This is a Webbified version of my February 6, 2001 talk.bizarre posting, which those of you who have good archives can retrieve under message-ID <95pq7n$aed$1@diamond.ansuz.sooke.bc.ca>.  I have corrected some errors and added some notes at the end, along with a thumbnail gallery of my photos.

What does "table d'hôte" mean?

A lot of people seem to hit this page while trying to figure out what the phrase "table d'hôte" means.  It's French.  It means a full-course meal, such as you might get in a fancy restaurant.  If you order table d'hôte, you typically get an appetizer, a soup course, a main course, and a dessert, and you can choose from at least two or three options for each of those.  It's usually a little cheaper to eat this way than to order the same items individually; the restaurant wins because by offering you the package deal, they encourage you to have a complete multi-course meal at all, instead of just ordering one or two courses.

A fairly large number of people also seem to hit this page after searching for "hote women", or some variation of that, I don't know what a "hote" woman is; you probably won't find any on this page.

Now, the travelogue...

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entree

This is a sketch of what I did on my vacation and the people I did it with.  In one sentence:  I attended FROST.BOB II ("fervent refutation of sainthood talk.bizarre outrageous blowout"), February 2-5 2001, Quebec City.  I'm trying to be honest and unmerciful.  If you find the events reported herein shocking, then I encourage you to believe that I invented some or all of them in order to make the story more exciting.  If you're going to believe that, then you maybe shouldn't look at the photographs.

I should apologize to all the people and the accented French letters I have probably missed or skipped over in writing this.

At lunch on Saturday, Meredith [1] asked me how I first arrived in talk.bizarre, and I told her.  She did not ask me why I stayed once I got there, and it's just as well, because as of lunch on Saturday, I wouldn't have been able to answer that question.  But now I can.  Something else Meredith said was that her t.b friends were better than her other friends because we laugh at her jokes because we *get* the jokes - her other friends laugh at her jokes just because they think she's cool.  Three experiences underscoring something similar for me:

1. When it was discovered that Soren can twist his tongue around its long axis under conscious control.  He and I are the only human beings in whom I have ever witnessed this behaviour, although I have also seen pictures of one other case.  It seems to be pretty rare.  (Given the size of my sample, I'd say at most 1% in the population, and it doesn't seem to run in families like some of the other interesting things I can do with my tongue.) Note that the significant part isn't that he and I can both do this, but that we had the opportunity to discover it at FROST.BOB II, and other people besides Soren and myself took photographs of it. 
2. When Kludge awarded me a can of Burma Shave for saying "The new bridge is built on the original pylons and is therefore perfectly safe" and nobody needed to have the traditions involved explained to them. 
3. When I said "Let's everybody...  trade sandwiches!" and Meredith laughed, notwithstanding that she knows exactly how cool I am. 

In short:  I stayed in talk.bizarre because t.b people are my kind of people.

[1] I believe Meredith Tanner to have originated in the same cloning vat as my friend Sarah Williams.  Sarah is ten years younger and has longer, darker hair than Meredith; other than that, they are more or less interchangeable.

soup du jour

Best French sentence of FROST.BOB II, your choice of:

The Popular Favourite:  "Je suis avec l'orchestre." ("I'm with the band.")

From Meredith's phrasebook.  Also, don't miss Waider's variation:  "Nous *sommes* l'orchestre." ("We *are* the band!")

The House Specialty:  "J'ai une tres grosse queue."

Found on a toilet paper dispenser in a men's washroom stall at YQB, and PROOF POSITIVE that Chevyn was at the BOB in spirit if not in body.  One of the many endearing things about this sentence is that "queue" is feminine.  Then there's the choice of the adjective "grosse".  Also fun:  once I had that definition fixed in my mind, imagine my thoughts on encountering a stand selling "queues de castor".  I didn't see the English translation ("beaver tails") until much later.

The thing is, I happened to know already that "castor" means "beaver", and furthermore, I happened to know *why*.  It comes from the same Latin root as the word "castrate", and beavers are so called because at one time humans believed that beavers believed that humans believed that beaver testicles were an aphrodisiac, and so if a hunter cornered a male beaver, he'd bite off his own testicles and throw them down on the trail, hoping that she'd be content to take them instead of his life.  Remember, this is our national animal.

