Airports

When I was little and Father took me and my siblings off Mother's hands for a while, he wouldn't know what to do so he'd drive us up to Moncton airport so we could watch the planes take off and land.  On one of those occasions I got really quarrelsome, and I don't remember why!

Visiting an airport is fun when you aren't the one flying and don't have to worry about being on time and such.  Besides Moncton, I've also been to Halifax airport several times, which is some distance from the city.  And I've been to Toronto's Pearson airport quite a few times.  As well as Heathrow, which is a bit of a monster.  

When you're actually flying you sometimes have time to kill in an airport concourse.  I'm often looking for places then to get rid of cash before flying to a new country.  And after you arrive you may be waiting for your luggage to appear on the carousel.  I've read that when you arrive at Lagos airport in Nigeria, you have to grab your luggage on its first carousel turn, otherwise someone else will!

Ever see the Aiport disaster movies of the '70s?  They're kind of fun in a shameless way.  One thing that bugged me about the second one was that they had an overnight flight going westward, when they only go eastward in real life!  If I could be any movie character, I think I'd be Al Petroni, the veteran pilot played by George Kennedy in all the movies.  In the first one he managed to lift a jet off a runway in the nick of time.  When his assistant said "The manual said that can't be done!" he replied, "That's the good thing about a 707.  It can do everything but read!"

A very strange day

I never seem to experience days as particularly strange.  I visited Japan 15 years ago and that seemed a rather strange country, more so than China. (Maybe it's because most Chinese are still rural peasants that they seem understandable to me.  In the future, when China has attained Japan's level of economic development, will that country seem strange too?) And Korean society is also pretty strange, especially the totalitarian northern half.  And Russians can be very strange too, as can Americans.

Do some people strike me as strange?  To tell the truth, most people seem a bit strange to me. (I guess that means I'm the strange one!) And when everyone seems strange, nobody stands out as more so.

I've seen some strange movies too.  I once saw a strange Quebec movie about a family, titled C.R.A.Z.Y.  I really can't describe it, yet I knew it was something great!  I saw this series about the history of cinema by Mark Cousins, who had an Ulster accent and a real eye for unusual films!  A while ago I saw the movie Boyhood, filmed over a decade where the character matured along with the child actor, and was thinking, "This is the kind of movie Mark Cousins would like!"

Beatniks and hippies

When I was little I was afraid of Canadian Indians and hippies.  Back then the big hippie song was "The Age of Aquarius." One day I got curious about my astrological sign and looked it up.  What a surprise I got when it turned out I was an Aquarius!

In recent years, I went to a Halloween costume party as a beatnik.  I wore a blazer and turtleneck, shades over my glasses, a fake beard from Malabar Costumes, and my mother's beret. (She'd stopped wearing it after seeing that video of Monica Lewinsky meeting President Clinton while wearing a beret.  It must have reminded her of the time in her youth when berets were associated with "fast girls"!) I also did the thing where you trace a square with your fingers.

Of course, back at the time there were different degrees of bohemianism.  There were some hard-core hippies, who were into free love and communes and such, but of course most of them were dilettantes going through a phase, who overestimated their own daringness.  But it's the same with every generation of youth. (Every generation is fated to turn into their parents...)

Remember Rocky and Bullwinkle?  Bullwinkle as Mr. Know-It-All once talked about "How to be a beatnik" and said, "Beatniks are found in unemployment lines, health food stores, and especially coffee houses!" (Mr. Know-it-All is my favorite part of the show.)

I was in Seattle once in a store selling all sorts of curious items, and one was a 1960s sign saying "Hippies use side door"!

New technology

How has new technology affected me? Well, our home has now been online for twenty years, so I'd hate to imagine what my life would be like without the internet.  It's like having the world's largest library in your room!  I was reading this book of predictions from 1980, and nobody predicted it.  Predictably, Arthur C. Clarke came closest.

 

There was a lot of new technology back in the 1950s, the age of modern conveniences and "keeping up with the Joneses." My parents first had a TV set when they were newlyweds in England in the mid-1950s.  They remember eating crumpets on Sunday afternoon and watching the BBC show Brainstrust with intelligentsia figures like J. Bronowski, Robert Boothby and A.J.P. Taylor.

 

When I was young we only got two TV channels (along with two other poor signals). I was in my teens when we got cable TV in the '70s, and in my early twenties when we got a VCR and started getting a wide array of cable TV channels in the mid-'80s.  It's just a few years ago that we got our first widescreen TV, but television technology doesn't mean so much to me now.  Most of my TV watching is on Youtube. (Just now I've been listening to The Goon Show, a British radio comedy Father remembers from the '50s!)

Siblings--older and younger

I'm the youngest of five kids, with two brothers and two sisters. (It was in boy-girl-boy-girl-boy order.) When I was really little I vaguely recall being disappointed in my realization that I was the youngest in the family--it wouldn't have been so bad if I'd been second youngest.  But I didn't mind it so much later, though I used to hate Scrabble because I was youngest and knew the fewest words. (Today Scrabble's one of my favorite games!) I guess I had some advantages in being youngest and even got spoiled a bit.  But it's too late to change anything now, of course.

Are there good TV shows about sibling relationships?  In hindsight, family shows like The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie look cheesy.  But I saw the really great sibling show Bloodline on Netflix recently.  It's about a family in Florida who own a hotel, with a straight-arrow brother who's a police detective, a lawyer sister who has a good career in the big city but ends up returning home, a goofy younger brother who keeps making dumb choices, and a black-sheep brother who returns home after a long absence, is involved with drug smugglers and ends up compromising the whole family so the cop brother kills him. (The cop brother says as narration: "Please don't judge us.") There was also a little sister who drowned in childhood, which figures in the plot...

That's what a family show should be like!

Ditches

I read once in John Barber's Globe and Mail column that there are some streets in the remoter parts of Etobicoke that have ditches alongside them! (They decided against getting rid of them.) It's pretty cool that a city as big as Toronto still has some places with that rural touch.

When we lived in Sackville, N.B., there was a ditch next to our street that drained out through a pipe under our driveway.  In March a big pool of spring melt, with ice floating on top, would accumulate next to the driveway, unable to drain out because the pipe was still iced up.  For a long time, I wondered what it would take to accelerate the pipe's thawing, but eventually I figured out that the trick was to move off all the floating ice, so the water would get warmer.  Why didn't I realize that sooner?

In May, before planting our vegetable garden in the back yard, the first thing I'd do was to dig the surrounding ditches a bit deeper to speed up its drainage. (I do that now with our smaller garden.)  I still have dreams about digging those ditches...

When the American "founding father" was a boy, he told his father that he was more interested in farming than in book learning.  So his father put him to work digging a ditch.  He ended up realizing that books might be hard, but farming was hard too. (As a grownup, he developed a farm but hired someone else to dig the ditches.)

When Marlon Brando was a schoolboy, he scored 98 on an I.Q. test--just a pinfeather below average--and his teachers told him he was stupid.  One told him, "You'll end up digging ditches!" He actually did dig ditches for one very brief period, and later on, when filming Last Tango in Paris,

he improvised a speech about his memories of ditch-digging. (I learned of this in Peter Manso's Brando biography.)

A train ride

Both of my grandfathers worked on trains.  My father's father was a postal worker who sorted mail on trains, while my mother's father rose to the position of conductor. (During the Great Depression both of them occasionally brought home a hobo and gave him a square meal.) In my childhood we could often hear the distant horn of a train.

 

I remember when we took the train to visit my grandparents when I was six or seven. (We lived in Sackville, at the southeastern corner of New Brunswick, while they lived in Campbellton on New Brunswick's north shore near Quebec.) The detail I recall is that you could get water in these cone-shaped paper cups.

I've travelled on the train between the Maritimes and central Canada several times.  When I was eleven we went on a class trip to Ottawa and met our local M.P., fisheries minister Romeo Leblanc.  And when I was seventeen, my brother and I took the train to Montreal where I took the specialized S.A.T. exams. (My subjects were mathematics, history and Latin.) We stayed at a youth hostel.

In the late 1980s there was a time when I was going to university in Halifax, and often took the train back to Sackville.  That train route included a nice scenic stretch through the Wentworth Mountains.  Someday I want to see the Prairies and B.C. by train, or maybe even Siberia!

If you ask me, we need to get fewer people in cars and planes, and more on trains, which are more fuel-efficient.  I have a feeling that when I'm older I'll wish I'd ridden the train more often.

Obsolescence

I miss having a watch that you had to wind up every day. (It was a nice morning ritual for me.) These days all watches seem to be battery powered.  I also miss vinyl records with their crackling imperfections.

Remember rotary phone dials?  My brother used to have a phone with a picture of the medieval scholar Roger Bacon in the dial hub.  I saw this documentary Manufactured Landscapes once where they showed a dump in China with about a million phone dials! (They had to go somewhere...)

Ever been in those big high schools and such that they built about a century ago?  Back then the door to each room would have a transom window on top so they could let out the hot air.  But today buildings have air conditioning so they aren't needed now.  Too bad, they were an elegant feature.

I also remember the age of paper grocery bags.  Back then they had bags of double-lined paper for frozen foods!  And we also got milk in glass bottles instead of plastic pouches and cardboard boxes.  And there were also freezers that you had to defrost!

I suppose that when I get a little older I'll start feeling obsolescent myself.  But such is life!

Handwriting

My late mother was an amateur graphologist. (That's a handwriting analyst.) I was often showing her the signatures of famous people and asking her to analyze them.  I think gay men often have a dragging G-loop.  Charles Manson's handwriting kept running off the edge of the page, which shows that he didn't recognize limits.

A psychiatrist analyzed the handwriting of movie star Montgomery Clift and said it showe the most mixed-up person he'd ever dealt with!

I've shown my handwriting to a couple of experts.  They said it showed that I have a generous nature, I live in the now, I'm proud of my family and origins, I need to be with people and appreciated, I'm an observer and something of a perfectionist. (I often correct my writing.)

For me this group is an opportunity to write by hand every week, which is sort of a relaxing change from all the typing I do on the computer.  They say that schools may stop teaching cursive handwriting because it's obsolete in the age of the computer.  Sort of like they used to teach calligraphy in the age of the fountain pen but stopped when the ball point pen took over.  I think that would be a shame.

Sunset

I've seen quite a few sunsets in my life.  I wish I'd seen more sunrises, but that requires waking up early.  My sister Moira gets up really early. (There have been times when she woke up before I got to sleep!)

Did you know that the sky is blue because of the dust in the air?  And sunsets are read because the sunlight comes at a slant and passes through more air, hence more dust.

In tropical countries sunsets are really short because the sun takes a course through the sky close to the azimuth (a line perpendicular to the horizon), while here its course is more slanted.  On the other hand, in the north on summer nights you'll get a really long evening twilight followed closely by a really long morning twilight.

Anyone remember the instrumental hit "Canadian Sunset"?  We had it on the easy listening record James Last and His Musical World.  And one of my favorite songs in Fiddler on the Roof (one of my favorite musicals) is "Sunrise, Sunset." For a wedding song, it has a surprisingly elegaic tone!

A basket of deplorables

I'm a bit sore about the U.S. election.  For people like me who supported Bernie Sanders, it's a huge temptation to say, "I told you so!" Back in the spring Sanders' supporters pointed to polls that kept showing Sanders leading Republicans like Donald Trump by wider margins than Hillary Clinton did.  All the Clintonites could say to that was that such polls were unreliable.

Yes, I do believe that Sanders would have beaten Trump decisively.  He had greater support than Clinton among the crucial bloc of independent voters:  indeed, he probably would have won the nomination itself if key states hadn't excluded independent voters from their Democratic primary.  And he likely would have got a much higher turnout, especially among younger voters.

Sanders narrowly lost the nomination (among other bad reasons) because too many Democrats said, "he's not One of Us!" Yet at key moments like the vote on invading Iraq, Sanders proved to be a more reliable supporter of Democratic policy than Clinton!  The Democrats chose the wrong moment to be clannish.

When a Cassandra gets proved right, it's a cold comfort indeed.

Dreaming about the past

I sometimes dream of being back in high school or junior high.  Some of the time I'll remember that I'm finished with that and start feeling that I don't belong there.  After seeing the trailer for Silence of the Lambs--not the movie, just the trailer--I had a nightmare where I was back in school and the principal was Hannibal Lecter! [Sure, I mentioned this a few weeks ago, but I felt like mentioning it again!]

I also dream about our old home in Sackville, N.B., which we sold twenty years ago.  In some of my dreams we're visiting the new owner, a friendly French woman who doesn't really exist.  Sometimes it's May and I'm about to start planting our backyard vegetable garden.  Other times it's the end of August and time to return to Toronto, but my parents are procrastinating on the return.  In one dream, the whole street was inundated by a flood!

I also dream about London, England, where I lived for eight months two decades ago.  There are several museums I love there, and I often dream of visiting a non-existent museum that's an amalgam of them.

Occasionally I dream about visiting Russia, which is odd because I've never been there, nor do I have any conscious wish to go there!

Shopping malls

I sometimes dream about shopping malls.  They were a big deal when I was little, though not so much today.  There's a website that tells you all about closed shopping malls and what's happened to their spaces!

I remember when every shopping mall had a bookstore.  That would usually be the place I frequented most.  Lately there have been fewer of them because of all the shakeouts and consolidations.

today many malls are under pressure because so much stuff is being bought online.  I suppose you could look at the internet as a virtual supermall.  But I'm happier when I can see and touch what I'm buying, and have staff in the flesh to deal with.

Someone said that mini-malls are in danger of disappearing.  I'll believe that when I see it.  Something about the mini-mall makes me recall my small-town youth.

The end

My life doesn't have that many dramatic endings.  I remember twenty years ago when we sold our old house in Sackville, N.B.  By that time we were already living in Toronto, but when my parents returned to close the deal, I went along too.  The place was pretty empty, but I did go there one last time.

Some movies have great endings.  There's The Searchers, where John Wayne is outside, seen from the inside through a doorway, and the door closes on him.  And there's Goodfellas, where ex-gangster Ray Liotta picks up his morning newspaper and remembers Joe Pesci shooting people. (The background music is the Sid Vicious version of "My Way"!) Also, there's City Lights, where the formerly blind flower girl realizes that destitute tramp Charlie Chaplin was her benfactor.  Or Citizen Kane, where the sled gets incinerated without the reporters learning it's the key to their mystery.

And there are some good book endings, like when Huckleberry Finn mentions that Aunt Sally wants to adopt and civilize him as the Widow Douglas was trying to do at the start of the book, and says, "I can't stand it.  I been there before." (Someone said that a comedy story is about going from A to B back to A.)

Guns

Guns aren't my favorite subject.  I'm glad I live in Canada rather than the United States, where too many people see guns as the embodiment of their freedom.  It goes back to the Second Amendment, yet its language speaks of the need for "a well-regulated militia." Not just regulated, but well regulated!  Government in the U.S. clearly haven't been regulating their "militias" well.

I've never got into hunting.  It's different with Inuit, say, who have always hunted for their food and clothes. (I'll admit that eating game you've killed is no worse than eating meat from a factory farm.) But I don't like the idea of taking even an animal's life just so you can call yourself a rugged outdoors man.  Besides, my ears are too sensitive for gunfire.

On the animated TV show South Park, there's a character called Uncle Jimbo, who's a hunting enthusiast.  When he sees an animal, he yells "He's coming right for us!" so they can say that they shot it in self-defense.

There's a really funny movie, A Christmas Story, about a kid who wants a Red Ryder B.B. gun for Christmas.  The grownups keep warning him, "You'll shoot your eye out!"

I saw an editorial-page cartoon once where someone said "I'm sick and tired of hunters being depicted as pigs and morons!" and someone else said "The pigs and morons don't like it either."

The Wizard of Oz

When I was little we had a younger children's version of L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz  published by Random House. (They also did versions of Grimm's fairy tales and Alice in Wonderland.) Now that I'm older and have read the full version, I appreciate its brilliance.  One interesting thing about it is Baum's Germanic influences:  "munchkin" probably comes from "Menschen" (German for "little people"), and Glinda the good witch must get her name from the Wagnerian heroine Sieglinde.

I first saw the Judy Garland movie when I was not quite nine.  The part that really impressed me was the black and white opening sequence, especially the storm.  The book and movie are both rather brilliant, but in different ways. (C. Collodi's Pinocchio is the same.) I particularly like the Scarecrow's goofy dancing.

For all its brilliance, I have to admit that the movie has a lot of minor flaws.  In the scene where Dorothy meets the Scarecrow, she's reached a fork in the Yellow Brick Road and doesn't know whether to go left or right, leading to a conversation with him.  Then they head out to the right (or maybe the left?) with no explanation for why they chose that direction! (The screenwriters created a problem but didn't solve it.) And the scene in the wicked witch's castle is pretty lame:  they even threw in the "drop the chandelier" cliche.

There's also the black musical version The Wiz.  The movie version made the bewildering mistake of casting 40-year-old Diana Ross as Dorothy (they thought they needed a "star") and Richard Pryor's wasted in the title role, but I did like the colorful sets and the supporting cast, including Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow.  I want to see the recent TV version.  And I've also seen the odd stage musical Wicked, which presents the Wicked Witch of the West as an animal-loving antiheroine.

Back to school

I've always imagined the year starting in September rather than January.  Every year I'd start school hopint that things would be better this time, but they never really were. (I wish you could just got to school and learn, but in practice it's just as much about fitting into a group!)

One thing that depresses me is the rise of "back to school" clothing sales.  So what if your clothes aren't brand new like the other kids'?  What's so terrible about wearing hand-me-downs?

I sometimes have a dream where I'm in school again. (After seeing the trailer for Silence of the Lambs, I had a nightmare where I was back in school and the principal was Hannibal Lecter!) In this dream I sometimes remember that I'm finished with school and don't belong there.  It's like there's part of me that'll never leave school...

I recall Matt Groening's comic strip Life in Hell doing a serious about school.  He had this message for high schoolers: "After you graduate, you can leave this place.  But your teachers have to stay here."

Hospitals

I was born on February 5, 1962, on the same day as actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. (That day there was a big planet conjunction and solar eclipse that had some astrologers predicting the end of the world!) I always thought I'd been born at Sackville Memorial Hospital--in Sackville, N.B.--but in my late 30s my parents revealed that the birth happened in our car while Father was driving Mother there.  It was a blue Ford Consul from 1957 or so.  Oh well, who wants to have been born in a hospital anyway?

I was in Sackville Memorial Hospital when I was fifteen for ulcer trouble.  I was hospitalized again in Canterbury, England, four years later, and underwent surgery to remove my ulcer.  I can show you the scar...

My mother spent her last week in the hospital at Yonge and Queen, after falling downstairs.  When she died it happened so fast that I was still asleep.

What's your favorite medical TV show?  Mine is the 1980s series St. Elsewhere, about a run-down Boston teaching hospital.  My favorite characters were the fussy surgeon Mark Craig and his goofy assistant Victor Erlich.

History

History is my favorite subject.  I actually have a Ph. D. in history! (My thesis subject was the western Chinese treaty port of Chongqing in the early 20th century, and its British community.) I also organize a history discussion group through meetup.com .  We talk about history books and screen DVDs of historical movies. (This week we're showing Cabaret!)

I was talking to Margo from Russia in that group, and she told me that when they teach history in Russian schools they start with the Greek historian Herodotous and his famous book about Persia and its wars with Greece! (I actually read that book a few years ago.) Here in Canada, at least when I was young, they don't start teaching old world history till high school; before that it's just Canadian history.

I've actually read parts of Edward Gibbon's seven-volume Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Someday I'm going to return to it and read the whole thing!

People who don't know history are prisoners of their own time. (The United States has a very dramatic, entertaining history for a fairly young nation, yet that subject interests few Americans!) The more we learn of history, the more familiar our ancestors look.

Sequels and remakes

Remember the Dr. Suess book The Cat in the Hat? (I avoided the movie version--they cast Mike Myers in the title role, when anyone can see William H. Macy has a greater resemblance!) Well, I actually preferred the sequel The Cat in the Hat Comes Back!  Maybe that's because a lot of it took place outdoors in the snow.

I've read the whole series of Jalna books by Mazo de la Roche.  It's sort of a European- style family saga, set among the Canadian squirearchy.  The first books start in the middle chronologically, then she wrote a combination of prequels and sequels! (Upper Canada College and the Royal Winter Fair are recognizable without being named.) They made a TV series of it in 1972, which was widely considered a disaster, but my mother liked it.  Few Canadians read the books these days, but they're still popular in France.

Some movies come in series.  Even before Star Wars and Harry Potter, there were movie series like the 1930s detective Charlie Chan.  I always liked Warner Oland in that rold, even though he was actually Swedish. (Such casting would be considered insensitive today.) They showed the movies in China, and when Oland visited that country Chinese people were surprised to learn that he wasn't one of them!  He'd captured the essence of Chineseness.

Clocks

In my hometown of Sackville, N.B., they used to have a revolving clock next to the town hall.  It was a Centennial project from 1967 built by the Lions Club.

Digital clocks seem to be replacing the round analog ones.  In New York City once I saw a digital clock showing the time not to the minute, not to the second, but to the tenth of a second!  Just looking at it put you into a hurry.

Analog clocks got their round shape from sundials.  I once read of a sundial inscription that said, "Let others mark your pain and showers, I'll only mark your sunny hours!"

As I get older, I realize that there's nothing more precious than time.  Money you can sometimes accumulate in unbelievable amounts beyond what you can ever spend.  But time has a tighter limit:  I'll be very lucky to get 100 years, and I've already used up over 50!  I couldn't imagine living long enough to read all the books I'd like to read someday.

The fog

I used to like misty fog when I was young because the air felt alive. (Or maybe that's just nostalgia.) 

When my parents lived in London in the mid-1950s--my father was earning a doctorate at Imperial College, and they lived in Chiswick--they still had fierce "pea souper" fogs full of chemicals.  They caused several deaths, and they say that the fog alone could make runs in women's nylons!  They've told me of seeing a bus that had a man with a flashlight walking ahead of it to make sure that the way was clear.  They disappeared in later decades, because of the decline in London's heavy industry.

 

Ever see a foghorn on a ship?  When I was little I was fascinate by them.  I saw some cartoon where someone got thrown into a foghorn, and that got me wondering, if you went down into a foghorn, what realms would it take you to?

When I was young I read a Carl Sandburg poem that started, "The fog comes on little cat feet..." There was a jazz singer called Mel Torme, nicknamed "The Velvet Fog."

John Wayne

I remember seeing John Wayne's last public appearance.  It was the Oscars show in 1979, and he announced the best picture winner. (It was The Deer Hunter.) You could see that he wasn't long for this world.

John Wayne died that June, when my parents and I were visiting Britain.  They showed some of his movies on British TV, as they sometimes do after a movie legend dies. (They did the same with William Holden a couple of years later.) That's where I first saw True Grit and Stagecoach, the movie that made him a big star.  Stagecoach isn't just a great western, it has a great romance between him and Claire Trevor.

One of my favourite westerns is The Searchers, directed by John Ford and starring Wayne. (They made a lot of great westerns together, including Stagecoach.) He plays a man whose niece gets captured by Comanches, who pursues them in an obsessive quest for over a decade, and turns into something of a monster:  will he rescue his niece or kill her for living the Indian life?  It's one of the rare westerns with a sense of tragedy.  There's a great closing shot where an indoor camera sees him outdoors, framed by a door, and the door closes on him!  I've seen it half a dozen times.

