Kate of Late

Vancouver on the Cheap

Vancouver's food scene is unparalleled in Canada, but fine dining can be awfully expensive here. Locals tend to stick to the casual. One reasonably-priced new joint, two old sprang to my attention lately after a couple of timely invites. 

See Chau Kitchen & Bar, on Robson at Nicola, for food its proprietor calls "modern Vietnamese." In Vancouver, Vietnamese food tends to be served up in dives with zero ambience. Because it's cheap and tasty, you don't particularly care. You're in, you fill up and you're out -- bada bing, or whatever the Vietnamese equivalent is. At Chau, they've made an effort, with spare but handsome decor and alluring sepia photographs of the owner's family.

Despite the visual upgrade over run-of-the-mill establishments, the food remains a bargain. You can happily while away an evening here with friends over decent cocktails and bright dishes that deftly contrast sweet, sour and spicy flavours as well as soft, firm and crunchy textures. This one definitely deserves a look-see. Its website was under construction when I looked, but the phone number is 604-682-8020.

I don't usually go to Bin 941 (Burrard and Davie) or 942 (Broadway and South Granville) Tapas Parlours because they are so fantastically popular, and you can't reserve. As an old crank, I don't have the patience for lineups in the rain. But irreverent chef/owner Gord Martin's two amazing sister restaurants, long, narrow and arty, have dished out great, generous tapa-sized dishes for eons.

Apparently the recession has touched the Bins as it has other restaurants, which for us consumers is good news -- early in the week you might actually get a table without a lengthy wait. Curl into a banquette with a long-lost chum, order from the well-considered wine list, and tuck into novel beauties like airy, tongue-tingling Navajo bread, “5 Spice Duck Confit” with sundried apricot gastrique, or Kobe Beef Meatballs, dishes ranging in price from $4 to $16.

Most wines on the list are tasty New World offerings from B.C., California, South America and Australia, $8-$11 a glass, $30-60 a bottle. This is a fab late-night haunt, too -- the music is fine and the menu promises “Foodgasms till 1:30 a.m.”

 

On building Castles in the air

YOU know TV network executives are absolutely desperate when they decide to jazz up a series about police detectives by adding a character who is -- tada! -- a writer.

Yet this is exactly the gimmick at play in Castle, a new ABC drama starring two Canadians, Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic. At the start of the series, NYPD Detective Kate Beckett (Katic) -- described on the show’s website as “a tough, smart homicide detective” -- consults crime novelist Richard Castle because a killer is basing his crimes on scenes from Castle’s books. As the website blithely describes it, “once that case is solved, (Castle) and Beckett build on their new relationship as they look to solve more strange homicides in New York -- as much fun as one can have with death and murder.” (In other words, party down!)

Big city-based crime-solving shows are now beyond clichéd, and this series features TV’s usual complement of hunks and babes in the lead roles. Beckett is a wraithlike sleuth who dons an oversized beret for cold weather investigations. She approaches the body of a murdered teenager in Central Park with precisely the same abdomen-forward gait as any of the walking skeletons on Fashion TV. (If that’s what a steady diet of doughnuts and bad coffee does for a policewoman, sign me up.) I guess we can call it at this point: The gritty days of NYPD Blue’s pudgy, pockmarked detectives are dead; long live America’s Top NYPD Model.

But I’ve digressed. To me, the best thing about this show is the hilarious way its website describes Richard Castle as a “roguish best-selling writer.”

Now, I don’t know how many best-selling writers you’ve met, but we’ve all seen them looking every inch the ornery misfit on TV. The last thing you’d call most professional scribblers is “roguish.” Churlish, perhaps. Nerdish. Jewish, in some cases. I could actually imagine somebody who looked like Mordecai Richler riding along with the New York police, annoying them all day and boozing with them prodigiously later. But I’ve seen few writers of any kind who even vaguely resemble dashing, well-dressed Richard Castle. On top of that, he’s charming -- he’s the only reason I’m watching the show.

Not only is Castle described as “roguish,” he’s “wildly famous.” There’s an oxymoron for you -- I’ve never heard a writer described as “wildly famous,” although I suppose J.K. Rowling would come close. Those on a quest for wild fame tend to scrupulously avoid writing for a living. Writing is more the province of misanthropic hermits who can barely afford two shoes to rub together, which serves as their excuse for never going out.