So, mixing together the English, French, and Latin meanings of "queue", "castor", "beaver", "tail", etc., and with the feminine conjugation of "queue" in the back of my mind all the way through, I came with some possible interpretations of "queue de castor" that definitely had the talk.bizarre nature, and I was rather disappointed to discover that it's actually just fried bread.

ps; this is true

main course

I won't go into the various stressful things I left behind in Victoria which I'll have to deal with again now that the BOB is over.  Many of them would get me in trouble if I mentioned them here - even my oblique references to my life in certain recent postings have gotten me in trouble, although possibly in good ways in the long run.  One stressful thing, of a total of about five of similar scale (not that you'll be able to judge the scale from this description), was that just as I was changing my answering machine message before leaving, I got a call from the Dianetics Centre.  I hung up on it.  We'll have no talk of Dianetics in this establishment, please.  But I had to wonder whether they got my number by random dialing, or because they had a reason to target me specifically.  If they did have a reason to call me, then I've a pretty good idea what that reason would be, and although not directly my problem personally, it would indicate some unfortunate things about the state of mind of some other people, and I'd be sad about it.

I changed my message to:

"This is Matthew Skala.  I am on vacation in Catholic country until Tuesday the 6th.  There is no way to reach me short of the direct intercession of the Virgin Mary, so say your rosary at the tone."

I booked passage on the airport bus for Friday.  My plane was due to leave Victoria at 0630 (note, all my times are local wall time wherever I am at the time unless I say otherwise); I figured I should check in at 0530; it's about an hour's drive to the airport; so I wanted a bus for 0430.  Conveniently, that's the earliest time for which the bus company says you can get a ticket.  They also say they can pick you up at any of the downtown hotels, or the University.  Since I live a hop, skip, and a jump from the University, I figured I'd catch the bus there at 0430 and all would be well.

Well, it turns out that the airport bus company can send a bus out at 0430, or they can send a bus out to the University, but not both.  Also, the busses don't go on the half hour, they go on the hour, so the best they could offer me was a bus that would go through a point sort of midway between the University, the airport, and downtown, for 0525, to arrive at the airport just before 0600.

What I should have done was say "No," and get a cab.  But I said "Yes," thinking, without having checked, "Oh, the city bus that would allow me to make that connection runs very early in the morning." It does, by my standards, but that means basically that there's one before 0700, not that they're conveniently available at 0500 or so.

Given that I had reserved the bus seat, I should have either canceled it or just not shown up (they had my phone number, but no credit card), and gotten a cab.  But I didn't.  I thought it would be more bizarre to walk.  So that's what I did.  I woke up at 0300 on Friday, got dressed, whined for a while, deathmarched from 0337 to 0445, and then waited until 0525.  I had left a lot more time than I needed because I didn't know how long the deathmarch would be.

I actually arrived at the airport just in time to catch the previous plane, which left at 0605 instead of 0625.  That was Air BC flight 1528, Victoria to Vancouver.  Not a particularly noteworthy flight.  We had a little bit of turbulence.

Air Canada flight 150, from Vancouver to Montreal departing at 0810, was on an A320.  I had some qualms about taking that flight because Dr.  Nancy Leveson, an expert in air safety, says that the A320 is the only plane she would not ride in.  The reason is that it's heavily computerized and has a crummy user interface, so that there have been several cases of the plane getting into a dangerous situation, the pilots knowing what was wrong and what needed to be done, but being unable to fix it because the "safety" features of the computer won't let them *do* that, and spending the last moments of the flight desperately trying to disable the computer.  But I didn't have a whole lot of choice if I was to take a trans-Canada flight, because that's the equipment that's available for those kinds of flights.

On flight 150 I sat down next to a kid who spent a long time trying to get his friends, in rows behind him, to swap seats with him.  I don't know, maybe I smelled bad.  It wasn't until we were in the air that he finally found a spare seat somewhere back there and moved into it.  The in-flight entertainment started with the CBC television news, which was all about bacteria.  First they talked about the envelope of unidentified blue powder that had been mailed to the Immigration Minister.  They'd evacuated the building and sent the powder off to the lab, and the news of the day was that some of the lab results were in and they had determined that it was *not* pathogenic bacteria, but they still weren't sure just what it was.  Also in the bacterial news was more talk about the compensation for the victims of the Walkerton E. coli tragedy.  There was a quote from some man on the street type saying that he hoped the people responsible for the disaster (or possibly some other disaster, I kind of forget) would be sent for a long time to "a cold place", but I don't think he meant FROST.BOB II. I am not going to mention the E. coli joke in this report, except in this sentence.  I noticed that unlike the other video stuff, they had completely separate English and French news programs instead of just one with two sound tracks.  And even though I couldn't understand the words, I could tell that the French one was better.

We got breakfast on flight 150; it was omlette or waffles.  I had omlette.  If they had chosen to call it "scrambled eggs", that would have been just as accurate a description.  I don't think the waffles were on sticks.

Later we got to see a movie:  "Pay it forward" with Kevin Spacey.  For a while I wondered if it had the bizarre nature; I eventually decided that it had the glurge nature instead.  It was about a teacher who gives his students the assignment of changing the world, and one of the students thinks it would be a cool idea if he did something nice to three people and told them each that they had to do three nice things to other people, etc.  There's a cheesy romance subplot, and the kid is in a broken-up family with an alcoholic mother and a father who is officially not supposed to be around, but keeps showing up and hitting them, and the teacher used to be in a family like that himself, and then the kid *dies*...  glurge!  I'm not sure it was the best idea to show that to people who had just eaten airline omlette.  Or scrambled eggs.  Fortunately, there wasn't any significant turbulence on that flight.