New shoes

Remember that thing they have in shoe stores that has a seat on one part and a foot measurer on the other?  that way the salesman can sit down while measuring your feet.  When I was little it seemed really nifty to me.

When I was about twelve I got a pair of North Star sneakers, and I ended up wearing nothing but North Stars for a few years.  I'm not sure why exactly I got so crazy about them. (I also recall Dash sneakers from when I was even younger.)

Today my shoe size is 8 and a half, like the Fellini movie.  Sometimes I have to look a bit for a new pair, because some brands only seem to come in 8 and 9 and such.

Twenty years ago when I spent eight months in London researching my Ph.D. thesis, I bought a new pair of shoes just before leaving.  But I managed to wear them out in just four or five months, literally ending up with a hole in one of the soles. (I did a lot of walking about in London.)

I was just reading in Ten Lost Years about a Depression kid who got relief shoes, but they were oversize boots like Li'l Abner wore.  When he was playing outdoors another kid said, "He has relief boots!" leading to a fight.  Nastiness comes so easy to some kids...

Weird

What can I say about weirdness?  I remember this skit on Sesame Street where Ernie was upside down and Bert was right side up, but Ernie poured a glass of milk and it flowed up into his cup, causing Bert to say, "That's weird, that's weird!" (My brother saw it too and pointed out that it was really Bert who was upside down, along with the camera!

The subject also brings to mind Weird Al Yankovic, who sings parody songs and keeps having hits after thirty years!  When I'm at karaoke I sometimes sing "Eat It," his parody of Michael Jackson's "Beat It."  He recently did a parody of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" with the semi-porn video, but his version was "Word Crimes," devoted to grammatical pedantry:  it's way better than the original!  I too am bugged by solecisms like people using "literally" just to give emphasis to hyperbole, when it really means, "This isn't hyperbole, it's serious." (Like a fashion critic saying, "Kim Kardashian is literally drowning in silk.")

It's funny, but theses days I never seem to see anything that strikes me as truly weird.  I feel like I've seen everything...

Raccoons

Remember the TV show The Honeymooners?  Jackie Gleason played bus driver Ralph Kramden, who belonged to a lodge called The Raccoons.  That was a really funny show!  I remember one episode where he'd sent in his tax form and the tax people want to speak to him about it.  He got really worried that he was going to get into legal trouble, but it turned out that he had just forgotten to sign his name!  Well, I made that same mistake one year.

I remember one episode where he ended up telling his wife, "You know why I get into all this trouble?  Because I've got a big mouth!"

Of course, the animated show The Flintstones was basically a Honeymooners ripoff.  But that show's writing wasn't half as good!

If you ever visit New York City, in front of this big bus terminal they have a statue of Gleason in his bus driver uniform with a plaque that says, "Ralph Kramden.  Bus driver.  Raccoon lodge treasurer.  Dreamer."

X-rated movies

The first X-rated movie I saw was Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange when I was seventeen.  It has a witty performance by Malcolm McDowell, but the futuristic satire is pretty heavy-handed, especially the scene with the social worker.  Someone told me he had to leave in the middle because in the rape scene where he's singing "Singin' in the Rain," the young men in the audience were singing along with him!

There's also Last Tango in Paris.  My sister saw it when it played our small New Brunswick hometown Sackville.  She recalls that the place was packed and everyone in her row kept giggling!

Do you like Vincent Price movies?  In America they're considered good kiddie fun, but in Britain they got rated X! (The British also gave Tom Jones an X rating, though it doesn't seem so dirty today.) Marlon Brando's biker movie The Wild One actually got banned in Britain for over a decade.

And then there are the movies that should have been rated X but escaped through token cuts.  Like Basic Instinct, which is Hollywood at its most cynical.  Or The Exorcist, which scared a lot of people, but when I finally saw it, it left me cold.  And there's also Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which I just didn't get.  The orgy scene seemed elaborately silly.  In the end I found it all pointless.

Pets

My brother used to have a dog called Theseus.  He was half-collie, I think, and really smart.  He recognized several words, including "stick." When he heard the word "stick," that meant to him that someone would take him outdoors to play with a stick and have fun, so he'd get really excited in that canine way.  It was tempting to say "stick" to him just to watch him react, like Pavlov's dog drooling at the sound of the bell. (The word "walk" had a similar effect on him.)

I also recall that he liked being scratched behind his ears.  And if you drew your finger along his muzzle, that would make him sleepy.

My sister-in-law's friend had a dog called Lola.  Occasionally they'd be visiting at the same time as me.  Lola would always respond to my presence in the same way:  she'd bark angrily at me for a couple of minutes, then she'd settle down at start licking my arms all over. (I guess I taste good!)

Josh Billings wrote, "Money can buy a good dog, but it can't buy the wag in his tail!"

George Carlin wondered, "What do dogs do on their day off?  They can't lie around, that's their job!"

I wish I had my camera...

I'm not big on taking pictures.  The way I look at it, it's enough to preserve a sight in your head.  I'd rather record things verbally, like with my blog or this memoir group.

When Laura Ingalls Wilder was young her sister went blind, so she was always describing to her what she saw in words.  That was good training for her as a writer.  My mother told me a lot about her youth, yet after her death I felt there was still a lot I hadn't learned about her.

When I had a paper diary instead of a blog, I used to write about my dreams a lot.  That's another good exercise for a writer, because writing about a dream means taking various, diffuse sensations and bringing them together into a narrative, to the extent that you can.

My big hero is Samuel Pepys.  He managed to describe his life and activities in an authentic, unaffected way.  The National Post used to reprint his diary one day at a time, which is a good way to read it since that's the same pace at which he wrote it.

Comic duos

Good comedy never dates.  Look at Laurel and Hardy!  They started out in silent movies, but unlike most silent comedians they had a smooth tradition to sound.  They made some really classic shorts, including one where they were chimney sweeps in a mad scientist's house. (In the end Hardy got changed into a chimp!) The butler looked at them and muttered, "Somewhere an electric chair is waiting!"

The made a really funny movie called Sons of the Desert, where they sneaked off to a convention while their wives thought they were going to Hawaii for Hardy's health, but the boat they were supposed to be on sank! (Of course, The Flintstones stole the idea.) And another really funny one was Way out West, where they came to a frontier town to give an heiress the deed to a gold mine, but gave it to the wrong girl and had to steal it back...

Are there any funny duos today?  I like the movies Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson have made together, Zealander and Starsky and Hutch.  Peter Cook and Dudley Moore made some funny movies like Bedazzled.  And there was Wayne and Shuster on the CBC.

French language and culture

I come from the officially bilingual province of New Brunswick.  When I was in school we started learning French in Grade 2.  Back then they had more of a "natural" approach to teaching it:  I recall that we used the same textbook year after year in the middle grades. (The first dialogue started with the words "To connais Marcel Martin?") It wasn't till Grade 8 that we seriously started learning to conjugate verbs.

I remember the CBC show Chez Helene, a 15-minute show that came on just before--or was it after?--The Friendly Giant. (It seemed to be a female counterpart to that all-male show.) There was a mouse puppet called Susie, and they sang songs like "Il eat un petit navire." I don't think I learned much French from it.

When I was young, I read some French comic books. (You could find a lot of that in New Brunswick libraries.) My favourite was the series about Asterix, a short Gaul who drank a magic potion like Popeye's spinach, and beat up Roman soldiers.  In one adventure he saw an aqueduct being built and said, "The Romans are ruining the countryside with their new construction!" I also came across Tintin, and Petzi, a little bear cub who sailed a boat around the world with his friends:  the original was in Danish.

When I was in London, England, twenty years ago, I was making small talk with a Frenchman and mentioned that Canada had bilingual food labels so I knew that the French for bran flakes is "flocons de son." He said that in France they're called "les bran flakes"!

My least favourite...

My least favourite food is unfresh fish and undercooked potatoes. (And I don't like ratatouille either.) Onions and tomatoes are two foods I've never liked.

My least favourite sound is the noise you make when you're sawing through a piece of styrofoam. (Try it sometime!)

One movie that I thought overrated is Life Is Beautiful.  The whole thing was stupid, shameless and rather tasteless.  It's the sort of movie that asks you to believe that Nazis would bring their own kids to a concentration camp for a children's party! (In real life, of course, a concentration camp is the last place they'd take them, next to the battle front.) All so they can have a "Roberto Benigni meets a Nazi child" scene!

It's hard for me to choose a least favourite TV show because I don't watch that many shows.  I can mention that I watched the whole first season of Orange Is the New Black, the Netflix comedy-drama about a women's prison, but I couldn't get into it.  It's something of an "oil and water" combination of the serious and the funny.  The best thing about it is several of the supporting characters, especially Laverne Cox as the transgender inmate, but the yuppie lead character is annoying. (Someone writing online said that she's annoying on purpose!) The writing is often clever, but sometimes cleverness trumps credibility:  I had the same feeling about Weeds, another Jenji Kohan production.

Baldness

My hairline has receded quite a bit, but I find that easy to ignore.  Is there anything more pitiful than a combover to make the most of what's left of your hair?  I guess there's wearing a hairpiece.

Someone pointed out that Russia's leaders have alternated between men who didn't have much hair and men who did:  Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin.  I read somewhere that one cure for hiccups is to think of seven bald celebrities!

I like Mussorgsky's orchestral piece "Night on Bald Mountain." I've also seen the title translated "Night on Bare Mountain," but that doesn't seem as effective.

I read somewhere that Queen Elizabeth I was bald and had to wear wigs!  So was Margaret Dumont, the straight woman in all those Marx Brothers movies.

Parades

I remember that back in the early '70s they'd broadcast Toronto's Santa Claus Parade on nationwide TV!  I actually saw it in person in 1974, the last year when it went down Yonge Street on Saturday morning.

Back in New Brunswick, Moncton had a smaller Santa Claus Parade.  I went to it once or twice, and remember a marching band with one musician playing a glockenspiel, and a guy in a Ronald McDonald clown suit driving a go-cart.

I haven't seen a parade for years. (Are they going out of fashion?) And I don't think I've ever been in one.  I have been in a few protest marches.  In London, England, I walked along Park Lane in a march to protest the free world abandoning Bosnia.  We ended up at Trafalgar Square where Vanessa Redgrave made a speech.

I've seen a classic silent movie about World War I titled The Big Parade.

Vegetables

When we had a garden in New Brunswick we grew a lot of vegetables.  Corn, peas and potatoes especially.  The problem with corn and root crops like carrots is that you have to thin them out once they've grown just a little.  It's hard to choose which plants to keep and which to remove.

Peas require netting, but it's fun to shell them.  Most of the pods would have six or eight peas, but occasionally I'd get one with ten!  I developed a fondness for eating peas raw.  We'd also grow head crops like cabbage and cauliflower and broccoli and brussels sprouts.  Unlike what we grew from seed, we'd buy these plants and grow them in the garden.

That big garden is one of the only things I miss from New Brunswick.  We now have a smaller garden in our back yard.  For a few years I just grew potatoes, but this year I made it bigger and planted stuff like beans and onions.  I also planted two rows of peas with a row of sunflowers between them, in the hope that the pea vines would grow up their stems! (And my sister has planted some herbs in a planter.

TV miniseries

When I was 14, I saw the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man.  It wasn't so profound but it was entertaining enough.  Peter Strauss was like something carved onto a totem pole, but Nick Nolte was lively.  Ed Asner (Lou Grant) played their father, who was totally unpleasant and unlikable--something refreshing in that!

When I was 18 I saw the miniseries of James Clavell's Japanese epic Shogun, which I enjoyed despite a big flaw:  the Japanese dialogue wasn't subtitled! (The network was evidently afraid that subtitles would turn off the average semi-literate viewer.) The subject interested me so much that I read the book!

My favourite American miniseries is Lonesome Dove.  Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones were in rare form, and a lot of actors were at their best--even some actors I usually don't care for were better than usual.  I've read Roy McMurtry's novel and it's also excellent.

And I've seen quite a few British miniseries of the sort they play on Masterpiece Theatre:  stuff like The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elizabeth R.

Skipping school

When I was little I read this Walt Disney comic where Donald Duck's three nephews--Huey, Dewey and Louie--decided to play hooky. (This comic was the first place where I saw the expression.) They ran away into the countryside, but Donald kept emerging on the horizon unknowingly approaching them in this big truck you could see from a long distance.  In the end they entered a lodge that turned out to be hosting a truant officers' convention!

I remember another story where Donald was hosting a fancy garden party and his nephews ended up soaking him and all the guests.  There was also a big dog who got soaked and shook off the water right next to the nephews, so they finally got soaked too!

Those were some great comics with Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, drawn by uncredited genius Carl Barks.  There was one adventure where they went into the Andes and found a land where chickens laid square eggs!  And there was one where they visited the planet of Valhalla and found  Vulcan's forge, where he was turning bricks into gold,  (There was indeed a Roman god among these Norse gods.) Uncle Scrooge was pleased, but the nephews figured out that the process was having an odd gravitational effect that was drawing this planet dangerously close to earth, threatening a collision!

The moon

I don't think I saw the first moon landing back in 1969, but I do remember hearing a lot about it.  And I remember the Apollo 13 crisis in 1970.  Our schoolteacher took us to her apartment so we could see on her TV the spacemen being rescued from their capsule at sea.

The moon landings were something of a dead end.  The real future of space exploration is unmanned missions!  But I've been wondering what life would be like for people on the moon.  I suppose they'd live as troglodytes, spending most of their time at lower levels while growing their plants under skylights at the surface.  There'd always be a danger of a meteor crashing into a skylight and letting the air get sucked out, because there'd be no friction to slow them down.  A lunar eclipse on earth would mean a solar eclipse for people on the moon.

As for getting to the moon, I'm not astronaut material.  When I think about being weightless, it scares me.  Imagine being in a world with no up or down!  Yet I've dreamed about being on the moon quite a bit.

Archimedes knew that the earth is spherical because during a lunar eclipse its shadow on the moon stays equally round at all angles! (And seafarers have always known it because when you approach a mountainous coast the mountaintops appear over the horizon first and the lower parts appear gradually, which can only be explained by the sea forming a convex curve.)

A dream

I often have vivid dreams.  Lately I've had a disturbing thought:  Do I prefer my dream world to the real one?  I suppose that's a sign of aging.

My mother died three years ago.  A while ago I was dreaming about her.  In the middle of the dream I remember that she was dead, so I went up to her and held her hand, which fill her with an inner glow.

I often dream about my old home in Sackville, N.B.  In one recent dream the street I had lived on was completely underwater from a flood, houses and everything, which a nearby street had been buried under a mountain of gravel.

One of my favourite actresses is Laura Dern.  I met her in a dream once, and I said to her, "Any day when I meet Laura Dern is a good day!"

I also dream a lot about London, England.  I sometimes dream of visiting a museum that's an amalgam of all the London museums I love!

Horses

Horses have really big eyes!  If my eyes were that big, I'd be afraid of getting poked in them, they'd be such a big target!

I was thinking about why horses let people ride them.  It must be because a horse's life gets boring if you never get ridden.

I've been to the Royal Winter Fair a few times, with its big horse shows and market selling just about every equine good.  Do people actually get used to that smell?

I was reading that Bruce Springsteen's daughter excels at show jumping.  It's ironic that a working-class hero's daughter has made an impression in such an upper-class sport!

If I got a choice of what animal to be, I'd be either an eagle or a horse.  I'd probably choose the horse, because I'd prefer being a herbivore to a carnivore. 

Marijuana

I've never tried marijuana.  I think I'd rather eat it in cookie form than smoke it.  But I'm definitely in favour of legalizing it.  It's only a "gateway" drug toward more dangerous stuff because of its illegal status.  We hear about "skunk" strains with dangerously high THC levels, but that actually strengthens the case for legalization:  if it's legal, the government can regulate it and remove skunk the way they regulate liquor and ban moonshine.

Legalizing marijuana will also mean legalizing hemp, a crop that could revolutionize farming in North America.  It's a plant that grows like a weed anywhere and has lots of important uses, like making paper in the place of cut-down trees.

It may be true that excessive use causes brain damage.  So the government should give the message: "Responsible adults, use it at your own risk."

When I was in college, I used a desk on which someone had written, "Washington owned slaves and blew dope and they won't admit it"!

Comic books

When I was little our house didn't have a lot of superhero comics. (My parents didn't seem to approve of them.) But we got a lot of the more family friendly-ones.  Stuff like Little Lulu and Little Archie and Richie Rich.

Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge were among my favourites. I with they'd build a tiny car like Donald Duck drove.  Some of Uncle Scrooge's adventures brought him to places like Valhalla and the Battle of Marathon! (When I was little, I already knew that the Greeks fought the Persians at Marathon because of the Uncle Scrooge comic.)

Did Richie Rich die and become Casper the Friendly Ghost?  Or did he go to hell and become Hot Stuff?  Harvey Comics' official line was that Casper's the son of ghost parents, which begs the question of what happened to his parents, who are never around.  Did they get resurrected?

One unusual comic I remember is Swing With Scooter, about an English pop star and his swinging friends. (Why yes, this was the 1960s!) The best character was Malibut the weirdo.

My mother really like Jerry Lewis. (She took us to a few Jerry Lewis movies, including The Big Mouth and Hook, Line and Sinker.) And we got several Jerry Lewis comics too.

And we had a lot of Classics Illustrated comics, both the regular series and a junior series with fairy tales. (Each issue had a fairy tale, an Aesopian fable, a poem and a page about a member of the animal kingdom.)

Immigration

It's immigrants that make a country interesting.  Toronto a century ago must have been a pretty bland place compared to today.  I have a Chinese doctor and a Czech dentist and an Arab shrink.  There's just been a big international soccer tournament, and street pedlars have been selling flags representing dozens of nations!  I wonder if you see that in New York and Los Angeles too?

A few weeks ago I went on a march between Jane and High Park stations in support of Moslem refugees. (It was in response to a march by an anti-Moslem group the week before.) We were chanting, "Say it loud!  Say it clear!  Immigrants are welcome here!"

Someone said that Toronto is the most multicultural city in the world.  If you ask me, true multiculturalism goes from the bottom up!  The United States has been called a "melting pot" for immigrants, but that's always struck me as a simplistic take on the complex, gradual process of assimilation.  Even the log cabin was introduced to America by German immigrants!

I think that the Americans should give their Columbus Day the new name Immigrant Day.  After all, Columbus was the first immigrant to America!

Courtrooms

I'm not the sort who visits courtrooms much.  Back in 1992 I had jury duty for a couple of weeks. (It was a bit of an adventure.) But I never got chosen for a jury, because I was a student and students are too unpredictable.  There really isn't any point in calling up students, since they never get chosen.

I don't follow trials in the media either. (I'll admit I was surprised when I learned that O.J. Simpson had been acquitted.) My feeling is that I'll never know the truth about whether someone is guilty or not, no matter how much I learn about the case.  I hope I never end up serving on a jury!

I was reading about the trial of the Chicago Eight in 1969.  Abbie Hoffman and the other hippies were convicted, though their convictions were later quashed on appeal.  After being convicted, following normal procedure, they were booked at the local jail before being released on bail pending their appeal.  Except that on this occasion the jailers made a point of cutting their long hair while these hippies were in their power!  Not long afterward the Republican governor of Illinois appeared at a party rally where he produced Hoffman's long locks and declared, "Republicans get results!" What petty bullies!

Hippocratic Oath

I've been learning ancient Greek lately.  Just the other day I came across a famous quote attributed to Hippocrates: "Life is short,  medical art is long,  crisis is quick,  experiment is risky, judgement is hard."

My problem with Greek is that the small letters are hard to read! (That wasn't such a problem when I was younger.) When a word starts with a vowel, it either has a single start quote (like an apostrophe) over the vowel, or a single end quote.  If it's a start quote it's a regular vowel, but if it's an end quote it corresponds to a word that starts with "H" in the Roman alphabet.  The problem is that I have trouble seeing whether it's a start quote or an end quote.

So when I read Greek writing I write it down in Roman transliteration.  That isn't so hard, except that there are two "E" vowels and two "O" vowels, so with the hard E and O (eta and omega) I add a carat accent (E^ and O^) while the soft E and O (epsilon and omicron) are unaccented.  And the vowel upsilon had a "U" sound so I write it as U except when it comes between two consonants, then it write it as "Y" because that's the general practice (hence words like "hyperbole").

And with the dative case there's this little mark under the last letter, pronounced a bit like "I" but slighter, so for that I add a tilde (~).  And sometimes I'll add an "H" between vowels, like with Lahis. (The Greek writing sometimes puts an umlaut over the second vowel to make clear that they aren't a diphthong.)

Boarding house

I've never been in a boarding house.  My mother used the expression "boarding house reach" whenever someone managed to reach a long way to pick up food at the dinner table.

I do remember the comic strip Our Boarding House.  It was about Major Hoople, a fat, pompous work-avoider. (His favourite expression was "FAP!") When its creator Gene Ahern left the strip and moved to another syndicate, he created Room and Board, which was essentially the same strip except that Major Hoople became Judge Piffle!

There was also a one-hit rock band called Major Hoople's Boarding House. (Not to be confused with another band called Mott the Hoople.) I don't remember the title of their only hit single.  I wonder how much difficulty they had getting permission from the syndicate to use that name.

Books I want to read

I have a pretty long list of books I want to read someday.  I've read most of Dickens, but there's still Dombey and Son.  I also want to read George Eliot's Middlemarch someday, like a lot of people.  And Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth.  And John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy.  And just about anything by the Texan writer Larry McMurtry.

Every time I finish a book on my list, I seem to get another to replace it.  Like last year when I read Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' superb The Yearling, and now I want to read her Cross Creek too!

I've developed an ambition to read every book that's been made into a Classics Illustrated comic book.  In recent years I've crossed off James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans and King of the Mountains and Erckmann and Chatrian's Waterloo and Jules Verner's From the Earth to the Moon--except that in the last case, I've only read the first of the two books.  But the next one on my list is Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, and that one scares me! (I should read his The Hunchback of Notre Dame first.) There'll be quite a few by Verner and Cooper and H.G. Wells.

Years ago I read a big part of the first half of Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  I want to read the whole of it someday.  Likewise this long Chinese novel by Cao Xueqin, Dreams of the Red Chamber.

Science

I've never really got into science fiction.  I did like Frank Herbert's epic sci-fi Dune series.  Someone said that science fiction is the last moral genre in literature.

My father was a nuclear physicist.  He's still concerned about the issue of nuclear armament. (We've been watching the TV series Manhattan, about the scientists who built the first A-bombs.) In the early 1960s he went to a peace conference in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, and heard a speech by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

I don't see how religion and science are so incompatible.  Sure, some literalists insist that the theory of evolution goes against the Book of Genesis, but I imagine scripture as allowing flexible interpretation.  Religion and science really operate in different areas, it seems to me.

I may know more about subjects like geography and chemistry than William Shakespeare did, but he seemed to know everything about life!

The more I learn, the less I feel like I know.  I guess that's wisdom.

