Dear Sweet Canada

In honor of Trump's inauguration, I decided to dedicate the bottom of this week's NYCPlaywrights Saturday email (where I put links to items of theatrical interest, grouped by a single theme) to Canada.

Starting with Justin Trudeau reciting Shakespeare.

Could you imagine Trump reciting Shakespeare? No, of course not because Trump is a thug and a slob.

Like so many Americans, I never paid attention to Canada. Which, when you think about it, is just so weird. First because Canadians certainly think about the USA. Here is Trudeau talking to some kids about Trump - it's a good bet that few American students know who Justin Trudeau is -  hell, plenty of adult Americans have no idea who he is, as this Youtube video so clearly illustrates.

But another reason it's weird is because Canada is a giant country. It's the second biggest country in the world after Russia (USA is #3) although sure, they only have one-tenth the population of the US but still. A giant country is sitting there, less than 300 miles from where I live, and it is directly across a river from the northern border of the state I live in.  Which is a really big state, but still.

It's only because of my new-found admiration for Justin Trudeau that I think about Canada as much as I do now. Prior to discovering my Premier Ministre D'Amour,  the only things I thought about Canada was that Joni Mitchell is Canadian, and that the plot of the South Park movie was a plan to invade Canada ("Blame Canada - with all the hockey hullabaloo, and that bitch Anne Murray too, Blame Canada, they aren't even a real country anyway.")

So I was doing some Googling around, looking for interesting items related to Canadian theater - this item was particularly ghastly - Canada's Hamilton Theatre inundated with angry Americans mistaking it for 'Hamilton' - when I came across information about a play called TRUDEAU STORIES, currently playing at the Great Canadian Theater Company about a young woman who had a Platonic relationship with Pierre Trudeau in the 1980s.

Then I found this podcast interview with the author and I really want to go see this show. I am seriously considering the idea of driving up to Ottawa (which is the capitol of Canada in case you didn't know, and you probably didn't even though it's the capitol of a GIANT COUNTRY) next week.  It's only a 7 hour drive - about the same distance as Washington DC.

In the podcast the author of the play, Brooke Johnson, mentions that people ask her if Justin Trudeau has ever shown up and she said no, although of course she would love it if he did. Maybe he'll show up this Tuesday when I am (maybe) there - SELFIE TIME!

The US is so lucky to have such a good neighbor on our longest border. We really don't appreciate Canada enough, partly because they're so good to us. But although Justin Trudeau can tell you, as he does in this video, that 35 of our united states list Canada as their #1 export destination, Donald Trump, the greatest humiliation of this country (and I once believed that was George W. Bush) most certainly does not know that.

Also, I don't think Donald Trump cares whether Americans would be hurt by a trade war, as JTRU seems to believe. Donald Trump only cares about using his position to LOOT the United States on behalf of himself and Vladimir Putin.

We would really be screwed if Canada came to hate us. We have to stop taking Canada's niceness for granted.

What I'm saying is, we need to start having more appreciation for our dear sweet GIANT neighbor to the north.

A Mari Usque ad Mare

1. The Canadian motto, A Mari Usque ad Mare, means “From sea to sea."

2. For more than 40 years, scientists have tried to figure out what's causing large parts of Canada, particularly the Hudson Bay region, to be "missing" gravity.

3. In 2010, an actuarial study determined that, on average, a strategic reserve of 40 million pounds would be necessary to avoid stock shortfalls due to poor harvests. Slightly more than 36 million pounds of maple syrup are currently stored in three different locations in Quebec. Last year, the Federation had to rent additional storage space to cater for the harvest surplus. The new Laurierville warehouse will now provide the required space to fulfil the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve.

4. When you think of French in Canada you probably think of Quebec, and most of the French speakers in Canada do live there and speak what is known as Quebecois. But there is another dialect, Acadian French, which is largely spoken in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. The two varieties differ in accent and certain words and phrases. Acadian French uses more terms derived from seafaring, and a number of old words now obsolete in France. The two varieties developed differently as the languages of separate 17th century French colonies (Canada and Acadia) with separate administrations.

5. The 1 800 O-Canada service provides general information on Government of Canada programs, services and initiatives and guidance on how to access them.
The service also provides information on alternative formats of reports and publications.
Telephone: 1 800 O-Canada (1-800-622-6232)
TTY: 1-800-926-9105
Within Canada, you can call toll-free from Monday to Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., local time.
If you are outside of Canada, go to Calling 1 800 O-Canada from abroad.

6.  One of the Articles of Confederation of the U.S. states that if Canada asked to become a state, (they) would be automatically accepted into statehood.

7.  Winterlude is an annual festival held in Ottawa, where Canadians celebrate the freezing temperatures and snow by throwing a winter themed party. The festival includes ice skating, ice sculptures, snow playgrounds and outdoor concerts.

8. Newfoundland and Labrador harvest icebergs that float over from Greenland to produce beer, vodka, wine, and beauty products.

9. But the most idiosyncratic menu item — and the one Americans might consider most far-fetched for McDonald's — was the McLobster. I ordered one. For diplomacy. For a better understanding of our friendly neighbors to the north. Even the Canadian government calls lobsters Canada's "most valuable seafood export." So ordering a McLobster apparently transports you to the pages of The Shipping News. "Tap your toes to the sound of the fiddle and embrace the salty sea air of the east coast," the ad copy reads. A vicarious trip will set you back $7.99 Canadian, about $6.51 U.S.

10. Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages

• To ensure that your rights are respected: In Canada, the Official Languages Act establishes the equality of English and French and grants you language rights. It is perfectly normal to insist that these rights be respected.
• To find solutions: As an ombudsman, the Commissioner of Official Languages uses persuasion and constructive dialogue with federal institutions to find appropriate, fair and long-term solutions.
• To report a problem: Complaints are an indicator of what’s happening in federal institutions. They help the Office of the Commissioner work with federal institutions to find solutions to problems.
• To raise awareness in federal institutions: A lack of familiarity with or a misunderstanding of the requirements of the Official Languages Act is often the reason for non-compliance with language obligations. By filing a complaint, you are helping to make federal institutions aware of these issues and promoting a change in corporate culture.

11, Justin Trudeau’s French-only responses at town hall under investigation by commissioner

Oh Canada

Marijuana in Canada - not legal yet

I'm heading for Nova Scotia on Friday, the first time I've been to Canada in twelve years. So I will be doing lots of Canada-flavored blogging in the next week or so.

And I will be reviewing the Visit Canada information on the official Canada web site.

Justin Trudeau plays rope-a-dope and Trump is the dope

The Canadian Kid

It was so obvious Trump was going to come out of the G7 looking like a fool.

Like so many others, Trump completely underestimated Justin Trudeau - who long ago assembled a team to prepare for Trump to throw the inevitable trade tantrum. As the NYTimes said:

The Canadians could see the trouble looming in the summer of 2016. Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s trade minister at the time, found herself, along with millions of Canadians, fixated on the unfolding United States presidential election, and it was becoming impossible to overlook the gathering clouds of protectionism. 

Trudeau and team studied and learned well that you can't get down into the mud with Trump - he is a creature of mud and he has the home advantage. They are remaining calm and polite which is driving Trump crazy - he doesn't understand calm and polite.

And Trudeau set the stage long ago by being so cordial to Trump and the feckless Ivanka - Trump assumed Trudeau was another toady like the Republicans he so routinely rolls over. He thought he was going to roll over Trudeau.

If you watch the documentary "God Save Justin Trudeau" you can see Trudeau doing the same with the conservatives in his own country in 2012 who thought Patrick Brazeau was going to crush him in the boxing ring. They just couldn't imagine this polite friendly guy could be strong.

As this Guardian review of "God Save Justin Trudeau" notes: 

Film-makers Eric Ruel and Guylaine Maroist depict Trudeau’s spectacular victory in October as a fight, showing it was exquisitely planned from the start.

Trump of course doesn't understand planning & preparation as he famously kept saying he was going to go into talks with Kim Jong Un and just wing it.

It turns out Trump still doesn't get what happened with Trudeau, and still can't understand how Trudeau, whom Trump thought was a little wimp, just like the right-wing Canadians did before Trudeau crushed Patrick Brazeau in the boxing ring, could stand up to him. According to this piece in Vanity Fair, TRUMP SPENDS NORTH KOREA DEBRIEF OBSESSING OVER JUSTIN TRUDEAU: 

Yes, speaking to reporters in Singapore following his summit with gulag enthusiast Kim, Trump continued to lash out at our mild-mannered neighbor to the north and promised to mete out more financial punishments for allies that dare match his provocations. 

“When I got out to the plane,” Trump said. “I think that Justin probably didn’t know that Air Force One has about 20 televisions. And I see the television and he’s giving a news conference about how he will not be pushed around by the United States and I say push him around? We just shook hands. It was very friendly . . . No, I have a good relationship with Justin Trudeau. I really did, other than he had a news conference, that he had because he assumed I was in an airplane and I wasn’t watching. He learned. That’s going to cost a lot of money for the people of Canada. He learned. You can’t do that. You can’t do that. We have a big trade deficit with Canada . . . It’s either $17 [billion] but could actually be $100 billion. You know they put out a document, I don’t know if you saw it. They didn’t want me to see it, but we found it. Perhaps they were trying to show the power they have. It’s close to [a] $100 billion-a-year loss with Canada. They don’t take our farm products—many of them.”

In the movie "God Save Justin Trudeau" you can see Trudeau talking about how he is often underestimated. And nobody underestimated him more than narcissist ignoramus bully Donald J. Trump, the perfect target for Trudeau and his exquisite planning.

Am I a centrist?

At a movie theater on the UWS
of Manhattan to see "The Post"
which I guess makes me a liberal.
In the US.

I always thought of myself as a left-liberal, but now that I'm paying more attention to international politics by way of my admiration for Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron, I wonder.

Canadian writer Jonathan Kay found it highly offensive that I pointed out that Quillette - for whom he has written three articles, two in 2018 - is not actually centrist but rather alt-right and that it publishes the work of many people - people I like to call evo-psycho bros who believe that black people are innately less intelligent and even, more criminal, than other "races" justified by their transparently bad science.

At least two Quillette articles have been reprinted on the white supremacist web site American Renaissance:
On the Reality of Race and the Abhorrence of Racism by Bo Winegard, Ben Winegard and Brian Boutwell; and
How Criminologists Who Study Biology Are Shunned by Their Field by Brian Boutwell.

Quillette's founder, alt-right Claire Lehmann threw a fit on Twitter when I suggested that one of her favorite authors, Bo Winegard, is a hack who is riding the wingnut welfare gravy train with his laughably bad "scientific" claims about race and gender essentialism. 