Air Nova flight 8724, Montreal to Quebec, was probably the best flight of my trip.  Air Nova is the Quebec airline and it's a fair bit cooler than the others I traveled on.  For one thing, when they give the announcements in English and French, they do the French version first, and it's clear that they *mean* it...  unlike on my other flights, where the flight attendants and passengers clearly view the bilingual announcements as a mindless formality.  Also, the flight attendant was a young woman with an ass almost as nice as Stevi's.  The other flight attendants I encountered on this trip were all much less attractive, as well as being either male or much older.

I didn't eat it because I was saving room for the organized group dinner, but I had the impression that Air Nova's interpretation of "snack flight" was something along the lines of Kate's interpretation of "nosh"...  being more along the lines of a multi-course gourmet banquet.  Other airlines snacks are more along the lines of "Here, have a banana.  Or a bag of chips." They don't even give out peanuts anymore because of allergy lawsuit horror.

Upon landing in Quebec, I got a taxi to the Hotel Chateau Bellevue ("Hotel where bizarre people stay").  I had been expecting that Waider, with whom I'd be sharing a room, would have gotten there already.  But he hadn't.  I left my bag in the room and got directions to Aux Anciens Canadiens ("With Elderly Canadian People").  I should have, but didn't, change from my traveling clothes (appropriate to the Victoria winter, and indoors anywhere) into my outdoors in Quebec in winter clothes.  Because I sort of thought that after dinner there'd be a chance to come back and change.

Meeting people was an adventure, as usual.  Most of the people who were there who I hadn't met at BAST.BOB were people from the MUD who I didn't really know anyway.  It turned out that the group driving from Montreal, which included Kate, Ben, Waider, and Yong-Mi (possibly others, I don't really remember), had been delayed and would be late.

Yong-Mi brought Collon, and Crunky, both of which were candies of some sort.  She did not bring her Nice Korean Boy, because she was afraid we would corrupt him.  I note that she actually calls him "NKB" in conversation; that may be because his name doesn't work in English, or it may simply be part of the talk.bizarre thing.  The food was delicious but I was not fully pleased with the service:  they brought me the wrong main course, they brought my dessert to Waider, they never brought Waider's own dessert at all, and that was just what I noticed down at my end of the table.  Excellent food, substandard service, turned out to be a pattern at almost all of the places we went.

I recognized the scene depicted on the beer label as being from _The Magic Flute_ - a story (I think it's an opera or something) about five voyageurs who are off in the wilderness feeling sad and lonely and trade their souls to the Devil in exchange for him taking them to Montreal for a single night of debauchery, after which they would have to go to Hell.  This story was generally agreed to have the bizarre nature.

After dinner we didn't go back to the hotel; instead we went out and bought effigies.  There is a quasi-supernatural being called Bonhomme, which is in some way associated with the Carnaval.  Bonhomme sees all and knows all.  The official X Industries approved description of Bonhomme's appearance is "like Casper on shrooms".  In order to participate in Carnaval, one is supposed to buy a little rubbery "effigy" of the dreaded creature and attach it to one's parka zipper.  There are signs up advising you to "Achetez votre effigy!"

Once we were all effigized, we wandered around the nearest Carnaval site looking at the risque snow sculptures.  Oh la la!  It was discovered that someone had made the mistake of bringing gravity to the BOB; we never did figure out whom to blame, but it made several people fall down in the snow.  D loaned me a scarf because I looked cold; not having changed yet, I *was*.  We slid down the hill on inner tubes sponsored by Oreo, but I was getting colder and colder and eventually decided to leave the group to go back to the hotel in a party that also included Eamon, K, and Stevi.  I had intended to rejoin the group after changing into warmer clothes, but I miscommunicated with Eamon, and the others were making a one-way trip of it, so he didn't wait for me and I was never able to *find* the group on my own that night.  I should have phoned, I guess.

I returned to my and Waider's hotel room, took a shower, and watched Canal D. I watched part of a French movie which most definitely had the talk.bizarre nature, although Waider told me later that *all* French movies have the talk.bizarre nature and this one wasn't at all unusual.  Here's more or less what happened while I was watching:

There were three men and a woman.  I think they were gangsters.  They were chasing each other around a used car lot; most of the time the men chasing the woman but I think it was a game of tag or something rather than in anger, because sometimes she would deliberately run *toward* them.  They were all wearing silly hats.  Occasionally there would be cuts to other scenes, including some gratuitous nudity.  Then they were in a car, which I think they bought at the used lot.  They stopped and talked to two young men who had a guitar and a sitar.  Then they drove away, and picked up a female hitchhiker and tried to feed her all kinds of junk food.  Then we saw another young woman lining up vegetables on a shelf for a while.  Then they raped the hitchhiker.  Then we cut to the girl with the veggies.  Then they changed hats.

