Turns out Rurality’s garden was visited by the worms as well. Sure, she claims it’s just the hot weather splitting open the tomatoes. The poor woman is deluding herself. And most people do when they get such a forceful message from the slimy ones.

Unlike the lowercase worms in Phyllis Smith’s Arkansas, Rurality’s Alabama ones have left the caps lock on. The “HI” looks aggressive. It’s as if they are a bunch of worm thugs out for trouble. “HI” they grunt, right before they trip you and run off with your wallet. Rurality, don’t fall for it. Just walk away.

As I face the combination of my vast household with that of Matt’s, my entire life, books, photos, art, clothing, music, kitchenware, must now fit into a Tokyo-sized apartment. Since most of my expansion occurred during 2000-2002 – when I was living in an on-location Tokyo-sized apartment – I am painfully aware that my stuff can fit in said apartment but that Matt also has enough stuff to fit into said apartment. Surely we can’t buy two of said apartments.

My rules are I am keeping everything. Anything from my travels or in a foreign language will be protected as if I were a lioness wielding a red hot poker. Thus my non-English language books, the majority of my books, are safe, as is my humble collection of folkart: Romanian glass icons, Ethiopian religious symbols, Peruvian clayworks, Chinese basketware and so on. No art books can leave my possession either (or indeed, be lent out). Photos, impossible, as is my correspondence. As for clothes – ha!

My concession are a few books that I will recycle via secondhand bookshops and friends. Truly I will never reread that book about the Dutch torturing the English in 17th century Indonesia nor that horrid history of bananas.

Then there is the bigger issue at hand.

What does one do with their university class notes?

This, as Cheryl the Red and I discussed, is all we have of our education. Thousands of dollars, years of work, what do you do with it a decade or more after you’ve graduated?

Art history, for example, represents one of my very deepest interests. Spanish, French and German hark back to a time I could say I was multilingual. Chinese, why those eight years of fervent studying, almost a third of my life, would turn to tragedy if they were lost. And Classical Chinese, there’s the only class for which I ever got a C and the only test I ever failed – the Museum of Me needs my failures as well as my triumphs.

As I explained to Cheryl, my goal is to put aside one hour each week and re-write my notes into a notebook, condensing the lessons. I will clip out the drawings and glue them into a scrapbook, then recycle the paper.

Among the detritus my sister left behind was the metal tin of Adult Late Night Games. I fell upon on the box and took out the cards, when one card caught my eye.

It was a vocabulary card, with a trio of rarely heard words, the rules of the game being you come up with two alternate definitions, presenting all three to your opponents. If they guess one of the made-up definitions to be the meaning of the word, they must remove an item of clothing. Balderdash, in other words.

But what I liked were the words. Adjectives, verbs and nouns I missed my whole life:

• Zugzwang: an obligation to move in chess, even if disadvantageous (dibs on this word in Scrabble).
• Clitellum: the raised band encircling the body of an earthworm.
• Gammomania: A form of insanity characterised by strong and extravagant proposals of marriage.
• Levigate: to reduce to a fine powder.
• Briarean: having one hundred hands.
• Bathycolpous: someone with a particularly large chest.
• Callipygian: having particularly beautiful buttocks.
• Kakopyge: someone with ugly buttocks.
• Daspygal: having hairy buttocks.
• Hermipygic: possessing only one buttock.

Update: Matt adds steatopygic, having an extreme accumulation of fat on the buttocks, and David adds epipastic, medical dusting powder.

The last two weeks have brought me anguish.

Crenguţă’s diseased body took a turn for the worse on my birthday and she died sometime in the night. Before she succumbed, I took a photo of her lovely little toes:

Then, as I was recovering from one hamster death, poor Valentina escaped never to be seen again alive. I set up four hamster traps around the house, looked in every nook and cranny, and finally decided I’d found her hiding place. Alas, she was in a different part of the house.

The thing that gets to me is that she died a mere two metres from one of the easily accessible traps, filled with seeds. Probably disoriented, dehydrated and starved, she could not make it this far.

