Author: wdfyfe

Before WD called himself a writer, he worked at a number of different jobs from stacking lumber to interior design. He studied English at UBC and creative writing at ASU where one of his teachers, Rita Dove, taught him the importance of the tale. He has written for radio, magazines and newspapers, but never television. He’s published both fiction and nonfiction in Great Britain and the US. He reads French passably and speaks enough Spanish to get from A to B and find the toilet. He has interviewed John Cleese, Peter Ustinov, Margaret Drabble, Kenneth Branagh and enough other famous people to make him a hopeless name dropper. His not-so-secret passions are history and trivia, and he has never lost a game of Trivial Pursuit — although he did come 4th one drunken Quiz Night at the Uxbridge in Notting Hill. He lives on the Pacific Ocean, although, not close enough to see, so he spends his days looking at a computer screen. It’s a wonderful life and he has only one regret: he can’t type faster.

Older and (somewhat) Wiser?

There are tons of old people lists floating around the Internet.  They run all the way from old advertisements with doctors smoking cigarettes to lists of things that the world had never even heard of when grandma was a kid.  Some of them have this smug undercurrent of “things were so much better in my day,” but generally they’re all just harmless ways to play Remember When.   However, they all have a tendency to unlock the inner dinosaur in most of us and make us remember that we’ve been strolling around this earth for a long, long time.  Unfortunately, none of these lists makes any mention of what it takes to survive the rigors of life and actually arrive at an age when you can afford the luxury of nostalgia.  Nor do they offer a list of all those neat little goodies we all pick up along the way — the tricks of the trade, so to speak.  Things like white shirts attract spaghetti sauce and doctors are never on time.

It takes a lot to get old, and when you do, you need to stop every once in a while and congratulate yourself.  You finally made it, and now you’re old enough to know:

Puppies are a natural antidepressant

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.  Somebody, somewhere is going to have to pay for that Happy Meal™.  And if you eat it, chances are good it’ll be you.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Lincoln was right.  You can fool some of the people all of the time.  The rest of it he just made up.

Integrity is what you do when nobody’s looking.

The meek may inherit the earth, but there’s always going to be at least one big, nasty bugger there who wants to contest the will.

There is justice in the world, but most people mistake it for fairness.  That’s why they get pissed off.

Nothing feels as good as warm on a cold day.

Everybody says they want the truth — until it actually shows up.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line — no matter how many times you think you found a shortcut.

The major difference between smart and wise is a couple of bad decisions.

Most people simply don’t have enough money to get rich quick.

We’re all in the same boat; some of us just have a different captain.

And finally:

Like Polonius’ adv ice to Laertes, most of the feel good/words of wisdom homilies are just crap.

Hallowe’en: No Time for Horror Movies

As of right now, it’s two weeks until Hallowe’en, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to take much more of this.  Make no mistake: I love Hallowe’en.  It’s my favourite occasion after Christmas, St Paddy’s Day and the Summer Solstice (I think I was a Druid in a past life.)  The problem is, like a lot of good things on this planet, idiots have got hold of Hallowe’en and they’re hell-bent on ruining it.  Every year it’s the same: one minute after Columbus Day, they trot out the Horror movies.  Then it’s wall-to-wall gore until the sugar shock wears off November 1st.  For the last nine days, our 500 channel universe has been turned into a butcher shop, and it doesn’t look like the carnage is going to let up any time soon.  So far, I’ve managed to avoid Friday the 13th in about 20 of its repetitious incarnations, Nightmare on Elm Street parts 1 through 35 and the entire Halloween franchise — except for about three minutes of Resurrection when I got the wrong Mike Myers.  If I don’t see a decent movie soon, I swear I’m going to buy Netflix.

