- You might have thought you were fit as a fiddle until you were drafted to be a hernia soldier. Seems hernias can affect any age and sex no matter how buff you are. Odds are your draft notice is more likely to be delivered to you the older you are.
- Your body may have let you down causing “the bulge” and takes a beating with hernia surgery but it is remarkable how it heals itself with your help of course. Nasty coloured bruises adorn certain parts of your body but in a matter of three weeks or so the nasty bloody crustiness disappears and the angry incision site calms down. Eventually you’ll be swaggering down the beach and only seasoned hernia adventurers can unearth your little scar secret!
- Surgery isn’t the be and end all. There has been an administrative, technical, and medical involved in your diagnosis, surgery and recovery. You may be the unfortunate star in the adventure but without your supporting cast just think where you’d be.
- You realize how much you took your health for granted. Your Great Hernia Adventure has taught you amongst other grander things, how wonderful it is to bend over and tie your shoe, play golf, garden, wash the car or pick up a grandchild or your loyal Spot. You don’t appreciate how fortunate you are until your health is in question. You hear this frequently but truly understand it when your health is compromised question.
- You understand what pain is, how you react to it and how to manage it and even develop compassion for others (and yourself) suffering pain.
- You have developed a sense of gratitude for all those assisting you (and this includes yourself) in your Great Hernia Adventure.
RKS 2025 CANADIAN Film: “The Bearded Girl”
What a fantasy film! Could it ascend to the heights of Cinderella, Pinocchio or “Nightmare Alley”?
Eighty-eight generations of a family have produced a bearded girl. Commences as light peach fuzz and by maturity is wild mountain man thickness. Creates audience attraction in a carnival sideshow particularly when the bearded girl is s sword swallower.
Cleo (Anwen O’Driscoll) approaches the big day when as the Bearded Girl she will assume the title of Bearded Woman and the leadership of a sideshow community in Beautiful British Columbia.
A conflict has developed between Cleo and her mother Lady Andre (Jessica Paré). Cleo has novel ideas for the repetitive sideshow her mother has taken the lead on for years. Restless youth rejecting tradition. Inflexible mother and her progeny attempting to assert herself.
A blow up ensues when Bearded Girl Cleo tells her mother Bearded Woman Lady Andre her husband left her due to her nasty behaviour as opposed to that of her husband’s. Cleo flees the sideshow for the city with her hot tempered and domineering mother saying never return.
Cleo does not make it into the “city” taking residence in a nearby small farming town forming a romantic relationship with milk farm heir Leonard. Unfortunately her beard makes itself known to Cleo yet again requiring a daily morning shave but it returns each morning with increasing thickness. Tired of masking her appearance she appears fully bearded before Leonard freaking him out (pardon the expression).
Meanwhile back at the sideshow grounds greedy real estate developer Richard Dick Sutherland (Jeff Gladstone) requires the sideshow lands owned by Lady Andre for a parking lot for his planned 300 room resort-casino-racetrack. Lady Andre isn’t giving an inch and is subject to harassment by Dick and his cronies including an in his pocket sheriff.
Take this movie as an odd British Columbia fairy tale and enjoy the strange plot but fairy tales are allegorical and have a social meaning. This bizarre story delivers clear and simple messages and a question or two.
Be who you really are despite pressure to change from external forces and possibly yourself.
Generational conflict is inevitable but it can be resolved.
Innovation and change are often necessary and if not accepted by the older generation the status quo becomes non-functional leading to bitterness and frustration.
How much is love based on physical as opposed to intellectual attributes?
Corporate greed is not always victorious.
And having some extreme fun here the film is an allegory about Quebec’s struggle to assert itself within Canada!
Clever co- writing and direction by Jody Wilson. Blake Berrie and Thiago Gaddha are co-writers.
Screened 17/18July2025 at Fantasia film festival in Montreal.
RKS 2025 CANADIAN Film Rating 76/100.
RKS 2025 CANADIAN Wine: 2021 Nomad Fumé Blanc From Niagara, Ontario
Aroma: Lemon, lime, guava, peach, pineapple and mango. Wow this has lots going on!
Palate: Despite all the fruitish bouquet activity there is a certain austerity on the palate and despite 12 months ageing in oak it has a clean stainless-steel backbone, or least that is the way it presents itself. Try and try you might detect in a massively compact and secretive fashion all the fruit described in aroma above. A brackish and dry finish.
