Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Donald Duck

When I was young I enjoyed comic books with Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge.  When I got older I found out that Carl Barks, who drew their adventures without credit, is considered one of the medium's most brilliant artists. (Floyd Gottfriedson, who drew Mickey Mouse and Goofy's adventures, is also acquiring a big reputation.) I remember one comic where Donald was putting on a fancy garden party but his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie ended up soaking everyone!

I also like a lot of Walt Disney's Donald Duck cartoons, especially those from the early years were he's creating chaos.  There's one where Mickey Mouse's band is playing the William Tell Overture and Donald takes out a flute and starts playing "Turkey in the Straw," and a moment later the whole band's playing it too! (The two tunes aren't so different.)

On the subject of cartoon ducks, there's also Daffy Duck.  When I was young I would have chosen Bugs Bunny as my favourite Warner Brothers cartoon character, but now that I'm older I prefer Daffy.  Especially the later cartoons where he developed into a curmudgeon!  One of his best cartoons is Duck Amuck, in which the cartoonist keeps changing the scenery on him and driving him up the wall.  And there's also Ali Baba Bunny, in which he and Bugs find themselves inside Ali Baba's treasure cave and Daffy lets it go to his head! ("It's mine, it's mine!")

Sunday, December 27, 2015

Soap operas

I'll admit I went through a soap opera phase.  When I was 17 or so I watched Another World, mostly on Fridays when they had the most dramatic stuff so people would tune in next week.  And later I watched General Hospital for a while.

I used to watch the British soap opera Coronation Street.  The British ones have a somewhat higher standard than their American counterparts.  This show is set in the Lancashire region around Manchester, and the dialogue makes good use of the local dialect. (Some Dutch people have been learning English from watching the show, so they're using expressions like "Flaming Nora!" and "I'll tell you something for nowt!) It's been around since 1961, when it was part of the "kitchen sink" movement of realistic British drama.

I spent a year in Scotland in my late 20s and took to watching a couple of Australian soap operas that they show on British TV.  One was Neighbours, set in a bland Melbourne suburb. (Kylie Minogue and Guy Pearce were on the show then.) The other was Home and Away, with a rural setting.  I read that in suburban England people have taken up Australian slang that they heard on those shows:  stuff like "a blue," which means "a quarrel."

Thursday, December 24, 2015

ESP

I've never been interested in this paranormal stuff like ESP or the Bermuda Triangle or Chariots of the Gods?  It's always seemed to me to be aimed at all the credulous suckers out there.

Do I believe in ghosts?  I'll believe in them when I meet one.  But if they're willing to leave me alone, I'll return the favour.  I like to think of myself as free of superstitions.  Yet when I'm in a subway station I never walk on an escalator that isn't moving.  It just doesn't seem right somehow.

I've heard that in India people take ghosts very seriously.  And the Vietnamese are very superstitious:  when Vietnam's soldiers drove the Khmer Rouge out of Cambodia and found their killing fields full of bones, they were afraid that ghosts would come after them.  Which I guess is understandable.

Which of course reminds me of another joke.  There are two burglars in an apartment, and one of them says, "I hear someone coming!  Let's jump out the window!" "But this is the 13th floor!" "Come on, this is no time to be superstitious!" (I heard that on a record called World's Worst Jokes.)

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Puns

I think it was Samuel Johnson who said, "Puns are the lowest form of humour." When I was little, I found that saying odd:  what's wrong with puns?  The higher forms of humour were still rather new to me.

I remember a lot of jokes from when I was little, including some puns.  How do you make a slow horse fast?  Stop feeding him!  What do you call a guy who plays basketball in a tuxedo?  A gym dandy!  And I recall my brother telling me a long joke about a castaway who built a boat called a bark, then tried to launch it in a bay called a bight, but it turned out that his bark was bigger than his bight! (boo hiss)

Remember when The Globe and Mail ran "Your Morning Smile"? Their jokes included some puns.  Someone submitted this joke: "When the eel in the sea bites you under your knee that's a moray!" (It helps to be of a certain age.)

Monday, December 14, 2015

Ice cream

When I was little, we had a cottage near Northumberland Strait.  Sometimes we'd go there and bring ice cream, but by the time we ate it it would be half-melted.  To tell the truth, I rather like half-melted ice cream. (You can enjoy the flavour more because your taste buds don't get deadened as quickly.) So I prefer ice cream in a bowl that's still hot from the dishwasher!

My favourite ice cream flavour is cherry vanilla.  I also like strawberry ripple, but they don't seem to make that any more.  My mother liked ice cream with nuts in it, but I never have.  I can't imagine why anyone links mint!

In my neighbourhood, there's a fine ice cream shop called Dutch Dreams.  It would be a good place to take your date, what with its cute retro look.  I'm hoping to get a girl there one of these days...

I read somewhere that the best ice cream in the world is made with ultra cold liquid nitrogen. (It can also make instant compost.)

I once saw a Scottish movie titled Comfort and Joy, about a Glasgow D.J. who settled a gang war among ice cream vendors by inventing ice cream fritters!

Sunday, December 6, 2015

A favourite magazine

One magazine I subscribe to is Harper's.  It has stuff like the Harper's Index, full of telling statistics, and Annotation, which takes a document and adds notes to show what it really reveals.

I used to read the leftist magazine The Nation a lot back in the 1990s.  I don't read it as much today because it no longer has columnists Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn, but I sometimes read Katha Pollitt.

I now read some magazines online.  Every day I glance at Salon, whose articles vary but are often interesting.  (Allen Barra used to write a sports column for them, and that's the only time I've followed a sportswriter!)

I also read The Huffington Post.  They have a wide range of writers, but for me the fun part is posting comments and getting into online quarrels.  Lately I've been supporting Bernie Sanders and putting down Hillary Clinton.  I've also criticized President Obama and incurred the wrath of people who worship him.


Thursday, December 3, 2015

Saturday afternoon movies

When I was young I saw some Saturday matinees.  Stuff like Mary Poppins, The Wizard of Oz, Bambi, Cinderella, Huckleberry Finn, Captain Sinbad, National Velvet, and a Marx Brothers double bill.  But serials and such were before my time.  I remember once before a show when the audience was chattering so loudly that the manager came onto the speakers and told us to quiet down!

I also saw some kiddie movies on Saturday morning on the local TV channel CHSJ from Saint John, N.B.  The show's logo was a rooster and the theme music was a jazzed-up version of Verdi's Anvil Chorus.  They showed stuff like Shirley Temple, Nancy Drew, 1930s comedies starring Joe E. Brown, the comedian with the wide grin, and Snow White and the Three Stooges, which was as odd as it sounds.

Monday, November 30, 2015

Loud noises

Loud noises can make me jump, literally. (My nerves are on the touchy side.) There are a lot of noises that annoy me:  stuff like cutting styrofoam or microphone feedback.  And thunder gets to me.

Yet these noises don't bug me as much as Muzak.  Especially the Christmas-themed Muzak they play every December. (I could throttle whoever composed "Silver Bells"!) I heard somewhere that the heavy metal rocker Ted Nugent wanted to buy the Muzak corporation in order to close it down.

But I can make some loud noises too.  Once I went to this Board Game Meetup where they had a set of cards you'd draw from to decided who'd go first.  The cards had questions like "Who ate ice cream most recently?" and "Who has a birthday coming up soonest?" On this occasion we pulled a card with the question: "Who has the loudest voice?" I immediately shouted at the top of my voice, "I think I have the loudest voice here!  Does anyone want to challenge me?" Nobody did.  Of course, I scared the whole place out of their skins! (It helps to sing opera.)

Thursday, November 26, 2015

What others may think of you

I try not to worry about what other people think of me.  If they tell me, of course, it can be hard to ignore.  But if they keep it to themselves, well, what I don't know can't hurt me.  Some people dislike the thought of people talking about them behind their back, but I don't care.  If they only talk about me when I'm not around, it means they respect me.

What bugs me is when they talk about me in my presence.  I remember in school when kids would see me and that would remind them to talk about me!  School, like prison, can often be a zero-sum game where you raise your own status by lowering someone else's.

My mother is a different story.  She was terrified about what people might say about us!  She remembered back in her hometown in Cape Breton between the World Wars, when there was a married man who was overheard talking to his mistress.  She was trying to get him to buy her a new coat, and said, "I look terrible in this coat!" He then said, "You look good to me, dear." Word got out, everyone found it funny, and he never heard the end of it! (It all ended badly, of course.)