Later, I watched South Park for a while.  Then Waider showed up and we went to bed.  It was maybe 0200 or so.  Waider snores like a pig, but fortunately, I don't think that had much to do with my not sleeping well.  More relevant would be that I never sleep well on the first night of events of this nature, especially when there's a time shift involved.

On Saturday morning, we had breakfast.

Afterwards, I wandered off with that Dawn person and Kludge to the Chocolate Museum.  Dawn with in seventh heaven and Kludge at least third or fourth, but to be honest I was a little less than impressed with the Chocolate Museum; it was basically just a shop selling chocolate with a very small exhibit of the history of chocolate in the back.  So we bought chocolate.  Kludge wanted a cup of hot chocolate; they had it in four grades of strength.  The woman in the shop tried to sell him the strongest, but he chose the second-weakest and regretted doing so, saying he should have gotten one of the stronger ones.

Out on the streets again, we encountered the soap box derby.  It was a little less than impressive because they would race two cars, and then *wait* a *long* time before racing the next two.  Through it all, someone was shouting at the crowd in French over a loudspeaker trying to keep everybody interested.  "Hey, that car has a nipple on the front!" "Um, I think that's meant to be a reservoir tip." And it was.

We were all supposed to meet for lunch but nobody knew where or when.  I had been loaned Brian's cell phone because nobody in my group had one.  I didn't really know how to use it, and at one point phoned up Kate and put her on hold for a minute before hanging up.  But I figure if Kludge doesn't know how to operate a cell phone, I don't have to either.  We eventually assembled more or less everyone at a pizzaria.  Just like at With Elderly Canadian Persons, the food was excellent and the service wasn't.

Meredith observed me writing my notes for this report and said "I hope you're not writing anything nice in there" and I assured her I wasn't.  I didn't know that in fact she had *read* part of my notes, or anyway that she thought she had.

There was a lot of debate about where to go next.  We were all planning to go to the Chutes de Montmorency ("Extremely Dangerous Icy Frozen Waterfall of Death" [2]), but some wanted to go earlier than others, some of the drivers didn't know where it was, and so on.  I ended up in Ben's minivan with Ben, the good Doctor, Eamon, K, and Dawn.

[2] Translation due to Larry.

The Extremely Dangerous Icy Frozen Waterfall of Death was definitely cool if not downright frigid.  I observed a vending machine in the snack bar selling still soft drinks for $2.25 a bottle, the highest price I have seen on that kind of machine to date.  At UVic, we gripe about paying $1.75 for the same products.  Eamon took a photo of K being molested by the Bonhomme creature.  Then we hiked out to the bottom of the waterfall.  We noted that the Quebecois attitude to dangerous fun is to put up a sign saying in French "Hey, if you get killed out here it's not our fault" and leave it at that.  In the places most of us come from, they would at least put up some safety railings, and probably wouldn't even *have* Extremely Dangerous Icy Frozen Waterfalls of Death at all, because of the hazard of lawsuits from people who fall in crevasses and nearly get killed.  Which I did.

We were all impressed by the ice climbers, but I at least didn't feel much urge to become one with them.  Taking pictures was plenty.  Then we headed back to the snack bar and took the lift to the top of the falls, where we met some others.  We walked out on the footbridge over the falls, after reading the sign with itemized various dangers:  "Beware of falling rocks.  Beware of falling snow.  Beware of falling ice...", each with its own symbol.  There was also an important interpretive sign at one end of the footbridge, explaining how the previous bridge had broken one day and sent three people plunging to their deaths, and the new bridge was built on the original pylons and was therefore perfectly safe.  Jake announced that he wanted to plunk his ass down in one of the chairs in the Manor lobby; since he was doubtless the expert on the plunkage requirements of his own ass, we let him lead the group back to the Manor.

We all had dinner and talked of many things, among others the exchange rates between good food, good wine, good company, and good sex.  As usual, the food was excellent and the service less than so.  After dinner, we all charged back out into the snow again, apparently just for the purpose of getting ourselves very cold, although looking at the Extremely Dangerous Icy Frozen Waterfall of Death in the dark with the lights on it was a useful side effect.  Then we marched back to the Manor again and tried to make transportation arrangements.  I was on the last taxi, with Kate and the good Doctor, and while we waited he told me what was wrong with my brane.  This rather worried me because I wasn't sure how seriously to take it - on the gripping hand, he appears to be a bona fide neurologist; on the other hand, he seemed more gleeful than concerned, and as Yong-Mi said later, (this is a paraphrase) "By the good Doctor's standards, few if any of us have normal branes." Which reminds me - now that I'm back from the BOB, when I go on talk.bizarre and read posts from people like for instance Kludge, I hear them internally spoken in the voice of the person who wrote the words.

