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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.