This made a big impression on my mother.  Once advantage of living in a big city is that you don't get talked about as much as in a small town.  Or when you do, it's easier to ignore.  One superpower I would not want to have is the ability to read people's minds.  I don't want to know what everyone thinks of me!

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Electricity

Electric power is one of those things we take for granted.  Two centuries ago it was unknown, one century ago rural houses didn't have it, and even now much of the world goes without it.  It allows us to stay up late and use radio, TV and the internet.  And it makes housework a lot easier.

It takes a blackout now and then to make us appreciate electricity in our life.  Remember the big blackout of 2003?  I was on a streetcar when it struck, and had to get off and walk home.  We had to eat raw food.  That night I saw more stars than I had in ages!  The next day I had an appointment with my psychiatrist and walked all the way there, which took a few hours.

The provincial government plans to privatize Ontario Hydro, and I think that stinks!  I'm still angry that after Margaret Thatcher senselessly privatized British electricity, Tony Blair passively treated even this privatization as irreversible.

Friday, November 20, 2015

The wrong choice of words

Malapropisms.  They're named for Lady Malaprop, a character in Richard Sheridan's 18th-century play The Rivals.  She was always using fancy words that weren't quite right, like "The very pineapple of perfection!"

Archie Bunker's another character who often got words wrong.  He'd call the AFL-CIO "the UFO-CIA"!

Sometimes translators get words wrong.  There was a Pepsi ad campaign in southeast Asia where "Come alive with Pepsi" came out like "Come back from the grave with Pepsi." President Carter gave a speech in Poland where "my love for the Polish people" came out as "my lust for the Polish people." And Kennedy's famous line "Ich bin ein Berliner" can be translated as "I am a jelly doughnut"!

Saturday, November 14, 2015

The Marx Brothers

The first time I saw the Marx Brothers was a double-bill matinee when I was little:  At the Circus and A Day at the Races.  The Marx Brothers were all different while the Ritz Brothers were all the same.  My favourite was Harpo the silent one.

The movie I've seen more times than any other is the Marx Brothers college comedy Horse Feathers. (The title is meaningless, of course.) That's the one with Groucho as university president Quincy Adams Wagstaff. ("The faculty can keep their seats.  There'll be no diving for this cigar!") We own the VHS videocassette, though now it's packed away somewhere.  Good comedy never dates.

The Marx Brothers started out in vaudeville, and when silent movies were replaced by sound, acts like theirs became well-suited to Hollywood. (Another example is W.C. Fields.) Their early movies were made before the Production Code came into effect in 1934, so they have a lot of off-colour humour.  In Horse Feathers there's even a scene in a speakeasy!

Groucho had an interesting life.  He left school in Grade 8 but still became well-read in classic literature.  In the 1930s he became one of Hollywood's most prominent anti-Nazis. (After 1945 he visited Berlin, found the spot where Hitler's bunker had been and danced on it!) In the '50s he had a big comeback with the game show You Bet Your Life.

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Sandwiches

When I lived in Sackville, N.B., there was a natural foods store run by a German couple, called Jacob's Larder.  We often brought protein bread there. (I'm not sure what the ingredients were.) And I often ate it in tuna fish sandwiches!

When I was little my two older brothers sometimes ate these huge peanut butter sandwiches with three or four slices.  But I was never capable of that.

My mother made me a cheese sandwich for a school lunch once, and she added Miracle Whip to it!  I just couldn't understand why:  it would have been perfect without it.  There's no accounting for tastes.

Egg sandwiches are my favourites.  I don't like BLTs because of my aversion to tomato slices. (It's something I inherited from my father.) I can't imagine how the British can stand cucumber sandwiches!

Sandwiches are named for the Earl of Sandwich, an 18th-century gambler who ate them at the gambling table so his gambling wouldn't be interrupted!  Did you know that Hawaii was once known as the Sandwich Islands?

Sunday, November 8, 2015

Wrong answer

One thing that bugs me is people saying "Would you like to _____?" except that only a yes answer is acceptable.  They only put it in the form of a question because they trust you to answer yes.  But sometimes I only figure out the situation after answering no!

Or when your parents ask you, "Have you washed your hands?" and you say yes, but they don't believe you and make you go wash them anyway.  Which begs the question:  Why didn't they just tell you to wash your hands in the beginning?  I guess it's their instinct to ask a question just to put the ball in your court.

In the movie Little Big Man there's a scene where Dustin Hoffman, who's been growing up with a First Nations tribe, has been captured by the cavalry and handed over to a preacher to raise.  The preacher asks him, "Do you know how to skin mules?" Hoffmann answers yes because he guesses that's what the man wants to hear.  But he says, "Being raised by Indians you wouldn't know how to skin mules.  We'll have to whip the lies out of you!"

There's a passage in Uncle Tom's Cabin involving Topsy, formerly an abused slave girl but now being raised by kinder people.  She breaks a dish or something, then when questioned denies it, which gets her into trouble for lying.  So later on, under similar questioning, she confesses to a similar act when she actually hasn't done it!  For her, figuring out the right answer to give is a matter of guessing what your "master" wants to hear.  That's a legacy of being enslaved and beaten and subject to arbitrary power.

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Bad language

A few weeks ago at choir practice, as part of some training exercise, Paolo the director asked us to yell at someone outside to me here.  When it was my turn, on the spur of the moment, I yelled, "Come here, you sonuvabitch!" Everyone laughed.  And "sonuvabitch" is a word I'd never used in real life.  It just seemed like the fun thing to say at the moment. (Now that I think on it, I might have said, "Getcher stupid ass in here, you goddamm sonuvabitch!" But that might have been overdoing it.)

Different generations have different standards about dirty words.  In The Music Man there's the line "Has your son started using words like 'swell' and 'So's your old man!'?" And my mother remembered how you could get thrown out of a British pub for using the word "bloody."

Back in the 1950s the big Catholic organization condemned the movie The Moon Is Blue because it used words like "virgin" and "seduce"!  In the musical Kiss Me, Kate the song "Brush up Your Shakespeare" has the line, "They'll think you're a helluva fellow." The '50s movie changed it to "heckuva"! (That movie also changed the "Too Darn Hot" line "According to the Kinsey Report..." to "According to the latest report..." Mustn't be controversial!)

Recent TV shows, of course, have been more liberal with bad language.  There was this western series Deadwood with a Chinese gang boss whose only English vocabulary was the C.S. word.  It was safe to tell my mother that because she didn't know what it stood for!  It was the same with telling her that the actor Samuel L. Jackson is associated with the M.F. word.

Monday, November 2, 2015

Fiction vs. non-fiction

I'm a non-fiction man myself.  When I was little, I didn't like the idea of fiction!  It seemed to me too similar to telling lies.  Sort of like winning at gambling feels too similar to stealing.

I've always read a lot of non-fiction subjects like history and biography.  Lately I've been reading more novels, partly because of my book club. (The Yearling and Vanity Fair were magnificent.) Also, I got the ambition to read every novel that's become a Classics Illustrated comic book.  The next one on my list is Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, but I'm scared of it.

I find that it's easier to read a novel when I've already seen the movie or read the comic.  It just feels less intimidating to me!  Yet it seems somehow illegitimate, like losing your virginity before you marry.

There are a few cases--Little Big Man, The Never-Ending Story and This Boy's Life--where I'm glad I saw the movie first.  That's because in all these cases the movie was pretty good but the book was great!  If I'd read the book first the movie would probably have disappointed me.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

The police

I remember when I was 15 (around the time of my ulcer trouble), bicycling to school on a rainy day.  I was always sure to stop at intersections with a red light or a stop sign, and even signalled my stop, but on this day my bicycle skidded into the intersection in a hydroplaning motion. (I'd never had this bike out in the rain before and the brakes didn't work as well as I expected.) I thought, "Drat!"

A policeman in his car saw me, stopped me and chewed me out.  He called me "my man" and I've hated that expression ever since. (Don't ever call me "my man.") I stammered out that the bike had slid on me, but that didn't mollify him.  What bothers me is that I ended up blubbering.  Fifteen-year-olds do not blubber!  I feel like a failed a basic test in life.  I wish I could live my life over and stand up to him.