These days, Canada’s most wildly famous writer is probably Margaret Atwood, who seems able to wander all over the country without being trampled by hysterical sycophants. It’s not so easy for our character Richard Castle, apparently -- he’s “the consummate man’s man, ladies’ man, and man about town -- nearly as well known for his tabloid-generating antics as for his immensely successful novels.”

Tabloids stalk writers? Must be an American phenomenon. I once read something about Stuart “Vinyl Café” McLean’s “antics,” but that was in Frank magazine. The paparazzi just don’t seem to hound Canuck writers the way they oughta. If only we could get more photos of grizzled poets skinny-dipping on the cover of Hello! magazine.

As a matter of fact, this whole Castle TV series has made it clear to me that Canadian writers don’t know what they’re doing. It turns out the reason for Castle’s interest in wasting his workweek shadowing a detective is that he’s “bored with his own success.” That’s right -- fame and money (you should see his loft) were so easy for Castle to come by that by the age of 30-something they’re a honkin’ yawn. And that without any Canada Council support.

Obviously this is some scriptwriter’s vengeful fantasy. I can guess at how it all went down. Officially, he (or she) was planning to pitch some other TV series, possibly about an L.A. pastry chef and surfer who always seems to stumble on either pastry- or surf-related crime scenes. But the night before the scriptwriter is to present his concept and a sample first episode to some mucky-muck at ABC, he can’t get to sleep because of the rats scampering over the rusty car in which he lives. So he amuses himself by making up some godforsaken bullcrap about a rich, famous, handsome, sexy writer who’s so blasé about his achievements that he prefers to spend his days bumping into corpses with a humourless NYP “dick” who appears to be suffering from a raging case of PMS.

Anyhoo, the writer wanders into ABC with this pastry chef-surfer-crimesolver scheme in hand, presents it to a surprisingly unappreciative audience, and is about to be punted out the door with the ferocity of Pelé. Suddenly, he backtracks, shouting, “But that’s not my real idea! My real idea is, uh, about a mystery writer, like, say Scott Turow but without the lawyer bafflegab, who starts advising the NYPD, partly to get ideas and partly because there’s a hot cop in charge. And then he thinks it’s cool so he starts tagging along on all her assignments, and because he doesn’t think like a cop he helps her solve crimes!”

And for some reason, the ABC network honcho agrees that this would make a fine series. As a matter of fact, the honcho’s own father was a mystery writer who died of starvation and ignominy while waiting for somebody to buy his stupendous novel about the murder of a roomful of television executives. Maybe the honcho can somehow right this tragic wrong by giving the fictional Richard Castle the life his own dad craved. “If it appeals to nobody else, it’ll appeal to the writers,” he explains to any higher ups. As they begin to laugh uproariously at the very idea that that might count for anything, he pulls out his taser and mows them all down. They shall not be missed.

Not that I have anything against ABC TV executives. As a matter of fact, I have an idea to pitch them myself: A humourist with a chip on her shoulder the size of, say, the Lower Mainland keeps stumbling over bad TV shows and coming up with her own magnificent alternatives. One day she tags along with an ABC TV executive and -- hey, I don’t give this stuff away. You’ll just have to wait for the pilot.

All hail the death of ‘masstige’

ONE of the few pluses of watching the economy crumble is witnessing the demise of the phenomenon marketers call “masstige.”

In case you don’t know what masstige is, or was, I hadn’t heard of it either before I read an article in New York magazine online last year. As Wikipedia explains, “Masstige is a marketing term meaning downward brand extension. The word is formed from the words mass and prestige and has been described as prestige for the masses.”

A product with “masstige” can also be described as “aspirational.” It’s an item that is purchased by members of the middle class to make them look and feel richer than they are -- a luxury handbag, for example.

Over the past eight years or so, the vast moat between the rich and the middle class in terms of North American style looked like it was drying up. Popular magazines encouraged us regular folk to buy up-market, by listing which star had bought what, where. Meanwhile, former nobodies who had catapulted to fame by appearing on, say, American Idol began strutting around in Manolo Blahniks, encouraging dangerous fantasies in anybody who had ever crooned a Motown song in the shower.

