Capt Mondo's Photo Blog

Annie’s cat, which she named “black cat”, has now been absent for several days, and I suspect has found a quiet dark nook to hide herself away in. Given her state when we last saw her, I am pretty sure she must’ve expired.

Despite bouncing back after the initial vet visit last Sunday, she quickly sunk back to the way she was before. Still throwing up, with no substance, just watery green bile. Then a couple of days ago she stopped taking water, even when placed directly in front of her.

Our nanny let her out on Friday afternoon (after throwing up on her coat first) and hasn’t been seen since. I’ve looked in all of the usual places I’ve seen her hide away — under the back and front porches, hiding in the garden, between the houses and a few other places, but no sign.

I was planning on taking her to the vet that evening to have her put down, but she seems to have taken matters into her own hands (or paws, I guess).

The kids have been too excited about Halloween to notice the absence, or at least to talk about it openly, but they know she has been very sick and we have been preparing them both for the worst.

Our other cat, Blackberry, is the happiest I’ve seen him in ages. No longer grumpy, he is the de facto head cat again. Not exactly cuddly, but he is no longer hissing in anticipation of being playfully jumped on by Black Cat when let out the door.

Erika is talking about getting another kitten from the local pound, possibly on the weekend.

She was the dopiest female cat I’ve known, and certainly the most talkative (too much so sometimes), and I’ll miss her.

As a member of the ROM in addition to getting free admission and notifications of any special events there, we also get a small flyer called ROMLife that lists all of the programs and courses taught there. What caught my eye a while back was a talk that Rick Green – former member of The Frantics, the “Green” of The Red Green Show and head writer for History Bites – was planning to give. I love the show and have managed to catch most of the four seasons currently being shows on History Television, so I arranged to go and see it. And since my Aunt Audrey lives close by and I haven’t seen her for a while, I asked her to join me.

Turns out she hasn’t seen the show, and that’s because it’s on an “upper channel” she doesn’t get, but she was up for an evening out with her nephew.

After catching up on what she’s been up to of late, we headed over to the ROM, getting there with plenty of time to spare in order to get tickets and decent seats in the auditorium. It started at 7-o’clock and after a brief introduction by the directory of the ROMLife program Rick Green took to the stage.

He talked about the show in general and how the show started. He started out by giving us a version of the 2-minute pitch he made of the show to the people at History Television several years ago. The basic premise focused around the idea that television had in fact been around for most of the events in history – that much is known to anybody who has ever watched the show. But as he then went on to say, the show will also designed to be a dark critique of television as a medium itself, showing how the viewpoint and the emphasis shown distorts the overall picture. The end result is something like a mongrel cross between the classic SCTV and just about any other show you might run across on History Television. Interestingly, he has nothing but praise for the execs at History Television, who have apparently given him all of the support he’s needed to start the show and keep it running, now into its 5th season.

He started by showing off a clip from a yet-to-be-seen show from the new season that looks at the antagonism between Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I. Rick introduced the clip by saying that in fact the two of them never actually met during their lifetimes, and that the writers had to think of something that would bring them both together and be a good forum to display all of the issues each of them had with the other. The result: The Jerome Springer Show featuring a pissed-off Mary Queen of Scots with a strong white-trash/Southern accent bitching away at the way she’s being treated by her cousin. Great stuff! Bracketing this sort of material was extensive commentary from three curators at the ROM, all experts in their field who provided extra details on the history. Sometimes they provided further background for other clips from the show that were then played, other times showing items in the museum collections relevant to that era, or providing an archeological perspective on the events covered in specific History Bites clips. It ended up being a good mix of comedy and history lesson, taught by the best in both fields. There was even a bit of crossover, as the archeologists tried out some very dry comedy, explaining how horrible human tragedies (usually massacres) usually left him to find largely intact pottery from the hiding places where people had hidden them and never returned to collect them. Bad for the original owner, but great news for the archeologist. The condition of any pottery that was found quickly became a running joke throughout the evening.

Fans of the show would have been interested in the back-stories behind some of the clips he played. He mentioned a few of the places used as backdrops for some of the scenes – not too surprisingly, the Medieval Faire that runs in Oakville during the summer cropped up more than once. He prefaced the clip from the new season that featured a scene from All in the Family set during the time of the first American Thanksgiving by saying that the two writers who wrote it had not been born when the show was originally on air. They had to rent some tapes of the show in order for them to understand the format. This happens a lot, ranging from shows just before my time (like The Ed Sullivan Show), to shows I vaguely remember (like Laugh In), to much more recent shows like Survivor, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and so on.

The presentation went on for a couple of hours, and was lots of fun. I think you can measure its success by the fact that my Aunt, who had never seen the show, thought the evening out was a hoot.

