First, I am pleased and proud to announce that the Toronto Public Library does not overtly censor its public-access Internet terminals. True, if you enter “doggie snuff porn” or “bukkake” into the library’s default search engine you get only a single hit — which, when clicked on, boots you into an endless log-in loop that keeps asking for password and ID until you get tired and go away. However<\/i>, if you simply enter Google’s URL directly into the nav bar you can bypass that entirely and wallow in all the sploogy, sour-cream-dip Asian wonderfulness that you desire. (I should mention for the record that I didn’t even know what “bukkake” was until introduced to the term last night by a buddy who, perhaps wisely, does not appear to have an online presence I can link to.)<\/p>\n
Anyway, you might wonder what I was doing testing the limits of the TPL’s nannyware in the first place. I was killing time in the hope that more people might show up to my fucking reading if I gave it a few more minutes. It actually worked, kind of. The room was small but reasonably full — maybe, what, 20? 25? or am I flattering myself? — and not counting Bakkanalia and library staff I’d only met four of the attendees before. Of course, when I asked up front how many of the audience had even heard of me, a good chunk of the room put their hands up; I’m guessing that my hosts might have rounded them up with tasers for a spot of the ol’ community service. On the other hand, most of the rest not only knew who I was, but had read most of my stuff. To reward them for their loyalty I read a previously unreleased bit of Dumbspeech<\/i>. Then, since this was after all part of a larger, federally-funded effort promoting Canadian<\/i> speculative fiction, I threw in “The Eyes of God”. It has all the explicit Canadiana anyone would want: priests, pedophilia, a trip to the Northwest Territories, Westjet pimping the intrusive mindreading technology of multinational conglomerates, and the kind of if – you – don’t – have – anything – to – hide – you – shouldn’t – mind – this – camera – in – your – bathroom<\/i> mindset that our current lawnorder government was so fond of before the RCMP busted them<\/a> for cheating on the last election.<\/p>\n Afterwards a few of us went for beer, during which part of the discussion centered around whether Starfish<\/i> or Maelstrom<\/i> would translate better to film. I’m still of the opinion that a faithful Maelstrom<\/i> movie might be a bit like watching a Terminator film in which every one of the stats and tactical overlays shown from the T-eye’s view is essential to the plot. One of my companions mentioned the late Stanley Kubrick’s opinion that the best movie adaptations are based on books with the least amount of actual plot<\/i>, and suggested that Starfish<\/i> would therefore be an ideal candidate. I decided then and there that I would not be paying my share of the tab that night.<\/p>\n Then there was the cab drive home, in which it was decided that the best way to present Starfish<\/i> would be as “Starfish! The Musical!”, featuring the hit dance numbers “Cold Fish” and “Daddy Does Me Best”.<\/p>\n This morning I woke up sick. I’m sure there’s no connection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" First, I am pleased and proud to announce that the Toronto Public Library does not overtly censor its public-access Internet terminals. True, if you enter “doggie snuff porn” or “bukkake” into the library’s default search engine you get only a single hit — which, when clicked on, boots you into an endless log-in loop that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-public-interface"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}