With Karl Lagerfeld designing for H & M and Isaac Mizrahi for Target, with the wealthy Olsen twins being photographed by paparazzi buying the same Starbucks coffee as the rest of us, and with fancy bakery cupcakes within reach of both Suri Cruise and our own sweet angels, champagne dreams suddenly began to seem more available to the perfectly ordinary.

Prestige was that easy to come by, or so it appeared. But it now looks as though “masstige” was another symptom of an economy gone wrong. In the same way that the current financial crisis was triggered by banks lending mortgage money to people who truly could not afford to own houses, goods that were thought to lend prestige to the bourgeoisie were often things that sensible people would always have considered out of reach.

As a matter of fact, Louis Vuitton luggage is not a must-have for somebody in North Vancouver insurance sales. Nor do my own abbreviated locks require pricey Kiehl’s shampoo. Truth be told, a $2 coffee is probably good enough for the likes of us. Who were we trying to kid?

“You had a lot of people who graduated to a level of consumption they could not really afford,” retail analyst Adrianne Shapira told the New York Times in January in an article called Thinking Twice About That $400 Handbag. “Two-hundred-dollar pairs of denim were plausible when home values soared, but now $100 jeans are looking more reasonable.”

It’s fascinating to watch a trend wane. A local restaurant flack told me, for instance, that top eateries in Vancouver are now feeling the pinch. My guess is that those many couples for whom a $300 dinner actually is a big stretch are finally recognizing the fact and staying home.

Even the style- and prestige-crazed are, at the very least, feigning an interest in frugality, wanting to be down with the rest of us. In a Times article earlier this month headlined Extravagance Has Its Limits as Belt-Tightening Trickles Up, socialites in Atlanta reported hauling out 10-year-old gowns to wear to charity fund-raisers. As one lawyer married to a wealthy heir pointed out, “It’s disrespectful to the people who don’t have much to flaunt your wealth.”

Fancy that.

In addition, as Juliet Schor, an economist at Boston College and the author of The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting and the New Consumer told the Times, people no longer need to compete with each other when everybody around them has stopped spending. “You can stay right where you are without falling behind,” she said. At the same time, Schor noted, keeping up with the Joneses may have become less gripping than observing the financial ruin of the Smiths.

Since not everybody is hurting, I expect the economic downturn will lead to more of what is known as “covert couture,” which means designer clothing made to look less posh. Even if one’s own fortunes are flourishing, the tactful sartorial hint that they’re not may become all the rage.

For instance, you may have noticed that dresses and jewelry for the Academy Awards this year were less over the top than usual. Some of the presenters, like Jennifer Aniston, even looked like they’d done their own hair, though that probably wasn’t the case. If she had done so and made it known, however, people would have been applauding her pluck.

I think the Oscars were a bit of a bellwether generally. The show suggested that it’s better to take the approach of Hugh Jackman’s amusing shtick, pretending to be rising to the challenges inherent in the times, than it is to flaunt your privilege. Case in point: At the Vanity Fair party after the Academy Awards, trays of In-N-Out burgers and chicken pot pies reportedly replaced the traditional fancy finger foods.

The new frugality has all kinds of applications. Over Christmas, the New York Times’ wine expert Eric Asimov wrote a story that appeared under the headline Let the Good Times Tiptoe. It pointed out that industry-wide, despite the festive season, consumers were choosing cheaper wines.

Meanwhile, the most recent Food & Wine magazine contains a feature called How Good Is a Wine List’s Least Expensive Bottle? In it, writer Lettie Teague claims she has never before read a wine list by focusing on its prices, which certainly makes her one up on everybody I know. In sampling the lowest-priced bottles on the lists of several good restaurants, she was surprised to discover they weren’t half-bad.

So she is spreading the word, and no doubt the rest of us will follow suit. Being the one who can identify the most enticing bargain will soon confer cachet. Already the media is getting on the bandwagon. The March issue of F & W also includes a story on how to recycle Sunday’s leftover roast beef into Tuesday’s fajitas -- as if most of us haven’t been doing that forever, but just not pointing it out.

Such tips will surely become ubiquitous, with boasting rights seized by those who cut their costs while retaining their flair. Good on them. It’s neither snobbish nor “aspirational” to pursue an affordable lifestyle, which is what makes the idea such a wonderfully welcome change.