Back at the hotel, there was a drunken party in Kludge's room.  I'd had basically enough alcohol at dinner, but I did try very small amounts of the ice wine, Waider's wimpy legal potcheen, and the illegal untaxed liquor which a friend of an attendee had manufactured by means of a hot water heater and an Apple II. I would not necessarily have believed that tale of its origins from just anybody, but considering who the bottle arrived with, I think it was probably true.  Despite comments from the others, I didn't think either the potcheen or the untaxed liquor were particularly vile, although the untaxed liquor was so strong that it had to be inhaled rather than actually swallowed.  My view is that the keys to a good potcheen experience are:  A. treat that shit with the respect it deserves, and B. don't let Brian bartend.  Jake had brought a bunch of near-fatal soft drinks for those of us who actually still wanted to use our livers, but that particular night I was mostly sticking to water.  The party also featured Kegel exercises, guitar music, and a whole lot of conversation.

On Sunday, after breakfast, I went toboganning with that Dawn person and Kludge and D and Yong-Mi and Jake and I don't remember who else.  That was fun.  It was better than the Oreos.  I got some glop on a stick, too.  Then we rode the funicular railway into the lower tourist trap part of town and looked at stuff.  The question of the moment, to which we never got a good answer, was "What's French for 'head shop'?".

Lunch at the Chateau Frontenac (local equivalent of Victoria's Empress Hotel) was pretty good though not quite as good as some of our other meals.  It was supposed to be Chinese, and wasn't really.  Then we went on a deathmarch to nowhere in particular and nearly got run over by some old-fashioned snowmobiles.  We wanted to ride the rubber rafts down the hill, but as we got to the crest of the hill and saw the queue stretching all the way back down the other side of the hill, we decided we didn't want to wait that long.  We went into the big tent to visit the washrooms, and with some trepidation I went behind a screen labeled "pour hommes seulement" and found a cinq-homme portable urinal, which had a trace of the bizarre nature.

Before I left on vacation, my academic supervisor had given me a piece of life experience advice.  This occurs infrequently enough to be worthy of note.  She said "Go easy on the caribou, especially first thing in the morning", after giving a description (which I posted a paraphrase of to the list) of caribou and its effects in which I'm sure she used the word "wretched" at least five times.  Caribou is the Quebecois equivalent of glogg - it's a red wine drink with a lot of hard liquor in it and various unmentionable and speculative ingredients, served hot.  Even though the Carnaval has been somewhat cleaned up and made family-oriented since the time when Wendy went, and caribou is no longer readily available first thing in the morning or prevalent even at other times, we had more or less resolved that a taste of caribou would be a necessary but not sufficient condition for the BOB to be a success.  So we found a caribou stand and had caribou.  It was pretty good; part of the key to a good caribou experience is probably to have just one serving of the wretched stuff instead of chugging it down by the caneful.  The hollow red plastic Bonhomme canes, suitable for filling with caribou, are still widely available, but people generally don't seem to actually be using them as flasks anymore.  The only one I remember seeing which actually had liquid in it was in the hands of a tourist at the Quebec airport.  A more fun plastic novelty item, I think, would be the trumpets - useful both for making annoying noises and as a subject for double entendre.

Then there was the Irish pub, where Waider bought a round of Guinness and regaled us with tales of his native land, and then we went to the dinner in the vault, which was conveniently in the same building.  The Burma Shave presentations were a highlight of Sunday's dinner.  The good Doctor collared me to say that one of his informants had told him that I had written "freak fest" in my journal, and was this in fact the case?  and I said, "Well, I don't think so," and after some research determined that the informant in question had misread my handwriting of the word "breakfast" on Saturday morning.  She looked up from her meal of a bug and two thirds to say that even if I hadn't written it before, I was obligated *to* write "freak fest" in the log now.  So:  FREAK FEST!

Another fun thing about that dinner was when I recognized some of the "Irish" music they were playing as being _In My Hands_ by Natalie MacMaster from Nova Scotia, a CD which I own a copy of.  I'm not sure that Natalie MacMaster really qualifies as having the Irish nature, but I guess it was about as Irish as some of the other stuff they were playing.  Andrea asked me about my experience of the tradition of birthday bumps, and we established that all the Canadians knew about birthday bumps, and the tradition was the same more or less all the way across this great nation, but none of los Americanos had a clue.

