I'm back from Montreal. I still haven't completed my Montreal blog, which is makes me feel lame beyond belief. Soon. As well, I think I'm going to cut back on blog postings here -- perhaps once a week or so during the summer, and wind the whole blog down in early September and try something different. Today, I offer some excerpts from items you might have missed...
Josey Vogels, writing in her My Messy Bedroom column (Hour, April 29th, 2004), quoted from an article I wrote for The Peak, the SFU student newspaper, many years ago. This, from the Vogels article:
While tons has been written on the history of kissing - one theory goes that kissing started among cave people who licked each other's faces for the salt - very little has been recorded on the history of hickeys.
I did find one article that quotes Oliver Kralhein, a guy from somewhere in New York who has been studying hickeys since 1965 and published a zine on the topic for over two decades.
In the article by Canadian journalist Ryan Bigge, Kralhein says his research suggests that hickeys have been around since the dawn of time.
[…]
According to Bigge's article, even Robert De Niro, John Tesh and Cher have permanently marked themselves with decorative hickeys. And back in the mid-90s, the rap group Funky See, Funky Do released a song with the following lyrics:
"A kiss is fine but it don't always last/That's why I got a hickey of your name on my ass/That may seem strange and a little bit fruity/But every time I say your name I think of booty."
For those wondering about the veracity of my hickey article, well, read the whole thing here and decide for yourself.
Moving right along. From the July 2004 Toronto Life, Robert Fulford writing about The Walrus in an article entitled Tusk Force:
Having started out with the promise of long-term security, the magazine instead proved astonishingly unstable. Moreover, the articles in the first five issues, whatever their other qualities, contain little that’s original or challenging; they suggest, on the contrary, that among Canadian writers new ideas are thin on the ground.
[…]
This is a magazine that performs better around the edges than at the core. Put another way, it succeeds most when it appears to try least. With some exceptions, the longish articles, the pieces that take up six or eight pages, have been badly managed lumps of prose, compilations of unremarkable facts and obvious ideas, put together without skill or wit.
And this, while very old news, is still worth checking out -- excerpts from an article on Frank magazine by Jowita Bydlowska in the Ryerson Review of Journalism:
"Dead cat bounce" is a term used in stock markets to describe the final, futile upsurge of a declining stock. In Frank's case it was the freakish spike in sales after Taylor published his first issue, number 414, in October 2003. Since that one brief, floating moment, the gossipy cat has been in free fall.
[…]
The dreary newsstand sales confirmed a lack of interest in Frank when Taylor developed his dead-cat chart in December.
[…]
Five issues into the new Frank, Taylor was obsessing over his "Trends in Circulation" chart where the long painful descent of the dead cat was marked.
[…]
The cat began falling around 1996 when Frank was successfully sued for $75,000 by a Quebec judge for suggesting he slept with a key witness at a trial over which he presided.
[…]
It was difficult not to quietly root for him. Besides, dead cats can bounce at least twice, and cats have nine lives.