No wonder that cop was so slow on the draw

IF you’re one of those people who have recently been griping about Vancouver-area police, or complaining about the escalating costs of security for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, you’ll be pleased to learn that addressing those problems is going to be a breeze.

All we need to do is follow the British example and stock up now on what they’re calling “cardboard constables” -- life-size replicas of police officers. Hello, savings!

In the U.K., these doppelcoppers are positioned strategically to trick bad guys into thinking there’s a “capable guardian” on site, and thereby eliminate the public’s fear of crime.

So far, 13 forces in England and Wales have said “Yes, guvna” to the scheme that provides them with petrified paper police. West Midlands has purchased 80 bogus bobbies, costing about 10,000 pounds ($17,800 CDN).

Essex, on the other hand, brought in a paltry eight of the faux flatfeet. Their chief role in that county is to lurk around gas stations so drivers will stop peeling away without paying for petrol.

Those are the kinds of lightweight jobs the stand-ins generally get, as visual deterrents to thieves and shoplifters. Few of Great Britain’s pretend police are faced with anything as heinous as the stapler notoriously brandished at our own RCMP. Still, it seems England’s fake force rivals Vancouver’s real ones for bravery, common sense and indefatigable commitment.

In Avon and Somerset, some of the cut-outs personify specific local officers, complete with their distinctive tattoos. In those particular communities, cardboard policemen aren’t being used as metaphorical scarecrows, but as metaphorical fishing lures. They’re meant to help draw local citizens, in hopes that they will eventually feel comfortable with the flesh-and-blood version of the police. Apparently, nothing says “approachable” like a cardboard replica -- unless you’re in the West Midlands, in which case a cardboard replica says “Go away.”

Though this new brand of policing is obviously money well spent, there are complainers. The Campaign Director of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, for instance, explained to the Daily Telegraph that “Cardboard cut-outs are no substitute for actual policing. No cut-out, to my knowledge, has ever slapped handcuffs on a criminal.”

We Lower Mainlanders might point out that no cardboard cut-out has tasered a weary traveler to death, shot a rowdy teenager, killed someone while driving drunk, or beaten up a newspaper deliveryman for a few hundred dollars, either. To our minds, that’s a plus.

We could also inform the Campaign Director of the Taxpayers’ Alliance that if we bought Vancouver versions of these ostensible officers, they might actually serve as a deterrent to the scumbags in our warring gangs. Our 3-D fuzz has had no effect on gang violence whatsoever. That hardly bodes well for our regional officers’ competence when it comes to 2010 security.

Why can’t we steal a page from the New Zealand roadwork contractor who bought and put up a life-size replica of a police car to convince drivers to slow down and spare a few of his workers’ lives? With the drivers suddenly afraid of getting tickets, it worked. Your average Vancouver gang member can’t be any smarter than your average New Zealand driver. And if murderous thugs don’t get sucked in by the ruse, maybe the street racers will.

As a humour writer, I’d naturally like to see us get our own counterfeit Mounties. English newspapers like the Daily Mail have had a comic field day and I’m just plain jealous. The Mail headlined its news story on the subject “The very thin blue line.” It ran its photograph, of a cardboard copper standing guard in a thrift shop, above the cheeky caption “‘I wasn’t cut out for this sort of work.’”

Admittedly, the idea may not sit well with B.C. taxpayers. Even among Britons, reaction to the concept of paper tigers filling in for the real thing has been mixed. “(It’s) a case of spot the difference,” John from Chichester wrote sardonically.

“With pubs going under at an alarming rate, I think this is a good idea,” typed the irreverent Derek Church of Sussex. 
“People will have something to throw their redundant darts at again.”

There are union concerns, as well. The vice-chairman of the Police Federation felt it necessary to point out these worries to the Daily Telegraph, saying, “While I appreciate that money may be tight for policing, this does seem a drastic solution to avoid paying any salary and pension costs.”

Drastic, shmastic. Vancouver needs to put a plan in place, pronto. Still, I wouldn’t advise posting replicas of the RCMP or Vancouver Police, per se. We’d be better off using images that local residents respect and admire. Luckily, there are lots of sites on which we can cruise for better choices. You can actually find two-dimensional versions of countless cultural icons online, ranging from Harry Potter’s sidekicks to Barack and Michelle Obama.

A whirl around the available options suggests a few ideal stand-ins, which should be re-outfitted in highly visible RCMP serge or Vancouver Police blues for the requisite intimidation factor. Snow White’s dwarves Sleepy and Grumpy, for instance, might remind the would-be offender of the “good cop, bad cop” shtick that could eventually confront him. Princess Leia, glaring out from under the flat brim of her Mountie hat, could discourage theft in the suburban video arcades and comic book shops patronized by her acolytes. A cheerful, sloshed-looking Dean Martin could “patrol” the bar district without landing any punches, while a jodhpur-ed, high-booted Liberace would serve as a friendly warning for those seeking to make trouble in the West End. No doubt the Vancouver Police could commission a replica of actor Nicholas Campbell and his Da Vinci’s Inquest cohort, in their regular low-key costumes, to temper shenanigans in the Downtown Eastside.

This will surely bring about a change in the levels of violence citywide. For one thing, criminals will no longer need guns to lash out at their flat-footed, flat-bodied oppressors, just matchbooks or magic markers. Drawing a moustache on Dean Martin could become the new obsession of Lower Mainland evildoers. Truly vicious criminals might go so far as to attack Grumpy with a pushpin.

Admittedly, we do run certain risks with this idea. Last November one fearless thief stole the cardboard officer itself from a Tesco supermarket in Grimsby, England. But I ask you, isn’t that preferable to taking a living, breathing police officer off our Lower Mainland streets? 

Oh, right -- I see what you mean. Not necessarily.

 

Isaac Newton is my home slice

HAVE you stocked up on fresh batteries? Have you thoroughly dusted your calculator, and put your computer through its most taxing calisthenics? 

If not, I fear for your ability to celebrate the 20-year-old event that takes place worldwide next Saturday, March 14th -- International Pi Day. A non-believer, I will be ignoring it myself, but as your weekly correspondent, I’m here to make sure you don’t. 

You understand that this isn’t about the kind of pie that calls for lard, flour and a 400-degree oven. Rather, this is the day on which the Giant Pi, a talking pi symbol, is dropped like a New Year’s Eve disco ball for the tens of thousands of computer screens poised to catch it. 

The Giant Pi is just a kitschy image, though, like those of Santa or the Easter Bunny. The day is actually a celebration of the magical number 3.14159 -- it’s infinite, but I’m going to stop there, for fear of boring you. If you look on Yahoo Answers for the significance of pi, here’s the explanation: “The value of pi is a constant which equals the circumference of a perfect circle divided by its diameter. It is a transcendental number, meaning that the number of decimals is infinite, yet all the numbers are defined.” Translation: Pi is that sequence of numerals where, if you understand anything about it, you’re smart. 

Naturally, I still have no idea what the fuss is about, or why a ratio that defines the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter is more important than any other ratio you could name. Not that I could name any. But reporter Holly Fletcher at Columbia University’s Columbia News Service obviously can. According to her story about it, International Pi Day is a big round deal that will draw math mavens to the site Piday@pidayinternational.org next Saturday at precisely (and you can bet on that) 1:59 p.m. Get it? Pi Day takes place in the third month, on the 14th day, at 1:59 -- 3.14159. Well, I don’t blame you. My kids had to explain it to me -- several times. 

In Fletcher’s story, one numeric whiz describes the event as the “Christmas of cyberspace,” pointing out, “There are math nerds and geeks in all walks of life, not just in schools. There are some math wonks on Wall Street too.” (Obviously not very good ones.) 

“For hard-core mathematicians, pi, which is central to many equations, represents a numerical marvel that is similar to the famous conundrum, Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” writes Fletcher. “To the math world, the question is, Which came first, the circle or the ratio?” 

Oy, my brain hurts. I had already sprained it with that chicken and egg thing, and now this. 

Apparently if you’re truly into insurmountable mathematical challenges, you’ll spend hours a day searching for repetition -- or, better yet, a denouement -- in pi. In 1666, for example, pi nut Isaac Newton confessed, “I am ashamed to tell you to how many figures I carried these computations, having no other business at the time.” Thank God he eventually found some real work. 