Game shows

One game show I remember is Truth or Consequences.  They actually renamed a New Mexico town after the show!  Someone said all the contestants seemed to be Nixonites from Iowa.  Bob Barker would start by telling them a riddle that they never knew the answer to so they'd have to "take the consequences." (A lot of the riddles were about nudist camps.) I do remember one riddle that a contestant did know the answer to! "Why don't bachelors drink canned tomato juice?  Because they'd rather squeeze their own tomatoes!" At the end of the show he'd say, "This is Bob Barker, hoping all your consequences are happy ones!"

My mother used to like the game show The Love Connection, where a contestant would choose one of three dates, come back and report how the date went, then see the results of who the audience thought was the best match.  I heard that they threw in some fake contestants to make it more lively!

I remember some of the prizes they plugged on game shows, like Turtle Wax and Sarah Coventry jewelry and Spiegel knitwear. (The Spiegel promo always said "Spiegel, Chicago 60609 Illinois"! They must have done a big catalogue business.)

Mad magazine did a spoof "TV shows we'd like to see." In their version of What's My Line, the show where blindfolded contestants guessed the special guest's identity, the host asked "How did you know it was him?" "I peeked!" And in their version of I've Got a Secret, where they had to guess someone's secret, which was written onscreen for viewers, the secret was "This is a stickup!"

I've heard there's a TV channel with nothing but old game show reruns!

Sad stories

Some movies are sad in a shameless, manipulative way that's unintentionally funny, like Love Story and Titanic.  Then there are movies that earn tears honestly.  Like this anime Grave of the Fireflies, about two doomed orphan kids in wartime Japan.  Or some of the Italian movies directed by Vittorio di Sica, like The Children Are Watching or Umberto D. (His The Bicycle Thief was so sad that I couldn't bear to see it again.)

Some sad songs get to me.  Like when I was twelve I heard this '50s song "Teen Angel," which made a big impression on me.  And there's "Red River Valley," the original country song. (Someone said that country songs are about "hurtin'.")

When I was researching my Ph.D. thesis about the Chinese treaty port of Chongqing, I encountered a really sad story.  Among some Chinese businessmen there was a practice known as "name-selling," in which they created a company that was effectively in their hands but had a foreigner as figurehead, for the real or imagined benefits of being a foreign business and being represented by foreign consuls.

There was one case in Chongqing of an English drunk on his last legs who became such a figurehead in return for enough money to live on.  After his death, the British consulate arranged his affairs.  His Chinese backers had put up a bond in his name, and the money was used to repay his creditors, who were lucky enough to get three-quarters of what they were owed.  The detail I remember is a list of his assets for selling off, including several dishes, mostly broken.

History is about people like this as much as anyone.

Comfort food

For me, salted peanuts are a favourite comfort food.  I recently found out that at Bulk B arms you can buy a ton of peanuts all at once!  There was a time when I was recovering from an ulcer and had to go without them, which didn't please me.

I also eat popcorn when I go to the movies.  There was a time long ago when I had it with butter (or "golden topping," as some cinemas are careful to call it!). But I finally noticed that it was just as good without it.

My favourite ice cream flavour is cherry vanilla, but they don't seem to make it anymore!  I prefer ice cream half-melted, so my taste buds don't get deadened so quickly.

I also like fresh strawberries, and they'll soon be in season!  My father and I used to go to Whittamore Farms in Markham and pick them direct from the ground.  We'd wake up early and get there early so we could pick them before they got hot. (We'd also get raspberries and peas and such.) But we no longer have a car to get there with.

Childhood songs

When I was little we had a record player and quite a few songs for kids.  My favourite was "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy." Another one was "Where Do You Worka John?" which I recently found out was a "novelty song" from the 1920s.

Where do you worka, John?

On the Delaware-Lackawanna!

What do you do-a, John?

I pusha, I pusha, I pusha!

What do you pusha, John?

I pusha, I pusha, da trucka!

Where do you work John?

On the Delaware Lackawannawannawannawan, the Delaware Lackawanna!

I also remember schoolboy songs.  Like the one that went:

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Teacher hit me with the ruler!

I met her at the door with a loaded .44

And she ain't gonna teach no more!

There was also a variant on "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" that went:

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Cowboy

Had a very shiny gun!

And if you ever saw it,

You would turn around and run!

*     *     *

Then one foggy Christmas eve,

The sheriff came to say,

"Rudolph, with your gun so bright,

Won't you shoot my wife tonight?"

And of course there were Christmas songs!  I think the last classic Christmas songs were "Do You Hear What I Hear?" and "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year" in 1963. (Unless you count "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer"!)

Did you ever get the words to TV theme songs wrong?  The opening line of The Mary Tyler Moore Show is "Who can turn the world on with her smile?" but I thought it was "Who can turn the world down with a smile?" I actually prefer my version!

My mother remembered millions of songs!  Father remembered the Danny Kaye song that went, "Bongo, bongo, bongo, I don't wanna leave the Congo, no no no-no-no no!"

Guilty pleasures

Ava Gardner, the movie star, was a bit of a guilty pleasure.  You knew she wasn't good for you but you couldn't turn her down!  She was a great femme fatale in the the film noir The Killers.

One of my guilty pleasures is the comic strip The Phantom, which I read online.  The Phantom was one of the masked vigilante heroes who appeared in the 1930s, like the Lone Ranger and Batman.  He lived in Skull Cave in the jungles of Bengalla, with a community of pygmies, and devoted his life to fighting pirates and criminals, the 15th in a line going back centuries.  It's sill and far from "politically correct," but pretty fun.

Howard Hawks made a lot of great movies, but even some of his less great efforts are guilty pleasures.  Like To Have and Have Not: it's based on a Hemingway novel, yet the movie is basically about Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall's sexual chemistry and nothing else. (They married soon after finishing the movie.) But gosh darn it, that's enough!

Another guilty pleasure Howard Hawks made is Hatari!  That's the one with John Wayne as a big-game hunter catching live animals in Africa.  It's also silly but fun. (Henry Mancini's "Baby Elephant Walk" is in it.) It was released in February, 1962, the same month when I was born!

Other guilty pleasures of mine have been Tim Horton's bowties--they're like an eclair on speed--and punk rock!

Substitute teachers

I recall that when I was a schoolboy things would go even worse than usual for me when we had a substitute teacher. (Bullies felt there was nobody to stop them.) I wouldn't want to teach school, even just as a substitute for a short time.

I remember there was an episode of The Waltons where the regular schoolteacher was unavailable and a substitute took over for a few weeks.  She quickly alienated everybody and made a mess of things, like when she insisted on moving a girl to the back row without letting anyone tell her that the girl was hearing-impaired and couldn't hear her from that distance.

You know, I liked The Waltons in the '70s, but now I realize that I had no taste back then!  It was a really cheesy, sentimental show, especially in the last scene when they always said good night to each other and they played this harmonica music. (The walls in their house must have been really thin!) And every episode would start with a two-word title, with the first word being "the": this episode was titled "The Substitute."

And don't get me started on how bad Little House on the Prairie was.  Sheer shamelessness!  And yet Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, on which the show was based, are wonderful kid-lit that grownups can enjoy too. (My History Discussion Group is going to read one in December!)

Cheapskates

My father's a child of the Great Depression. (He remembers when oranges were a Christmas treat.) That's probably why he's a bit of a cheapskate.  He's a rather stingy tipper, so when I tip I try to be generous.

It shows when we want to buy a new dishwasher or video player or home computer or such.  His instinct is always to buy the cheapest model available, and you'll have to fight him before he'll buy the second cheapest!  My sister Moira says that it's a way of avoiding the decision.  But on the other hand, you can also avoid the decision by buying the most expensive model!

Am I a cheapskate?  Well, I like to keep wearing my clothes till they're clearly threadbare.  I was thinking that if everyone started wearing their clothes as long as they could before buying new ones, the economy would be transformed.  Where would the fashion industry be then?  I've never understood why people view hand-me-down clothes as something to be ashamed of.  I'm the youngest of three sons and often wore them in my childhood.  Too many people are suckers for clothes marketing.  Maybe I am a cheapskate...

