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Why is Woody Allen creepy?

So. Evil won in the race for Prime Minister.

Mark Blevis, of the Electric Sky Podcast, wrote to me and said:

On behalf of all Canadians who care, and the ones who should and don’t realize it – my apologies for what took place on Monday night, and all I can say is that it’s the Canadian way to punish ourselves for the mistakes of another. And we did that, exactly, by voting in Stephen Harper and his glorified Reform party, now called the Conservatives of course. And the only thing I can offer you as condolence for having come to Canada and now going through this is that Harper’s conservatives will probably only last 12, maybe 24 months as a minority government.

Calm blue ocean…calm blue ocean…calm blue ocean…

Okay, Mark. I’m on the beach – no, no, not a tropical beach, a chilly one, the shore of Lake Ontario – looking out at the calm blue water. I can see into the future. I can see the Liberals getting a little slap on the wrist, Harper is getting enough rope to hang himself and he promptly does so and now there is a brand new election, and a brand new Liberal candidate who is saying I AM NOT A CROOK and no one believes him, but who cares? Because LO, BEHOLD, it is Jack Layton winning, winning, winning, winning, WINNING!

Ahhh. I feel much better now.

After the movie Match Point ended I listened to the people around me as we left the theatre. Two little old British ladies started going on about a marginal character:

Mrs. Grizzle Ooo, that Margaret Tyzack!

Mrs. Buxton I just love her. Did you know she’s an Officer of the British Empire?

Mrs. Grizzle And she was in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre!

Mrs. Buxton It’s terrible, the way they underutilized her.

Mrs. Grizzle Just criminal.

It was sweet, the way they obviously had no idea who the movie stars were, but that elderly woman on screen for twenty seconds – by god, they were practically members of her fan club. She’s probably the only reason they’d gone to see the film. I bet it would have been fun to sit next to them during the steamy sex scenes.

Which brings us to the teenager I heard saying to a friend, “It must be creepy to be directed by Woody Allen to do all those sex scenes,” and I realized that they were so young that to them Woody Allen is the creepy guy who married his stepdaughter, instead of the guy who made all those movies in the seventies that their dad loved and so they watched them whenever they were on network television, this being before the days of Betamax and they found the movies unpleasant in the extreme – i.e., they find Woody Allen creepy for entirely different reasons than I do.

Paul and I were in the laundry room. Paul was reading. This giant 6′4″ man with a deep, boomy voice and a thick accent said, “Good book?”

Paul looked up and shyly nodded.

“You like to read, eh?”

Paul nodded again.

“Reading is good. Liking to read will take you far in life.”

I said, “I think he has more books than toys.” And as an aside, one day Todd and I waded into the mess that was Paul’s room and started cleaning, since most of the mess was our fault – “Oh hell, someone’s coming over – let’s just dump all the mess from the living room in Paul’s room and close the door,” and before we started I jokingly said, “You know, I bet we could give away everything in here and leave the Legos, and he wouldn’t even notice,” and then when we were finished, and we really had put almost everything in the cart for Goodwill Paul wandered in, and I was right. He didn’t notice at all.

The man grinned. “But you have to leave time for sports, right? You like hockey?”

Paul hesitated, then said, “I don’t know.”

The man leaned closer, and spoke more slowly. “Ice hockey. You like to play it?”

Paul said, loudly and slowly, “I don’t know what it is.”

The man sighed, defeated by what he viewed as an accent too thick to understand, while I giggled to myself over the fact that it hadn’t even occurred to him that Paul really didn’t know what hockey was. I mean, can you read a book while you play hockey? Does it involve pretending you’re a monster with your friends? Are there Legos involved? Yeah, I didn’t think so.