Saturday, August 13, 2011

IT'S ALIVE!!!!

Will I ever tire of using that phrase to announce my continued existence and return to blogging? Short answer: no.

I'm working on a Big Post, which will have to wait until my head clears (nauseating details of the state of my health we shall forego, but I have suffered an invasion which may or may not have some relation to my having ordered the E-Coli special at a St. John's McDonald's).

In the meantime, I will bring closure to my previous musings on the Great Canadian/Newfoundlandian mini-series, Random Passage.


By the time I had finished tape 3 out of 4, I had begun to get impatient with the characters and their endless personal drammers, so I looked on the internet to see if it was going to unfold as I was privately predicting. It turned out that I was not quite correct on all the details, but I had the gist of it down. Still I persevered with watching all of it, and reached two somewhat related conclusions:

(1) One could be justified in nick-naming this work "Random Sausage" -- I think that's self-explanatory;

(2) If there was anything you could call a "surprise ending" it was the late chapters set in St. John's, in which the EEEEEVIL Catholic Church was portrayed like some collection of cartoon villains, injuring, enslaving, and cheating the poor workmen of the town in order to build a huge cathedral* to the glory of the local Bishop* (called, inexplicably, "your Lordship").

In other words, it's just the typical sort of artistic venture which government grant pimps of Canada cheerfully fund and support with regularity.

*Never mind that the actual cathedral in question was not begun until 1841, several years after the Random Passage story ends (1837), and that Newfoundland did not get its first Catholic bishop until 1847. But, ya know, whatever.

Stay tuned for more important news and views.

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