Let me put this into perspective so we’re all on the same page.  Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, what’s-his-name with the hockey mask and anybody else with a chainsaw, pick axe or pointy stick have nothing to do with Hallowe’en.  These guys and their horrible movies were invented by Hollywood to cash in on the universal need for teenage boys to get close to teenage girls — who are looking for an excuse to let them.  (This little drop of human nature BTW, hasn’t changed since the Stone Age, but now it’s worth millions.)  That’s where horror movies came from — not from Hallowe’en.  Hallowe’en has never been about half-naked young women and dumbass young men getting their entrails splattered from here to Main Street.  Nor is it about the lunatics, maniacs, evil spirits and just plain nasty folks who stalk them.  These are all modern creations designed to separate unsuspecting youth from their money.

For the record, here’s the Twitter version of how Hallowe’en came about in the first place.  Despite all the ghosts and goblins, Hallowe’en actually started out as a quasi-religious holiday, back in the way back days.  This was at a time when Christians were battling Pagans for the collective souls of the European multitudes.  Religious marketing was at its cutthroat best.  As I’ve said before, the early Christians weren’t stupid and they incorporated a lot of pagan traditions into their rituals to ease the masses into accepting Jesus as their personal saviour.  In those days, pagans (and most Christians) believed that unsatisfied souls walked the night, and they could, on occasion, mete out some pretty mean-spirited (pun intended) retribution on the living — if they saw fit.  The church decided that November 1st, Hallowmas, a day that already honoured the saints would be a good opportunity for people to pray for the souls of the recently dead, thus, aiding their journey to heaven and getting them away from the God fearing living.   Since midnight masses were de rigueur in those days, the church services took place at night or on All Hallows’ Eve.  (Sound familiar?  We know it in its corrupted form as “Hallowe’en.”)  However, the nouveaux Christians of the day continued to hedge their bets.  On their way to church, they wore cloaks, masks and even costumes – all to disguise themselves from the assembled apparitions who were hanging around consecrated ground, awaiting prayers of deliverance.  In addition, some of the poorer members of the parish would accept coins or food from the wealthier patrons to add their prayers for the dear departed.  That’s it: the time, the place, the costumes, the tricks and the treats.  There’s a lot more to it, but for bare bones it serves our purpose.

If you notice, there were no chainsaws, axes, heavy mallets or ball peen hammers.  There were no knives, swords, machetes, garden forks, shovels or soup spoons.  Nobody got stabbed, jabbed, poked or prodded.  Nobody was torn limb from limb, dismembered, eviscerated or even bruised.   It wasn’t a bloodbath, nor even a slight rinse.  Originally, and for most of its history, Hallowe’en was spooky, creepy, perhaps even a little frightening, but murder and mayhem were never on the agenda.  It’s only recently that it’s been turned into a three-week multi-channel splatterfest.

Next Week:  How to Write a Horror Movie, and Whatever Happened to Spooky?

The Nobel Peace Prize: Hilarious

Last week, when the Norwegians awarded the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union, I think more than a few people were waiting for somebody to grab the microphone and say “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night.”  Strangely enough, nobody did, the Norwegians carried on (with a straight face) and everybody, outside of a couple of thousand apparatchiks in Brussels, went “WTF?”  Of all the odd Nobel Peace Prizes ever awarded (and there’ve been a few) this certainly isn’t the oddest (more about that later) but one does begin to wonder who thinks this stuff up in the first place.  Do they ask for suggestions?  Take a vote?  Hold a lottery?  My guess is a bunch of ex-politicos get together, toss back a few Hansas, then, as the evening wears on … well, you know the rest.  Regardless, the EU is now officially a Nobel Laureate!  This entitles them to a diploma and a monetary prize of about ten million Swedish Kroner (Interestingly, neither Norway nor Sweden actual uses the Euro.)  I’m sure the Greeks could use the extra cash, though, even if they do have to pay exchange.

This isn’t the first LMAO moment for the Nobel Committee; their history is full of them.