Sunday night's drunken party was a lot better than Saturday's.  We had body parts!  These included my tongue, Soren's ass, Dawn's leg, and Meredith's toes.  There were also calvado, potcheen, war stories from the porn industry, quotes from the Cricket record, rubbing of tummies, patting of heads, indeed a whole lot of massaging in general, strong ginger pop both plain and with potcheen, and Brainalyzer.  But no Kegel exercises.  In business arising from the minutes:  Yes, I'll distribute references on the Cricket record and the book about the poi and the optical robots.

I am reliably informed that some people got laid after that party - or even *during* it, in the case of two people who were conspicuously absent.  My sources were most discreet and didn't name names, but I saw enough myself to have a pretty darn good idea anyway, and I don't mean just relatively legitimate couples like Eamon and K. But all I'll say for sure is that *I* didn't get any of that.  All I got was to listen to Waider snore like a pig.  I guess that despite appearances, there just wasn't enough alcohol in the world.

Monday, the day when most people were leaving, I was a little startled to awake at 0730 and find Waider still snoring beside me.  I thought he was leaving earlier.  Turns out he was leaving earlier than me, but not *that* early.  We wandered down and debated departure times and plans for the day with the others who were there.  Then we went outside and deathmarched in the old city for a few hours.  We went down the Alley of Art where a group other than mine had bought all the bizarre abstract paintings earlier.

Then we came back to the hotel and argued about how to dispose of the fairly large amount of liquor and other supplies that had been left in Kludge's room.  Kludge officially gave a bottle of bourbon to the hotel staff, about half of the soft drinks were left in the room as an unofficial gift to the house (including all of the Fukola Cola and much of The Drink).  Waider was supposed to take a lot of the hard stuff back to Ireland because Irish customs doesn't care, and the remaining potcheen and its bottle were supposed to be a thank-you to Kate for her organizational efforts ("Mew!  Mew!"), but Kate was already gone and everyone except Kludge, D, and myself left in a taxi while Kludge was upstairs collecting the bottles together.  He tried hard to talk us into it, but neither D nor I was willing to take the alcohol home.  We aren't big drinkers and didn't have room in our luggage anyway.  Kludge wasn't willing to consider actually destroying any of it because there are sober children in India [3], so he ended up taking the remnants home himself.  I did assume responsibility for a bottle of Brainalyzer, the chocolate espresso beans, and D's dreadful cannibalism novel (thereby helping him make space in his bag to take some soft drinks too).

[3] All together now:  "I suppose you've *been* to India?"

We took a taxi to the airport even though our planes wouldn't leave for quite a while, and D and Kludge got switched to an earlier flight and then I got on standby for an earlier flight myself, so the BOB more or less ended at that point.  I spent my last few hours in Quebec waiting in the departure lounge.  I was the last standby person to be allowed onto Canadian Regional flight 8649, Quebec to Toronto.

Flight 8649, on an "F28" aircraft, was my least favourite of the five flights I took.  Not only did they not play the French announcements first, but they were actually rude about them.  The flight attendants didn't even do the safety dance properly during the French side of the emergency exit announcement; they just sort of stood there like big girl's blouses.  Also the cabin pressure control was poor, and the seats were uncomfortable and (although in objective terms they probably were the same distance as on all the other planes) they felt closer together.  Bad ergonomics.  I did get to see some cartons of "Sealtest" milk, though, reminding myself of my "Sealtress of Time" post, and that was a good thing.

I had a long wait at the Toronto airport because of having taken an earlier flight.  During that wait I noticed that Toronto, or at least the Toronto airport, seems to have a much higher percentage of black people than other parts of Canada I've been.  In the departure lounge for flight 3553, Toronto to Victoria, the crowd was solid gray.  It was rather an experience to hear the boarding pass checker person make the announcement that senior citizens and others requiring assistance should get in line to board early, and see the entire room get to its feet and shuffle to the gate.

On flight 3553 we drew a cop-ilot with Personality, who made humorous apologies for our great taxiing adventure as the plane went from the gate to the service area to be deiced and waited for the runway to eventually take off late.  Even the recorded announcement voice did a sort of giggle in the bit where she told us not to use personal electronic devices, although why that would be funny I'm not quite sure.  I guess it's the kind of computer in-joke that appeals to recorded announcement voices.  The flight attendants on this one also didn't do the dance during the French announcements, leaving me with a rather negative impression of Canadian Airlines.  And this was another A320.

But even so I think Canadian Airlines 3553 was the second best of my flights - not as good as Air Nova 8724, but still pretty good, and that was mostly because I enjoyed the in-flight meal and entertainment.  Also, I managed to be one of two people in a row of six seats, so we each took one side and had lots of extra space.  Just as before, the French version of the daily news was obviously better than the English one.  They played a sitcom called "Suddenly Susan", which I tolerated for about ten seconds.  Then I switched to one of the audio-only channels which was playing "Canadian hipsters on the world stage".  Since Gordon Lightfoot was one of the hipsters in question, this definitely had the bizarre nature, and Suddenly Susan without the audio, just grooving on the chicks, wasn't bad tack either.  Then they had a documentary about Maurice Richard, good of course even though most of the interviews were in French with unreadable subtitles, and then they played _Almost Famous_.