Anyway, because of my unpleasant interactions with Lehmann and Jonathan Kay and other Quillette supporters I find I am accused of being on the far Left. 

They don't care, I suppose, that I've also criticized people they consider "Social Justice Warriors" also known (by me at least) as  "identitarians." I even did a series on Social Justice Warriors vs. New Atheists, on this blog. I also dislike the "Dirtbag Left" or sometimes the "Radical Chic." I argued with Rebecca Traister about Al Franken and #MeToo. I have criticized Robin "white fragility" DiAngelo and Razib "too racist for the NYTimes" Khan equally for their racial essentialism. 

In fact, there seems to be no large group of people with an online presence I can be part of because I invariably will disagree with them about one thing or another and that will end in being blocked or banned or insulted.

As far as being Far Left, I voted for Hillary Clinton which makes me left-liberal in the US. 

In Canada I would be Liberal since I would have voted for Justin Trudeau. As I mentioned the other day, in Canada they have two major parties vying for who is the most firmly pro-choice. And even the Conservative party in Canada is firmly pro-socialized medicine. So actually I might be centrist in Canada.

In France I would be a complete Centrist because I would have voted for Macron. In France they have viable Socialist and Communist parties. And while I certainly agree with many aspects of socialism, I don't think it's the complete answer.

Not helping to clarify the issue are people like Steven Pinker, who claim to be liberal, but who constantly bashes the Left.  Pinker even suggests there is an effort on the part of the media and academia to withhold "the truth" - a position in complete accordance with the alt-right.

I think this is all part of the reason why Emmanuel Macron felt he had to create a new political party, En Marche, to reflect the problem of people like me - agreeing with some aspects of several parties, and not finding a place for ourselves with our refusal to accept everything from any one group of people.

More on the Thrilla from the Hilla

Q. What is the Thrilla from the Hilla?

A. The fight between two Canadian politicians in Ottawa in 2012, one of whom is now the Prime Minister of Canada.

Q. What is Ottawa?

A. The capital of Canada, you dumbass American


I am very sure if you are an American you did not know that Ottawa was the capitol of Canada, because I did not know it until recently (I thought the capitol was Toronto) and even more so because my daughter, who has been to Canada many more times than I have, also had no idea until I told her the other day.

I'm incredibly excited to have discovered the documentary "God Bless Justin Trudeau." I can't believe  it took me so long to discover it, I've been searching on Youtube for videos associated with the Thrilla for days now and although I did find plenty of videos associated with it, including a version of the match itself with French commentary

 - and you can see my video collection here - no references to the movie came up. I only found it because I Googled "posters of Trudeau" and the poster for the movie turned up.

I promptly rented it and will have more to say about it soon. But for now I leave you with this bit which really really amused me. An exchange between Justin Trudeau and his wife. The full exchange, which was shot from a distance by the documentary camera and helpfully captions goes like this:

SOPHIE TRUDEAU (kissing Justin) 

Just do what you have to do. 

   JUSTIN TRUDEAU 

I know. 

   SOPHIE 

I really admire you. 

   JUSTIN 

I was put in this planet to do this. I fight and win. That's what I'm good at.  

   SOPHIE 

(unintelligible and not captioned)

   JUSTIN 

But it's true honey! 

   SOPHIE 

You fight from the good place. 

Be humble.

They had been married for like eight years in 2012 so it's interesting that they are speaking to each other, especially Justin, like they just started dating.

Ezra Levant is not having a good month

Supposedly Faith Goldy was fired from Rebel Media
because she was interviewed by an even 
more extremist media outlet, Daily Stormer

LINK TO THE ORIGINAL TWEET

While I was in Canada last week it seems that the leading alt-right media outlet in Canada Rebel Media, created by Ezra Levant, has been melting down, not only because of blowback from Charlottesville and Rebel's connection with alt-right wackos (I discussed its promotion of Milo Yianoppolous, Gavin McInness and Jack Posobiec a couple of months ago) but because of alt-right in-fighting and blackmail.

First the Charlottesville blowback. 

Canadaland, which I recently discovered, ran a story on the Rebel's sympathetic views of the white supremacists:

In the hours and minutes leading up to that moment, however, (Faith) Goldy had spent her live Periscope broadcasts rationalizing the rally organized by white nationalist Jason Kessler — an “extremist” to whom the Rebel once paid the revenues from a video that contained material plagiarized from him — and complaining about what she saw as the unfair treatment of the alt-right by authorities. In particular, she expressed the (wildly incorrect) view that American police are more generous toward Black protesters than white ones. 

Goldy — a proponent of the concept of “white genocide,” who thinks that most Jews are “giant Democrat-donor losers,” and also believes there should be a new Crusade to expel Muslims from the Holy Land — was a popular presence at the event, occasionally interrupting her broadcasts to oblige selfie requests.

The Rebel tried to distance itself, suddenly, from the alt-right as Vice reported here, but it was not enough and too late. The Norwegian Cruise Lines cancelled the Rebel's cruise (another Levant cruise was written up by The Walrus recently) and Canada's Conservative party leader Andrew Scheer has (finally) distanced himself from Levant. Anti-racist Canada has a whole handy list right of various controversies right here. And now this:

The move to disable The Rebel’s domain comes after Silicon Valley firms like GoDaddy Inc. and Google disabled the domain for neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, forcing the website offline. Cloudflare, which hosts caches of websites, also terminated their relationship with the website for its political content. The Daily Stormer was also denied hosting by a Russian service provider following an attempt to relocate the domain

However, even more interesting is the way the far right is turning against him, in part because of a blackmail story.