It had really started when the local newspaper ran a letter by a shoemaker whose shop was near the police station, complaining that the local cops were lazy and always hanging around the station.  So the police became more visible at this time.  But a week or two after this incident, they all got fired.  I can't say I feel any sympathy for the fired cop who'd bullied me.  Indeed, I wish I'd had the chance to say to him something like "I'm the boy on the bicycle you made cry.  I'm pleased that it didn't save your job!"

I recognize that being a policeman can be a tough, dangerous job, and I accept that most cops are doing the best they can.  But too many are ignorant jerks who abuse their power and rely on fellow cops keeping their mouth shut.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Aliens

Is there intelligent life on other planets?  Well, the universe has billions of galaxies, and if you assume that just one galaxy in a million has one planet like earth, then that's thousands of worlds out there! Maybe there's a world where Hitler won the war.  But they're clearly too far away for any chance of communication. (Light and radio signals take millions of years to travel between galaxies.) I have a feeling that even if another planet knew of us, they'd be prudent enough to leave us alone.

Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the Milky Way?  I'd guess there's a pretty good chance that our planet has no counterpart in the galaxy.  All the requisite condition coming together with the result of intelligent live evolving--stuff like the moon being big enough to create tides, so sea life will spread onto land--all that faces steeper odds than winning a lottery.  Intelligent life is a miracle even great than we know.

I've never seen a U.F.O.  I wish I would someday.  But I have seen some science fiction movies from the 1950s involving aliens landing on the earth.  The interesting thing about them is their obvious Cold War subtext.  Some of them, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and War of the Worlds and Invaders From Mars, play on the period's paranoia and fear of The Other.  But there are some with a more liberal vision, like The Day the World Stood Still and It Came From Outer Space.  More recently there was Signs.  When I saw that one I liked it at first, but the next day I decided it was nonsense.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Outhouses

When I was young, we had a beach cottage with an outhouse.  I'm not really nostalgic about that.  The last time I used an outhouse was in 1988, I think, at a gas station in Maine.  You'd think that all gas stations would have flush toilets by now, but I suppose that American regulations are looser.

Dolly Parton said about the toilets in her mansion: "It has four rooms and a bath.  When I was young, we had four rooms and a path!"

It's easy to forget that the flush toilet is largely a recent invention, though the Minoans in ancient Greece had a version.  A lot of the world still uses outhouses.  When I was a kid, I was watching a colourful historical epic with fancy costumes and wondering, "Did those people go to the bathroom?" Back then, of course, they had outhouses!

Today's young people in the developed world have never used an outhouse.  I guess that in some ways they have it easier than we did.  Yet I also think about some of the pleasure we had that they miss out on, like Sunday funnies back when the newspapers provided more space for comics, TV shows like Ed Sullivan, or dorky enjoyment like the old Walt Disney movies. (Disney still makes movies, but they aren't as "square" these days.) And there's nothing quite like the old radio shows.

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Watermelons

I used to like watermelon.  I'd even eat some of the white stuff in the rind!  Today I think they've even developed a seedless variety.

Did you know that originally all watermelons were round?  They only developed the oblong variety in the 20th century, because it was truck-friendly.  

There used to be a prop comedian called Gallagher who was always doing odd stuff with watermelons.

The radio personality Captain Midnight made a list of the worst song titles ever, and one of them was a coon song from minstrel shows a century ago: "Plant a Watermelon on My Grave and Let the Juice Seep Through." (Other coon songs are "Got a White Man Working for Me" and "If the Man in the Moon Was a Coon.") But the Captain missed the worst song title ever: "Daddy Swiped Our Last Clean Sheet and Joined the Ku Klux Klan"!

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

A race

Races don't interest me so much.  So what if you're only second fastest?  Is it worth it for a jockey or auto racer to risk his life just to come in first?  There's a famous line in the Book of Ecclesiastes, "The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong." That book was written over 2000 years ago, yet it seems surprisingly modern, even existential.

I recall the space race from the 1960s.  Did it really matter whether the Americans or the Russians reached the moon first?  Unlike many people I don't remember where I was when Apollo 11 landed. (I felt sorry for Michael Collins, who had to stay up in the Command Module while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the surface.) They left a plaque saying "We came in peace for all mankind," but it was an American flag that they left behind.  they could at least have left a United Nations flag as well, like when they reached the top of Mount Everest.

And don't get me started on arms races, which only benefit national elites and manufacturers.  At the end of his presidency Eisenhower warned against "the military-industrial complex," yet where was Ike for eight years?  If he'd taken on the M.I.C. at the start of his presidency American history might have taken a different course.  But instead he largely took the path of least resistance.

Monday, October 12, 2015

Superpowers

What superpower would I most like to have?  Seven-league boots that could get me anywhere in a short walk!  Invisibility has an appeal for little boys, but crossing the street can be dangerous.  And I don't feel the need to be strong enough to lick enemies in a fight.  The superpower that scares me most is the ability to read people's minds.  What if you find out that people don't like you as much as they pretend to?

In a discussion on Facebook someone was asking, "If you could be a superhero, what would your name and power be?" I answered, "I'd be Bigmouth, who stays home and rants." Another time there was the question, "What comic book character would you become and what would you do with your powers?" I answered, "I'd be Richie Rich and spend my money on the nearest escort service!" Money is the real power.

The superhero movie I'd like to see is one where Superman and Batman team up against Wonder Woman and she kicks both their asses!  I like to think that Wonder Woman could wipe the floor with any three male superheroes.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Classroom films

I remember seeing classroom films when I was young.  There was Holiday From Rules, in which a bunch of bratty kids who hate rules get put on a desert island without any rules, leading to anarchy. (If you ask me, micromanagement vs. chaos is a false choice.)

There was also one in a western setting where a bad kid in a black hat challenged a good kid in a white hat to a foot race. (White Hat was a better kid than Black Hat because he did things like eat a hot breakfast.  I don't do that today!) The main thing I remember was that Black hat tried to cheat by running across a railway line, but got his foot caught in the ties just as a train was coming along!  Unfortunately, he got saved by White Hat in the nick of time.  We should have all booed.

Then in Grade 8 we saw a British film teaching school lab safety through comedy.  It opened with a slapstick western scene involving dynamite, complete with an Indian saying, "White man speak with forked tongue!" But that had no relation to the rest of the film; it was just to grab our attention.  The main part of the film had this big doofus called Bernie in a school lab making mistakes we were encouraged to spot. ("My microscope bulb is burnt out.  I'll use the sun!")

You can find a lot of unintentionally funny classroom films on Youtube.

Friday, October 2, 2015

Royalty

I don't care much about the Royals. (I'm a small-R republican.) I think that Canada should get rid of the monarchy and have a president instead. (Realistically, it usually takes a war or a big economic crisis to make a nation give up monarchy.) Canadian monarchists are the most fatuous people in the world.

I'll admit I feel greater sympathy for Prince Charles than for those Whitehall bureaucrats he's been interfering with.  And I agree with him that a lot of modern architecture is garbage!  Someone said that to understand Prince Charles you have to remember his German roots.  He wants to be another Prince Albert, but times have changed.

Prince Philip, on the other hand, is royalty's answer to Archie Bunker!

Elizabeth II has now replaced Victoria as Britain's longest-reigning monarch.  She's also a far better queen, hard-working and conscientious and unfailingly polite.  I imagine her father would be proud of her.

The future King William V has a degree in art history.  That might actually prove useful for him, considering the huge collection he'll inherit!

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Scars

When I was almost twenty, I had an operation to remove a stomach ulcer.  I was living in England at the time and had the operation at a hospital near Canterbury.  It was harder on my family than on me. (Someone said, "No young man thinks he is going to die.") I had some major blood transfusions, and I suppose I might have got AIDS like Arthur Ashe, but I didn't!  Just like when my mother didn't take the headache pills that might have been thalidomide...

The operation left a scar down the front of my abdomen, all the way down to my navel. (I can show it to people who are interested.) The sutures also left pinpoints.  I was reading that Dolly Parton had an operation like mine and disguised her scar with a butterfly tattoo!

Do I have emotional scars?  I guess we all do, but in my case they don't seem worth talking about.

I like Howard Hawks' gangster movie Scarface with Paul Muni and George Raft.  Brian de Palma's remake with Al Pacino wasn't nearly as good.  I remember that around the time when the remake was released, I had a dream where I returned to my hometown as a famous criminal!

Saturday, September 26, 2015

PEANUTS

Charles Schulz' Peanuts is a classic comic strip.  When I was little we had a lot of the reprints.  I think my favorite character of all is Lucy, just because she's such a monster!

