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.

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."

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.

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."

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!

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!

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.