In 1911, the prize was awarded to Alfred Fried, the founder of the German Peace Movement.  The idea obviously didn’t catch on, because three years later, German Pickelhaubes were lunging over their borders at anybody who looked at them cross-eyed, and half the world went to war.  Fried went to Switzerland (perhaps for the skiing.)  When World War I was over, Nobel got busy again, and in 1919, awarded the Peace Prize to Woodrow Wilson for his work on the League of Nations.  The best that can be said about Wilson and his “Fourteen Points” is God only had ten.  Meanwhile, the League was such a winner that Wilson couldn’t even convince his own country to join it.  Ten years later, in 1929, the Prize was given to Frank Kellogg (no relation to the Corn Flakes guy) who, with Aristide Briand, produced the Kellogg Briand Pact which outlawed war.  Unfortunately, no one bothered to tell the fascists this, and they spent the better part of the next decade killing people.  Finally, a couple of guys (Chamberlain and Daladier) said enough is enough and started shooting back.  For the next six years, the entire world set about slaughtering each other as if they were born to it.  The bloodbath ended only when President Truman (who never got a Peace Prize, BTW) scared the bejesus out of everybody with the world’s first atomic bomb.

For the next twenty years, the Nobel Committee didn’t have that much to do.  Most of the awards were no brainers: Marshall, Pearson and the Red Cross, etc. etc.  It wasn’t until the highly politicized Vietnam War came along that Nobel went back into full idiot mode.  In 1973, they awarded the Peace Prize to Henry the K (Kissinger) and Le Duc Tho, his Vietnamese counterpart.  There are people walking around today who still think Henry should be tried for war crimes, and given the Vietnamese penchant for murder, mayhem and torture, the only nice thing people have ever said about Le Duc Tho is he had the good grace to refuse the award.

In 1994, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin shared the Peace Prize with Yasser Arafat.  Two ex-military Israelis and the grandfather of international terrorism!  I’m sure Mars and all his minions closed up shop and retired.

From there, is just got nutsy.

In 2001, it was Kofi Annan to the podium.  This is the guy who handled the UN peace keeping forces in Rwanda in 1994 — not that there were any.  He was instrumental in the debacle that George Clooney had to clean up in Darfur.  He was running the show while the North Koreans were developing nuclear weapons and may or may not have been up to his elbows in the Oil-for-Food scandal.  Not only that, but many people believe he single-handedly ruined the United Nations for all future generations.

The next year, 2002, the Nobel Committee decided it was Jimmy Carter’s turn to get a basketful of Kroner.  If you recall, it was Jimmy who screwed up the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran so badly that relations between Iran and the West have been in the toilet ever since.  In fact, the results of Jimmy’s utter incompetence turned Iran into the maverick state we’re faced with today and have put the entire world at risk of war for thirty years.

However, it’s recent history that says it all.

In 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee telephoned Al Gore and said, “Come on down!”  Al, the king of global warming, flew in with one of the biggest entourages in Nobel history, including his own motorcade.  Meanwhile, celebrities of every stripe were also flying in from all over the planet to attend the After-Award parties that guzzled and gossiped into the night.  It was the inauguration ball that Al never had.  Enough jet fuel was expended in one week to power Las Vegas on the 3rd of August.  Then, as the limos idled outside, Al told the assembled few that if ordinary people didn’t quit using up the planet’s resources, we were all going to be up to our elbows in poached polar bears.  After that, they all climbed into their jets and went home, happy in the thought that the planet was a better place for their having been there.

However, for downright slap-you-in-the-face audacity, nothing beats Barack Obama’s getting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.  There isn’t a single reason why he should have been chosen.  His contribution to the world up to that point was nothing short of nothing.  He hadn’t done a damn thing for peace except talk about it.  College sophomores do that every day.  Who did the Committee reject?  A bunch of crack addicts?  At the time, Barack said he was surprised; he should have been embarrassed.  However, he stood up there, like Al and Jimmy and Kofi before him and got his diploma — just like everybody else.

However, as I mentioned, even Obama’s peace prize isn’t the oddest one.  The oddest Nobel Peace Prize ever was the one the Nobel Committee never awarded.  For some unknown reason, the Nobel Prize for Peace was never given to Mohandas K. Gandhi.