You can see above that the blood had already started pooling in her extremities. Rigor mortis had set in as well. She had been alive until recently and I failed her.

A mother whose son went down in an airplane in the Andes was struck with the feeling that her son was dead even before anyone else had known the plane crashed. Another family friend here in Vancouver had a dream of her father appearing out of the woods in her backyard at the same time he was dying in Romania. I believe very strongly in telepathy, especially in times of stress.

Yesterday morning I woke at 3:30 am, overwhelmed with depression and fear. It must have been at the time Valentina realized she would die and began her frenzied search for nourishment.

Valentina is laying on her funerary shroud within a perfume box, as she has been for the last few hours. I want to keep her with me for a few more hours. She only lived six months and all I will have of her now is this photo:

Remember this picture by Gautier Dagoty?

Notice the little dude in the lefthand corner?

That’s Zamor.

Zamor was a Bengal servant in Madame du Barry’s service, received from the king. Joan Haslip’s Madame du Barry: The Wages of Beauty describes his life at Barry’s home of Louveciennes (pages 90-91):

The countess adored him, stuffing him with sweetmeats, dressing him in the most extravagant of costumes in velvet and in satin with plumed caps and jewelled earrings. She even went to the lengths of having him christened, with her as godmother and a Prince of the Blood, the Comte de la Marche, standing in as godfather. People spoke of the orgies at Louveciennes, of little blonde peasant girls brought in to frolic and make love to Zamor for the pleasure of the old King, who to amuse his mistress gave her blackamoor a pension and appointed him as governor of Louveciennes, calling in the solemn-faced chancellor to affix his seal on the documents.

By the time Madame du Barry returned from exile at the Pont aux Dames convent (sent there by orders of the dying Louis XV), Zamor had grown into an annoying brat. Despite advice from her steward and lawyers to fire him, du Barry was too soft-hearted.

Zamor filled the next few years by hanging out in Paris’ Palais Royal cafes and later the Republican Club in Louveciennes itself, making friends with spies and bad sorts. When du Barry’s famous jewellry was stolen on the night of January 11, 1791, historian Haslip suspects Zamor as the insider on the job with his new friends. Sadly, too, it was at the Republican Club was Zamor met Englishman George Grieve, who was later to rape du Barry while arresting her.

Grieve had taken an interest in Zamor, encouraged him to read Rousseau and received from Zamor purloined letters from du Barry’s desk. By the time du Barry finally fired Zamor during the Reign of Terror – talk about bad timing – he was completely on Grieve’s side, supplying him with proof of du Barry’s guilt for having ‘aristocratic leanings.’

In Haslip’s book, Zamor appears one more time, on December 6, 1793, at the trial in the Great Hall of Liberty, formerly the Paris parlement, to provide damning proof that du Barry hosted aristocrats. He added that he tried to warn her but, bull-headed, she wouldn’t change her evil ways.

Du Barry was guillotined the next day, after she won a few hours reprieve by giving away the locations of her buried treasures to the Committee of Public Safety in a bid to win her life.

We pick up his story again online. Zamor himself was not immune from suspicion and faced prison time. After his release, he disappeared until 1815 when he was a bitter old man living in Paris. The site on which we find this information ridiculously exonerates Zamor of all wrong-doing.

Personally, I think Zamor was a bastard.

I wasn’t going to blog for a while, but I’ve just dug up my lists of weird searches that have led readers here. Going back to 2004 when I finally added Sitemeter, these searches make writing Maktaaq worthwhile:

1. hamster emails
2. indiebride poem
3. “japan men” photo “long hair”
4. woman eaten poo
5. krazy kat skirt
6. dr and mrs vandertramp song lyrics
7. hamster ladders
8. contact with deceased ladybug
9. spook the parrot
10. drugstore and biscuit beetles
11. bride porn
12. dream analysis guinea pig
13. squash, plural
14. big brown nipples
15. topless hula girl toy
16. what type of yoghurt can hamsters eat
17. guinea pig clothes
18. tooth extractions fetish
19. zombie fortress [this one was used twice this week!]
20. my hamster is throwing her babies across the cage why
21. what is written on the godmother’s business card
22. wet butts sex
23. pink hamster
24. strawberry shortcake adult comic dominatrix
25. wood sliver infection of the finger
26. what noise does a wookie make?
27. dream dictionary fingernails fall off
28. origami freddie kruger fingers
29. lewis and clark encountering werewolf
30. “how to survive a robot uprising” -”with more interest”
31. tweety bird birthday party for thirteen year old
32. grapefruits vs flatulence
33. The touching, massage, closeness guinea pig plan
34. insect squish fetish stories
35. pitt bull method of killing
36. chinese zodiac sign toxic rabbit
37. radioactive cutlery 2004 Bush
38. preserved babies in formaldehyde
39. queer eye bourgeoisie:
40. fresh pork of my thoughts [note: this was my second post as a blogger way back in 2002]
41. guinea pigs music notes tone (-”as guinea pigs”) ( -’”"guinea pigs”")
42. possum rat nutella
43. praying mantis tattoos
44. origami krueger claws

The searches have shifted from hamster menstruation (it can happen!), the one search I was once guaranteed to be #1. I still get a lot of slipper spanking, Marissa Imrie and Mohammed Bijeh, but not enough to make me really certain of what my identity really is. Am I a morbid ghoul or am I fraught with a latent sexuality borne of a convent upbringing?

Makes me want to write more about shepherding guinea pigs through Gobi Desert sandstorms. Or something.

As our little book club is now reading Evelyne Lever’s Marie Antoinette: The Last Queen of France, I have faithfully delved into it, already reading one-sixth of it. Hurrah.

However, already I have a few questions that need answers. What was so scandalous about Louis XV? What hanky-panky was the Sun King up to? Was Madame du Barry really practically from the gutter?

To answer a few of my questions, I picked up a few books at the library and began to research.

We’ll leave the Sun King aside for now – but Louis XV, yes, I would agree with Evelyne Lever and Joan Haslip (the writer of Madame du Barry: The Wages of Beauty), that this Louis was still hot shit in his old age. Not my type, but still, check him out below.

Louis XV was famously unfaithful. His most famous lovers were:

• Madame de Mailly
• Madame de Vintimille (younger sister of Madame de Mailly)
• Madame de Châteauroux (another younger sister of Madame de Mailly)
• Two other de Mailly sisters
• Marquise de Pompadour – with whom he later became merely friends, as she didn’t like sex
• Marie-Louise O’Murphy – a saucy Irish lass who was famously painted by François Boucher at fifteen (below) as the Reclining Girl, now in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek
• Madame du Barry, the last mistress

The king also frequented his Parc aux Cerfs, the Deer Park, where a changing smorgasbord of misguided girls were provided for the king’s vast appetite.

As for Madame du Barry, was she riffraff?

Pretty much.

Mother Anne Bécu was a gorgeous seamstress who, while sewing sheets at the Picpus monastery, hit it off with the handsome Brother Angel, or Jean-Baptiste Gomard de Vaubernier. Oops.

But it gets worse. The future Madame du Barry, four-year-old Jeanne Bécu, went off to Paris to live with mom, mom’s new boyfriend Monsieur Billard-Dumonceaux, the paymaster of the city of Paris and inspector of the army commissariats, and his courtesan-mistress, the Italian Francesca or Madame Frédérique.

Life in a courtesan’s household left its mark on the little child and not even nine years in a convent culled her love of luxury. A few lovers here and there, then a stint at Monsieur Labille’s fashion house, followed by falling in with the pimp Jean du Barry, le roué (“the rake”). Not quite a streetwalker, yet hardly off the mark.

Seen above in her favourite portrait, by the darling of women’s art history, painter Marie Louise Élisabeth Vigeé-Lebrun, du Barry is certainly lovely.

All her portraits, though, show a wide space between her eyebrows and eyelids,

a long face,

a small mouth,

and a high forehead,

all contributing to a langurous look. Not quite beauty by my standards, but then, I’ve never been into vacuous blondes.

