Late Night With Drew Carey

So, Drew Carey spent a fortune on personal trainers, plastic surgeons, stylists, colour consultants and tailors, and ended up looking so much like David Letterman that he was actually able to pull a Prince and the Pauper and just walk in one day and take over Late Night. An abject Letterman, meanwhile, was hired to be the new David Letterman wax statue at House of TV Guys in Niagara Falls after nobody would believe he was actually him. Price is Right was taken over by Dane Cook and was cancelled after three airings.

My Daughter II

The day before my baby girl turns nine, I offer up this photo (and it was a real 35mm photo, not digital) of her baby self examining the aftermath of a tornado that hit our neighbourhood. This was taken about an hour later. It knocked down dozens of century-old maple trees, including the one that crushed the police car in the background. She still gives me this look after a wave of destruction has rumbled through town, although now she tends to play a more hands-on role.

"I didn't do it."

Maury Chaykin’s Grits

Maury Chaykin looked a little lost, a huge, shambling, shaggy man in the corner of the bar, by himself and clearly overwhelmed by the film festival crowds.

So I said hello. He gave me a look that I would later learn meant “Are you the guy with my cigar?” I introduced myself. I really wanted to meet the man; he’s a great actor, a classic Canadian face and one of the few celebrities I’ve always expected would be more down-to-earth than the usual Hollywood star.

He wasn’t. Not off the bat. He rocked back and forth on his heels and looked around the smoky room. You could still smoke in bars back then, which is good, because this was a cigar bar, and he thought I was a waiter, because I was young and thin and dressed in black.

“You know what my favourite line of yours is?” I asked, fuelled by an amber-coloured elixir called Warthog Ale.

“What?” he sighed, clearly expecting me to recite some obscure bit of dialogue from Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster, which I had to look up on IMDB just now because I don’t watch that kind of artsy crap. I was at this film festival because of the Midnight Madness horror marathon.

So I recited the line: “No sef-respecktin Sutherner uses INSTANT grits!” And his face lit up. This is how I spent a beer-soaked, cigar-sampling night hanging out with Maury Chaykin, swapping stories about how good it feels to love bad movies — or to be in them, as he has been. The titles are legend: Iron Eagle, Wild Thing, Turk 182, Meatballs III: Summer Job and many, many more. Most of us know him from Dances With Wolves, of course. I know him from Whale Music, a sadly underseen Canadian drama, one of my favourite films.

I told him how the one TV channel I could get on my hospital TV during my long convalescence in 2000 showed A&E’s Nero Wolfe series over and over again, so much so that I can’t think of Wolfe without thinking of Chaykin.

When I mentioned the old pulp theory that Nero Wolfe was the bastard son of Sherlock Holmes, Chaykin roared with laughter. “I was told that, and I didn’t believe it,” he said. “Maybe if I’d known, the series would have lasted longer.”

Maury Chaykin died a couple of hours ago, on his 61st birthday.

He was a sweet guy, a terrific actor, and one of those single-serving friends I will never forget.

Turds of Misery 1913

Long before the boys we love gathered in the basement to crank out Stones covers and drink Blue Ribbon, the original Turds were the talk of Black Lick, Pennsylvania, in the early years of the 20th century. The band included Buster, Lefty, Fingers, Jeremy and Little String. Jeremy, the grandfather of Bagpipes MacDonald, chose not to have a rock-cracking nickname because he knew his grandson would need it later. The original Turds later added Hoots, who blew into an old whiskey jug, and interpretive dancer Calvin Coolidge, who later went into politics. Years later, leftover souvenir Lefty masks would be sold in England and become a bit of a novelty.

Jude Law has been cast as Fingers in the movie.

My Daughter

My little girl is about to turn nine. Here’s a photo of her as a baby, eating a waffle.

Trinity: Why Semantics Matter

(With apologies to Christians and people without humour, or both)

I know what they were trying to say. They just didn’t say it.

Becky, Trudy and Dezzeray used to be in a Runaways cover band, until Gina quit, and without an actual musician, they had to find a new direction.