Working yesterday at a festival, I supervised the native plant table for about ten minutes. A woman, in her mid-forties, and her obnoxious son of about nine or ten began looking through the album of invasive plant species.

Woman: Is a bulrush the same thing as a cattail?
Maktaaq: I don’t know. Maybe it is.
Woman: You’re standing right in front of the cattail sign.

I looked down and – lo! – there was the cattail poster. I quickly scanned the poster for an answer to the woman’s question. The rhizomes are nutritious, the pollen can be made into flour and the down can fill life vests.

Then I turned to a coworker and asked him. Yes, the answer was that cattails are bulrushes. British English has the bulrush being the cattail, whereas American English has the cattail as the cattail, the latter term more familiar to me – yet Canadians, when faced with British and American counterparts, should, by default, utilize the British one. The woman seemed triumphant.

Woman: So, if English ivy is invasive, then why do respectable nurseries sell the stuff?
Maktaaq: Most people don’t know yet that ivy is crowding out native species.
Woman: But isn’t ivy as bad as Himalayan blackberry? And why do plant stores sell blackberry plants when they’re so bad.
Maktaaq: Well, some seed companies sell dandelions, for gourmet salads.
Woman: I know, I’ve planted dandelions, but they’re non-flowering so they won’t spread. And they taste terrible. So why do nurseries sell ivy? Isn’t that unethical?
Maktaaq: I assume a lot of people still don’t know that ivy is so bad, like kudzu in the early days.
Woman: Also, isn’t ivy bad for houses? Why do people plant it? Isn’t it bad of nurseries not to tell people about the dangers of ivy?
Son: Mom, enough with the talking! Look at the book with me! STOP TALKING!

I quickly moved to the puppet section. The wombat, bunny, aligator and other animal puppets seemed easier to handle. Then some guy came up to me. He was pushing a stroller; in his early thirties, he seemed toked one too many joints in his youth.

Stoner Dad: Where is the bat house tent?
Maktaaq: I don’t believe there is a bat house tent at the festival this year. Let me look in the programme. Nope, no bat houses this year.
Stoner Dad: Is a bat house hard to make?
Maktaaq: I think you just have to make them pretty high.
Stoner Dad: But could you just use a birdhouse?
Maktaaq: Maybe, but you’ve got to remember that bats don’t move like birds.
Stoner Dad: Are bat houses really hard to make?
Maktaaq: I don’t believe so, there are lots of programs given by local naturalist groups on making bat houses – you might check the continuing education catalogues or community centres. Better yet, keep your eyes on newspapers because some groups only get exposure through there and their courses fill up fast.
Stoner Dad: What if I want to build my own bat house and I don’t get into a course?
Maktaaq: There’s lot of information online; that’d be the first place I’d look.
Stoner Dad: But aren’t bat houses hard to make?
Maktaaq: They shouldn’t be too hard to make.
Stoner Dad: Where do you think I could buy a bat house?
Maktaaq: Um, phone up the *local* Naturalist Club.
Stoner Dad: Gee thanks for the advice.

My bullshit quota was running low. I edged away from the puppet table and back to the kids’ balloon craft table. Secretly, though, as a Transylvanian, I was pleased to be the bat house expert.

Inspired by the zombie armageddon imagination exercise in the Dawn of the Dead remake, I put three books with zombie stories on hold at the library. Each week I read one of the stories.

Next week, it’ll be James Herbert’s The Fog. Last week it was Neil Gaiman’s Bitter Grounds, from The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Volume Fifteen. Unfortunately, the story was about traditional zombies. Good writing but I am looking for the ghoulish zombie, not the voodoo one. Eating the living and the eaten formerly living rising up to join their brethern. That sort of thing.

Last night it was Stephen King’s Home Delivery in his Nightmares & Dreamscapes. Ghoulish zombies, yes, but not enough of them. Only mentions of the living being cannibalized – more gore, please.

The one highlight in the story lies in the pleasure this prodigal daughter of knitting got from the following two paragraphs:

The cold cobwebs of bone, which were all that remained of his fingers touched her throat before the baby kicked in her stomach – for the first time – and her shocked horror, which she had believed to be calmness, fled, and she drove one of the knitting needles into the thing’s eye.

