May 2024 – Everydave Life

May 29, 2024

This One Stops Time

This week I have two fellow bloggers to thank for this one – as usual John from the Sound of One Hand Typing, who suggested the writing prompt (“book reviews”) and also Keith, the Nostalgic Italian who is a prolific reader and led me to this particular one, writing a full-length review of it a couple of years back.

The most recent book I finished reading was Matt Haig’s How To Stop Time. Arguably it fits the book itself, as it seems I could be reading it hungrily for an hour or so at a time and it would feel like just a few minutes had passed. It’s quite good and thought-provoking indeed.

About two years back, I read Haig’s Midnight Library, and thought it was quite excellent too, that one dealing with a depressed young woman who essentially got the chance to go and briefly step into alternate realities and see her life as it would have been had she made different choices. Ultimately she realizes she probably was just where she was meant to be after all.

How to Stop Time is equally interesting in concept. Its protagonist, Tom (much of the time) has a secret. A secret so big, he has to have a secret identity. You see, this rather mild-mannered English high school teacher is old. People figure he’s middle-aged… he has one or two gray hairs popping in. But he is old. Not “he saw the Doors play live” old, a fan of Shakespeare old. Not because he liked reading Shakespeare’s plays, because he was a friend of Shakespeare’s and The Bard once saved him in a brawl. He was born sometime in the 1500s. Tom however, has a different metabolism, to say the least and ages slowly. Very slowly. Problem is, back when he was young, people in the Middle Ages village thought it was unnatural (well…) and thus deemed his mom a witch and quickly killed her off as such. Tom soon learned that he was going to be deemed a freak should others figure out that he, more or less, never got older. So his life was spent moving from place to place, hoping to not be recognized.

Along the way, he finds there are some others like him, and they have a secret organization. Forget the Masons, the Albas are the “it”. People hundreds of years old, looking fairly spry, ruled by one even older Alba who had the wisdom and years of connections to provide them with new identities, false Ids, get them jobs…but ruled their day to day life. His main rule was keep moving, and don’t fall in love. You can’t have a 300 year old man who looks 23 fall for a similarly aged girl… in a couple of deccades, people would recognize she was now middle-aged, but he was still the same old 23 year old (maybe 24 by now) with movie star looks. People would talk. And the boss wanted more than anything to avoid “talk”. Being discovered.

Predictably, for the second time in about 400 years, Tom falls in love. And his lover finds out his secret. Will his loyalty be to her (and one other Alba friend whose life he’d saved centuries earlier) or to his all-knowing, all-powerful boss?

It’s really a page-turner … and that’s from a guy who isn’t the biggest novel reader. Typically I go for non-fiction. But when fiction gets me thinking this much and wanting to keep reading , that goes out the window. Would I want to live into the centuries? On the one hand, I could see the world. Feel like learning to play the cello? What’s stopping you – you have all the time in the world! On the other hand, always looking over your shoulder, listening for gossip about you and worse, knowing anyone you love will probably die off in what to you is a span of “months”? A tough trade-off.

“How to Stop time”. Recommended. Read it, then wait for the apparent forthcoming movie.

May 23, 2024

Not Such A Swift Choice Of Motivational Speakers

This week one of the prompts from John (of The Sound of One Hand Typing) was to write a whole post in just nine sentences. Always a bit of a challenge, especially for me. I’m not ordinarily the most concise or short-winded of writers! But today I’ll look at the controversy surrounding NFL football player Harrison Butker and his recent controversial speech at a small Kansas religious college. Here goes-

Harrison Butker is sort of wrong; so too are his many, many, ever-so-many vocal detractors. Butker is a member of the winner of the last two Super Bowl-winning Kansas City Chiefs team, and one I doubt many people who aren’t big NFL fans had heard of before. Noteworthily, one of his teammates is the boyfriend of Gen Z’s appointed and anointed Queen, Taylor Swift.

Anyway, he addressed the graduating class of Benedictine College this spring and not only criticized Gay Pride (calling it a “deadly sin”) but told women they were being told “diabolical lies”. They could work and be successful outside their home – like his mother is actually – but their most important role was being homemakers and mothers.

Not surprisingly, reaction was swift (no pun intended, but if it fits…) and irate. A petition is going around to have him suspended or barred from the NFL. To that I say, “get over yourselves.” Oh, make no mistake, I think he’s largely wrong. I support equal rights for the LGBT people and think society benefits from women being in the workplace, with many outshining most of their male colleagues in a variety of fields. But there is nothing wrong with women staying home and raising a family if that is what they decide. Either way, Butker just speaking his mind, his opinions. He has a right to do that like you have a right to do rebuking him.