Ezra Levant, co-founder of right-wing Rebel Media, has had a lot of bad days recently. In a dramatic video released on August 17, the Canadian activist/lawyer/vlogger detailed the sordid saga involving a former employee who had allegedly been blackmailing him with threats of releasing sensitive information unless he got paid off. “And I don’t really know how to say it, other than to just say it,” said Levant. “And I can’t believe it, but here goes. I’m being blackmailed. I’m being extorted.” 

The alleged blackmailer is 22-year-old Caolan Robertson, who Levant had hired to work with one of his star reporters, British anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson. Levant’s emotional mea culpa was in response to Robertson’s August 17 video in which he announced that he was leaving Rebel while also levying some serious charges of financial impropriety and editorial ineptitude against his former boss. As it turns out, Robertson had been secretly recording all of his conversations with Levant. He’s got Levant talking about the “hush money” he’ll pay his employee.

Nobody seems to know exactly what Levant was being blackmailed over. My money is on something to do with Levant's (I suspect) closeted homosexuality. The two men Levant accuses of blackmailing him are a gay couple. Levant mentioned they were a couple and said "but I don't care about that." I should think not since he was a promoter of the career of Milo Yiannopoulous and even provided a video of Milo and Gavin McInness french kissing because (they claimed) they wanted to upset conservative Muslims.

It's thanks to Rebel Media that my impression of the Canadian right is that it's about 50% gay. 

Many have observed that Levant can't be anti-Semitic because he's Jewish. But as many on the alt-right seem to be figuring out, Levant is involved in right-wing media mostly to fleece the gullible rightwing extremists through a variety of methods. Anybody who spends any time examining the career of Levant will quickly realize he has no personal integrity.

One of things that seems to really annoy the right-wingers is that Levant was shown to be creating a fund-raising campaign to pay for the legal bills for the idiot who jumped on the Public Theater's stage - even before she jumped onto the stage and was arrested. I blogged about it in June.

Mike Cernovich, incredible asshole who promoted Pizzagate, defends Rebel Media.

Gerry Butts, political advisor to Justin Trudeau, tweeted his take on the Levant meltdown.

Right-wing nuts of Canada

Speaking of dangerous right-wing lunatics like Alex Jones, the recent mass-murder in a Canadian mosque by a right-wing Trump lover has focused attention on the nuts of Canada:

That conversation among largely anonymous anti-immigration extremists exists in the broader context of a right-leaning talk radio culture in Quebec that has been critical of Muslim immigration and what it sees as a failure by Muslims to assimilate into Canadian culture. Talk radio of this stripe is rare elsewhere in Canada and is reminiscent, albeit far more mild, of the raucous right-wing shows in the United States.
The radio stations Radio X and FM93 are among those cited as giving voice to anti-Muslim activists. While their own commentary may be muted, they give a platform to less-tolerant voices from sites like Point de Bascule, which means Tipping Point, and Poste de Veille, which translates roughly as “Watchtower” and whose website shows a pirate ship with a jihadist flag as its sail approaching Quebec City.
One popular conspiracy theory links Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to the Muslim Brotherhood, a pan-Arab group that supports the application of Islamic law in Muslim communities.

Of course stupid people, the kind of people most taken in by insane conspiracy theories and irrational hatred of the Other exist in every society and even Canada has not been spared. Stupid people will always be a problem in any human society. 

It should be noted that the far-right, in its endless quest to demonize all Muslims immediately in the wake of the shooting tried to claim the shooter was Muslim himself. The Trudeau government had to force Fox News to take down one of its lies.

Back from Canada

The name of the company means
"late night" in French, although
literally it is "bed late."

I had a nice weekend in Canada in Montreal and Quebec City, although I did too much driving again.

The logo here is for a Canadian convenience store chain, "Couche-Tard" which I was happy to see on Sunday night when we didn't get a chance to get dinner before seeing a theater production in Quebec.

Claude Montminy, one
of my interviewees.

Also because I love that logo. It means "Canada" to me as much as maple syrup or Justin Trudeau.

I've interviewed several Canadians for the upcoming podcast and it should be a pretty good episode. 

I was excited to get a chance to speak French too, and I even asked Claude Montminy, a native francophone, one of my interview questions in French, namely: "Pourquoi tu-es devenu dramaturge?" ("Why did you become a playwright?")

Although most people, even in Quebec City, speak English as well as French and will switch to English in a heartbeat if you sound at all anglophone.

Quel petit monde du Canada

Cast members with the director of the movie
and the author of the play Les Grand Chaleurs

So last blog post I mentioned two Canadian movies as well as a video of the Trudeau/Brazeau boxing match and scenes from the TV show Sensitive Skin. And I observed it's a tiny world in Canada. Well it turns out even tinier than I thought.

I've been watching the movie Les Grande Chaleurs with both English and French subtitles in order to help figure out what was being said. The English subtitles weren't shown over the credits - but nevertheless I managed to make out that it said the movie was originally a play first performed in Quebec in 1991. So I did some Googling and discovered the play was written by Michel Marc Bouchard. And on reading his entry in Wikipedia discover this:

The adaptation of his play Tom to the farm produced by Xavier Dolan in 2013 and scripted with the author received several awards including that of the international critic (FRESCI) at the Venice Film Festival in 2013. The Girl King , written by Michel Marc Bouchard for Finnish director Mika Kaurismäki and shot in Finland will be presented in 2015.

