TV comedies

When I was little, I watched sitcoms like Green Acres. (Eddie Albert did a great slow burn.)  Later I watched All in the Family faithfully on Friday nights.  I also watched MTM sitcoms like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show. (Newhart's therapy group was really funny!) I watched Happy Days but always found Laverne & Shirley unfunny.

In the 1980s I watched Cheers, which holds up pretty well. (I've been watching it recently on Netflix.) I haven't watched many sitcoms in recent years.  I've seen Seinfeld in short bits but never watched a whole episode from start to finish.  I've never watched Friends,whose concept always struck me as deeply uninteresting, or Two and a Half Men.

Recently I've been watching some comedies on video.  I took up The Simpsons, and it's brilliantly written, at least in the early seasons.  I love Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, perhaps because I have Asperger's Syndrome and David's character seems to have it too.  I've watched a lot of South Park, though I'll be the first to admit that it's vulgar and uneven.  But its Fat Albert parody and the boy band satire are hilarious.

I miss the variety show.  When I was young I enjoyed The Red Skelton Show and The Carole Burnett Show.  Skelton used to do a funny pantomime as a glass blower, so I've always thought of glass blowing as funny.  And Carol Burnett did these skits with Ed and Eunice and Mama where Eunice lived this petit bourgeois life of not-so-quiet despair.  This premise shouldn't have been funny, but it was!

National parks

When I was young, my family often visited Fundy National Park in southeastern New Brunswick.  We liked the nature trails and camped out there.  We also visited P.E.I. National Park for the beaches, and Cape Breton Highlands National Park.

Near my hometown of Sackville, N.B., there was Fort Beausejour National Historic Park.  It had a museum with exhibits about the 18th-century colonies.  Back in 1755 it was the French fort on a ridge, looking southeast to the British Fort Cumberland on a parallel ridge.  When war broke out it was the first British conquest.  Brook Watson was there, a young man who'd lost his leg to a Havana shark (there was a famous painting of this) and later became Lord Mayor of London.  We heard stories about how the British cattle wandered across the icy Missiguash River onto the French side and Watson swam across and brought them back, then later he impressed some hostile First Nations warriors by taking a dagger and repeatedly stabbing his wooden leg.

We also visited Fort Louisbourg National Historic Park in Cape Breton. (My mother came from the nearby town of Louisburg and remembered playing in the ruins when she was little, before they started restoring the place.) Now they have guides there playing 18th-century French settlers.  Fort Louisbourg has an important place in American history due to the 1748 campaign where New England militias came together to take the fort, the beginning of the United States Army.

Magazines

When I was young, we got quite a few magazines.  My grandfather gave us a gift subscription to National Geographic every year until his death, and we collected the maps that came with it.  We subscribed to Reader's Digest too, though that was pretty right-wing. (I remember they did an article praising Mobutu, the dictator-thief who ruled the Congo.) But I did like their Notes From All Over.  We also got The New Yorker, and the Boy Scout magazine Canadian Boy.

And we subscribed to Time magazine, which was (and is) incredibly tendentious.  After Nixon resigned, they put his successor Gerald Ford on the cover with the headline "The healing begins." (A note of wishful thinking there.) I recall that their letters section was particularly slanted in their choice of the last letter on a subject, presented as the implicit last word.  For example, after a 1978 cover story on the coal miners' strike, the last letter said, "Jimmy Carter's mishandling of the coal strike is yet another argument for nuclear power." They killed two birds with one stone then.

In high school we got a magazine aimed at teenagers called Today's Generation, and it was unbelievably right-wing!  One thing that really bothered them was the "Day of Protest," a one-day general strike the unions staged in 1976 to oppose the federal government's policy of wage controls.  This angered them so much that they had editorials in two consecutive issues attacking the union movement's "bully-boy tactics."

Don't get me started on the lameness of The New York Times' Sunday magazine.

Future books to read

I have an ambition to read every novel that's been made into a Classics Illustrated comic book.  I started doing this last year, and I've already read Last of the Mohicans, Waterloo and the first half of Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon. (He told the story in two books.) The one I'm dreading is Les Miserables, which is really long and sounds pretty shameless.

I've read a lot of Charles Dickens novels, but I still haven't got around to Our Mutual Friend or Dombey and Son.  I heard Marilynne Robinson's Gilead in audio book form, and now I want to read more of her novels, especially Housekeeping.  I haven't read much of George Eliot--just Silas Marner--and I want to read The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch someday.  Last year I read Mark Twain's travel memoir The Innocents Abroad, and now I want to read his frontier memoir Roughing It.  I recently read Herodotus' history of the wars between Greece and Persia, and now I want to read Thucydides' history of the Great Pelopponesian War and Xenophon's Anabasis.  Seems like whenever I get a book read I end up with two new books I want to read!  I couldn't imagine ever running out of books to read.

Natural disasters

I haven't had much experience of natural disasters.  Back in 1972 we were travelling in the United States and encountered what was left of Hurricane Agnes. (By that point it was just a storm.) In 1954 my newlywed parents were sailing to Britain on the Empress of Australia when they caught up with the remnants of Hurricane Hazel in the Labrador Sea.  My father got seasick quite a bit, while my mother lay down until she got over it.  She told me that they kept the tablecloths from slipping by making them wet.

I've never been in an earthquake, though once I was in the Robarts Library on the fifth floor when I felt what later turned out to be a tremor in Toronto!  At the time I had a vaguely uncomfortable feeling and had to stop work for a minute.  But I only realized what it was when I heard about it on the news.

Best present moment ever

What was my best present moment?  Well, the best eight months of my life was researching my Ph.D. thesis in London, England, in the mid-1990s.  I did do a lot of research, but I found time to do a lot of other stuff.  I went to a Proms concert in Albert Hall.  I even went on a couple of protest marches for Bosnia, and heard Vanessa Redgrave speaking in Trafalgar Square. (That's a once in a lifetime experience.) And I saw a dozen plays, and the silent movie Sunrise accompanied by a live orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall!

I had a lot of enjoyable experiences.  I actually enjoyed food shopping because I felt independent.  And there was the time I wanted to find this statue of John Bunyan.  I found the spot on a map but when I went there I couldn't see it.  Then one day I was riding in the top half of a Routemaster bus, and there was the statue!  They'd put it outside a church at the second-storey level.

I also enjoyed visiting Hampstead in the north. (There was the Everyman Cinema there, where I saw movies like Vanya on 42nd Street.  You could get there by subway, but I preferred the bus.  Once I went on a walking tour of that neighbourhood where they showed the house that was the model for Admiral Boom's house in Mary Poppins, and a place where you could see part of the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral.