Aye-Aye!

Six words: Ray Hudson dot wordpress dot com.

Why hadn't I thought of this yet?

"He'd smell a soccer jockstrap and faint dead away."

One of things I'll miss most about Canada were the lazy Sundays I spent on the couch, recovering from a hangover or pretending to do schoolwork, watching La Liga from Spain. While the English Premier League is no doubt the most popular competition in the world, for my money the Primera (as it's called over there) is the most exciting.

Real Madrid won the league title in a thriller this year, to my great dismay (as a Barcelona supporter), but the upside is that it excited Ray Hudson, colour commentator and all-around buffoon, to the point of, well, "SHEERDELIGHTORGASMICJUBILATION!"

If you've got speakers, turn them shits up.

Lusaka Sunrise, Bloodshot Eyes

Just in case anyone still bothers to check on this tomb-like corner of the internet anymore, I'm set to launch the (hopefully) less stagnant Lusaka Sunrise. Bandwidth permitting, it'll detail goings-on, political hotstoves - anything too hot for the JHR correspondents' website, anyway - spoiled Westerner complaints and photographic evidence of my seven-month tenure in the Zambian capital. Anything to limit the use of my embarassing new account with the Book of Faces (don't gloat).

When I inevitably get sick of Africa, I'll do my best to get back in here to post on matters closer to home. Promise.

And the following is why I love Barca...

It's not very often that I'll get right off the couch and lose my shit while watching sports, especially while I'm alone and sober. But this makes it twice this year that I've become irrationally emotional during Barcelona games. This time, lil' 19-year-old Lionel Messi does his best to imitate Maradona's famous gol against England in the '86 World Cup. And to think, he's still 19. What the hell was I doing at 19? Certainly not dribbling through an entire professional soccer team and being all prodigal and whatnot. Turn up the sound for predictably moronic Spanish commentary.

And why is lil' Messi so little? Guessing from the goal above, he took Adidas' 'Impossible is Nothing' ad campaign quite seriously:

Memorable Quotes from the Fabled Fourteenth

12 pounds of ribs, 4.5 litres of Jack Daniels, 6 guys from The Cord and one papered-over coffee table made for a very fabled April 14th. I wish I could provide some context for any of these quotes, but for better or worse, I don't know what most of them mean. I was just happy I could even decipher the writing through the grease, BBQ sauce and liquor stains. It reminded me of conducting some sort of perverse historical primary research, piecing together degraded penmanship and crumpled parchments to unlock the mysteries of the past. It's not exactly Paris 1919, I warn you, but it's fairly easy to tell that our main goal on the day was to puff ourselves full of senseless male bravado. As the table quotes so nicely reveal, we accomplished that and so much more.

“Dear Dan: you’re being a schoolboy bitch.”
- B. Rock

“I was mostly just drunk, and then there were people.”
- Mike Brown

“You throw at my face, not my hand.”
- Joe Turcotte, referring to the sub-par throw

“How can you hold that?”
- Tony to Al, referring to the hot ribs

“How many lighters do you think I got? An infinite amount of lighters? God.”
- B. Rock

“I’m going to Bear-in-Mind to frame it.”
- Tony

“Heyyyy, we got it up.”
- Dan P.

“No, Jerkoff glove not Turcotte glove… they sound the same but they mean different things.”
- B. Rock

“Father’s Day is the most confusing day of the year on your reserve.”
- B. Rock

“I’m a MAN… we’re all MEN!!”
- Al

“I’m not quoting myself Joe. I’m not that narcissistic.”
- M Brown

“Hey, that’s a DJ Shadow beat. Don’t even confuse that with Swollen Members.”
- B. Rock

Brevity

You may have noticed I've added a clichéd tagline under this blog's title, and thought I should offer a brief explanation. In my general experience with writing, it's much harder to write less than more. Packing meaning and impact into the fewest words possible is a skill practiced and prized by few, especially in academia. Despite my flowery and sometimes pretentious word choices, I've been making a conscious effort to write less and mean more, like the it-getters over at The Economist.

When in doubt, follow the (fittingly edited down) rules of George Orwell's Politics and the English Language, probably the best thing I ever read in high school.

1. Never use a metaphor or figure of speech you're used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use jargon if you know an everyday equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Insouciance

My mom's never been one to mince words, even when I was little. Probably because of her medical background, she's shamelessly frank about the body, it's parts and functions. I was drilled to use terms like 'bowel movement' and 'sexual intercourse' from an early age instead of their cruder counterparts. More recently, I've heard the horror stories of her home nursing career: the lady bed-ridden with sores and being slowly eaten by maggots; interning a man to the hospital with a dead rodent in his ass.

So she spared me no gruesome details in her battle with Africa's microbiology.

"Everywhere you turn, something's trying to lay eggs in you," she told me, resting comfortably in a friend's care in Abbotsford, BC. Finally back from her 80-day sojourn to Mozambique, I wondered why she'd been back for a week and I hadn't heard from her - turns out she has malaria. On the scale of things that can go wrong in Africa it's a mere nuisance, she said, well worth contracting because it meant she didn't have to sleep with a mosquito net in the interminable heat. With proper treatment it's only a day or two of discomfort followed by a couple months of feeling kinda tired, hardly the colonial-era mass-murderer that branded Sub-Saharan Africa 'White Man's Grave'.

"Oh, and I have to go to the doctor on Wednesday to get de-wormed."