I still find Madame du Barry intriguing, despite her looks and lack of decent personality, more so because I couldn’t help but peek 200 pages into her future and saw that she ascended to the guillotine in hysterics. Too bad for the poor girl.

Her friendship with an illuminary of eighteenth century art is just as fascinating. Young Jeanne Bécu, as a grisette (“working woman”) at Monsieur Labille’s, made friends with Labille’s daughter, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard.

Another favourite in the pantheon of women’s art history, this portrait painter is quite famous in feminist art circles for her self-portrait (below, with students Marie Capet and Carreaux de Rosemond).

Celebrated for its depiction of a professional, at a time when an impermeable ceiling prevented women from having any sort of career beyond opening her legs (in matrimony or otherwise), the portrait has two gushing groupies and a pompously luxurious hat that serves to highlight the fact that, yes, she has made enough of a living at her art to be able to afford an expensive example of millinery.

Having read Margaret Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman, I have a few thoughts left to dissolve:

• “A cicada was singing in a tree nearby, its monotonous vibration like a hot needle of sunlight between the ear.” (chapter 4) I always thought cicadas sounded like robot drones, but I’ll accept this.
• Ainsley has a poster of silent film sex symbol Theda Bara (chapter 5). The actress, whose name, others have pointed out ominously, is an anagram for Arab Death, ended her career when her husband disapproved of his wife continuing her job after marriage.
• Of a foreign film that Marian considers seeing (chapter 14): “In her present state she did not feel like writhing through intensities and pauses and long artistic closeups of expressively twitched skin pores.” As a foreign film buff, I say Ha!
• From chapter 15: “He’s beautifully toilet-trained now, he uses his plastic potty almost every time, but he’s become a hoarder. He rolls the shit into little pellets and hides them places, like cupboards and bottom drawers. You have to watch him like a hawk. Once I found some in the refrigerator, and Joe tells me he just discovered a whole row of them hardening on the bathroom windowsill behind the curtain. He gets very upset when we throw them out. I can’t imagine why he does it; maybe he’ll grow up to be a banker.”
• In chapter 20, Marian’s family breathes a sigh of relief: “…Their fears about the effects of her university education, never stated but always apparent, had been calmed at last. They had probably been worried she would turn into a high school teacher or a maiden aunt or a dope addict or a female executive, or that she would undergo some shocking physical transformation, like developing muscles and a deep voice or growing moss.” Which reminds me, Taiwanese girls are freaked out about developing muscles. “No, I don’t dare walk up that hill – what if I build muscles?” Oh, if only it were so easy to buff up. The growing moss part – I am intrigued, Margaret.
• “There was a fizzling sound, and Trevor appeared dramatically in the doorway, holding a flaming blue sword in either hand.” This snippet from chapter 22 deserves its addendum, uttered by Trevor himself: “I just love things flambé.”

Our first book club meeting concluded with cake-making, in keeping with chapter 30′s defining moment:

Unlike the fully dressed version that Marian made, we opted for a bikini’ed edible woman:

As you can see, the hair is the same “masses of intricate baroque scrolls and swirls, piled high on the head and spilling down over the shoulders.”

We also used the only three colours available to Marian, red, green and yellow, as well as “globular silver decorations” for her eyes. We added some globular silver decorations to her belly button.

Voilà!

MaikoPunk poses with the finished product before we all dug in and destroyed her.

It took us a while to decide on our next book, as MaikoPunk begged for a nonfiction work. We finally agreed on Evelyne Lever’s translated Marie Antoinette biography when we realized we could host the next book club meeting on Bastille Day!

No decisions yet on how to commemmorate this book.

Matt, a native Texan, says that many movies are about Texas but few are filmed in Texas. After having seen Texas in person twice, I needed to see Texas on celluloid and I was up for the challenge of finding a film about Texas set in Texas.

“Manos” The Hands of Fate was filmed in El Paso in 1966 and so I settled Matt down in front of the TV to prove to him that there are indeed movies about Texas made in Texas.

Known as one of the best films of all time, the 1966 “Manos” The Hands of Fate was the work of El Paso fertilizer salesman Hal Warren and features his trademark editting style of thirty-two-second scenes – thanks to the technology of the hand-wound 16mm Bell & Howell camera.