The name Xavier Dolan rang a bell - and that's because the other movie I mentioned in the same blog post as Grande Chaluers was directed by (and performed by) none other than Xavier Dolan. 

Do like a hundred people live in Canada?

More about the movie in this article from 2009.

The latest NYCPlaywrights Podcast is online

A little better technical quality for this second podcast. Also a special easter egg, a clip of John Lennon talking about KING LEAR and I am the Walrus.

Listen here.

I'm really looking forward to the next podcast on the theme of "O Canada!" - can't wait for my trip to Canada in a few weeks to do some research. 

An acoustic version of "Oh Canada" 

Yay I am in Canada

I've been too busy traveling to blog. But I finally made it to Canada. Yay!

Going through New Hampshire via Amtrak

CAT ferry to Nova Scotia

They freaking LOVE Tim Hortons in Canada. I haven't seen a single Starbucks - it's all Tim.

HEAVENS TO MERGATROYD! This blog is twenty years old!

Yes the name of this blog was inspired by
one of Snagglepuss's favorite exclamations.

My first blog post was not very inspiring: 

I'm still working out the kinks, come back later, it will be better. Thanks.

Back in those days we thought that George W. Bush was, and ever would be, the worst president of the United States. 

All these years I've been hogging the domain name mcclernan.com for myself, in spite of having many relatives, close and distant, who share the name. But so far nobody has complained.

I recapped the first ten years, back in 2015. Obama was president then, so things were looking up from the Bush years. 

So what's happened since November 2015?

I was blogging pretty heavily from 2015 through 2018, averaging about 300 blog posts per year, more or less. But blogging fell way off in 2019, when I only managed 59 posts and after that only managed 42, 28, 23, 29 and 34 posts each year after that. This year I have 43 posts, counting this one, so far. 

The reason blogging dropped off so much on Heavens to Mergatroyd is at least partly because I started my blog Pinkerite and instead of writing about politics and especially race pseudoscience on this blog, I started writing about those things over on Pinkerite instead.

I see that in 2015 I expressed my admiration for the feminist writer Sady Doyle who since then became Jude Doyle. I mentioned him in January of this year in a blog post on Pinkerite. 

2016 started out on a high note when I moved from Astoria back to Manhattan, to the Upper West Side in a quaint hundred-year-old walkup. Then I moved out thanks to unpleasant neighbors in 2021. 

Trump was elected. I immediately became interested in Canada and in the French language. I had been in Canada once, in 2005, before I started this blog. Since Trump was elected I visited Canada in 2017, 2018,  twice, then not again until January of this year. 

Part of the reason for the gap, I think, was because Biden defeated Trump in 2020, and I didn't feel as much of an urge to get out of the United States during that time. But when Trump was elected again in 2024, I went to Montreal during the inauguration, just to be out of a country full of morons who voted for a rapist fascist disgusting felon psychopath, clearly in the early-mid stages of dementia. 

And of course there was Covid.

In the past ten years I traveled to France and Slovenia.

I've written about learning French quite a few times. Thanks to my French studies I ended up learning more about Peppa Pig and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic than someone my age would ever expect to know. Dear god I know so much about My Little Pony now.

I  also created my own animations in French, but they are pig and pony-free.

I discovered Murderbot, Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron. I knew J. D. Vance was a creep in 2016.

I've continued to express my appreciation for the Beatles and in particular for Paul McCartney in the past ten years. 

I've memorialized Earl Rich, a friend of mine who was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1997, several times on this blog.

Quite a few people I have known have died in the past ten years. My childhood arch-enemy John Sayers, my young adulthood arch-enemy Laura Garth, my actor friend Tony White, another actor friend Doug Rossi, my college friend Geri Tuckett. And of course my cats, poor Miss Willow and poor Mr. Fuzz. But at least my cats lived about as long as cats normally live, the other people I mentioned here died before their time. Since my cats died, I've switched to caring for plants instead.

Theater-wise, things have been slow. I only managed to eke out one production, Norma Jeanne at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic about Marilyn Monroe in the past ten years, but I've written three solid full-length plays since 2020 and am working on a fourth.

Pete Duel, Judy Carne, Ben Murphy
-----------------------------------------

Here's a funny coincidence - I've written about Pete Duel on this blog - first in 2005, then again in 2015.

And the Pete Duel Memorial Site is still going strong in 2025. The entire series "Alias Smith and Jones" is now available on the Internet Archive.

One of my favorite episodes, "The Root of it All," was quite feminist for 1971. In the episode, Smith and Jones meet a feisty woman played by Judy Carne and another woman played by Victoria Thompson. 

Well Thompson showed up in a playwrights group I was part of for a couple of years in 2022-23. I knew I had seen her name before and after Googling around I discovered she had been in AS&J - but I never got a chance to ask her about the experience. But still, it was a funny coincidence.

In addition to this blog, I've had my blog NYCPlaywrights going since 2010, and Pinkerite since 2018.

TOP TEN POSTS IN THE PAST 10 YEARS

1. Did Brigitte Macron and her first husband appear in an episode of "French in Action" - mystere et boule de gomme! - over 16,000 visits.

