Colleen Anderson's Blog, page 65

District 9: A Review

And this is your spoiler alert. I'm going to dissect the movie so move on if you don't want to know what happens in some of it.

There's been a lot of hype about District 9. It was discussed some on my writers group list and people have seen all the bus ads and trailers. My neighbor said, "Oh that's supposed to be one of the best movies of the year." It's produced by Peter Jackson of  LOTR fame and director Neill Blomkamp. And while I found the movie good, it wasn't great.

What works for it are qui

Salmon Fishery: Another Ecosystem on its Last Gasp

In the 80s the Atlantic cod fishery faced a moratorium because the cod stocks had all but disappeared. Some fishermen say that they were telling the Department of Fisheries and Oceans that the fish were getting smaller and fewer. They say the department didn't listen. Others say that the fishermen were as complicit as the fisheries department because they continued to fish the stocks to near extinction. It's obvious, if nothing else, that there were several guilty parties and that the fish disap

Love, Sex and Inanimate Objects

Just when you think you've seen it all, up pops another twist on the skein of life. I'm used to reading about, and hearing about different fetishes. I write erotica as well as other subjects so most of it I've heard of. Some of it is downright weird and some even revolting but I've heard of it.

What I have not heard of, or didn't until yesterday, was objectum sexuals. It doesn't exactly roll of the tongue and seems a blend of Latin and English but perhaps that's to be expected from a self-proclai

Why Canada is Racist

It's a shameful fact that I'd like to see less of, that Canada is racist. I'm lucky enough to have been raised without racism. I don't understand it. But then some of it is subtle. It's not always about the color of a person's skin but a person being other, not one of us. Outsiders need not apply.

Canada's own interior racism (or should I say racial profiling) includes the interment camps for people of Japanese ancestry during WWII. Those people were uprooted for fear that because of their origin

Terror of the Air: Cold War Memories

When I was a child growing up in Calgary, there was an air raid siren in our neighborhood, at the corner where the Chinese store was. Yes, we did call the little corner store the Chinese store, as it was run by Chinese, yet this was never a derogatory term. I believe the air raid siren was across the street by the gas station. It was very tall, with a thick pole about the width of two light standards. It had to be about 25-30 feet high, with a big megaphone shaped horn at the top and all of it p

Waterpod and Floating Villages

Awhile back I posted an article on the Freedom Ship, basically a floating condominium that would tour the world. Ritzy, high end, super expensive and still a pipe dream ten years after the first idea hit the blueprints. 

And interestingly enough I finished writing a story this year that took fifteen years to finish. It takes place around New York, where people live on and farm barges in a very near future where pollution and toxic waste have poisoned a lot of the land. Impossible? Maybe but the i

Bog People and Mummies

I've been fascinated with mummies since I was about nine. These husks of a former life, reamed, cleaned and packed were then embalmed, smeared with unguents, wrapped in yards of cotton and placed in several sarcophagi. They were sent well prepared into the next life with canopic jars for all the important organs, gold and jewels and food. What a amazing world. And some of those mummies, richer in death than you or I could be in life, continued to grow nails or hair.

Is it any wonder that these bo

There is No Harmonization to Campbell's New Tax

Gordon Campbell's two-faced Liberals want to bring in a tax that they say they had no idea about three months ago. If this is in fact true I'd have to say this party is pretty poor in long-term planning. Long-term planning that raised and then took off a half percent on our PST (2004). Poor planning in giving everyone a pre-election bribe of $100. Poor planning in the Olympics, embroiling our tax dollars into it, and then going, oh gosh it's overbudget. I could have told them this three years ag

Fashion: A Bygone Era of Hats

I like hats. Hats are fun. The mad hatter loved his hat but then he was quite mad, from felting those hats. Mad as a hatter was once a popular saying. Though there is dispute as to whether it actually came from hat making, once hatters used mercury to felt the hats and that drove them quite mad as it was absorbed into their skin.

In a later era, World War II, my mother worked for a hatter in Calgary. Because so many men were on the front lines, women's emancipation happened. Women had to work the

Movie Fallacies: Eyeglasses

The movies are notorious for giving us views of the world that don't actually reflect reality. Granted, movies are make-believe, there are those "realistic" ones that still skew the truth. Early operatic Valkyries colored people's views of Vikings and it is still popular to see hulking Norse berserkers with giant horns (or wings) on their helmets, when in fact, archeological evidence indicates this was never the case. There was one helm with straight conical horns and deemed ceremonial due to th