Reay Jespersen

Yesterday Jackie and I finally got a chance to get in our snowed-out dogsledding from a couple of weeks back. We had a really good time. It’s no small amount of driving - three hours, give or take, northeast - and ain’t cheap, but if you like dogs and want to try something different as far as winter activities go, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

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Tonight Jackie and I met up with a couple of friends/co-workers from my work for a pint at a local Irish pub to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. With the place packed, we couldn’t for the life of us hear much of what sometimes sounded like it may have been live music, but the food was good and the beer, as always, was enjoyed.

Please note: we didn’t get green dye in our beer. Some things are sacred.

Friends/co-workers Deryk and Lauren. Kiss them, they’re Irish!

This Sunday the planets finally aligned, and we were able to get the shoot done for Barry’s camera test. Hopefully he’ll have a sweetly edited version available soon, which I can post here.

He’s heading to Europe next month to get more shot for his documentary, which makes me jealous. No word yet on whether or not he’ll spring for Jackie and me to go with him, though it would be a swell gesture of friendship.

Jackie: even in full-on winter gear, the sexiest Production Assistant ever.

Barry with his home-made stedicam rig. He will make you one for $8000.

You ever get the feeling you’re being watched?

I was driving by my old stomping ground of High Park recently, and was struck by how amazing it looked with the relative warmth creating fog around the trees. I didn’t have my camera with me, but I did have my cell phone, which has a 3.2 megapixel camera in it. I walked around briefly and got various shots, the best of which are uploaded here.

I was glad to have stopped to smell the proverbial roses. Minutes after I first saw the fog, the sun had come through the clouds and burned it away.

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The reason we couldn’t take the afternoon dogsled offered was because we’d already made plans to meet up with two of my sisters and one neice from the west coast, who were in town. Technically they’re step-sisters (and I guess step-neice), but I think we all dropped the “steps” a while back. They’re as close to me as my blood relatives are.

In any case, we only get to see them every year or two, so were happy to be able to catch them the night before they flew back home.

As my neice, Makerra, had never been up the CN Tower, it was recommended we have dinner at the 360, which is a rotating, window-encased restaurant up in the observation levels of the Tower. The floor of the dining area rotates once every 72 minutes, or so, giving diners a unique view of the city. It’s not cheap at first glance, but the cost of food includes your ride up to the top, rendering the food alone very affordable.

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Click pic for bigger handsomeness!

This is a picture/caricature of me, as done by my friend and co-worker, Deryk. He’s done one for each of the others in our department, as well.
And sure, some may argue it makes me look like a cross between an Archie character and someone from Tin Tin or Space Ghost, but I say it’s pretty damn cool. It makes me look like the dashing guy I am in real life. Hell, it’s practically a snapshot.

Not shown in image: dozens of swooning women smitten by my boyish good looks and amazing physique.

Given my typically late hours at work, I have every other Monday off, which is cool. My wife, Jackie, is a teacher who just started her March Break. We wanted to take advantage of the time together, so looked into taking a brief trip. However, flying in the face of all the self-hype you hear from last minute tickets to tropical destinations being uber-cheap, are… well… the facts of how expensive such trips were actually going to be. We also considered hopping down to Florida to visit Alex and Tracy for a few days, but again, the cost-to-available-time ratio was just too significant an issue.

Being the outdoorsy type she is, Jackie recommended something closer to home which would, as she and I later discussed, never (not ever) have occurred to me: dogsledding. And we wouldn’t even have to go to the Arctic, or anything. Who knew? There are a few companies around a cottage town a few hours north of here - Halibutron - which offer to teach you how to drive the sled and then let you loose on the trails. Jackie found one called Winterdance Dogsled Tours which seemed to have its game together more than any other company: they have a decent website which tells you everything you need to know, and includes a pic and personality/family history bio of each dog being used that season.

Jackie took care of all the arrangements. We’d stay at a local B&B Saturday night and do the first tour Sunday morning, leaving plenty of time to get home and head back out to meet my sisters in town from the west coast. It was perfect.

Then things took a turn for the worse…

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There’s a new Bill being pushed by the Conservative government here in Canada which, in short, gives the government the right to deny publically-funded tax breaks to Canadian-made movies and television programs which are deemed not morally suitable. Ostensibly, this is in order to prevent overtly obscene or exploitive movies from being made here; or at least doing so while taking advantage of tax breaks for the production.

Aside from the blatant censorship of the proposal - what else could it be when any governing body takes it upon itself to approve or deny the merits of art and the benefits that its creators should receive as measured by a self-determined system? - what’s odd about it is the fact that the Bill only extends as far as Canadian-made productions go, as per the proposed change to Section 125.4 of the Income Tax Act. Meanwhile, a Hollywood production, under Section 125.5 of that same Act, could very realistically shoot a movie on Canadian soil which would be deemed obscene or exploitive by those same standards, but the company would still be within its rights to request - and receive - tax breaks for filming here.

Canadian-made films being scrutinized under a microscope for arbitrarily determined qualities when other countries are free to film what they please here at the same time makes no sense at all. In either case it’s censorship so shouldn’t happen, but if you’re going to claim something’s being done for the greater good, at least propose it apply equally to everyone involved and not just to a select group.

Barry Sanders is a friend of mine who’s got various and sundry things going on in his life at any one time, and each one he adds himself is invariably creative.

His latest thing was to construct a poor man’s stedicam device, literally constructed out of material you can buy at home renovation stores, for his video camera. While the point of the device is actually for a larger project he has in mind (for which he’s going to Amsterdam next month; my creative notions have taken me as far as downtown, while Barry’s takes him to the other side of the world), he wanted to give it a small scale test run to see how it, and his various audio equipment, worked together.

He approached me and asked if I’d be up for writing a short monologue script, and either act it out in front of his camera, or get someone else to do so. A few days later, I’d written a couple of monologues, and a few days after that, we’d decided upon which one to use.

Problem being, while we were initially going to shoot the thing a couple of weekends ago, I asked to put it off a week due to unexpectedly late hours at work, and the lack of prep time that left me with. Then we were going to shoot it yesterday, but Barry discovered a problem with one of his mics which has to be dealt with before the bit can be shot properly.

Hopefully we’ll have a chance to shoot it this upcoming weekend, though with plans already made for the bulk of it, the window of opportunity is relatively small.

Fingers crossed.

Canadian jazz legend Jeff Healy succumbed to cancer yesterday in a Toronto hospital. He will be missed by music fans around the world.