I've also seen many of the TV specials.  They aren't quite as good as the strip, but they're still pretty fun, at least the early ones.  I like the jazzy music and stuff like the sounds indicating adult voices.

In recent years, I've been buying the complete run being published by Fantagraphics.  I have it all the way to the end of 1984. (The strip isn't so good after that time.)

On Youtube you can find Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown, a Peanuts special as directed by the violent Sam Peckinpah. (It was made by a student animator who went on to work on The Simpsons.) I find it really funny, but it's definitely not for all tastes!

Saturday, September 19, 2015

Trudeaumania

When I see the name Trudeau in a headline I still think of Pierre before I think of Justin.  That comes from being of a certain age.

I remember that on the day to the 1968 election (when I was six) my sister and I walked down to the post office and she asked whether I preferred Trudeau or Stansfield.  To me they were nothing but two names, and I chose Stansfield because it sounded more familiar to me.

When I was eleven we went on a class trip to Ottawa where we got to meet our MP (and cabinet minister) Romeo Leblanc.  He even arranged for us to meet Trudeau briefly!  One of the girls kissed him.  I'm ashamed to admit that I poked him in the back.

Trudeaumania was the Canadian equivalent of the Kennedy cult in the U.S.  If you ask me, J.F.K. was an oddly overrated president whose biggest legacy was the escalation that led to the American invasion of Vietnam.  And I'm not so sure that he would have got out if he'd only lived longer.

I thought that Trudeau's opposition to the Meech Lake Accord was petulant and short-sighted.  And don't get me started on the October Crisis! (I remember one schoolboy joke from the time: "When did the alphabet have only 23 letters?  When they couldn't find the F.L.Q.!")

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Motorcycles

I've never ridden a motorcycle.  I've seen the biker movie Easy Rider, which is pretty dated, though Jack Nicholson has a good role.  I remember the scene where Dennis Hopper said "We did it!" but Peter Fonda says "We blew it." That's how I felt when I completed my Ph.D. thesis.

I've also seen the biker movie The Wild One.  The movie itself is dorky in a '50s way, but Marlon Brando is way cool!  There's a famous bit where someone asks "What are you rebelling against?" and he says "Whaddya got?" (It was actually banned in Britain for over ten years.)

Twenty years ago my sister Moira was teaching English in the Czech Republic and was trying to explain to the kids what a "biker" was, so I mailed her a photo of Brando in that movie.  If you ever see the Gene Kelly musical Les Girls, it climaxes with a ballet version of The Wild One! (In the '50s there was a fashion for movie musicals to climax in a ballet number.)

I read somewhere that in engineering terms, Harley Davidson can't hold a candle to its Japanese competitors.  But that brand has the advantage of badass lifestyle marketing.  The Hell's Angels are so conformist that every member has to ride a Harley!

Monday, September 14, 2015

A very old person

My mother lived to be 94.  She kept her true age a secret, and I only found it out just before her death. (She was a decade older than my father.)

In her last years, I could see she was "slowing down." She took a lot of naps in the daytime.  When I had a button come off, she'd used to sew it one for me, but then she couldn't do it any more.  That must have been a disappointment for her, as I think she really liked being useful in that way.

And I remember how when we were eating out I'd help her walk to the car.  She'd hold on to my arm for dear life.  Now that I think of it, when I was little I must have held her arm that same way!  The circle turns.

Someone said that for some people, after you mother dies you get more like her.  I wonder if that's happening with me?  I've been taking more daytime naps than I used to.

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Gym class

Some kids like gym class.  Can't say I did.  What really bugged me was when they let us kids choose our own teams, which always meant that I got chosen last. (If I'd just been chosen second last, it wouldn't have bothered me.)

I remember at the start of one year the gym teacher warned us against chewing gum in gym class, and told us about this girl who choked on her gum and the gym teacher had to cut her throat so she could breathe until the doctors removed it.  When he said this, we all laughed, including me.  That's the sort of thing boys of eleven or twelve find funny.

I remember one time when we were given ropes to climb.  The gym teacher said, "I know that all of you can get all the way up, but I'll only expect you to get halfway up." I got on the rope, swung for half a minute, then finally got off.  It looked so easy when he did it!

I remember one school gym where someone managed to hit a volleyball up into the rafters and they couldn't get it down.  If you looked up, you could still see it up there.  Something creepy about that. (Presumably it's still there today!)

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Learning foreign languages

I'm a bit of a language geek.  English is the only language that I speak fluently, but I can read several with the help of a dictionary.

Of course, I learned some French in school.  I remember the CBC kid's show Chez Helene, where they sang French songs like "Il Etait un Petit Navire." And I started learning Latin when I was a teenager.  Once you know enough of those two languages, other Romance languages become easy to learn, like Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.  I like comparing the same word in different Romance languages, like a public square becoming "place" in French, "piazza" in Italian, "plaza" in Spanish, and "praca" in Portuguese.  Or the ending that's "-nia" in Italian, "-gne" in French, "-~na" in Spanish, and "-nha" in Portuguese.

I recently started learning Portuguese because I'd met this Brazilian girl....  I haven't seen her lately, but I'm still interested in the language.  I bought a whole lot of Portuguese pamphlets about lives of the saints, which are easy to translate because they're written for children.

I've also learned some Chinese and Japanese.  Chinese interested me from my youth, because of its complex writing system.  I got interested in Japanese because of anime.  In recent years I've even been learning some ancient Greek, so I know that what Archimedes really said was "Heureka!"

My sister Moira is the German expert in our family. (That language is full of tricks, like English. "Lass singen" means "Keep singing," while "Lass das singen" means "Stop that singing"!)

Sunday, August 30, 2015

Divorce

I've never been married, let alone divorced.  But "the war on divorce" bugs me.  It's always seemed to me that blaming failed marriages on divorce is like blaming death on the undertaker.

I recall that the radio advice dispenser Dr. Laura once got a call from a woman married to a religious nut who wouldn't let her wear pants or cut her hair short.  And Dr. Laura told her, "You'll have to stay with him because you have children." Well, it's easy for Dr. Laura to say that when her own husband lets her wear what she wants.

We hear that divorce is bad for children.  Of course if you compare children of divorce to kids with happily-married parents the latter will come out ahead.  What's more relevant is to compare them to kids whose parents were unhappily married but stayed together anyway (often for the children's sake). In that case you'll find that the latter kids are just as badly off.

A new thing they have in the Bible Belt is a "covenant marriage," by which a couple supposedly rule out the divorce option.  Yet happily married couples have no need for this, while unhappy couples need the divorce option.

The only true threat to marriage is unhappy marriages.

Thursday, August 27, 2015

Movies that make me cry

I don't cry often at movies.  Sentimental tearjerkers like Love Story tend to strike me as unintentionally funny.  But one movie that does make me cry is the Japanese animated movie Grave of the Fireflies.

It's a movie about a Japanese brother and sister in World War II whose mother gets killed in a bombing raid and whose naval officer father is missing and probably dead too.  They don't get along with their aunt and end up on their own, leading to starvation and death. (This isn't a spoiler:  the first scene makes their fate clear.)

I've seen the movie twice and what brings me to tears is the scene near the end, just after the sister's death.  The war has just ended, and some people return to their country home and start playing "Home, Sweet Home" on a record.  As that music plays we see moments with the sister while she was alive.  At that moment I realized that a movie that seemed to be about death was really about life!  And that makes me cry.

It's funny how cartoons can get to you emotionally in a way that photography and live action can't manage.  Art Spiegelmann understood this when he drew Maus, a comic book based on his father's memories of surviving the Holocaust, showing Jews as mice and Nazis as cats.

Monday, August 24, 2015

James Bond

I've never read Ian Fleming's James Bond books, but I've seen most of the movies.  They're pretty fun, especially the ones with Sean Connery.  He had great style, while Roger Moore was kinda goofy.

I'll admit that they're anything but "politically correct," and they have a lot of cliches.  Like the way he always survives the deathtraps that the villains spend so much time on preparing.  And like the Rocky movies, they're somewhat repetitious.  In every movie he'll have a testy scene with his boss M, a scene with Moneypenny the flirtatious secretary, a scene with Q demonstrating clever gadgets, search rooms, get into fights, meet gorgeous women, enter a villain's lair with fancy sets, foil the villain's crazy but serious scheme to dominate the world, and be making love in the last scheme.  There's actually a bit of comfort in such sameness.