2. Move over Dr. and Mrs. Vandertramp! - 15.6K visits.

3. Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right & hereditarian connections (before I moved my politics to Pinkerite and also updated the diagram.) - 4.2K visits.

4. No, Erik Satie did not only eat white foods(!!!) - 2.98K visits.

5. What do the evo-psycho bros think "race" is? (before I moved my politics to Pinkerite). - 2.74K visits.

6. Qui était Jeanne de Bret? - 2.68K visits.

7. #Free Melania - yes I know Melania has only herself to blame for marrying Trump, but my god, you can see what a grotesque psychopath he is in this video. No wonder, according to Trump's biographer Michael Wolff, she hates him. -  2. 22K. visits.

8. RIP MTM - I discussed the death of Mary Tyler Moore. 2.15K visits.

9. Watching Justin Trudeau talk about feminism is the most erotic experience of my life - still undefeated - 1.94 K visits.

10. Manhattan statuary - surprisingly popular at 1.94K visits.

Will I manage to blog for another ten years? Time will tell.

You can read about the history of blogging here.

I discover more about Canada: meet Tabatha Southey & Jonathan Kay's mom

I didn't even know who Justin Trudeau was until he came to the United States in early 2016 and such a big deal was made about his bromance with Obama. But even that barely registered. It was sort of like, oh, I guess they have a new Prime Minister in Canada now and he's young and handsome and gets along well with the President.

It took the election of Donald Trump to really make me appreciate Canada and Justin Trudeau.

There were so many things I didn't know about Canada until the past year. For instance, the capital is Ottawa, not Toronto. Did you know that? If you're like most Americans, you didn't. Here are Americans being asked who Justin Trudeau is right after he was elected.

So of course I had no idea who Tabatha Southey was.

While researching Steve Pinker's connections to the alt-right I came to realize that Quillette, which he frequently linked to from Twitter (although at this point not since January 31), was not only frequently running pro-evolutionary psychology articles but was running evo-psycho articles by people who not only believe in the innate intellectual inferiority of blacks, but in some cases believe that black people are also more innately criminal than other "races." Those people happen to be American college professors specializing in Criminal Justice. Some of them had also appeared on alt-right Stefan Molyneux's Youtube channel. A couple of their articles for Quillette have been reposted at white supremacist American Renaissance.

So my antennae have been out for Quillette content on Twitter, and when I came across Tabatha Southey's comment,  festooned with a Great Auk, I naturally Liked and Retweeted it. And naturally got into arguments with people who attacked her on the thread. But for all I knew she was just some random person with good taste.

And even when Jonathan Kay (who I knew of only because he ghost-wrote Justin Trudeau's "Common Ground") and his fellow Quillette author Debrah Soh, (whom I had also never heard of prior to this string of events) were freaking out about Southey's remark about Quillette, days later, I still wasn't clued in.

Then I Googled her. Turns out she's a big fucking deal in the Canadian literary scene. And has been for at least over a decade. So big that according to Kay, Ezra Levant even attacked her on Sun News (the video is unfortunately no longer available.) And she in turn has written about Levant. I'm surprised I didn't read that piece, because I was Googling for stories about Levant at that time in connection with the awful events of Charlottesville.

And now I realize I have already linked to an article by Southey on this blog on January 28, a piece in Maclean's which asks the immortal question: Is Jordan Peterson the stupid man's smart person?

Which Hackette's hacks are still mad about.

Jonathan Kay sniffed that the Effin Birds project isn't funny but actually it is. I don't think Kay has much of a sense of humor though. Southey made good use of his Tweet.

In turns out that Kay is pretty vicious: he told people to block me on Twitter saying I was "Not right above the shoulders" in response to my pointing out that Quillette provides wingnut welfare to hacks. Although since he is a three-time (so far) author at Quillette, I don't suppose his response was exactly a calm and disinterested assessment of my rightness above the shoulders.

I posted that on my Twitter and asked if he's always been that vicious. I was told he was like his mother, a Canadian right-winger, except she is "even worse." 

This is Kay's mother. No surprise she's a fan of Christina "Koch hack" Sommers and Jordan "lobster man" Peterson.

I sure have learned a lot about Canadians in the past year.

Anyway, back to Southey - in spite of Kay's comment she is still quite funny. The funniest I've found so far is from a couple of years ago. I LOL'd.

For a while when I was a little girl, my older brother and I made a lot of underwear jokes. We were like the George Burns and Gracie Allen of undergarments, only loud, and our routines were mostly just one of us saying the word "underwear," and the other one laughing; anyone else saying the word "underwear" could easily set us off as well.
Getting us dressed in the morning took forever. Trips to the laundromat were so gleeful, it was like the dryers emitted laughing gas. Finally, my poor mother reached the end of her knicker-quip tether, and this is what she did: One Saturday morning she took all the underwear in the house: mine, my brother's, hers and my dad's Y-fronts – a cotton comedy cornerstone right there – and she put them all on my parents' bed and basically said, "You have until sundown, go nuts." And that's what we did, and then, almost miraculously, we were done with underwear. 

And so I'm going to offer the world a chance to do much the same now. World, you have one week to make Hot Justin Trudeau jokes, and enjoy sexy-world-leader innuendo with impunity. Please make the most of this week and then, come Nov. 1, let's be done with this. 