Late this morning the whole of the Schengili-Roberts family descended upon Skydome to see the Garden Bros. Circus. Erika was a real trooper — she got back from the film set of Death to Smoochie at around 5am this morning, and was game enough to be woken at 9am in order to head down to the Circus pre-show by 10am. Vanessa, of course, had a blast. Prior to the show she got to see a lot of the animals — tigers, camels, zebras, elephants and mountain goats — and managed to get a ride on an inflatable slide. Then it was time to take our seats, where we got to see the performances. First, a firecracker leaps across the stage, which sets a man on a ladder on fire, who then proceeds to jump into a large pool of water. Vanessa was pretty much goggle-eyed from this point on.

Over the course of about 3 hours (including a 1/2 hour intermission) along came all of the other acts: various gymnasts, a tiger act, acrobats, dancing/walking dogs, high-divers, trampoline acts, trapeze artists, elephants, a clown and more, all presented within the traditional three large rings. Vanessa had a great time, looking and exclaiming at the various things going on. One of those things was an elephant having an enormous dump — one that would have easily filled Erika’s flower garden — Vanessa was quite impressed by that. 😉 Earlier, during the intermission, she got up the courage to go on an elephant ride with her mother, on a small little Indian elephant named Maria.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been at a circus either for that matter — the last time I was at a traditional circus (excepting a performance of Cique du Soleil’s Quidam which came to Toronto about 5 years ago) was when I was a “tween”, when a traveling circus (quite possibly Garden Bros.) came to Keswick. It was certainly done on a smaller scale back then — it was held in a typical large canvas tent — but I remember being closer to the action that we were at Skydome. And it was definitely a blast!

Afterwards, Vanessa went home with her mother as I went to the Convention Centre, to try and track down the backpack that Erika accidentally left behind from the Canada Blooms show. I’ve called during the week, trying to get a real person who knew something about lost and found, without much luck. So, since I was in the area, I thought I’d check it out in person. I needn’t have bothered. Talked to a couple of security guys, who didn’t know anything about a lost backpack. Crap! Will keep hounding them, but I doubt it’s going to turn up.

The backpack I’ll definitely miss. I’m also annoyed because it contained a couple of items as well: a copy of The Artists’ Way and my Samsung Yepp portable MP3 player. The book was easy to replace, as I stopped at an Indigo store on the way back home, though replacing the Yepp will be more expensive. Not that I plan on getting another Yepp — I was on the verge of taking a hammer to the damn thing at times, it was often so flaky. Brief digression: flakyness of the Yepp I had included simply turning itself off at odd times of its own accord, sometimes freezing in the middle of whatever piece was playing, the display caught in a perpetual loop preventing me from going forward or backwards between files save when being played, etc etc etc. A surprisingly poorly designed piece of hardware, all things considered. And costs way too much for what it is — which ain’t much. Am thinking maybe I’ll splurge and get a CD-R-based MP3 player. On the up side, took my time browsing through the book store, quickly absorbing a book on industrial design by Raymond Loewy, and was on the verge of buying an interesting-looking book on Shakespeare, but simply stuck to getting a replacement copy of the book lost in the backpack.

This day definitely ranks as a good day. Erika came home surprisingly early from her film shoot, coming home at about 4am this morning (was expecting 9am or later). I got up a few hours later, and took Vanessa out to the venerable Royal Ontario Museum. I gave her the choice of either going to the Science Center or to go see Dinosaurs at the ROM — she chose dinosaurs. It’s funny, we visited the place about a month or so ago, and I figured when she said she wanted to see the dinosaurs, she’d want to see the actual dinosaur exhibit, bones and all. Silly me. She actually wanted to see the animated Maiasaur exhibit, where kids get to slap a button on a console and a 10ft high animated Maiasaur appears doing such things as drinking water, running, snorting, etc. While visiting the ROM, I had the strange feeling of time both standing still and moving forward at once. I’d swear that nothing has changed in the old dinosaur exhibit since I was a kid — and that’s a long time ago now. The mannequin of the archaeologist putting a dinosaur bone in a cast has been around since the 60’s I’d swear, and I suspect it may be even older. On the other hand you have things like the Maiasaur exhibit, the “Bat Cave“, and Inco’s “Dynamic Earth” which are relatively new (and both of which Vanessa loves). I remember when the ROM was a real Victorian-style institution, with standardized rows upon rows of stuffed animals, birds, butterflies and bugs of all descriptions in glass cases. The current version of the ROM is much more fun for kids, though it’s lost something its haunted, almost hallowed nature to me. This was the ROM that used to have the outdoor Ancient Chinese Garden which is frozen like a fly in amber in one of the stories from Alice Munro’s “The Moons of Jupiter“. Am really glad that Vanessa enjoys herself there, and will look into getting a family membership next I head there.

Interesting side note: finally read my personal emails from Friday and it turns out that my Frantics Web site has been selected as a Yahoo! Canada site of the week. Neat! 😉