gives a shit that they can't do this or that properly? They're kids, and it's our job to ease their passage into the tough and lonely years that lie ahead.

Memory lasts a long time. I'd rather they remember a pat on the back than a snide, snarky comment that can burn, even scar.

A MYSTERY SOLVED? (MAYBE...)

I'm flat-out fucking floored by the fact that a suspect has been arrested in Thailand in the murder of child beauty-queen Jon Benet Ramsey.

Why the shock?

Because last year (as I recorded in this blog), I became slightly obsessed with the decade-old Ramsey case, after reading a wonderful book that convinced me, big-time, that the killer of the kid was her mother, Patsey Ramsey, who recently passed away from cancer.

After researching the case, pondering the evidence, weighing the probabilities, I was convinced that the mother, in a fit of rage, accidentally killed her daughter -- and that the husband then helped her cover it up.

Now, this new news shakes everything up.

I thought I was quite the amateur sleuth. I thought I'd figured it out. I thought the book was closed and that a murderer had passed away without serving justice.

Damn, I guess I don't know everything after all.

Let's just say I'll be following the upcoming developments pretty darn closely.

(And I still think she did it...)

A BRAVE NEW WORLD; JOHN D.MACDONALD; THE OPPOSITE OF AMBIDEXTROUS?

You know you've entered a brave new world when your departing student -- Korean, good-natured, always smiling -- chooses as a memento of your class a video taken of you wishing him good-luck, a video taken on his motherfucking dictionary.

Me, I used to settle for a handshake. Wait. That's a lie. Usually I didn't say anything to my departing teachers; after all, the door was open, summer break was near -- who had time for such adult pleasantries? But my students, some of them, were here for only two weeks, and I am a foreigner, and who knows when they'll get to shoot the shit with one of those exotic creatures again anytime soon?

So, my student pointed his electronic dictionary at me, told me to say a few words, then videotaped my good wishes to his heart's delight -- and to my rather low-key astonishment. I watched myself played back for our mutual amusement on the tiny monitor, the picture stilted but clear, the sound muffled but adequate.

I shouldn't have been so surprised. I taught in Japan for four years, and have been teaching Koreans for almost a year, and they always bring to class gidgets and gadgets that will hit western shores in five, six years time. Let's make it seven. I think Canada and America are probably about seven years behind, electronically, the best that Japan and Korea have to offer. (One of my former students, an elderly gentlemen in Japan who used to be head of Research and Development for Toshiba, told me that his company was working on DVD technology back in '85 -- right when video was just hitting its stride.)

Earlier this year my student asked me: "What's the English word for turning on your microwave with your cellphone?"

"Good question," I said. (Thinking: What the fuck?) "We don't have an English word for that function, because our cellphones don't do that."

But they sure as hell do in Korea and Japan. You can buy a Coke with your cellphone -- just hold your phone up to the vending machine, and, via the magic of pre-paid cards, you can guzzle to your heart's delight. You can order movie tickets. Register for lotteries. Check train schedules. And don't even get me started on what you can do in convenience stores.

And who knows what's in store for us? I saw a piece on the news about an event that happened in Hong Kong a little while back, where a rather heated argument broke out between a younger man and an older man on a subway. The older man berated his junior antagonist with vigor and energy. A fellow passenger videotaped the confrontation on his phone. Posted it on the web. The video spread. Within a few days the old guy's outburst was being used as a ringtone for cellphones all across Hong Kong.

So one minute you could be shouting at an asshole, or have him shout at you, and the next your voice would be used to serve as the wake-up call to sleepy commuters across China. Mama mia.

Living in Cambodia, and in some sense the Philippines, has been a good reality check, though. As far behind as Canada and America are, there are other countries even further back. (Not that this lack of progress is a good thing. But it does show that you can still function and glide through life without being constantly inundated by the latest, gotta-have-it technology.)

And as Bogie knew so well, the fundamental things apply as time goes by. A video camera in your electronic dictionary won't make your English any better, I don't think.

It could, however, be just cool enough to impress your old-fogey of an English teacher. That's gotta carry some street cred back in Seoul.