Starring Hal himself as hapless father Michael, Diane Mahree as his wife and little Jackey Neyman as his daughter, with an uncredited cameo by a poodle as the tragic family dog, the story unfolds with the family losing their way and finding themselves at Torgo’s doorstep.

Torgo hides a terrible secret in his pants – he is half man, half satyr. Actor John Reynolds, with help of Tom Neyman (Jackey’s father and the actor in the role of the Master), designed the prosthetics from wire coat hangers and foam. Rumour has it that Reynolds wore the contraption the wrong way, causing pain and leading to a pain killer addiction. Reynolds’ dedication to film is apparent with each painful step his randy yet well-meaning everyman takes across the screen.

The Master sleeps surrounded by his six wives, all models from El Paso agency Mannequin Manor, and with real-life family dog Shanka, who, in this charming family drama*, got a starring role as the Devil Dog.

When the Master awakes all hell breaks loose, with a madcap race between the Master and servant Torgo to win the affection of Michael’s wife, amid a ten-minute brawl between the Master’s six wives. It is at this point, when the now-famous line is uttered, “The woman is all we want. The others must die. They all must die. We do not even want the woman!”

The thrilling ending brings us back to where we started, though, instead of Torgo, we find Michael in the role of the servant. The film’s denouement leaves the audience gasping, for the Master is now surrounded not by six wives, nor even by seven but by eight – little Debbie is among the brides! – the words, “She will grow up to be a woman” echoing in the viewers’ ears. This horrific climax is splashed with the words:

The End
?

So beloved is this film that, in 1998, fans of Torgo tried to get the actor a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The star committed suicide six months after filming wrapped up – no doubt missing the camaraderie and the halcyon highs of the two-and-a-half month shoot.

*Tom Neyman’s wife and Jackey’s mom made the famous Manos cape, along with the billowing diaphanous robes of the Master’s wives. Tom Neyman painted the haunting oil of the Master and his Devil Dog. He also sculpted the metal hands visible throughout the film. Crew affectionately called the film Mangos: The Cans of Fruit. Incidentally, only little Jackey and Shanka accepted renumeration for their roles – a bicycle for the former and fifty pounds of the dog food for the latter – the rest of the cast accepted shares in the film in lieu of salaries, so great was their fate in this classic.

Ever since watching the fast zombies of the Dawn of the Dead remake, I’ve been on the lookout for possible fortresses during a zombie siege.

Yet, Douglas Coupland didn’t call Vancouver the City of Glass for nothing. This city is a deathtrap when it comes to zombie evasion.

All our malls; goldfish bowls with a “Zombie Buffet Open 24 Hours” sign on the front. One of our biggest malls and funnest consumer experiences, Metrotown Mall, has a permeable parking lot with flimsy gates.

The other malls are hardly conducive to a Dawn-of-the-Dead-like materialist calm before the storm. You may as well wander down Robson during zombie armageddon with a target painted on your face.

Office buildings, houses and even warehouses all have copious amounts of windows at ground level.

My guess is that if the zombies do take over, I would break into a tall apartment block with fire escape that’s locked on the ground floor – one of those stairwells, you could go into from any floor and then go out of on the ground floor, but that you can’t re-enter from the ground floor.

I’d shut down the elevators, make a clean sweep of the building, throwing out zombies that have inadvertently made it in before I locked off the building, and take inventory of all the food. I’d move non-perishables to the top floor (and my personal command centre), eating refrigerated food before the zombies shut down electricity to the city.

Today I discovered that Canadian Tire – for non-Canadians, this is, at its core, a hardware store – carries guns. I thought there were no gun stores in Canada. One zombie defense problem solved.

I have no idea what Malnurtured Snay‘s “Benelli shotgun with a pistol grip and stock” is exactly – I still can’t run into Canadian Tire and grab the first Benelli I see. I am working on this.

I figure, I can also grab a few vegetable seed packets while I detour to the Canadian Tire for zombie weapons.