Personality: Functional and militaristic Sauvignon Blanc.
Food Match: Fish and chips at the Niagara Golf and Country Club on the outdoor patio on a hot July evening. Pork chops marinated in lemon juice, oregano and olive oil on the grill.
Price: $20 CDN.
Cellarbility: Drink by 2025-year end.
RKS 2025 CANADIAN Wine Rating: 87/100.
(Nomad 2021 Fumé Blanc, VQA Niagara Lakeshore, Hinterbrook Estate Winery, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, 750 mL,12.5%).
RKS 2025 Film: “Cloud”: Up in the Sky or Down Far Below?
Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) is an internet reseller of whatever he can bargain cheaply for and hopefully resell at retail or wholesale at an enormous profit. Good freedom of enterprise all legitimate unless the merchandise is counterfeit. Operate in the cloud as Yoshii does under a pseudonym Ratel then the transactions are all anonymous and completed with impunity? As that Kim Mitchell song plays, “grab a soda and nobody gets hurt”.
Yoshii has cultivated enemies in his quest for financial success including driving brutally hard bargains and unloading counterfeit merchandise to other resellers purchasing from Yoshii that paid the additional price of being beaten by angry purchasers realizing they have been duped. In his personal life he has refused a promotion in his day factory job offered numerous times by his boss Mr. Takimoto (Yoshiyoshi Arakawa) grossly offended by Yoshii’s rejection. Then there is Muraoka (Masataka Kubota) a vocational college fellow student who he refuses an offer to join with in a business enterprise. Yoshii terminates Sano (Daken Okudaira) his assistant for snooping on his computer. In fact there are so many aggrieved individuals they band together and hunt down Yoshii seeking revenge.
Yoshii’s sales are sufficient to finance a move from Tokyo to a quiet village living in a large rented lakeside house. His girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) joins him. It is clear she is an avid consumer and wants to spend, spend and spend and Yoshii is her golden ticket.
Before moving from Tokyo Yoshii discovers a dead rat on his doorstep and has tripwire set outside his home causing a nasty spill on his motorcycle. In his new home an automotive part is thrown through his window and a Mercedes cruises menacingly outside his home in darkness. The mystery is in full swing!
His enemies unite and hunt down Ratel. The hunt, at times, is somewhat comedic but when Ratel the prey is in their clutch’s matters turn nasty and deadly. In the ensuing gunbattles it is Sano that comes to Yoshii’s rescue becoming Yoshii’s ally. This and Sano’s proficiency with firearms seem odd indeed for an assistant he employed to ally himself with a boss that terminated him.
Who is behind all the commotion and why? For a starter pay very close attention to Sano’s meeting with a “syndicate” member on a train station platform and his sending his best regards to the “chairman”. And the surreal car ride by Sano and Yoshii concluding the film will answer all your questions. Yoshii is an unwitting Jabez Stone and Mr. Scratch is clearly nearby? Sano is Charon?
Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Makes a Canadian theatrical run commencing 18July2025.
Watch the trailer here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsU2vNvHwns
RKS 2025 Film Rating 93/100.
RKS Literature: Marooned in Love (James Baldwin)
“Barbara and I were marooned, alone with our love, and we were discovering that love was not enough-alone we were doomed. We only had each other, and this fact menaced our relation to each other. We had no relief, we had no one to talk to-far behind us were the days when we had played at being lovers and laughed how easily the world was shocked. We were not playing now, and neither was the world.”
Marooned in Love, “Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone”, 1968.
RKS 2025 Canadian Wine: A County Pinot Noir From The Grange of Prince Edward County in Ontario
The winery website describes its Farmer Series Pinot Noir “as a robust terroir driven County Pinot” aged 10 months in French oak.
Aroma: Black cherry, raspberry held together in a light smoky frame.
Palate: Too smooth to be considered robust! Definitely tannins but not lending to a robust categorization and that’s fine by me. Somewhat of a chalky texture and a peppery influence on the thin finish. Raspberry and Catanian cactus pear.
Personality: “Farmer” from a Canadian perspective equates to adjectives of everyday, basic and decent then this Farmer’s Series Pinot Noir foots the bill.
Food Match: There is an emphasis on farm to table in The County. And there are plenty of farms in The County. If at the winery at The Grange Vineyard Kitchen why not The Grange Burger?
Cellarbility: Consume before 2026 winds down.
Price: $33. CDN.