Dreams

I have some odd dreams.  Do you remember Robert Altman's 1993 movie Short Cuts, based on Raymond Carver's short stories? Carver wrote these perverse-sounding stories where a couple lost their child to a hit and run driver and forgot to pick up his birthday cake, so the baker started giving them crank calls; or a couple had promised to feed a vacationing neighbour's cat, but stopped doing so because they'd rather have sex; or some guys went on a fishing trip and found a woman's corpse, but didn't report it because they didn't want their vacation ruined!  I actually haven't seen the movie, but I read a collection of all the stories that were filmed.  Carver would often mention draining boards in kitchen scenes, a detail to remember if I ever write that much-needed Carver parody!

Anyhow, last night I was dreaming about that movie which I hadn't seen.  This dream didn't even have the same stories or the same actors!  It did have an actor who was either John Saxon ('70s B-movies like Enter the Dragon and Kansas City Bomber) or Bob Oedenkirk, who was in the first season of Fargo I was watching recently, but is better known for Better Call Saul.  In this dream I jumped from the top of a building down to sidewalk level.  I sometimes do things like that in my dreams.

Lately I've had the uncomfortable feeling that maybe I prefer my dream world to the real one. (Is that a sign of aging?)

Fire department

In my hometown of Sackville they had a volunteer fire department. They used to have this loud horn that would make noises you could hear all over town when someone triggered an alarm, with a certain number in a higher tone then a certain number of lower ones showing which alarm it was.

My back yard borders on a fire station.  It looks like it was built a century ago or so, and has a tall tower from which I imagine you can see a large part of the city.  I wish I had a reason so ask them to let me go up there and see!  Oh well, what you imagine seeing is always more impressive than what you'll actually see.

Big city fires, like Chicago in 1870 or Rome in Nero's time, tend to happen in towns that have been expanding quickly with little regulation.  There's a legend that Nero started the fire himself, but I read on Wikipedia that historians are pretty sure it didn't happen this way, because the fire happened during a full moon and most arsonists would wait for a darker night to strike.  There's also a legend that the Chicago Fire started when Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over a lantern, but I've read a theory that it was caused by a meteor shower.

I've seen the documentary Sicko, in which Michael Moore took a New York fireman ill from 9/11 to Cuba for better medical treatment than he could get at home.  The Havana firefighters put on a ceremony for him. (No doubt firefighters around the world feel a common bond.)

Sanctuary

There's a classic movie of The Hunchback of Notre Dame that came out in 1939, the year of all the great Hollywood movies (Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz). There's a scene where they're about to hang Gypsy girl Maureen O'Hara but hunchback Charles Laughton comes swinging on a rope, snatches her and carries her back to the cathedral, where he proclaims in his inarticulate voice, "Sanctuary!"  In the movie she gets a reprieve in the end; in the book I think she gets hanged. (I'm going to read it someday, along with all other books that got made into Classics Illustrated comics!)

I first saw that movie on the TVOntario weeknight series Magic Shadows, where they'd show a movie in parts from Monday to Thursday, then show a serial on Friday. (Some of the longer movies got shown on Friday as well.) I also saw the cut-rate King Kong spectacle Mighty Joe Young and the Marx Brothers movie A Night in Casablanca on that show.  And I saw a lot of classics on Yost's Saturday Night at the Movies, like King Kong and The Grapes of Wrath and Douglas Fairbanks' silent swashbuckler The Mark of Zorro.

Charles Laughton is one of my favourite '30s actors.  His Oscar-winning performance was in The Private Life of Henry VIII, of course. (I like the scene where they're gambling on cock fights and her wife loses all her money, so he gives her his winnings then takes out his purse and gives her even more money!) My favourite Laughton performance is in Rembrandt.  When I see a Rembrandt self-portrait I think of Laughton, just as reading a Stevie Smith poem makes me think of Glenda Jackson.  And he was a witty Javert in Les Miserables.  He was also going to play the title role in a movie of I, Claudius, but sadly the production got aborted.

Famous crimes

I don't like reading about criminal cases, though I love a good gangster movie.  Goodfellas I can see over and over!  I've seen two film biographies about the real-life twin London gangsters the Krays. (One of them was literally insane, and ended up in Broadmoor.) I've also watched the handsome but uneven TV series Boardwalk Empire, about Atlantic City bootlegging in the 1920s.  The best thing about that show was the actors playing real-life gangsters Al Capone and Arnold Rothstein.

I've learned a bit about Capone from a couple of book about America in the '20s.  There's no real evidence that he was behind the St. Valentine's Day massacre.  The only thing that really distinguished him from other leading bootleggers was his love of publicity.  Other gangsters were prudent enough to keep a low profile, and Capone's higher profile is probably one of the reasons he only spent a couple of years at the top of the racket. (He was still in his twenties!)

There really was an Elliot Ness, but his book The Untouchables was a pack of lies.  In the end, they could only convict Capone of tax evasion.  The ultimate lesson is that Prohibition was a foolish mistake which led to increased crime.  Its the same with the War on Drugs!

Movies seen repeatedly

The movie I've seen more than any other is probably the 1932 comedy Horse Feathers.  That's a Marx Brothers vehicle (one of the early ones when Zeppo was still in the group), set on a college campus.  They made it before the Production Code was introduced, so there's a lot of off-colour humour:  a scene in a speakeasy, and a sexy woman euphemistically known as the College Widow.  There are a lot of great lines like "The faculty can keep their seats.  There'll be no diving for this cigar!" Groucho plays college president Quincy Adams Wagstaff, and has a funny song that goes, "Whatever it is, I'm against it!"

I've seen The Maltese Falcon more often than I can count. (Yet it never loses its fearsome freshness!) And I've seen several musicals quite a bit, like Mary Poppins and Oliver!  The other week I saw the spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West for the fifth time!  Another western I've seen a lot is John Ford's The Searchers. And I've seen Citizen Kane quite a bit.  Next week I may see Stanley Kramer's slapstick comedy It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World for at least the fifth time.  I've seen Lawrence of Arabia a lot, but I sometimes leave in the intermission, before it gets gory!

Poetry

When I was young, we got the book The Golden Treasury of Poetry, illustrated by Joan Walsh Anglund.  I especially liked some of the long story poems, like Longfellow's "The Skeleton in Armor" and Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle."

When my brother was a schoolboy he entered a poetry contest and lost to a kid who plagiarized Tennyson's "The Eagle"!

I think my favourite poet is Robert Frost.  He'd tell these stories about country life in New England and somehow draw universal themes from them. (I have a few of his poems down by heart.) My book club will be reading his poems this autumn.  That's the right time of year for Frost!

Recently I've taken up translating some American poems into Scots dialect.  I guess it's to be closer to my Cape Breton Scottish mother since her death.  Free-form blank verse like Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg works best since you don't have to worry about stuff like rhyming so much.

I'd like to write poetry someday. (Please don't laugh.) It's story poems that I want to write, even though they've gone out of fashion in recent years.  I'm thinking of writing a poem about Cinderella, and eventually one about the ancient kings Cyrus and Croesus.

Unusual travel experiences

I can't think of a lot of unusual experiences while travelling.  There was the time we were in Lille, France, and my father asked a Frenchman for directions in his best French.  The Frenchman didn't understand him so Father kept repeating himself, but it turned out that the poor man was deaf!

I remember the time where we were in a Dutch bed & breakfast in Holland. (Bike paths there have their own traffic lights!) I noticed a low ceiling with an English sign saying, "Spare your head"!  I love those foreign idioms.

Back when I was seventeen we visited England just when I was reading the I, Claudius sequel Claudius the God. (I'm rereading it just now.) That novel includes an account of the Roman conquest of Britain, so I got to see some of the relevant places (like Hadrian's Wall). We visited Stonehenge around the time of the summer solstice, so there were a whole lot of hippies nearby, at a Merrie England festival!

And I remember this antique shop in the United States with a sign outside saying "Don't bring your garbage in here." They had enough junk already!