Besides the aerial bombardment of insect matter from mosquitoes, tsetse flies and rinderpests there's the worms in the fruit; in the meat; even the sand on the beach isn't safe. "Walk barefoot and they'll bore into the bottom of your feet and go right up your leg into the large intestine," adding that an unfortunate colleague of hers was anally intruded upon by some spiral-boring sand worms while sitting on the beach. She theorized that her parasitic co-habitants had come from the mystery goat 'meat' (see: junk and ass parts) found in the stew, oddly proud that it didn't give her the same noxious diarrhea that had befallen fellow missionaries.

She took it all in stride though, and focused our conversation on the positives: the spiritual revival and longing for salvation she'd expected, pledging to put a family of orphaned siblings through school, learning some Swahili and Portuguese and, most of all, simply surviving the ordeal.

Makes me Wanna Holler

After my constant pestering (and probably some other factors that actually mattered), CBC is finally airing the final six episodes of Planet Earth, only the most epic and ambitious nature documentary of all-time. I went on about the series some time ago, after the first five episodes, and haven't left CBC's documentary department alone since.

So to get into gear for the premiere of "Ice Worlds", Sunday night at 7:00pm on CBC - the show's regular timeslot for the next six weeks - I've compiled a list of clips to whet the appetite.




Cute little fox cubs! Oh wait, they're eating cute little goslings.



Duckling divebombers



A Simba vs Babar deathmatch



A day in the life of a polar bear family. Way more realistic than a coke ad.



Will the big bad wolf catch Bambi? I hope so!



It took the crew nearly three years to get the shots of the elusive snow leopard, I'd say it was worth the wait



For the hardcores, one of my favourites - the episode "Fresh Water" in its entirety.

Obituary: Fintan Kilbride (1927-2006)

Though I'm scarcely qualified to eulogize a man whom I only knew in his twilight years, the passing of Fintan Kilbride over the holiday season - the only person I would call a mentor - has inspired me to write a few words about someone who touched the lives of so many, myself included.

I easily remember the first time I met Fintan. High school graduation was only months away and I was rudderless, hopelessly drifting towards an uninspired undergraduate degree that felt more like an impending jail sentence than the privilege of higher education. That spring, way back in 2001, I improbably found myself in an information session on volunteering. The only reason I even went was because my OAC global issues teacher gave bonus marks for attending such seminars outside of class. Amidst some stuff about landmines and sweatshops, an imposing figure took the floor to recruit students for his twice-annual missions to Jamaica.

Fintan stood tall, even as a septuagenarian, his pallid face wizened by years of work in the sweltering heat of the tropics. His stature was highlighted by a lithe but muscular figure that any 30-something would be proud of, even if his diminishing crop of hair belied his vitality. A Roman-Catholic priest turned high school teacher, I imagined he could put the fear of God into a callow teenager at a moment's notice. But the lilt of his Irish brogue was disarming and, with a infectiously broad smile, Fintan had me determined to raise enough money to join him on a two-week excursion that summer.

He made it clear from the start what the trip wasn't about: religion or altruism. Despite his strong personal faith and religious background, there was no pressure or expectation to be Christian while in Jamaica, though the nature of the experience was inevitably spiritual. He had a similar distaste for seeming the haughty Canadians swooping in to teach the enfeebled Jamaicans a thing or two. We had more to learn from them, he insisted, then they did from us.

And learn we did - from the exuberance of the children living in the garbage dump; the disfigured lepers who sang and danced with us without a care in the world; the audible gunshots from the slums of Kingston at night - Fintan was there to put it into context. He transported a small library to the islands, and at night he'd have us reading away on everything from gay rights to globalization to first-world suicide rates. While we gained insight into the social injustice we witnessed on the streets, Fintan's ultimate goal was to expose the superficiality and excess of our own culture that caused it.

But Jamaica was a mere summer vacation for Fintan's tireless work. Throughout the year he would build schools in Haiti and deliver medical supplies to Nicaragua, all the while teaching at Toronto-area Catholic schools. He recalled with great satisfaction the wager he would make with petulant children: beat him in jump rope and they could all go home. No student ever succeeded.

Through long conversations and much laughter, I learned a little of Fintan's compelling life story. A priest, teacher and consummate athlete, the man was full of surprises and unbelievable stories of humanity. A bit of a renegade in the Catholic Church - he was a vocal critic of priests being unable to marry and women being disallowed priesthood - he served stints in Trinidad and Nigeria that seemed to cement his connection to the developing world. I'll never forget his story of being shot down while flying medical supplies into Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War, the province where he'd built schools and hospitals. Or how he, as a priest, fell in love with a nun and the two of them left the Church to build a beautiful family together.

It's probably those little anecdotes that I'll remember most about him. How he said he'd always clean up a public washroom if there was litter on the counter top. How he'd be after me to go out for coffee whenever I was in the GTA, even after our Jamaica days were well behind us. How I'd receive letters from him out of the blue when I didn't even know he had my new contact information. How I had to cut his toenails when his sciatic nerve was acting up. How I mistakenly challenged him to a friendly game of table tennis and was soundly drubbed by a man 55 years my senior.

Only later did he tell me he was the world racquetball champion at his age level and the one below him. He could have been the champ at my age level, I remembered thinking.

After that formative summer in 2001, I went off to university and promptly changed my major to global studies, my eyes literally opened to a new world of opportunities. I ended up going back to Jamaica for a second time the next summer, and kept in contact with Fintan until I left Canada a couple years ago on another global exchange. Though we drifted apart, I still think of him often; what he taught me; what he meant to so many others around the world. As I carry my life forward and dear Fintan fades into memory, his creed of "peace, love and respect" won't be soon forgotten.

Theory of a Nickelfault

I've been saving this one for when I haven't posted in a month. Year in Review, thoughts on Blood Diamond and What I'm Going To Do With My Life to come soon!