RKS 2025 Canadian Wine Rating: 88/100.
(The Grange of Prince Edward County, 2024 County Pinot Noir Farmer’s Series, VQA Prince Edward County, 750 mL, 12%).
RKS 2025 Canadian Film: “Foreigner”: Polite Racism or Ignorance?
One associates racism with malevolent intent. The Canadian film “Foreigner” acknowledges malevolent racism also suggesting racism can possibly be “polite”, based more in ignorance than malevolence.
Yasamin (Rose Deghan) is a newly arrived Iranian teenager to British Columbia living with her widower father (Ashkan Nejati) and her grandmother Zoreh (Maryam Sadeghi). There are hints Yasamin’s mother succumbed to the vicissitudes of mental illness.
Understandably Yasamin is desperate to “fit in” at her new school. Valley Girls, or better said as this is Vancouver, North Van bible study girls, led by Queen Bee Rachel (Chloë MacLeod) appear anxious to welcome Yasamin into their circle. The North Van girls are overplayed, perhaps intentionally. They are profoundly ignorant about any culture other than North Van and they are pleased it seems, to meet their first Muslim! A good deal of amusement awaits the viewer as these are not overtly Mean Girls but their pleasing exterior may mask a vindictive and evil nature.
Yasamin rejects her Iranian culture in her desperation to fit in including a blond hair dye job but discovers recognizing her own identity through her experiences is more important than fitting in. Somewhat polemic you may find.
At times a bit of “Carrie”, “ET”, “Mean Girls”, “The Exorcist”, a rather lame Government of Canada Citizenship Video and a few satirical jabs at evangelical Christians.
Deghan certainly plays the role perfectly and her grandmother played by Maryam Sadeghi oozes love and empathy at precisely the right times.
You may watch the trailer here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iav4c1HG2Ug&t=1s
Directed and written by Ava Maria Safai.
Plays at Fantasia in Montreal on 31July and 2August2025.
RKS 2025 Canadian Film Rating 67/100.
Melania Trump Deported to El Salvador
Spoof News Services: 15July2025: Redneck, Florida
Spoof News Services reporters on the ground in Redneck, Florida have reported Melania Trump has been deported to El Salvador this afternoon. She was abducted by MICE Agents in a shopping mall in South Beach, Miami attending an opening of a discount designer mall by the dog of Kimmy K “Puffyhead”.
Tom Unwholesome, former MICE Czar had explained to reporters that Melania had a heavy accent and was acting suspiciously eating TACOs at the mall and agents identified her as a dangerous foreigner most likely a “Mexican birth righter” on par with Rosamund O’Connell. Mr. Unwholesome was subsequently executed on the White House lawn hence is the former MICE Czar.
Karry Leadhead, a White House spokesperson, reported a serious error had occurred attributable to “Biden agents” and negotiations were underway to get “the old bird back”. Unfortunately, her return may be subject to a 400% tariff imposed on exports from El Salvador by executive order of the Big Guy.
Further details to follow.
RKS Literature: American Media’s Obsession with the Cult of Personality
“You are literally, then, one amongst countless millions. You are news. Whatever you do is news. But it does not take long to realize, at least assuming that one wishes to live, that to be news is really to be nothing; that the attention paid to one’s vicissitudes is merely the most cunning way yet devised of making the adventure of one’s life a farce. He woke up this morning, or he didn’t, and then he peed, or didn’t, and then he shit, or he couldn’t, and then he fucked his wife or his broad or he fucked his boy or his boy fucked him, or they blew each other, or they didn’t- it’s a story, either way, any way: it is all, all, there in the eager faces of the reporters.”
James Baldwin, “Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone”, 1968.
RKS Literature: Avoiding an Incitement for a Racist Riot (James Baldwin)
“But, by the time one has become an incitement, not very much is left in one’s power. It is not a matter merely of walking straight, eyes straight ahead. No, one’s eyes must be everywhere at once-without seeming to be, without seeming to move; one must be ready for the rock, the fist, the sudden movement; one must see every face and yet make it impossible for one’s eyes to be caught, even for a second, by any other eye. One must move swiftly, and yet not in a hurry: one must, in fact, give the crowd no opening, either by seeming to be too proud or by seeming to be too humble. All such crowds are combustible, and they always will be. Their buried, insupportable lives have brought them together and on the only terms they can come together: the unspeakable despair concerning their lives.”
James Baldwin, “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone”, 1968.
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