I read about a British schooled who caused controversy because he wanted to got to a costume party dressed as the man in Fifty Shades of Grey.  In the end he went as James Bond instead.  Funny how there's no controversy in dressing as a professional killer who goes through women like Kleenex!

I haven't seen any of the recent movies with Daniel Craig.  Nothing can compare to the nostalgia of your memories.

Saturday, August 22, 2015

A lucky break

I'll admit I've had some lucky breaks in my life.  One is that when I entered York University in 1990, it was the same time that Ted Goossen became a professor there and he needed a research assistant. (We were both in the East Asian field.) We were a good fit.

Another is that my sister Margaret and her husband were at the  Goodenough College residence in London, England, for half a year in 1994.  It just so happened that I needed to go to London to research my Ph.D. thesis at the Public Records Office and some other places, and Margaret put in a good word for me!  It was the best eight months of my life.

And there was the time in 2003 when I noticed that the Toronto District School Boards night school courses included one in opera.  I was interested in it, but it was the same night as an acting class I wanted to take.  As it turned out, the acting class got cancelled so I got to take the opera course after all.  A dozen years later, I'm still in the Toronto City Opera chorus.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Jewelry

"What's all this fuss about Soviet jewelry?"--Emily Litella, Saturday Night Live

I don't know much about jewelry.  I was born in February, so my birthstone is an amethyst.  I've heard of the Mohs scale that ranks gems according to hard they are, with diamonds at the top. (You can tell fool's gold because it's harder than the real thing!) And I know some of their colors:  rubies are red, emeralds green, sapphires blue, pearls mostly white.  That's about what I know.

I've read about the blue Hope Diamond said to bring bad luck.  It's been displayed in Washington, D.C., since about 1959, and Washington has definitely been running out of luck!

My mother used to have a Japanese jewel box with a Japanese scene inside.  She may have got it in the 1930s, before Japan was at war with the west.

I read that big drug dealers now use diamonds as their currency, because they're easier to move around than huge piles of cash.  I also read that Napoleon had a carriage lined with diamonds in case he had to make a quick getaway.  Diamonds are forever, but who cares?  If almost nothing lasts forever, then the things that do become irrelevant because they've outlasted everything else in their world.

Sunday, August 16, 2015

Smells

Some of my earliest memories are smells.  When I was four we lived in England, and when I visited again years later I recognized several smells from that time.  Stuff like greengrocer shops, butcher shops, coal smoke (from the time we visited London), bus diesel fumes. I also remember the popcorn smell of cinemas.

I once smelled something in a dream. (It was a locker-room smell.) I've also tasted beer in a dream, which is odd because I've never tasted it in real life, but I recognized the taste from the smell.

Growing up in New Brunswick, I occasionally smelled skunks.  Here in Toronto I never seem to smell them.  And our lawn in so small that I don't smell freshly mown grass much, unlike back in New Brunswick.  When my window is open I sometimes smell barbecue smoke. (We used to have a KFC in our neighbourhood and I could occasionally smell it in our back yard.) I recall a time when we drove past the Christie cookie factory in the Lakeshore area and there was a fragrant smell.

Once a rubber band got under one of our stove's heating elements and melted.  What a stench!

Saturday, August 15, 2015

Road trips

When I was young, my family took a lot of road trips. (I don't know how Father could handle all that driving!)We lived in Sackville, N.B., and even though St. John was closer than Halifax, and could be reached in a shorter drive, the Halifax drive actually seemed shorter because you'd go through a wider range of scenery, while the St. John road was pretty monotonous beyond Moncton.

You know that smell of freshly cut grass right after you mow a lawn?  Once we were driving between Halifax and Truro just when the farmers had been doing a big mow.  The smell was overwhelming!

There are some famous American movies about road trips. (It's such an American theme!  The sea in Moby-Dick and the Mississippi River in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn function like the road in later stories.) Easy Rider was a hit at the time, but it's dated pretty badly.  I prefer Five Easy Pieces, with Jack Nicholson as a pianist turned oil roughneck going to visit his family.  It was so sad when he was ashamed to introduced his waitress girlfriend Karen Black to them because she was beneath their class!  There's a funny confrontational scene in a restaurant.

I hope that in the future people will take long trips by train, instead of by car or plane.

Sunday, August 9, 2015

Learning to drive

I've never learned to drive.  It just wasn't a big priority to me.  I can't imagine how someone parallel parks.  And it's a big responsibility too. (At least a car isn't a horse, which also entails the responsibility of a pet!)

That's one reason I'm glad I live in a big city, with its mass transit removing the need for driving. (My father stopped driving and got rid of our car a couple of years ago.) It must be terrible to live in one of those suburbs where everything is designed to be car-friendly.

Of course, getting a driver's licence is an important rite of passage for most teenagers.  I was reading about this eccentric dictator in the republic of Turkmenistan. (He erected a gold-plated statue of himself.) He published a book detailing his ideology, and before someone could get a driver's licence he had to pass a test on that book!  That dictator knew how to assert his power in a way that young people couldn't ignore, but it seems awfully petty.

Tuesday, August 4, 2015

VCRs

We got our first VCR in 1985, about the time that I graduated from college. (We almost got an obsolescent Betamax, but fortunately we ended up getting a VHS.) The first films we rented were The Dresser, a stage adaptation about a doddering Shakespearean actor and his garrulous dresser; and Comfort and Joy, a whimsical comedy about a Glasgow DJ who settles a gang war among ice cream vendors by inventing ice cream fritters.

Having a VCR opened up a whole world of movies for us, especially after moving to Toronto, with its specialty video stores.  I used to rent a lot of videos at places like Hollywood Canteen and Suspect Video.  In 2001, I think, we bought our first DVD player and soon stopped renting videocassettes.

When I was in a London residence twenty years ago, researching my Ph.D. thesis, Philip Chang and I handled the video club.  I found some good rentals at a shop in Notting Hill.  On Saturday afternoons we'd show videos for the children of residents, like Mary Poppins  and The Jungle Book. (Lesley Brooks lent us stuff from her big video collection.) It was pretty fun.

Friday, July 24, 2015

Movie musicals

I like those old Watner Brothers musicals from the 1930s in black and white with choreography by Busby Berkely.  Footlight Parade has this great story about impresario James Cagney and his secretary Joan Blondell whom he doesn't notice loves him--until the happy ending, of course. (If you removed the musical numbers from that movie you'd still have a great comedy.) I also like those Fred Astaire musicals:  Ginger Rogers is one actress who could play start women!

When I was young I enjoyed a lot of '60s blockbuster musicals like Mary Poppins and Oliver! and Fiddler on the Roof.  And Bob Fosse's Cabaret is in a class by itself!  There's a great number where a teenage boy at a beer garden starts singing this sweet song "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," and it turns out he's a young Nazi!  Then the crowd starts standing up and singing along with him, except for one old man who doesn't get it. (Or maybe he sees it all too clearly.)

There haven't been so many good musicals in recent years.  Prince's rock musical Purple Rain is worth seeing just to watch Morris Day and his band steal the whole show.  It's funny about Dirty Dancing: I found the first half cheesy and predictable, then the second half was also cheesy and predictable, but I no longer minded!

Monday, July 20, 2015

Insurance

I don't really have any experience with insurance, but the subject interests me, the way companies use statistics to calculate odds. (A bit like bookies!) I love the film noir Double Indemnity, which is about insurance salesman Fred MacMurray (intriguingly cast against affable type) scheming with femme fatale Barbara Stanwyck to sell her husband a big policy then murder him and get a big payoff, without arousing the suspicion of Edward G. Robinson, company investigator and MacMurray's friend.  It all turns out badly in the end, of course, but in an unpredictable way.

The script, adapted from James Cain's novel by detective novelist Raymond Chandler, has lots of great dialogue.  Like the best film noirs, it makes good use of Los Angeles locations.  In the scene where the husband gets killed, the camera sticks to a closeup of a clearly turned-on Stanwyck.  Really chilling stuff.  This was just Billy Wilder's third movie, but he was already an expert director!  He originally filmed an extra scene showing MacMurray's execution, but he cut it because it wasn't needed.  That's confidence.

Saturday, July 18, 2015

Waiting rooms

When I was about ten I went to the dentist and got my teeth drilled.  As I was waiting I read in the newspaper that the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner had just sunk in Hong Kong harbor.  So whenever I read about the Queen Elizabeth, I think of dentists.