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I first encountered author John D. Macdonald through his introduction to Stephen King's short-story collection Night Shift back in junior high school, and for many years, decades, in fact, that was where my involvement with Mr.Macdonald started and finished. I kept going back to that introduction, which commended King for his style and his sense of story, and which also served as a subtle lesson in how to write well. He was an intensely prolific writer of paperback originals, crime books, mostly (though not exclusively), and for some reason or another his own works eluded me; mostly because a lot of them were out of print, I suppose.

Recently, though, through the magic of astonishingly cheap used book-shops here in Baguio, I've been able to pick up a dozen or so of his paperbacks from the 1950's and 60's and 70's at less than twenty, thirty cents a pop. The original, tattered paperbacks. Speaking from the past. Rugged and well-read. Hinting at the humanity and insights to be found within their tales of crooked men and desperate women.

And you know what? Big surprise. The man is good. Real good.

There's something about crime fiction I especially like -- its lack of pretension and snobbery. The story in crime fiction exists to move. The book exists to tell us about something bad that happened to this particular set of people, and because the focus is on the story, the subtext, the human emotions, the lessons learned, are allowed to hover below the surface instead of announcing their importance at every opportunity, as the worst of 'literary' fiction so often does.

Macdonald was most famous for his private-eye series of Travis McGee series, but his first hardcover bestseller, Condominium, is an excellent read, humane and true. One condominium complex in Florida in the late seventies. The sad and lonely lives of its inhabitants. A hurricane on the way. You can do the math. A metaphor for life itself, some might say, all of us living together, foolishly making our way through our lonely little lives, aware that we're perched precariously on the edge of disaster, but living anyway, the best that we can. Until the calamity starts, and we're all washed away.

A powerful, thoughtful book that glides along effortlessly. (Of course, the most effortless books are usually the ones that were the hardest to write. To look effortless takes a lot of effort.)

It's always nice, at a later age, to discover writers who speak to you. It's as if they've been waiting there all along -- on the rack, behind the shelf -- wondering when you would find them.

And when you find them, all you have to do is open up.

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What's the opposite of ambidextrous? Monodextrous?

I'm not sure. It sounds like it would be lonely -- to be the opposite of something as agile as
'ambidextrous'. If you can use both hands to do anything, it gives you a sense of power and grace. If you can only use the one, I would imagine that would make you feel somewhat inferior. But that can't be the case, because most people aren't ambidextrous, right? Most people use the hand they're good at to cut with scissors, hold their cups, change the channel. (Me, I'm a lefty; my right hand is pretty much confined to typing.)

Do ambidextrous people secretly sneer at the rest of us? Do they look at the consistency with which we use only one hand and roll their eyes at how underdeveloped we are as humans? Do they wait for the human race to evolve so that, eventually, all of us, united, brethren, separated no more, will rule the earth with both hands as our humble and hungry servants, obedient to our ferocious, ravenous, insatiable will?

I'm just asking.

SENSATIONAL SLINEY; GOLDMAN THE GREAT; FOREIGN CHILDREN FIGHTING; BAGUIO CITY, IN ALL ITS GLORY

While watching UNITED 93 in the theatre last week, the stunningly powerful new film about 9/11, I couldn't help but be impressed by the performance of the actor playing Ben Sliney, the head of the FAA, the utterly ordinary but singularly courageous dude who made the unprecedented decision to shut down all air traffic control in and out of the United States on the morning of that fateful, horrific day. He seemed so natural, so unaffected, so real; only a superior actor could pull that off, I decided. Probably had stage training, I reflected. Until I checked the web a few days later and discovered that the thespian chosen to portray Ben Sliney was none other than Ben Sliney. The guy. The real person.

I was shocked, though I shouldn't have been. He was so natural that he wasn't acting at all, it seemed to me -- which, paradoxically, is the best kind of acting there is, where you don't notice any acting at all.

And yet, of course, Ben Sliney was acting. He was recreating what had happened to him almost five years ago. (And, get this -- September 11, 2001, was his first fucking day on the job. Welcome to your new world...) He even admitted in an interview that he was asked to swear in the scene where he sees the gaping hole in the World Trade Center for the first time, even though he would never have sworn in real life.

How does a non-actor pull of such a natural performance? Is it easly to 'play' oneself? I don't think so. Think of all those fake news-anchors who can't even convincingly play themselves spouting small talk on a daily basis, let alone in a situation where you are re-enacting the most traumatizing event of your (and your nation's) life. Should he be nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. You bet your ass he should.

I don't pretend to understand acting, though I judge it all the time. (Granted, I had the lead in my Grade 4 and 5 plays, portraying Ichabod Crane and Santa Claus, respectively, and my performance in my Grade 13 play undoubtedly helped us perform so well at the Sears Drama Festival in Brantford, Ontario, but hey -- who's keeping track right?) It's such a mysterious, undefinable process -- pretending to be somebody else. And yet we do it all the time, daily -- simulating emotions, feigning interest or concern, fatigue or enthusiasm.

But to do it on screen so seamlessly, in a such an understated, moving film -- I tip my hat to Sliney. He made me believe he was one hundred percent the character he was portraying.

Which he was. And still is.

Which is confusing, yes, but riveting nevertheless.

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What are we to make of a book that begins as a rather routine police procedural set in modern-day New York (with a suitably brisk pace and better-than-average characerization) and ends with Alexander Graham Bell being attacked in Central Park in nineteenth century Manhattan by two thugs possessed by the personality of pawns from the late twentieth century who, using regression-reincarnation techniques, are unwittingly part of elaborate, though separate schemes by American and Soviet intelligence services designed to reverse the course of the Cold War by altering the very fabric of the space-time continuum, resulting in an alternate reality where one Super Power ends up ultimately being dominant over the other?

That's what happens in William Goldman's fascinating 1982 novel Control. Goldman, perhaps best known as the screenwriter of All The President's Men and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, is also a sleek, provocative novelist. His books move. And this book moved in ways that I never, ever expected.

And so late in the game, too! This is a book that doesn't introduce its' science-fiction elements until three quarters of the way through, when the book is almost over. We think it's one kind of a book; it turns out to be another.

It's not a literary milestone, no, but fuck it; i's better than that. I can't remember ever reading another book that holds its cards so close to the vest for so very, very long. Usually, in fiction and film, fantastical, science-fiction elements are made plain and clear early on in a story -- well before the half-way point, at any rate. The novelty and absurdity and logic of this story, published at the apex of the Cold War, delighted me.

I wish more writers were brave enough and clever enough to introduce such potentially risky elements at a point in the story when many authors are already cruising into neutral.

Goldman doesn't publish many novels anymore, but Control, out of which I wasn't expecting much, did what so few thrillers do -- it actually thrilled.

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It's interesting, watching people argue. Especially when they're arguing in a foreign language you don't speak. And especially when the people doing the arguing are eleven years old.

Something's going on -- of that you're certain. But you're not sure what it is. You see the anger elevated; you witness the rage, supressed. You hear words fly and spout, but you're not sure whether they are bad words or hideous words, hateful words or benign words. And because they're kids, you tend to dismiss the importance of the debate; you forget that childhood taunts sting and pierce.

But you keep watching. Looking for the spaces in the language. Watching spittle on lips. Suspicion in eyes. Malice in a shove. Refracted through linguistics, but evident, so obvious, sad and hateful and human.

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The August, Asian edition of Reader's Digest features a beautiful picture of Baguio City in its' readers' photo section, a whole-page piece at the front of the magazine. There is the city I've been living in for the past nine month 1500 metres above sea-level -- the small houses dotting the mountains' green landscape, the white clouds bisecting the manmade structures and the natural-made beauty.

It's affirming, to see a place you're in (literally only miles away), in a full-colour spread in an international magazine. Affirming to know that people in Mongolia and China and Japan and Malaysia will look at that photo -- at the mountains, at the clouds -- and wonder about the houses, and the people inside them.