Monday, December 29, 2014

Hydro

"Hydro" comes from "hudor," the Greek word for water.

If you ask me, bottled water is the big marketing con of our age.  Until I move to a place like China, I'm going to trust the water from the tap!  I'm just glad I don't live in Britain, where Margaret Thatcher privatized the water utilities out of sheer ideology and Tony Blair's New Labour preserved privatization out of sheer cynicism. (Privatization was bad for the British people.  But denationalization would offend the Big People.)

Barbara Ward once said that 1% of the money the world spends on armaments would be enough to provide clean water for everyone in the world.  But leaders aren't just afraid of their country being weak, they're afraid of looking weak!

Someone said that clean water will be the oil of the 21st century.  Which means that Canada will dominate the world, since we have more lakes than any other country.  Which may mean that the Americans will finally take us over, since they're so wasteful of water and their leaders prefer conquest to conservation.  Here's a prediction:  if the USA takes over Canada, we'll stay much the same but they'll be transformed!

Saturday, December 27, 2014

Telling lies

Some French philosopher spent a whole day in bed wondering, "If I benefit from telling a lie, should I do it?"

I haven't told a lot of lies.  I might lie to someone who was unreasonable, and would clearly handle the truth in and way that just made things worse.

I remember this really lame public service ad put out by the Mormon church with singing and dancing kids telling real kids not to lie.  The predicted that if you do you'll feel bad and "start to cry." Well, that's my problem.  If I tell a lie it's up to me to handle it without feeling guilt.  And if I do handle it that way, the Mormons won't like that:  they want me to feel guilty and cry!  But I won't let them, so there!

Friday, December 26, 2014

Last call

I've never experienced a barroom's last call late at night.  Like my parents before me, I never drink alcohol.  I never even got into tea or coffee either.  But I have a weakness for Pepsi-Cola. (It's my vice.)

I do stay up late quite a bit.  The internet never sleeps, and there's always something new to read.  Sometimes The Huffington Post will have an article on something I feel strongly about, like Private Manning's court-martial. (I consider her a hero.) Then I'll start posting comments and replying to other people's posts, and that may keep me up for hours!

I also play computer games pretty late.  There's one game called Hot Shot, involving firing a ball from an angle you choose, so it'll bounce off points until you've eliminated all the red ones.  You get a few new points to use at midnight, so I play it just after then.

And just after midnight the King Features Syndicate webpage, comics kingdom.com , shows the day's new comic strip episodes.   Dilbert is the only daily strip I still read in the newspapers, but I read several online, like Funky Winkerbean and The Phantom.  But what attracts me enough to pay for a subscription here is their reprinting of classic strips like Rip Kirby and Brick Bradford and Johnny Hazard.

Sunday, December 21, 2014

East Asians

Chinese culture interests me.  I've taught myself to read the Chinese language with the help of a dictionary.  People are intimidated by it but in some ways it isn't as hard as you may think. (The grammar is pretty simple.) I especially like its writing system, which matches a picture or two to a whole word.  I've also learned some Japanese and in some respects it's more different from English than Chinese is.

About fifteen years ago my sister and I visited China on a three-week tour.  We went to places like Beijing and Shanghai (which reminded me of Manhattan) and the place in the northwest with the ceramic warrior statues.  You can see the place modernizing somewhat unevenly. (On one road I noticed a road sign with a picture that said "No tractors.")

We also walked on the Great Wall, which is a pretty steep climb:  it was made for soldiers, not tourists.  They also took us to a really loud silk factory, like in the movie Norma Rae.  Those workers will be going deaf!

We were on a cruise ship on the Yangzi River north of the Three Gorges Dam, but some of us got food poisoning.  Overall, however, the food was pretty good:  they served us the best spinach I've ever eaten.  We hardly ever met beggars--I imagine the police keep them away from tourists.  But there were a lot of pedlars, not that I blame them for shaking us down.

If I visit China again, it won't be as a first-class tourist.  I don't like being a rich man in a poor country.

Saturday, December 20, 2014

Mysteries

When I was about fourteen I went through a Hardy Boys phase for a couple of years.  This was a series of books about two teenage detective brothers figuring out mysteries and catching crooks. (Many of the early books were written, uncredited, by a Canadian called Leslie MacFarlane.) My favourite character was their sidekick Chet Morton.  

I also read several Encyclopedia Brown books by Donald Sobol.  You'd read a short mystery and be challenged to guess the answer before looking it up at the back of the book.  It bugged me that I seldom guessed the answer.  There was one mystery where I guessed that the kid couldn't have banged his knee on the coffee table like he claimed because it should have upset the house of cards on it, but you'd have to be pretty dim not to figure out that one.

I don't care so much for mysteries today.  Some of the Agatha Christie movies are fun. (I think she was Catholic--what is it about Catholics that gives them a talent for writing mysteries?) I enjoyed Umberto Eco's medieval mystery novel The Name of the Rose, and ought to read it again someday.

I wouldn't make a good detective.  Life is a mystery to me, and more I learn the more mysterious it seems to get.

Sunday, December 14, 2014

Street names

My hometown of Sackville, N.B., has a Union Street.  Only in recent years did I realize that it must have been named for the 1926 union of Methodist, Congregational and some Presbyterian churches that formed the United Church of Canada. (Sackville had been an important Methodist centre.)

You can learn something about a town from its street names.  Sackville has Lansdowne, Lorne and Dufferin streets, all named after Governors-General of Canada.  One of its oldest streets is Charlotte Street, which probably honours Charlotte of Mecklenburg, wife of George III when Sackville was a new community.  We lived on West Avenue, but it wasn't named for being on the west side of town (though it was) but after someone called West.