Making horrid thick choking noises that sounded like the suck of a swill pump, he staggered backward, clawing at the needle, while the half-made pink bootie swung in front of the cavity where his nose had been. She watched as a sea slug squirmed from that nasal cavity and onto the bootie, leaving a trail of slime behind it.

Originally uploaded by Chief Ten Bears.

As I made dinner last night, I swear to god these sausages fried into curly shapes on their own and tumbled out of the skillet, more or less, to spell one of the most belaboured words in the english language.

Some people read heavily into random occurrences, like seeing Jesus in a tortilla or whatever. I’m gonna completely ignore this message.

Chief Ten Bears‘ sausages are conveying a message from the beyond. The Babylonians were famous for hepatoscopy, divination by way of entrails, but it was Shakespeare that made it famous via the Romans. Remember Julius Caesar.

These sausages, however, belong in a more obscure branch of hepatoscopy, called extispicy, or divination by anomolies in entrails, and then in an even more obscure branch of extiscpicy, called botulomancy, or divination by sausage.

Botulomancy predicts the future by sausage, hot dog, tube steak, smokies, bangers, haggis, head cheese, meatloaf, pâté, foie gras and even spam. Veggie dogs are exempt, however.

In this instance, the word fuck refers not to the English term for having sexual intercourse but to the Romanian, transliterated for the English-speaking household that Chief Ten Bears undoubtably represents. Fuck is the Romanian fac (“I do”), drawn from the infinitive a face, or to do. It is often misinterpreted by the English majority as a fuck you! when a member of the Romanian diaspora utters a polite fac eu! (I’ll do it!).

In other words, this case of botulomancy exhorts action. Do something.

Chief, have your chorizo sausage since spelled out any other messages? Do your taxes? Move your house from the flood plains? Change your hairstyle?

The above is an American’s attempt at a Canadian maple leaf, the kind so beautifully realized on our lovely and unique flag – stars are so 1777.

Then Travis picked it up and started a flag meme. That’s right, Canadians. Draw a Canadian maple leaf right now, without looking at a flag and post it on your blog.

Jen of World Wide Watercooler took up the challenge. So far, no other Canadians have engaged in this patriotic exercise.

Just for the record, here’s my contribution, before all the madness started:

Those years of lost Canada Days, face-painting Canada flags on preschoolers’ faces at festivals, were not lost after all.

Update: Saskatchewan maple leaf here.

For the inaugural meeting of my newly-formed bookclub, MaikoPunk, Matt and I will be eating cake to celebrate Margaret Atwood’s first published novel and our first club pick, The Edible Woman. The cake, of course, will be shaped like a woman.

“That could be tough to follow up for future books,” says Matt. “If most book titles were interpreted literally, it would be tragic at best.”

“Have you killed the salesman yet?”
“No, he’s still struggling, but I’ll have it done before the meeting.”

*Beware: spoilers.*

The zombie genre consists of true Caribbean zombies and the Night of the Living Dead zombies, historically called ghouls. While the fear of your dead mommy rising from the dead to eat you is ancient, zombie films (and books) consistently redefine the zombie and the details of the zombie armageddon.

If you do wake up in this movie’s zombie-infested world, here are ten things to keep in mind:

1. Sleep with your contacts/glasses on, your car keys beside you and have a full tank of gas. Forget not being a morning person.
2. Forget also zombies that react only to sight stimuli. These zombies detect humans in other ways. The Remake’s first zombie attacker was a neighbour who broke in. I suspect this little girl zombie either sniffed her way in or else retained some recollection that the neighbour’s house contained prey (along with the memory of opening doors – no broken window sounds alerted the sleeping prey).
3. The delay between human death and corpse reanimation is seconds.
4. These are fast zombies, currently in vogue. The ambling dead with which we are familiar suffer from rigor mortis, an impermanent state which covers only a 72-hour window. Fast zombies, who don’t appear to enter this state, retain and often exceed human flexibility.
5. The Remake zombies do decompose, albeit slowly. Presumably, as bacterial and fungal agents mutate into specialized zombie predators, rates of decomposition will accelerate.
6. Unbitten human foetuses can be infected in the womb through the bitten mother’s bloodstream.
7. Zombies have exclusive taste for human flesh. Dogs and presumably other animals will survive the zombie armageddon.
8. Zombies, in desperation, will cannibalize each other. Witness the mall sports store zombie janitor eating the entrails of a still-moving victim. The attack must have occurred long before this scene. Thus the human victim would have died minutes earlier and, given the seconds between death and reanimation, the victim would have already transformed. Yet the zombie janitor continued to eat his new compatriot.
9. In extreme cases, a hungry zombie will eat off its own lips. Witness once more, the little girl zombie at the beginning of the film. She has bitten off her top and bottom lips.
10. Once you are in your impregnable zombie fortress, do not leave it for the unverified safety of another sanctuary. It might turn out to be a zombie island.

If you managed to survive all the way to a mall with shatterproof doors, here’s what to do:

1. Store water in all containers in anticipation of an eventual water shutdown. Then use the mall rooftop to collect rainwater.
2. Dump out tropical plants, use the soil to grow fruits. All malls have smoothie shops and all smoothie shops have real fruits. Pick out the seeds and plant them in anticipation of depleted food stocks. Supermarket lemons, for example, are almost all sterile, however, not exclusively so. Small-scale agriculture is a viable option.
3. Use the remaining hours of electricity to research weapons.
4. Create your own bows and arrows or better yet, your own crossbows. Then practice, practice, practice. From the mall rooftop, you can safely upgrade your aim while annihilating the zombies.

Does anyone else have zombie survival techniques not listed here?

*****

After I wrote that I thought, wait, someone will tell me to read the Zombie Survival Guide. I have. But that book doesn’t specifically address mall survival tactics.

By the time I figured out how to hook up the ice cream maker, put together the ingredients for a basic vanilla recipe, and scrounged enough ice, it was midnight.

After ten minutes of turning clockwise the mechanism self-adjusted and the inner canister began churning.

Twenty minutes, I thought, that’s what I’m in for.

Buster Keaton’s shorts are about twenty minutes, I remembered. That’ll keep me busy while I churn away at the ice cream. In popped Keaton’s 1921 creation, the story of a family who takes his family out to sea on the homemade Damfino. Storm strikes, disaster ensues.

Every few minutes, I would take the crank off the inner canister and poke a finger into my ice cream.

The film is not one of Keaton’s best, it nevertheless kept me company while I churned.

The ice cream is for the museum on Friday. I spent two days mulling over the ice cream maker directions, trying to learn how to theoretically use the thing. This afternoon at work, I gave up and decided to learn to use it the practical way. Become an old hand at it by Friday.

I hate ice cream. Not as much as weddings but definitely more than garden slugs. Ice cream is cold and icky sweet. It lacks the pleasure you get from biting into something and chewing it. Give me a nice medium rare steak any day.

However, when I pulled off the lid from the canister the last time, my heart melted a little to make room for ice cream.

You see, there’s something about making something that had hitherto been a mystery – I had never given thought to the making of ice cream – that makes it dear to one. One of life’s mysteries solved – by me! – and ice cream is suddenly my best friend.

So much so that, despite the growing pain in my stomach (uh oh, lactose intolerance here I come), I want to buy my own ice cream churner.

My confession is this: I hate weddings. Always have.

I hate the one-time dresses, I hate the fattening tendencies of the colour white, I hate dancing alone in front of gawking half-strangers, I hate the fact that some of my good friends have yet to even call me three months after the engagement – goes to show you that the whole marriage thing is a stupid sham.

Furthermore, I hate housewives, SUV moms, soccer moms, Stepford wives and stay-at-home moms. I don’t buy into the mommy myth and I think earth is overpopulated, making motherhood a crime. I hate the fact that I’ll soon trade in questions about my diminishing prospects for questions about my ticking biological clock. Weddings and irresponsible fertility are linked.

My mom suggested a Catholic wedding.

No one in my family or Matt’s family is Catholic.

After a few phonecalls, no one is serious about converting and – what the hell? – I hate Catholicism! Catholics and I live on a precarious truce, but make me become Catholic and I become a rabid cauldron of anti-anti-abortionist and anti-homophobe venom.

Romanian Orthodooxy, the way my parents practice it, is a secular dream of easygoing practical solutions to the age-old problems: don’t steal, kill or cheat on your significant other, contraceptives and abortions are necessary and not evil. Rather in complete contrast to the misogynism of Catholicism.

My mom, in all due fairness, came up with the Catholic idea because Catholics seem more urbane in Romania. I am guessing that, since most Hungarian-Romanians practice Catholicism and since most Hungarian-Romanians are more prosperous than the average Romanian, that Catholics seem to be more elegant.

Then there are the bridal magazines. I bought two of them recently, in an effort to get myself into the wedding planning mood. I had to spend thirty minutes with Ms. magazine just to psych myself into buying these magazines first.

Yeah, gag me with all your to-do lists. I have better things to do with my time than become fixated on flowers and bonbonnieres – whatever those bonbonnieres are.

As the price of the wedding has now escalated to over $16,000, I am ready to pack a suitcase and run off to do volunteer work in Rwanda. $16,000 on one fucking day is not me!!! $16 a day in Rwanda could definitely be me!

My parents say that when I started talking, I asked for trucks and planes. I took apart cassette players and stuffed forks into electrical sockets during my infancy. Oh, I did get a Barbie for one birthday, but I gave her up after two days and a garish makeup job.

I dabbled in dumpster-diving, break-and-enters, fantasy noveling and backpack travelling. I am quite happy with who I am. I really want to continue being this person.

However, I am afraid the forces of normality are working their magic to erode me. I came across my two-year plan from 2004 and saw that I missed out on my April 2006 goal: a month in Bologna.

Where was I during April 2006? Putting in extra unpaid hours at work and suffering anxiety attacks all month. Not improving my Italian nor basking in socialist greatness. If it weren’t for Matt, I’d be mulling bridge-jumping.

Hopscotch, this strange religious experience…..It’s a secret, religious, weird, ceremonial rite of passage for girls that women know. Hopscotch was bizarre for boys because boys never played.

Eddie Izzard

For the first time in almost twenty years I played hopscotch.

I woke up yesterday with the burning desire to show a guy how to play, to divulge the secrets of femininity. Leaping out of bed yesterday, I was as ready to go as a malamute with rabies at a daycare.

But first, chalk.

We must have chalk somewhere in the domicile – surely we did not use it all up twenty years ago? Everyone has chalk lying around. No chalk.

Hours later, a 25-cent chunk of blue chalk in my hand, I am as ready as the malamute with rabies again. Grr! Up with hopscotch already!

Then, Jesus! What does a hopscotch game look like? I find a picture of a girl playing in New York – close enough – it’s on the continent.

Hopscotch is played all over the world, from here to Nepal, Ghana, Russia and China; no one knows where the game started, though the oldest known hopscotch diagram is etched into the floor of Rome’s Forum. Despite the overwhelming similarities, hopscotch has had many tweakings: in San Francisco, one researcher found twenty varieties.

So what version was I playing? I hopped onto the square with the stone, picked it up and hopped back. I remember something about jumping over the space occupied by the stone. Then there is the version where you pick up the stone and toss it back to home instead of carrying it back as you hop your way through the squares. Or do you first hop your way through each stone to the end, turn around, hop back to the stoned square, pick up the stone and finish?

No wonder boys had no idea how to play.

Two Christmases ago, my best friend Pugshot gave me the Sci-Fi/Horror B-Movie game, Grave Robbers from Outer Space.

We played up a storm, attracted by the cheesy dialogue, monster-distracting cleavage, bloodsucking fiends, blobs, carnivore slugs, killer toys and subterranean cannibals. I’ve recruited Matt into my

The next best thing to actually daydreaming up your own schlock horror pic might be playing this game. Just to start, you’ve got to come up with a title. You pick the six top cards from the deck, then cobble together a suitable title from the suggested words, adding the necessary thes and ofs.

In the last few hours, Matt and I have come up with:

1. Unchained Coed Girlfriend of the Unholy Damned Terror
2. Killer Hell Brain of the Demonic Sorority House
3. The Three-Headed Alien Vampire from Beyond
4. Lair of the Maniac Virgin Brides