I remember in one dentist's waiting room they some Sergeant Rock World War II comics.  At my current Czech dentist's place, I think I spotted a Victoria's Secret underwear catalogue. (Didn't that happen on Seinfeld?) My barber is Hungarian, so you can read some Hungarian magazines while waiting there.

My Arab psychiatrist's waiting room has National Geographic and Reader's Digest.  One of the only things I read in Reader's Digest is the Word Power quiz, except that I go straight to the answers!

Most of time in waiting rooms, of course, I'll bring my own reading.

Monday, July 13, 2015

January

January in Toronto isn't so cold compared to the small town in New Brunswick where I grew up.  I remember when your hands got so cold that they'd feel hot!  But there was lots of snow, and I miss that a bit.

Even here in the big city cold weather can get to people.  I'm an organizer of Meetup groups, and there's always a problem with people who say they'll come but don't show up. (As Mary Poppins says, "That's a pie-crust promise--easily made and easily broken.") If I knew of more dependable people I'd invite them.  But there have been a couple of times on cold January evenings when nobody but me showed up!  I guess the weather has something to do with it.

In the Toronto City Opera where I'm in the chorus, January is the time when we go on stage and start blocking the shows so we'll all know exactly where to be during the February performances.  Fall is my favorite time because we're just learning the singing.  But the blocking is less fun, because you start thinking about all the ways you can screw up. (I'm sure it's even harder for the soloists.) Back when Giuseppe directed the shows, you could see him getting more exercised as the premiere approached.

Now Beatrice is the director, and I don't know how she can be so patient.  Last year we were dress-rehearsing the finale of Don Giovanni, with the chorus in demon costume.  There's a point where we come out on stage, and some of us were supposed to form a line from left to right backstage and other surround Don Giovanni, then we drag him down to hell.  But when that point came, nobody came out!  The people at the front balked, and the ones behind them couldn't move. (There was one guy they relied on to go out first, but he was looking for a demon mask.) It isn't easy being a director!

Friday, July 10, 2015

Aunts & uncles

I had a red-haired aunt on my mother's side, who lived in a suburb of Sydney, Nova Scotia.  Her husband was a radio engineer who was smart with money.  He was a cousin of this woman who was a nanny for the Ford family in Detroit. (When Henry Ford II remarried and started a new family, they brought her out of retirement.) The Fords were generous with people like her, and she had quite a bit of money, but in her last years she came under the influence of some shady people.  When she died, they expected to get her money, but my uncle went to court and got most of it. (We don't know how much they got from her while she was alive.)

I had an uncle, also on my mother's side, who got polio when he was young and always needed crutches.  But he became the town clerk and even served as magistrate.  He also played piano in a jazz band and wrote some poetry.  A factory in his town burnt down and he heard through the grapevine that it was a case of insurance fraud, and that he'd better not pursue the matter if he wanted to show his face in town again.

Monday, July 6, 2015

Rebellion

I'm not really a rebel type.  Micro-managers are annoying, but I try to work with them.  What I don't like is when you have to guess what people want without being told.  Like when they ask, "Would you like to..." but the only acceptable answer is "Yes." I have a tendency to figure that out only after I've said no.

A little while ago when young blacks were rioting in Baltimore over a police shooting, Dr. Phil asked, "Where were their mothers?" Really, someone ought to give Dr. Phil a punch in the nose!  I respect people who'd rather do something than do nothing.  What annoys me is liberals who come up with an option that amounts to "Do nothing but pretend you're doing something!"

My brother says that if he'd been an Iraqi, he would have been fighting against the American occupation.  As for me, on the other hand, I'm all talk.  I'm sympathetic to the idea that some causes are worth dying for, but when the chips are down I'm not so sure that I wouldn't just chicken out and put self-protection above all else.  Most people don't know what they're capable of until they face the crucial choice.  People talk about how the common people in Germany let the Nazis murder millions, but would most of us have behaved differently?  What would you have done?

Saturday, July 4, 2015

My first computer

When I was a teenager, we got a TRS-80 microcomputer from Radio Shack.  It had a pretty tiny memory compared to today's models, but I learned the Basic language for computers from it.  You could also play a few games, like one where you were trying to land a spaceship on the moon, and had to calculate things so its downward speed would be zero or just over when it reached the surface.

In the early '80s when IBM released the PC, my brother went down to Boston to buy one.  But my father didn't get one of the new ones until 1987.  He bought an Atari model because it was the cheapest in the store. (You have to fight him before he'll buy the second cheapest!) Unfortunately, it malfunctioned several times.  In 1989 we got a Mac, and that's my preferred brand to this day.

It was in the early '90s that I first bought a laptop.  We finally going the online world in 1996.  I now have a desktop in my room and spend too much time on it. (I don't have time for TV any more!)

I've never got one of those iPads that you can carry around with you.  For me, going out of doors is a time to get away from computers.  And text messaging is a mystery to me.  But I kind of like emoji!

Monday, June 29, 2015

Bicycles

I haven't ridden a bicycle for decades.  I was about ten when I learned, and it wasn't so easy for me.  Today some people have recumbent three-wheelers where you don't have to keep balanced.  I wish I'd had one of those!  Back then I didn't notice anyone wearing bicycle helmets like today. (They still don't wear them in places like Holland.)

Does it bother me when a cyclist brushes past me on the sidewalk? On the scale of annoyances, to me it's pretty minor.  I can understand them wanting to stay off the dangerous city streets.  North American cities aren't as bike-friendly as in Europe, though Toronto has improved a bit. (In Holland, bike paths have their own traffic lights!) I guess that in North American culture there's a popular view that bikes are for kids and cars are for grownups.

There are lots of bicycles in places like China.  Some third-world planners associate them with underdevelopment (like rickshaws), which is a shame.  India has a lot taxis powered by pedals.  In some places they're banning bikes to make more room for cars, and it's sad to see other countries repeating our mistakes.

Someday they ought to design a recumbent three-wheel bicycle with a mast and sail!

Saturday, June 27, 2015

Italian food and culture

I love good Italian food!  When I was young we ate spaghetti often, but we didn't start eating lasagna till I was a teenager. (When I was little I saw a movie from the '30s with Shirley Temple learning to eat spaghetti:  back then it was still an "ethnic" food.) In more recent years, I've learned to make fettuccine alfredo, from a recipe on a calendar promoting milk.  I'm told I make it well.

I love Italian culture too.  I know a bit of the language:  when you know enough French and Latin, the other romance languages get easier to learn. (It's the same with Spanish and Portuguese.) I played the piano when I was young, and learned at lot of Italian musical directions that way.  I'm a fan of Italian opera, of course.  And there are a lot of Italian movies I love.  Directors like Vittorio di Sica know how to make honestly sad movies (not manipulative tearjerkers like Love Story and Titanic). The Bicycle Thief was so sad that I don't think I could ever see it again.

I've never actually visited Italy. (I guess I should add it to my bucket list.) One place I'd like to visit there is Bomarzo Gardens, a place near Rome full of grotesque Renaissance statues.  If I ever make a billion dollars, I'll build a Canadian version.

Sunday, June 21, 2015

The weatherman

My father follows the weather forecast on TV and online, but I don't.  My only exposure to it happens when I'm in subway stations and see the monitors that show the time, and also the temperatures expected over night and in the coming days.

Bad weather really doesn't bother me.  The key thing is that I know I can't do anything about it, so there's no shame in not caring. (I feel the same way about getting older.) What gets to me is all the problems that I feel I should be doing something about, but I'm not sure what.

The comedian George Carlin used to play Al Sleet the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman.  He's say things like "The forecast for tonight is:  Dark," or "The weather today is 70 degrees at the airport, which is pretty stupid, because I don't know anyone who lives at the airport!" My mother loved that routine, though she didn't think as much of his later stuff like "The seven words you can't say on TV."

Saturday, June 20, 2015

USA! USA!

When I was a kid, my brother was often complaining about American propaganda on the TV. (I didn't care much one way or the other.) I recall the cheesy '50s series The Adventures of Superman, where the opening credits would end with the line "He stands for Truth, Justice, and the American Way!" showing the Man of Steel with the Stars & Stripes flapping behind him.  That always gave me a laugh.  Americans as a group can be so full of themselves!