I live on Greensides Avenue, which is a rather bland name, like something a real estate developer would come up with.  Two of the newest streets in my neighbourhood are called Acores and Minho, presumably named with the Portuguese immigrant community in mind.

Some street names have a particular charm.  I remember from my visit to St. John's, Newfoundland, a street called Strawberry Marsh Road.  I wish I could think of names like that!

Friday, December 12, 2014

Fridays!

Of course, Friday is the last day before the weekend, so people have good feelings about it. (I remember being in a good mood on Thursday night because it came just before Friday.) There was a period when I actually watched some soap operas--was I ever that young?--and Friday would always be the most exciting day because they wanted to keep people watching after the weekend.

I used to watch The Brady Bunch on Friday nights. (There, I admit it, I watched The Brady Bunch!) Another Friday night show was All in the Family, which I really enjoyed.  The Tommy Hunter Show was on Fridays too, but I never watched that.  Sometimes I'd see the show's closing credits, with the guitar on a chair, while waiting for something I did want to see to come on next, like The World at War. (Another Friday show where I only watched the closing credits was Police Story.) It used to be the only night when I'd stay up late enough to watch The National on the CBC at 11:00.

Today, Friday night for me is the night of the New York Times Saturday crossword puzzle.  They keep their hardest crosswords for Saturday, so my favourite puzzles are then.  They come online at 10:00.

Another thing I do online on Fridays is read Dan Savage's sex advice column.  I'm hoping it might be useful to me someday.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Corn

When I was young, August was corn on the cob season.  We'd often buy fresh corn at a place called Larry's Fruits and eat it at our cottage.  We had a pressure cooker we could cook it in. (Maybe we still have it around.)

I sometimes burnt my mouth eating corn on the cob.  Today I usually prevent that by pouring cold water on the corn before serving it.  I've also noticed that it's convenient to roll cobs on top of an oblong butter dish.

When we started a garden in our back yard, corn was one of the things we always grew.  Corn stalks and husks make for a lot of stuff to put in the compost. (It's occurred to me that a garden's primary function is to produce compost, and the food is just a byproduct.)

Now that we have a city garden, it isn't suited to corn.  Even if you managed to grow cobs of any size, the raccoons will just get it.  Anyway, one inconvenience about growing corn is that it needs thinning early on, removing many of the little stalks so the rest can grow bigger.  For me, thinning is the hardest part of gardening because it's hard to tell which ones to keep. (You have to do it with root crops too.)

Corn comes from Mexico.  It's only safe to plant when the danger of frost is over, and I've heard that the First Nations figured out that it's safe when the new leaves on the oak trees are the size of a mouse's ear.  Seems very clever to me.

Monday, December 8, 2014

Singing in a choir

I was in the local United Church junior choir for a couple of years when I was young.  I could take it or leave it. (I enjoy singing more today.)

When I was in Grade Six, I missed a lot of school.  My parents didn't mind, but the teacher wasn't happy and spoke to me about it.  If I promised to stop missing school, I'd soon be breaking the promise and that would mean trouble, but if I said I'd continue it that would mean trouble right away.  So all I could do was say nothing and stare blankly.  He actually got my hearing tested! (It was perfect.)

But he did get to me, and in June I made a resolution to myself that in this last month I'd have perfect attendance.  I actually went to Sports Day, even though I knew I was going to hate it and I did.  But in the end it was no use:  I had to miss another day.

I should mention that if I went anywhere outside on a day when I'd missed school and any of my classmates saw me, they'd make an issue of it sooner or later.  Sure, it was none of their business, but it did get to me, and I got anxious not go anywhere on days when I'd been absent.

Now on the night of this June day I'd missed, we had choir practice.  It's true that this was the last rehearsal before the year-end concert, but it wasn't like I was doing a solo.  A lot of kids were in both the choir and my class, and I did not want to expose myself to their gleeful critiques.

One of my sisters said, "I think Jamie should go to choir practice anyway." (She was thirteen and I was eleven, and she'd got to the stage where she decided she knew everything about what was best for me better than I did.) So my parents started putting pressure on me to go.  It was finally my other sister who tipped the balance, and I went.

When I was at choir practice, Ann didn't lose any time saying, "Why weren't you in school, Jamie?" If that had been the only thing it wouldn't have mattered.  But she blabbed around about it, of course, and the next day at recess I had to deal with other kids making an issue of it.  I could not deal with this at all.  I ended up saying "Look, I just couldn't miss it!" which of course didn't do any good:  they wanted their pound of flesh.  I picked a sliver out of wooden plank and felt really, really stupid.  I knew what the consequences would be, but I took the path of least resistance and walked into it anyway.  And for what?

I'm still a bit resentful today.  It wasn't like my relatives were pressuring me into this to benefit themselves. (That's just the way of the world.) But they thought this was for my own good!  If there were consequences that I wanted to avoid, that just proved I was too sensitive.  It was bad enough that when people were deliberately nasty to me I was expected to act as if it didn't hurt me and call that a solution.  But now I was supposed to make decisions beforehand as if the nastiness I faced wasn't going to hurt me!  I wish I could have lived in two different worlds and gone or not gone to one regardless of the other, but these worlds did overlap and I couldn't just ignore that there'd be consequences I couldn't deal with.

Friday, December 5, 2014

Ideal holiday

I remember one year when I was sick with a cold at Christmas time (like in the old song). I mostly just stayed in bed and watched TV, including the movies Stalag 17 and The Man Who Came to Dinner.  And yet it was one of my favourite Christmases.  Go figure!

I guess my idea of a perfect Christmas is just doing nothing.  I'm long past caring about gifts; if anything, they're an inconvenience to me.  I suppose Christmas is the children's holiday, while New Year's is for grownups.