Colleen Anderson's Blog, page 55

The Grisly Quest For Body Parts

I'm working on a story that involves research into some ancient Christian practices. And I'm reminded yet again about the weird human penchant for bones.  When people die we either bury them in dirt or burn them. Some places like Cuba and New Orleans, which have little dirt due to high water tables, bury their people in above ground caskets where there is less chance of a body floating away or unpleasantly moldering in a hot climate. Most cultures inter their dead one way or another.

But...

The Olympic Torch and Being Green

Vancouver 2010 Olympics, given a bronze medal by the Suzuki society for green initiatives. Just made it but still somewhat green, right? I'm in New Westminster and today the torch has gone through on Columbia Street. Here's what it looked like.

First there were four Greyhound bus size trucks that went through. I might have missed one or two but at least three of these were Coca-Cola with people in red playing drums, waving flags, drumming, cheering. Then there was a five minute gap and a...

A Nasty Tale About Lice

I was born and raised in Alberta, where the summers are hot and dry and the winters are cold and dry. I don't mean dry as in no precipitation but dry as in the air can make your skin flake like a 10,000 year old mummy's. And the water is mineralized enough to leave scales on taps and pipes the envy of any dragon.

Calgary gets rain (thundershowers), hail (in buckets) and snow that lasts a winter. Or at lease these phenomena were common in my childhood. Because of this you never saw an animal...

Kangaroo Kontroversy

Now we're truly getting down to what the Olympics are all about. The Australian athletes have hung a two-storey flag of the boxing kangaroo outside their residence in the Olympic village. The Olympic village in Vancouver is, like every other Olympic venue, cordoned off and protected by security enough to sink the Bismarck. The only people who might actually get into this "village" are the athletes, reporters, security goons and other bigwigs of Olympic importance. But it is where all the...

Traveling in India: Kisses at the Taj Mahal

It is only be apt that when I was in India I ran into a man intent on kissing me at the Taj Mahal.  Actually, it was while I was walking there, in the city of Agra. The Taj Mahal was built by Shah Jahan in the 17th century as a memorial of love after the death of his favorite wife Mumtaz Mahal. She died in childbirth with their fourteenth child. (That would be enough to kill most people.)

The Taj Mahal houses the bodies and sarcophagi of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal and is considered one of...

Really Dumb Olympic Trinkets

I wasn't sure what I would write about today but then I received, with my bank statement, a little blurb about winning some Olympic art, sort of. My bank is VanCity, a local, good reputation bank. But in the statement was this double-sided pamphlet from Citizens Bank. It says, "You could win 1 of 12 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games edition Visa prepaid card collector sets." Phew.

Okay, so first Citizens Bank in my VanCity statement? It makes me wonder what my bank is getting out of it...

I Don't Get Religious Coverings

I should title this "I don't get religious head coverings" but in essence it applies to any covering. Now I imagine this post will probably get me in the bad books of a lot of religions, but let's just say I'm not against a religious covering in one religion or necessarily all religions. I've actually put off writing this for a long time, not out of fear but because I thought I should educate myself more. But there are a lot of religions and no matter how much I read I'm likely to miss some...

Writing: Submitting Poetry

Okay, I know I just wrote about this in the last few weeks but really, it sometimes pays to hit people over the head. In fact some of these rules apply just as equally to submitting other works as fiction.

Chizine has three poetry editors. Carolyn and I assist Sandra. We also correspond regularly with each other and offer opinions on whether we think a poem is good or not. When reading many submissions, and often bad ones (the ratio of bad poems to good ones is higher than it is with fiction...

Community in the City

Most of our cities are so large these days that there arises a suspicion of anyone who seems too friendly. Don't smile at anyone on the street. Don't answer their queries and if, like me one day, you ask if they can change a dollar into four quarters run away as if you're stealing their soul. We are packed in tighter, in this new ecotrend of eco-density, which if anything raises frustrations and issues of not enough breathing space, but we don't get friendlier.

Many people live in high rises...

Mutants Are Among Us

If you never read the X-Men comics (I grew up on them), then you might at least have seen or heard of the X-Men with one of the recent movies that have come out, the last one being Wolverine (and why they had to make him choose to be Canadian, from the US, as opposed to being Canadian as in the original comics, I'll never know). In those comics, most of the mutants' mutations give them a power, to destroy or create, or hold forces at bay.

Sure there are a few unfortunate mutants whose power...