I remember the spur of American patriotism that followed 9/11.  The response of many Americans to the disaster embodied an odd combination of self-pity and self-congratulation.  Some of them asked, "Why are we hated?" but in most cases this was just a rhetorical question, from people who didn't want to hear any answer that didn't have a pro-American spin.  Which only left a self-serving answer: "They hate us for our freedoms!" That isn't completely wrong, but it definitely misses the point:  there are nations just as free as the U.S. that don't get nearly as much hate.

It's fashionable among some Americans to say, "The French were cowards in World War II and us brave Americans had to save them!" Of course, back in September, 1939, the French actually went to war against Germany, while the Americans hid behind arrogant neutrality for two long years until Hitler finally declared war on them.  Who was braver at that time?  I don't really care who fought Germany when, but I'm disgusted by hypocrisy.  People just forgetting history isn't as big a problem as remembering selectively, according to which parts make your country look good.

Friday, June 12, 2015

Sailboats

When I was young we had a Mirror dinghy that we'd built at home from a kit.  It had a mainsail and a jib, and a rudder with a tiller, but no spinnaker sail like some small boats have.  You could remove the mast and spars and just use it as a rowboat.  We took it to our cottage to sail it.  We also took it to Cape Breton on a vacation.

Sailing is all a bit too complicated for me.  I remember the teacher in school showing us different kinds of sailing ships on the blackboard.  I understood that a catboat had just one sail, but more complicated stuff like sloops and schooners went over my head.  I still find it a mystery how they shift sails and tack and catch the wind currents and cross whole oceans.

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Arts & music festivals

In my hometown of Sackville, N.B., they'd have a musical festival every March.  My mother told me that at one festival event  she heard someone playing a piano and said to a stranger, "That piano's really out of tune!" It turned out that she was talking to the piano tuner! (That's what the English call "dropping a brick.")

I remember that in Grade 2 my class was going to sing a song in some competition at the festival. (I don't remember what the song was.) But on the day when we were going to sing, there was a bomb scare!  They spent the whole day searching the place for a bomb, and we didn't get to sing our song.  Some teenager went to Juvenile Court for causing the scare.  That's when I learned that life isn't fair.

One year I sang in a competition, with a song about an aspiring sailor, with the line, "I'll bring you a parrot in a cage when I sail my ship back home!"  The winner had a way better song than mine.  It went, "We are the King's men, hale and hearty, marching to meet our Bonapartey!"

I also played piano in a few competitions.  But I didn't really care for that:  the adjudicator's criticisms would get to me.  But my sister Moira was a good pianist and competed in festivals in Saint John and Halifax as well as Sackville.

Friday, June 5, 2015

Embarrassing moments

My sisters used to read Young Miss magazine. (It's now called YM.) One of its running features was called "Was My Face Red!" in which girls wrote in and described their most embarrassing experiences.  One girl mentioned the time that people were visiting her house but she was dressed shabbily, so she hid in the closet to avoid them.  Of course they opened up the closet and saw her inside!  Stories like that.

I try not to think about my own embarrassing moments.  I suppose I've gone through a few that are so embarrassing I don't want to write about them here.  So sue me.

One kind of person that really annoyed me in school (and still does today!) was the sort who'd notice when you brought embarrassment on yourself, then remind you of it later just to be mean.  It's the old "Hit him where it hurts" instinct.

Friday, May 29, 2015

Shadows

Because I've learned much of the Chinese language, I know that the Chinese word for "movie" literally means "electric shadow." I love knowing things like that!

I don't think about shadows much.  A solar eclipse is a kind of shadow, and when I was young I remember using a cardboard box with a pin hole on one side to see an eclipsed sunbeam on the other side that looked like a round cookie that's had a single big bite taken out of it. (It's dangerous to view it directly.)

I don't recall ever seeing a lunar eclipse.  I've heard that the ancients knew that the earth was spherical because its shadow on the moon in a lunar eclipse is circular at every angle.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

Churches

I grew up in Sackville, N.B.  That town had a lot of churches for its size.  There was a United church, as well as Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian and two Baptist churches.  Someone said that Catholics in North America like to build their churches on the highest hill in town, and the one here was at a pretty high elevation. (There was a monastery nearby.) The Presbyterian minister's manse was across the street from us.

The biggest church was the United church.  Sackville used to be a big Methodist centre, and this church went back to Methodist times.  When the Methodists joined with the Congregationalists and some of the Presbyterians to form the United Church in 1926, no doubt it was a big deal here.  One of the town's streets is called Union Street, and I doubt that it's named for labour unions.

It was the United Church that we attended. (We regularly sat in a pew that was second from the back row.) I went to Sunday school for a few years, but it didn't really interest me.  I did notice that while they sometimes talked about Mary Magdalene in the regular church, they never did in Sunday school.

Iv'e almost never attended church since I was eighteen.  I'm kind of indifferent toward religion, but I do have an interest in religious culture, like how the name Jesus is ultimately a Greek version of the Hebrew Joshua.  On a recent internet thread where people were talking about their religion, someone posted, "I'm an atheist, and proud." I then posted, "I'm an agnostic, and not proud."

Friday, May 15, 2015

What do I think truth REALLY is?

John Keats wrote: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, and that is all you know on earth and all you need to know." Yeah, right.

Great writers and artists like Shakespeare feel very truthful because they seem to know everything about life.  I know a lot about mathematics and geography and such, but how much do I know about life?

I've been learning Greek in recent years and get the impression that even in ancient times Greeks knew a lot about life and truth.  I'm impressed by all the Greek idioms for futility, like "spitting at the heavens" and "singing the encomium before the victory" and "sowing the ocean" and "teaching a horse to run to the plains." I recall that in Captain Corelli's Mandolin the Greek woman's father said, "Love is what's left when being in love burns away."

Paradoxically, I find that the more I learn, the less I feel like I know.  I suppose that's wisdom.

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Transgender

Terence, the famous Greco-Roman playwright, wrote the following quote: "Nothing human is foreign to me." I wonder if he was thinking of transgendered people?  I don't think I've ever met someone I knew to be trans, so to me I guess it is foreign.

A few years ago, some Democrats in the United States Congress introduced a bill banning discrimination against gays and lesbians, in much the same way as the Civil Rights Act banned racial discrimination.  The odd thing is that they ended up excluding the trans community from its protections.  Now it would be one thing if this exclusion tipped the balance in favour of passing the bill:  in that case I'd say, "Take this much now and get the rest tomorrow." But that clearly wasn't the case here:  President Bush announced that even if Congress passed the bill he'd veto it anyway.  This exclusion seemed to me more like compromising for the sake of compromising--Democrats compromising because that's the way they always do it--and it struck me as a lame excuse for strategy. (The bill didn't reach the president's desk.) But I think it won't be long before both groups get this protection.

The gay community uses the acronym GLBTQ, meaning gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer.  I'm not sure who exactly the Q community is:  I think it's people who don't want to be put in any category, and sometimes aren't sure where they fit in, but know they aren't straight.  If you ask me, the whole GLBTQ community should just use the term "non-straight," like "non-white."

Sunday, May 10, 2015

Computer & video games

When I was seventeen, I first encountered the computer game Adventure.  It involves going down into a cave and bringing back precious metals and stuff, and coming across trolls and monsters.  There's also a pair of complicated mazes.  Later, when I was 25 and we bought a home computer, we also got Bureaucracy, a game written by the great Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) where at one point you have no cash but have to eat in a cash-only restaurant, then the only thing you can do is sneak out. (That happened to Adams in real life.)

In my mid-30s, when we bought a Compaq desktop, they threw in "The Princeless Bride," the seventh in the King's Quest series of fairy tale-themed games.  Aficionados say the earlier games were better, but I liked it anyway.  It's about a mother and teenage daughter looking for each other in a magical kingdom where you touch objects with a wand and often do nice things for people.  I liked the mother:  while her daughter's looking for adventure and romance, she just wants to find the girl, save the magic kingdom from an unstable volcano and go home.

Today I prefer computer games that involve building and long-term strategy, along the lines of Sim City.  There are a couple I'm just now playing on Facebook.  One's called Tribez and Castlez [sic] and involves, uh, building castles.  The other is Forge of Empires and is about developing your community's technology from the Stone Age to the 21st century.  I've just entered the Industrial Age!

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Musicals and operas

When I was young, we had the three-LP album The Royal Family of Opera. (My favorite piece was Nikolai Ghiaurov singing "Le Veau d'Or" from Gounod's Faust.) When I was fourteen I saw my first opera movie:  Ingmar Bergman's film of Mozart's The Magic Flute, which I quite enjoyed.  When I was 21, I saw Franco Zeffirelli's movie of Verdi's La Traviata at the New York City art house the Paris!