Now, _Almost Famous_ is a pretty darn good movie, about a 15-year-old who goes out on a tour with a rock band to write an article for _Rolling Stone_ (who of course don't know that he's 15 years old) and it's his coming of age.  Je suis avec l'orchestre.  I saw it in a theatre a few weeks ago.  I sat there on the plane thinking about whether _Almost Famous_ had the bizarre nature or not, and decided that it did, at least a little.  Actually, it should have the bizarre nature a lot because of the circumstances, but we'll get to that.  Immediately before the movie started they flashed up a notice that this was a version edited for the airline and the director didn't want to be blamed for that.  OK, I thought, I'll see if I can spot the edits, and write them down, because that's the sort of thing I do.  Here is what I noticed:

First of all, I'm not sure the word "fuck" occurs in the original soundtrack at all anyway, but some things very close to it do:  for instance, someone says "feck" and then the characters discuss it ("She said the f-word!  No, she said 'feck'.  What's the difference?  The letter 'u'.").  They didn't cut that.

They changed "We did everything to get you laid!" to "We did everything to get you ladies!".  The scene where he actually *did* get laid, however, was left intact.

They removed a second or two where groupies discuss the limits of their commitment to l'orchestre, apparently in order to get rid of the phrase "blow job", even though other parts of that scene, to my mind equally explicit, were left in.

They cut a scene in order to avoid depicting "the finger".

One of the best sequences in the movie is where the band's private aircraft gets into severe turbulence and they all think they're going to die and they say to each other the things they would not say under other circumstances, and the kid writes it all down...  and then as soon as the last guy admits, "Oh, fuggit, I'm gay!" the plane gets out of trouble, and they land and sort of stand in the airport terminal looking awkwardly at each other.  As we started to get closer to this part of the movie I suddenly remembered it and thought how cool it would be if they actually *did* show that on an airplane.  That would *definitely* have the bizarre nature!  But they cut it.  We just get to see them getting onto the plane, and then afterwards in the terminal the guy from the band telling the kid "Write what you want.", which doesn't make nearly as much sense if you don't know that he got some really good material on the flight.  They also cut words here and there later in the movie, everywhere anybody makes any reference to the incident, so as to conceal its existence entirely.  In other words, THEY GUTTED THE PLOT COMPLETELY JUST BECAUSE WE'LL HAVE NO TALK ABOUT PLANES IN TROUBLE IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT! But it was still a reasonably good movie, and hey, je suis avec l'orchestre.

Upon landing in Victoria, I bought a ticket on the airport bus to the city bus exchange, figuring to take the city bus (which is free for me) the rest of the way home.  Upon arriving there, I discovered that the city bus wouldn't actually stop there - only one in three of those busses made the necessary detour to get to the exchange.  Yes, they built a major exchange not on the regular route.  And the last of the special detouring busses for the day had already gone.  So I figured to walk to the regular route.  I misread the map and failed to realise that the regular route was *just half a block away*, raising the further question of why they bother having separate regular and not regular routes.  I hiked off in the wrong direction for fifteen minutes, figured out I was going in the wrong direction, hiked back just in time to be see the bus I had wanted to be on, leaving.  Sitting at the bus stop, watching people arrive in unmarked white vans, take packages out of the back and put them into other unmarked white vans, tired, thirsty, my bladder overfull, I thought about it some more and realised that even if I had gotten onto that bus, I'd still have a long walk once I got into town because the other city busses I'd want to take also had all stopped running.  By this time it was about 2330 local.  So I found a bush to pee in, chugged down that bottle of Brainalyzer, ate some of the espresso beans, asked myself "What would Rictus Hep do?", decided I shouldn't do that, and got a cab back home.

And that was FROST.BOB II. If you didn't go, I just bet you're sorry now.

Notes

The official Web site for FROST.BOB II is on hilare.soo.com.

If you liked reading about FROST.BOB II, you might also like to read about BAST.BOB.

Kate says that my description of calling her and putting her on hold isn't 100% accurate, but you get the idea - incompetent fumbling with the cell phone.

Something else I noted and wanted to include in the report, but forgot, was that in men's washrooms in Quebec, instead of just having machines that sell condoms, they also sell ampuoles of ginseng, presumably for aphrodisiac purposes.

Apparently Dr. Dave isn't quite a neurologist yet, but is a bona fide M.D. anyway.  He says he's the one who said "I think that's meant to be a reservoir tip.", although he wasn't in the group I was in at the time I thought I heard that, so it may have been said by more than one person or I may have heard it repeated later and projected it backwards.  I don't really remember.