You want to say, "Whoa, I'd respect his arctic sovereignty," this is your moment.
Dying to shout, "Man, I'd enter that into my Hansard," when images of Justin Trudeau come on the TV screen at your local bar, you go right ahead. 

Any journalists thinking of asking, "Hey, soon-to-be-prime mister, did it hurt when you fell from heaven, and do you feel that the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere affected your rate of descent?" at Mr. Trudeau's next press conference, this is your time. 

Want to comment, "I know he's prime minister but he's welcome to be chief of my staff" on the next news article you see speculating about the Trudeau cabinet picks, by all means, do so now. 

Ditto "I'd like to be first past his post," and "I'll bet that's a right honourable member."

Although perhaps my laugh was partly out of guilt since I have been known to say that Justin Trudeau can eat my poutine any time.

And this piece about Damore is brilliant.

While he’s hardly alone, Damore’s laborious effort provides indisputable evidence of the attitudes that many women in STEM face. When a woman submits her resume, she knows it may be read by a Damore. When she negotiates a raise—an arena in which she’s damned if she does and, as the Google memo explains, too innately high in “agreeableness” if she doesn’t—she weighs the possibility that she’s negotiating with a Damore. When a woman takes maternity leave, she wonders how many of her colleagues are Damores, dismissing her as someone innately lacking the “drive for status.” 

Damores are everywhere. Great flocks of Damores perch in their offices—or worse, on the corner of your desk when you’re up to your neck in stack traces—depositing their opinions on IQ differences on passersby and filling the air with their cry of “Women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas.”

Canada trip - what I learned

Acadian flag

It's been two weeks since my trip to Nova Scotia and I've hardly had a chance to blog since returning thanks to my 2-week French intensive class which started right when I got back, and other things.

So now that I have a moment, here are some things I got out of my second foray into Canada:

• I drove 400 miles around Nova Scotia and I literally did not see a single police car. 

• The roads in Nova Scotia are scary - they only have highways into and out of big cities like Halifax. Everywhere else it's two lane roads, which is a nightmare if you don't want to drive much over the speed limit and there is no-passing. Those Canadian drivers will drive right up your ass, well above the speed limit including at night in dense fog. Which I unfortunately did drive in. I assume this speed-limit scofflaw situation is associated somehow with the scarcity of state troopers (or I guess province troopers.)

• Nova Scotia is not really Frenchy except for the south-west section I drove through where I saw many homes flying the Acadian flag.   

• Nova Scotia wine is ah-maze-ing. More about that in the next blog post. 

• Thank god for funky college town coffee houses - in the US and Canada. Starbucks is OK, but college town coffee houses have a better vibe, are usually larger and much more relaxed. You can sit in a coffee house charging your cell phone for hours while drinking a single cup of cappuccino and the kids at the counter don't care the least little bit. The coffee houses I hung out in during my trip:

Coffee by Design on India Street  in Portland Maine - I hung out here while waiting several hours between my train from Boston and the ferry to Nova Scotia. They had tiny lil bagels but the prices were reasonable.

I neglected to take a photo so I used the one from their web site.

 Just Us Coffee in Wolfville Nova Scotia - I had breakfast here on Sunday before my drive from Wolfville to Halifax. The window looking out onto the street isn't actually a window, it's just a big opening. It looks like the coffee house was once a garage.



You have to walk through Just Us Coffee to get into the Acadia theater which of course is a great idea since theater-goers can get stuff before or after the show.

Just Us! Coffee House and Acadia theater from across the street.

Humanit-T in Downtown Halifax - may be the greatest coffee house I've ever charged my cellphone in. Just look at this - it has all the best things about a college town coffee house but takes it to the next level.

It has the standard painting by a local but it's actually a pretty good painting. It has a comfy canapé sofa with throw pillow and serviceable coffee table in front - beat up so that if you spill any coffee you don't feel guilty. And an outlet - right there above the sofa.

This is the perfect coffee house set-up especially for a traveller. I was there on a Sunday afternoon while it rained for a couple of hours and although it was somewhat busy I always had a place to sit - this spot opened up during hour two and I was ecstatic. It's the little things when you've driven 200 miles in the last 24 hours on crazy scary Nova Scotia roads.

Humani-T in downtown Halifax -  center of the college town coffee house universe

The exterior of the mighty Humani-T Cafe.




The Works, Portland Maine - I wasn't here very long, it was a quick stop between the Portland ferry and the bus station on my way home - yes I had to take a bus instead of a train between Portland and Boston. But I got to spend a little time in this cozy spot so they fully deserve to be on this list. Much better than being forced to hang out in a Dunkin' Donuts across the street.

They are the Walrus, goo goo ga joob

It really startles me now, how little the election of Justin Trudeau registered with me. I am a regular reader, as anybody who follows this blog would know (like maybe three people but anyway...) of Paul Krugman and of The New Yorker and both Krugman and the New Yorker wrote about the election win. I must have read both, or at least read the Krugman piece and noted the existence of the New Yorker piece, but I have no recollection of either.

And the New Yorker piece mentions Krugman:

Trudeau is now set to become, among other things, Paul Krugman’s favorite politician, since he promises to follow an economic plan that might have been hatched on the right-hand column of the Times’s Op-Ed page: raise taxes on the rich and unapologetically do some deficit spending in order to rebuild the country’s infrastructure and its middle class.

I would have remembered if I had read that. Being Krugman's favorite politician means quite a bit to me.