When I was 31, I attended my first Canadian Opera Company production.  It was Smetana's The Bartered Bride and it was delightful! (Benoit Boutet was really funny as the foolish heir.) One year I went to half a dozen COC productions, but now I just go to the cinemacasts of Metropolitan Opera productions from New York.  My sister says that people who like opera tend to be bad-tempered, and that makes sense to me:  opera is all about strong passion.

About ten years ago I joined the chorus of the non-professional Toronto City Opera, which has a pianist instead of an orchestra. (I'm a baritone.) In my first season we did Donizetti's Lucia Di Lammermoor and Mozart's Don Giovanni, which are well-suited to beginners.  To tell the truth, I prefer rehearsing to performing.  And I don't mind performing so much, it's waiting in the wings that gets to me.

Five years ago we put on Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana and someone took a great picture of me in my 19th-century Sicilian costume.  My parents framed it.

If I had more time, I could write a lot about musicals!

Saturday, May 2, 2015

Excuses

Back when I was in Grade 8, my teacher wanted me to participate in some lunchtime activity. (I don't remember what it was, but I think it involved athletics.) This activity didn't appeal to me, but more importantly, I just didn't have time for it because I had to walk home for lunch and back.  So I explained this to him.

What I didn't expect was that the teacher didn't just accept this excuse.  He told me that I should go home quickly, eat a quick lunch and return quickly enough to participate.  The trouble was that he was assuming I lived five or ten minutes from the school, when I was actually on the other side of town, a good twenty minutes away!  I should have explained this to him, but I felt too intimidated to take him on, so I let him think I would be there.

Of course, in the end I did miss it, and he made an issue of this afterwards.  All I could do was lamely repeat that I'd had to walk home and back.  This wouldn't have happened if he'd accepted what I told him earlier, but to him I was just the weak link:  a kid making excuses.  If only I'd been a bit older, I'd have insisted on showing him that he was the one being unreasonable.  But I wasn't up to it.

Thursday, April 30, 2015

The Scots & the Irish

My mother was highlands Scottish from Cape Breton.  Her mother spoke Gaelic before English and her father probably did too. (My father's part Scottish.) My mother's maiden name was Nicholson, and I've visited the Nicholson clan monument on Scotland's Isle of Skye.  I also have ancestors from the Outer Hebrides, which I've also visited.

I'm really interested in Scottish culture.  A few years ago, I read the book How the Scots Invented Canada.  I've found the website whole.co.uk which will translate regular English into dialects like Scots.  Lately I've started translating some English poems into Scots:  free-form blank verse like Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg translates best into dialect because you don't have to worry about rhyme and rhythm.  Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology is well-suited, both in format and theme. (I ought to buy Masters' book and translate all his poems.) I guess part of the reason I'm doing this is to get closer to my mother since her death.

As for the Irish, I definitely love Irish music.  I used to watch the Irish Rovers' TV show faithfully.  I also watched a show with Tommy Makem and the Canadian group Ryan's Fancy.  I like Makem's serene version of the song "Will Ye Go, Lassie?" The Irish people have had an often tragic history and it shows, paradoxically, in their humour. (My mother once said that the tragedy of the Scottish people is that too many of them are yes-men.) And I love Irish writers like William Butler Yeats and James Joyce.

Sunday, April 26, 2015

Breakfast

What do I eat for breakfast?  On a typical day I'll have an orange, a banana, an apple and a carrot in that order. (I try to avoid eating the carrot just after the banana, but I'm not even sure why!) Cereal I prefer to eat at lunchtime, and fried foods are too much trouble in the morning.  I prefer not to eat bacon because I spend half the time just trimming off the fat--back bacon is better in that respect.  

My sister sometimes eats bagels, but they don't appeal to me.  Neither does granola, which I recall my brother used to eat.  I don't eat toast but I like the smell.

In New York City they have restaurants with really lavish breakfast spreads.  My sister says her only reason for visiting New York would be to have a big New York breakfast, but you can get it in Toronto too.  They also have places here where you can get a British breakfast, including beans and sausages and pastries.

Remember those TV commercials for sugar-coated cereals?  At the end they'd show a bowl of the cereal beside other breakfast fare and call it "part of this nutritious breakfast." It helps that everything else is nutritious, of course.

I once saw this video of classroom films which included Why Won't  Cathy Eat Breakfast? produced by the National Dairy Council.  They never do answer the question, but my theory is that when she grows up she wants to become a supermodel!

Friday, April 24, 2015

Failure

I guess our failures define us more than our successes.  Winning the Civil War didn't shape the North the way defeat has shaped the South.  We always remember "the one that got away."

I haven't failed often, but that's partly because there've been many times when I didn't even try.  I look back to writing my Ph.D. thesis over fifteen years ago.  Though I got my degree in the end, I still felt that somehow it hadn't been as good as I hoped it would be.  It's like the scene in Easy Rider where Dennis Hopper says "We did it!" but Peter Fonda says "We blew it." Maybe that's a common feeling among Ph.Ds.  I might have become a teacher, but I truly felt finished with academia.

Since finishing my Ph.D., I'll admit I haven't done much with my life.  In that Langston Hughes poem "Mother to Son" (where she says "Life for me ain't been no crystal stair,") there's a line that goes: "Don't sit down on the steps because you think it's kinda hard." I suppose I've been sitting on the steps.  I'm unemployed, but I haven't made a serious effort to get a job.  And I haven't really tried to get a girlfriend either.  But I have stayed active.  My mother once said that I'm too busy to work!

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Making desserts

Once in my foolish youth my brother dared me to eat a whole can of cherry pie filling.  And I did!

When I was little I learned to make Jello. (For a variation, you can put it into the freezer instead of the fridge, so it comes out icy!) Then IU learned to bake cakes from Duncan Hines mixes:  they had flavours like burnt sugar!  I haven't done that in recent years.  I read that when they first came out with these instant cake mixes back in the '50s, the recipe originally didn't require adding an egg.  But the marketers figured out that they should include the egg so housewives wouldn't feel like they were "cheating" on dessert, because this way it seemed more like a true "recipe."

Today I make superb gingerbread.  I use a recipe from Craig Claiborne's New York Times Cookbook.  The first thing you do is add vinegar to the milk and put it aside to make it curdle.  The hardest part is "creaming," where you add the sugar to the shortening little by little, mixing it in so the result will be smooth.  I figured out that before measuring out the molasses, the smart thing is to put a little oil in the measuring cup and spread it around so that it covers the whole inner surface.  That way, little of the molasses will stick to the measuring cup afterward!

With a whisk, I can take on the world!

Sunday, April 12, 2015

War

It isn't that I'm anti-war so much, but I'm more anti-prowar. (There's a difference.) I suppose a "good" war is at least theoretically possible, but the depressing thing is that for one side to be fighting a good war, that requires the other side to be fighting a bad one.  If only both sides could be in the right! (On the other hand, looking at the 1982 Falklands War, I wish both sides could have lost.  Jorge Luis Borges compared it to "two bald men fighting over a comb.")

But I'll say this much for war:  sometimes a guy will become a hero who'd otherwise be a loser all his life.  It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and even the most terrible wars produce winners.  I have a theory that war functions as an outlet for all the craziness that accumulates in a society.  It's appropriate that London's Imperial War Museum is in a building that used to be a mental institution.

Consider the case of Canada entering World War II.  In taking Britain's side so quickly, we took a more honourable course than the Americans, who waited two long years till Hitler declared war on them. (And some of them have the nerve to call the French cowards!) If I'd been an M.P. in 1939, how would I have voted?  If I thought that the vote was going to be close, I'd probably have voted yes.

But it was never going to be close, so I would have voted no just to show the government that they weren't getting a blank cheque.  As it is, I'm glad J.S. Wordsworth prevented the vote from being unanimous.  He warned that entering the war would put Canada on a slippery slope, and I see that happening today with Canada's campaign against Islamists in Syria.

Soldiers have my respect.  I couldn't do what they do every day, even in peacetime.  Our troops are serving us even when our government sends them on the wrong missions.  But I despise governments that hide behind the soldiers they're endangering, playing the "Support Our Troops" card to pre-empt criticism of their military policies.

As long as there's fear, there'll be war.