The guy’s a football player. How to work out to stay strong or kick a football? He’s your guy. Sociology, gender politics and deep philosophical matters? He’s a football player. Boo him if you like, boycott Kansas City, whatever. It’s fine, your right to do so. The bottom line is maybe next year the college can find someone more inspirational and aspirational than a dude who kicks a ball for a living.

(OK, that’s a few more than nine lines about him, but no more than 20. Which is about all the subject deserves! Above pic from Cleveland.com)

May 9, 2024

Police Would Have Needed Wisdom Of Solomon To Get This Right

Well, it’s Thursday again, and it’s time to go to a weekly writing challenge from John at The Sound of One Hand Typing. One of his prompts this week was to write about something that bothered you this week. Well in these days there’s never a shortage of things to bother anybody. I’ll pick one that was close to home yet many miles away for me.

I don’t check in on the Canadian media as much as I’d like really; living in Texas it is more relevant to read about local or American news than what’s going on “back home.” Nonetheless, I do check the Toronto news sites from time to time, and a few days back did just that. Initially it was to see what the local sports scribes were saying about the lacklustre performance of my beloved Toronto Blue Jays (and there’s something for a fan to be bothered by right there!), but headlines diverted me. “Four dead in wrong way police chase”, and attention-grabbers like that.

I started reading and was more disturbed, partly because it happened in a town I once lived in, on a stretch of highway I’d driven along countless times. Add to that the police force involved were my “locals” when I lived there, and in the day, I knew many of them – I worked for a business that had photo-work contracts with them. Most were excellent guys (and one or two, excellent women). One or two were personal friends. And it made me realize how difficult it can be to be a cop in this day and age.

Anyway, in this incident a couple of weeks ago, it seems there was an armed robbery of a liquor store in one suburb. Police, understandably, gave chase to the getaway van. What happened from there isn’t entirely clear from the articles I read, but a few miles and a couple of suburbs later, the idiot robbers got onto the 401, going the wrong way. This was happening in daylight, seemingly around rush hour. For those not familiar with Ontario, the 401 is Canada’s busiest highway, a multi-lane freeway linking the country’s two biggest cities. Even in the middle of the night, it’s busy. Police, at least six marked units, decided to continue the chase, dangerous or not. Now, from dashcam footage released from civilian cars, going in both directions, it does appear the van was driving exceedingly fast down the middle of the highway into oncoming traffic. Police on the other hand were flying along in a noisy parade along the paved shoulder. Predictably, the terrible happened. The van went head on into another vehicle, killing three people in that car, several other vehicles crashed into them, one caught fire, there were more injuries (none, at least from what I read) too severe thankfully. And the driver of the van, the alleged armed robber was killed too; his buddy in the truck badly hurt. Like it or not, I’m not shedding tears for them.

The worse part is that shortly before the crash, the “senior officer” in the chase radioed to call it off, it was getting too dangerous. The other cars apparently kept going; one was reported to have said it would be safer for oncoming traffic to at least see all the flashing lights and hear the sirens approaching and be alert than to suddenly come up on an idiot driving straight at them with no warning. Needless to say the police watchdogs there, the Special Investigations Unit is doing a thorough search into the events and will decide if charges are needed.

The Toronto Star, to their credit, did some fine investigative work and found that the driver of the van was already out on bail for another violent robbery of a liquor store plus large-scale thefts from Home Depot. His passenger has a similar criminal record, and the license plate on the van wasn’t registered to that kind of vehicle, making it seem likely it was a stolen vehicle.

It really bothers me when innocent people are killed by brain-dead, immoral criminals. This one bothers me a bit more, because of the location, and because it’s really a moral dilemma. What should the cops have done? It is easy and obvious to say they shouldn’t go on a high speed chase on a busy road, going the wrong way. But, they didn’t choose the route. The criminals chose to enter the highway that way, so would it have come out any better if the police held up? Certainly they could have tried to close off on-ramps a few miles down the highway and perhaps use units heading towards the van to attempt to create kind of a “rolling stop” of traffic, but that would take time and a lot of room – things they don’t have when some idiot is going 80 westbound in eastbound lanes. Seems to me any option they chose would have been the wrong one.

Being a cop is tough.