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.)

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!

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.

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"!

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.