I've never robbed anyone who didn't deserve it

My favourite character archetype, giving rise to one of my favourite subgenres of literature, is the Gentleman Thief. From the medieval Robin Hood who robbed from the rich to give to the poor, to the 18th-century highwayman who robbed from the rich and... well.. that's about it really, through Arsène Lupin and Raffles, Simon Templar and Lupin III, Thomas Crown and Danny Ocean, there's something positively alluring about a guy who's taking somebody else's money and looking absolutely stylish while doing it.

It takes a special kind of thief to become a popular hero in that vein. Bonnie and Clyde nearly managed it; Dillinger almost certainly did. It's not enough to be incredibly dapper; if you're mugging people in tophat and tails, you're still just a mugger. And it's not enough to pick your targets carefully; a guy who rips off a casino that nobody liked in the first place might get the viewers at home chuckling over the apparent justice, but they won't be rooting for him and actively hoping he doesn't get caught.

The gentleman thief is an iconoclast, the man (or woman) who can take on the accepted power structure - the banks, the casinos, the fat cats and businessmen that every prol schmuck secretly or not-so-secretly envies and hates deep in his heart of hearts - and can do it successfully, with clever wit to keep from getting caught - and a large dash of bravado and daring, allowing them to turn around during their getaway chase and thumb their noses directly at the police.

The gentleman thief does not content himself with just sticking up a bank; the gentleman thief breaks into the office of the corrupt bank manager, sits down and smokes a cigarette and waits for the manager to arrive as casually as if he were there to keep a legitimate appointment, and then very politely asks the bank manager to hand over the keys to the safe. When the bank manager doesn't, of course, more drastic measures will be required, and that is where we find the derring-do that makes for a good adventure story; but the charming insouciance of asking and apparently honestly expecting it to be handed over without any trouble is what separates the gentleman thief from his coarser cousins. A robber produces a gun immediately; a gentleman thief produces it with a show of winsome reluctance, no matter how eagerly he may actually use it in the ensuing struggle.

Obviously, gentleman thieves roll very high in CHA, in addition to the high DEX skills that are required for all of their ilk.

The Decemberists - Perfect Crime #1 (website)
The Films - Black Shoes (website)
MIA - Paper Planes (website)
The Clash - Bankrobber (website)

Friggin' 'orses

Now, don't get me wrong. I absolutely adore Quebecker accents. I think they're cute, and if I could hire a Quebecois lad to read books on tape in English for me, I'd do it. So what I'm about to say is being said lovingly.

It's goofy as fuck.

It's entirely unlike a French accent. I mean when they're speaking English, of course. I understand French, but not well enough to effectively place a regional accent (which makes me better able to understand the plight of foreigners who can't tell a Yankee from a Texan). A French accent can range from suave to comical depending on the individual, and you can tell that the speaker's native tongue is something smooth and Continental. A Quebecois accent is just straight-up goofy as fuck no matter who's talking, and it sounds like the person's first language is some kind of silly bird-speak.

Which it might be, really.

One point the Quebecois definitely have over the French is in the department of profanity. Quebeckers damn well know how to swear. Most of the French people I've met limit themselves to "merde" the way most of the Yankees I know limit themselves to "fuck" - quantity perhaps making up for lack of diversity; but if you really want to hear some first-class, grade-A, five-star swearing in French, you turn to the Quebecois. Half of it isn't even directly translatable, and the parts that are just read like a vocabulary lesson on Catholic churches, but that's the beauty of it. When they swear in English, they apply the same rule, which is basically "string as many words together as you can, and sound as angry as possible while you do it." This leads to some absolutely virtuosic paragraphs of rhetoric.

"Motherfucking dogshit Christ goddamn, you fuckstick son-of-a-bitch crackerjack assfuck!"

It's sheer poetry.

Malajube - La Monogamie (website)
Les Cowboys Fringants - Toune d'Automne (website)
Les Innocents - Long, Long, Long (not only are they not Quebecois, they haven't existed for about 10 years now. no website for you)

Sunny days, chasing the clouds away

Teague Park, Longview - Photo by Justin Baker

Someone should start building playgrounds for grown-ups. Playgrounds the way we remember them from our own childhoods: swingsets sized for us, the monkey bars and jungle gyms and merry-go-rounds that have been torn out to make things safer for today's kids, who are apparently weak and frail compared to earlier generations. And once they're built, their use should be mandatory. Everyone could do with a day off to act like a kid again.

For my friends and I, that day was Friday. We brought lunch - a postmodern picnic-replacement picked up at a McDonald's on the way across town - and relaxed in the sun, throwing French fries at complacently overfed ducks who made a show of desultory pecking at the first few offerings, then ignored the rest. Everyone's a critic.

Having gotten the cold, feathery shoulder from the waterfowl, we went off on a grand adventure, hiking around the perimeter of the man-made fishing pond that dominates Teague Park and telling stories. On the far side of the pond, we noticed that there were two different playgrounds in the field across the carpark: a modern, "safe" plastic one, and that glory of glories, an old-school jungle gym with a swingset and a climbing tower and a fireman's pole and a metal slide.

We frolicked on it, running up the slide and skinning our palms on the pole and competing with each other over who could make the most dramatic death speech before throwing themselves down the slide (thankfully, it was only about 80 outside, with decent cloud cover, so the sun hadn't heated the slide up to griddle temperature yet - possibly the only advantage the modern all-singing, all-dancing, all-plastic playground equipment has over the originals). When some actual (chronological, rather than mental) children arrived, we left so as not to cramp their style.

We hit up the toy department of a dollar store on our way to another park on the north side of town, and spent the rest of the afternoon blowing bubbles and failing to fly a kite. A robin red-breast kept up a very loud commentary on our activities, deriding our kite failure and warning us when we ran too close to the overhead power lines, and when he called it a night, so did we.

The engineer of the group is already planning ways to improve on our dollar-store kite for next week's visit, and we plan to keep up this childish exercise routine as often as possible until the spring turns to summer and we have to stay inside with the air conditioning for our own good.

This Is Ivy League - Richest Kids In Town (myspace)
The Lucksmiths - Up With The Sun (website)
The Explorers Club - Don't Forget The Sun (website)

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Explosions in the Sky - Welcome, Ghosts (band website)