As time wasters go, pi appears to be highly seductive. By 2002, the number had been figured out to more than 1.2 trillion decimal places by its countless sycophants. One retired engineer from Japan famously memorized 100,000 digits of pi -- in order, duh! -- and then rhymed them off publicly for a solid 16 hours. Needless to say, there were no shouts of “Encore!” 

For some of my slower readers, I know an explanation of pi’s grip on the mathematician’s imagination will be necessary. Unfortunately, I am not the one to provide it. Yet I will try. That’s the sort of conundrum I’m all about. Here it is: Trying to figure out what pi is and where it’s going is the numerical equivalent of you listening to me repeating variations of “well, it’s kind-of like, like, well, it’s kind-of, kind-of it’s well, like …” into infinity. You know, profound. After a while, you, the listener, lapse into a Zen-like coma. The good news is that eventually one of us dies. 

This may seem unbelievable, but the concept of feting a never-ending number beloved of mathematicians never struck anybody until the late 1980s. Apparently that’s when a physicist -- and, presumably, party hound -- called Larry Shaw decided that staff at the San Francisco Exploratorium ought to kick it ancient-school in the Greek symbol’s honour. San Fran’s Exploratorium is the place to be next Saturday for the funfest, where visitors can dine on pies of various persuasions while adding to a string of colour-coded beads that each represent a number standing in for a decimal place. 

Elsewhere in the world, Pi Day has its own hucksters, who hawk everything from T-shirts to pi-shaped baking pans, so, as Fletcher writes, “people can literally take a bite out of π.” While biting, they might want to crank up one of the “pi” rap tunes featured on YouTube. The one by “Pi Diddy” based on Eminem’s Lose Yourself is pretty catchy. 

Visit the website www.piday.org and you’ll be asked about your own plans. One part-time magician and math teacher responds that he’ll be performing at a magicians’ convention on March 14, so he’ll celebrate by presenting “a card trick that gives a result of pi, accurate to five decimal places.” He’ll also encourage his audience members to eat something round, like a doughnut, and to sing a round -- “and hopefully they will be giving me a round of applause.” Another Pi Day enthusiast writes in with a joke you can tell while wearing your pi togs, which is this: “Oh, I’m such a slob. I’ve got pi on my shirt.” 

Honestly, I have no idea why people make fun of the arithmetic-minded. 

It’s seen as significant -- mostly by those who wear wizards’ robes decorated with math symbols even when it’s not Pi Day -- that Albert Einstein was born on March 14. Some pi hounds deliberately choose the date for their nuptials. I have nothing to say about this, if you know what I’m not saying, except that in a world where people raised on Harry Potter now train owls to deliver the rings at wedding ceremonies, one can hardly roll an eyeball without hitting something. 

How would I use pi to measure a rolled eyeball, I wonder -- but not for long.

Let’s just say he’s no Bob Hope

ONCE again I realize that I have missed my calling.
When other people seized the day, I seized the remote control. On the up side, there’s little risk that I’ll die in a hail of bullets. On the down side, I might drown in hail itself from sheer ennui. 

“What’s she on about, then?” you ask in that enchanting accent of yours. I’ll tell you what: I should have been a terrorist.

Not because I want to terrorize anyone. Perish the thought. If people run away from me screaming, I’d like it to be for the usual reason -- hygiene issue. No, I wish to be a convicted terrorist simply because of the fabulous retraining program.

For I’ve just discovered some news from late last year, which is that an Al-Qaeda operative who was convicted of plotting to bomb buildings in London was given the opportunity for free lessons in stand-up comedy. Zia Ul Haq (remember that name -- you’ll be seeing it on marquees in 2030) was one of 18 prisoners who signed up for them at England’s Whitemoor Jail. He’s in stir for the long haul, so must’ve figured he’d have plenty of time to polish his act. 

Haq -- and what a great name for a funnyman! -- is a graduate of construction management from Paddington, England, who was recruited by a terrorist cell. He got caught, and blah-blah-blah, the terrorist thing didn’t work out, and oops, there he is in another type of cell, one with government-funded perks. 