Via the New Yorker article I discovered a piece in the Canadian magazine The Walrus, (a magazine I had never read or heard of before) and I was really pleased to see that the author confirmed my own conclusions about the character of Justin Trudeau - and that's pretty significant considering that the author Jonathan Kay collaborated on Trudeau's autobiography "Common Ground." So he probably knows Trudeau better than anybody outside of Justin's family and close friends. Kay writes:

He’s someone who desperately wants to do the right thing. Who believes that what he does and says can set things right; that he can heal people and relationships; that he can make people like him and—a sad fantasy for many children of divorce—one another.

As I blogged a couple of weeks ago:

(I love him) also because he is always trying to do the right thing. He's super-conscious and for the most part carries it off with a fair amount of grace and not too much self-consciousness. And he almost doesn't have to - he's pretty much Canadian royalty, as the son of former Canadian PM Pierre Trudeau. The fact that he tries so hard to do the right thing makes him so admirable.

Kay made his observation in reference to a story Trudeau told about his relationship with his mother (I mentioned a couple of others in a previous blog post.) This story jumped out at me too, for its poignance and its exposure of the character of an endearing adolescent:

I spent more than thirty hours interviewing Trudeau. He told me hundreds of stories, not all of which made their way into the book. But there is one, from his young childhood—during the period after his mother, Margaret, abandoned the family—that stands out clearly.
“Whenever I knew my mother was on her way to visit 24 Sussex, I could barely contain my excitement, and began planning my welcome,” is how Trudeau tells the story in Common Ground:

On one occasion I decided to mark her arrival with a musical theme. I had received a small record player as a gift and enjoyed playing the hits of the day—“the day” being the early 1980s—especially Journey’s romantic ballad “Open Arms.” I had heard my mother say how much she liked the Journey song, and I decided that this would be the soundtrack to her entrance at 24 Sussex after one particularly long absence. I waited for her to arrive in her VW Rabbit before cueing up my tiny, tinny record player in my room upstairs. As she opened the door and entered the foyer I cranked up the volume and rushed to the top of the stairs. “Listen, mom,” I yelled down to her. “It’s our song!” Her reaction was to stare up at me, happy to see me but a little confused because she couldn’t hear the music at all. The volume on my record player was about half the level of a modern cell phone. I remember being crushed by that, so desperate was I to inject a sense of magic into every moment that we did have together as a family.

When Common Ground was published in 2014, and the Trudeau camp chose to disclose my role in preparing it, lots of friends asked me some variation on the question: “What’s he like? ” I would say, “Read the book.” And like clockwork, they would roll their eyes and reply, “No—what’s he really like? ” The underlying assumption is that books of this type are mere propaganda. Depending on the politics of the person asking me the question, there usually was some suggestion that, behind closed doors, Trudeau is either a closet socialist or a corporate shill. That he is a thumb-sucking ignoramus who is spoon-fed his lines by Gerald Butts—or a tactical genius who wears his glibness and childlike enthusiasms as a political mask. That he is a tormented scion who is desperate to rise to his father’s epic legacy—or who bitterly detests the old man’s oversized shadow. Since we have spent the last decade trying to figure out the “secret agenda” of Stephen Harper, it was perhaps inevitable that the country would become convinced that there is some “real” Justin Trudeau lurking below the surface.
You can find the real Justin right there, at the top of those stairs, playing his record player.

That last sentence especially is as perfect, concise a summation of a politician's character as any you're likely to see, right up there with another favorite of mine, the line from the New Yorker's David Remnick about Obama: His practiced calm is beyond reckoning.

Kay also addresses the phenomenon of Trudeau being considered just a pretty dummy - or at least less of an intellectual than his father. I could see that was bullshit even before I read "Common Ground" - and Kay of course spent quite a bit of time with Trudeau during the writing of the book and so is in a position to evaluate Trudeau's mind:

Pretty, yes. Dummy, no.

Trudeau probably reads more than any other politician I know. And yet you wouldn’t know this from the way he talks about ideas: His boyish, eager-to-please personality leads him to project publicly in a way that can seem intellectually unsophisticated. Political oratory always sounds best when it’s relaxed and natural. Trudeau’s hyperactive personality makes that a difficult act for him to pull off.

I admit that I am sometimes guilty of idealizing Canada, in light of the election of Trudeau vs. Trump and for other reasons, but Canada is dragged down by anti-intellectuals the same as in the United States - although perhaps not to the same degree. But I think that Trudeau's coming off as more of a regular guy and less of a brainiac serves him well. His being thought of as not-so-bright makes him much more palatable to the know-nothing slobs of Canada. Obama's and Hillary Clinton's obvious intellectual superiority were resented by many Americans and it worked against them.

Obama only squeaked into office, in my opinion, thanks to the overwhelming support of African Americans and the fact that his first opponent's running mate was Sarah Palin and his second opponent was Mitt Romney, who came off as a rich prig, and made Obama look like a regular guy by comparison. Women didn't support Clinton the way blacks supported Obama, since women suffer more from Stockholm Syndrome. But if Trump had gone up against Obama there's a good chance Obama would have lost. In spite of what Obama claims.

But I digress.

Trudeau should keep doing what he's doing.

I have to say, I was surprised by the reason given for the selection of the name "The Walrus" for this magazine. I immediately assumed it was from "Through the Looking Glass."

But no, it's a Canadian thing.