No, the resto's name doesn't really translate to "With Elderly Canadian Persons".  It's named after a book written by a writer who lived in the building where they later built the restaurant.

I've been asked why I spent so much time talking about boring plane flights and so little time talking about the really fun parts.  The answer is that this report is an expansion of what I wrote in my little green book; when I was having really intense Fun, I was too busy to write in the book, so those times get less reportage.  I figure it's more bizarre that way anyway.  A similar effect applies to my photographs.

I've been told that Air Nova is actually the Nova Scotia airline, not native to Quebec.  That would make sense with the name and all.  But they succeeded in fooling me into thinking they were a Quebec operation.

The comment that used to be here, about being dangerously close to my Web space limit, no longer applies.  I've got lots of space now and don't need help hosting the photos.  Move along.

Photos

	Matthew in the middle of his deathmarch to the bus stop.  It was raining in Victoria that morning.
	Matthew waits for the airport bus.  Note traces of breakfast at right-hand corner of mouth.
	Milling around outside With Elderly Canadian Persons.  Mew!  Mew!
	What could be more appropriate to sculpt in the snow than a foul-smelling tropical fruit?
	Meredith mercifully blocks us from seeing what Dr.  Dave is up to.  Stevi is not so lucky.
	Bonhomme is coming to get us!
	Kludge and Dawn resting in the hotel lobby.
	d.  prepares to flambe his crepes, under Waider's supervision.
	Unspeakable Disco Bonhomme recorded only one album with the original lineup of d., Waider, Dawn, Brian, Yong-Mi, and Kludge, and it is a rare collector's item.
	Waider is strapped into the driver's seat for another round of Fun, or else!
	Dawn slides down the hill on an inner tube.
	Kludge having more fun with the inner tube than is really appropriate.
	talk.bizarre's favourite snow sculpture.
	Just another Nice Korean Girl.
	Bonhomme is watching you!
	The soap box derby.
	Another photo of the same soap box derby cars.
	Kludge returning from the death march.
	Soren frobnicates, Stevi and k.  smirk, and Eamon is only partially visible.
	d.  is startled by a leprechaun at Saturday lunch.
	Brian, Yong-Mi eat Saturday lunch while Larry and Soren fade into the distance.
	Soren watches as Larry and Andrea sample the new extra-strength Tootsie Rolls.
	Meredith prepares to demonstrate her Quick Draw.
	The Extremely Dangerous Icy Frozen Waterfall of Death, with a stranger to show the scale.
	More strangers near the falls.
	The unmarked hazardous chasm into which I fell.
	The falls from close to the bottom.
	Not anyone we know, and probably just as well.
	A long view of the falls.
	Another long view of the falls.
	Danger:  falling rocks, snow, ice, and you.
	The falls from up close and at a crazy angle.
	The new bridge is PERFECTLY SAFE!
	View from within a barrel, 0.368 seconds after passing the top of the falls.
	Jacob and Dave doing male bonding stuff.
	Soren and Eamon ponder.
	The falls at night.
	More of the falls at night.
	Another shot of the falls at night.
	Brian breaks the bad news to Larry.
	Eamon and k.  relax after deathmarching above the falls in the dark.
	Meredith, Dave, and Eamon, with bottle of potcheen.
	The river.  It's got ice in it.
	The lower town, home of crummy tourist head shops.
	A good old-fashioned snowmobile ride to Hell.  I'm sure Bonhomme has something to do with this.
	The court jester dances ignorantly as Waider is stretched on the rack.  Bonhomme had a hand in this, no doubt.
	Kludge making award presentations while Meredith and Andrea look on in humble adoration.
	Brian and Yong-Mi watch the strange goings-on at Sunday dinner.
	Yong-Mi, Soren, and Jacob, demonstrate how to say "Je suis avec l'orchestre" in sign language.
	Eamon and k.  doing the boyfriend-girlfriend thing while Yong-Mi looks on.
	Dave and Stevi examine Sunday's dinner to verify that it is indeed quite dead.
	I'm not 100% certain what's happening to Dawn and Soren here, but he at least seems to be enjoying it.  d., however, is underwhelmed.
	Eamon demonstrates his ability to rub an unidentifiable person's stomach and pat Larry's head at the same time.
	Waider plays with his camera.
	Kludge, d., and Waider argue about who takes home the liquor.
	Matthew in Quebec airport on the way back, waiting in standby.
	The deep-sea tunnelfish stalks an unsuspecting snow plow.
	Matthew in Toronto - a warmer place, so the hat is unnecessary.
	Matthew in Victoria on the way back, the effects of Fun showing plainly on his face.
	Matthew, home at last, shifts back into his natural form.  Note tie.
	BURMA SHAVE