Haq’s stint at comedy camp was short-lived. But he wasn’t hooked off the stage by himself because of the miserable quality of his gags -- his confreres at Whitemoor also bit the dust. Prison guards enraged by the $20,000 training scheme protested and, with the support of UK Justice Secretary Jack Straw, got it yanked after three days. 

“Prisons should be places of punishment and reform…” said Straw, the ultimate heckler. He has obviously never been subjected to the punishing rants of Lewis Black, which have made many a viewer swear off stand-up forever.

Proof that nothing gets by the English, somebody named Kaveh from Manchester dashed off an email to the Times in response to its story on the scandal. “Oh come on, an al-Qaeda stand-up comedy act can’t be that bad,” he/she said, adding a snappy opener for Haq: “‘So what’s the deal with these infidels?’”

On a more serious note, Londoner “Chris” emailed the newspaper to ask, “Wouldn’t it be a better idea to have terrorists thinking about how to make people laugh than sitting alone in a cell thinking about how to make them die?” 

(Lighten up, Chris. We’re just in this concept for the jokes.) 

I think comedy could use an injection of Haq’s brand of -- may he forgive the term -- chutzpah. You can’t accurately describe any jihadist as “irreverent,” but in the context of an opinionated loudmouth with a microphone and a bunch of audience members hanging on his every word, what could be wrong with giving somebody like Haq a new take on things? 

My guess is that he won’t abandon his goal to be the funniest terrorist alive. My chief concern is whether his act will be original or, after a couple of decades of incarceration, even vaguely relevant. A martyr-worthy opener like “Take my life, please” has, sadly, been done -- it’s even the name of a Simpsons episode. And of course, religious fundamentalism is unlikely to be an asset in the world of stand-up -- when you don’t drink, date, or casually fornicate for religious reasons, you’ve cut yourself off from the majority of comedy’s central themes. 

Still, I have great expectations. Fortunately for Haq, if his mug shot is any indication, he’s no better in terms of appearance than the average funnyman. That’s helpful as he enters a profession where the sorrier you look, the sharper your edge. You couldn’t find a worse dressed, homelier bunch if you took a rake through a barful of freelance journalists. Do we want our comedy served up to us by a muscular hunk with no conceivable chip on his shoulder -- somebody who looks like Matthew Fox from Lost -- or by a quipster with a face like a slowly collapsing party balloon, who’s spent his life enduring the name Brent Butt? Sad sacks (Jackie Mason), lantern jaws (Jay Leno), the follically bizarre (Steven Wright, Demitri Martin), the minuscule (Billy Crystal) and people who look like puppets (Garry Shandling, Gilda Radner, Richard Pryor, Jim Carrey) -- all have found a forgiving home on the comedy stage. 

So Haq’s a shoe-in. He does have plenty of competition in the “religious/ethnic outsider” category, of course. For instance, there are already American Muslim comedians like Mohammed Amer, Ashar Usman, and Preacher Moss, one of whose jokes is,  “Osama bin Laden is like the Muslim Tupac. They can’t find this guy, but he releases a DVD every month and a half.” 

That particular trio came out with a movie last year called Allah Made Me Funny, but the men’s humour derives from their awareness of non-Muslims’ irrational fears about Muslims since 9/11. People were obviously right to be afraid of Haq -- that makes his schtick fresh. He could turn out to be the Mickey Rourke of jihadists, relentlessly preaching about his conversion to the sunny side of life, but still seeming scary as hell. 

The real pity is that Haq can’t immediately unleash his hilarity worldwide, and all because of something stuffy people like to call “criminal justice.” But there is hope for him to dole out the gold from “inside.” Last year, the BBC and Channel 4 inexplicably rejected a comedy about would-be suicide bombers by satirical documentary maker Chris Morris, who is known in Britain for his Channel 4 show Brass Eye. This was despite the fact that Morris was careful to make sure the program was not offensive to Muslim viewers. “It is fatwah-proof,” his producer boasted to UPI. 

Rumour has it that Morris plans instead to make a film version called Four Lions this summer. And who better for him to hire to ensure the yucks keep coming than your enemy and mine, Zia Ul Haq? 

I’d make the introductions myself, but I prefer to keep an ocean between Haq and me. As we all know, comedy doesn’t travel. On the other hand, terrorism is always on the move.