My bucket list

What do I want to do before I die?  There are a few places I'd like to travel to.  For some reason I want to visit Greenland someday.  And I want to visit Disney land!

Also, I want to visit Spain just to see the Prado art gallery.  It has a lot of famous paintings by artists like Velazquez and Goya.  One of them is Goya's painting of Spain's Royal Family toward the end of the 18th century, before the French Revolution turned all Europe upside down.

One French critic said that the painting looks like the corner baker and his family after they won the lottery!  When you look at it, you get the impression that the Queen was the one really in charge of the place.  Not because she was any smarter than the King, but just because she had a stronger will. (Some husbands depend on that.) But something about the way she holds her children humanizes her in an un-royal sort of way.  Familiarity breeds contempt, and there's something unsparingly familiar about the painting.

It's even more fascinating when you know the back story.  The Queen got her husband to appoint a scoundrelly young favourite of hers Prime Minister (they were rumoured to be lovers!), contributing to the nation's decline.  Napoleon would later oust the King and put his own brother on the Spanish throne, leading to years of occupation and guerrilla warfare.  The two sons in the painting would ultimately plunge Spain into several destructive wars! (The older son changed the rules of succession just a few years before his death so that his daughter would inherit the throne instead of his brother, and the younger son didn't take it sitting down!)

I really want to see that painting in person.

Old photos

I once saw a photo of a couple of ancestors from about a century ago, wearing silly hats and playing the fool.  There's something very humanizing about people from the past looking silly.  I was wondering, a century from now will people be looking at photos of us and wondering who we were and what our lives were like?

I like looking at really early photographs from the age of daguerrotypes.  People seemed to have a more genuine look in such pictures simply because they hadn't learned to pose for the camera. (Smiling for the camera only appeared in the late 19th century, when exposure times became shorter so people didn't have to sit still long.) In that PBS documentary about the Civil War, I especially liked the photographs by people like Matthew Brady.

Just today I saw a photo of a beatnik party from 1960 or so.  But it was a color photo, which didn't quite seem right to me.  People like beatniks I just associate more with black & white photos. (It's the same with photos of World War II.) And I find that sexy women seem sexier in black & white than in color.  I guess black & white seems more focused.

Puppets

I remember watching the Muppets on Sesame Street.  My favourite was Bert, whom Bernie was always making a fool of.  And I liked Muppet specials like Hey, Cinderella! which featured Splurge, a twelve-foot purple master who loved radishes.

My favourite scene in The Sound of Music is the "Lonely Goatherd" number where they're putting on a puppet show.  When I was young we had neighbour who was into handicrafts.  She made us several puppets, including one of Pinocchio.

I've read the book Pinocchio.  In the introduction C. Collodi writes, "This is the story of... 'A king!' my young readers will say.  It is not the story of a king, it is the story of a puppet." The original story is pretty cruel, with one scene where the Fox and the Cat beat Pinocchio to get the money he has hidden in his mouth, and leave him hanging from a tree!  And it isn't always consistent:  when he first sees the talking cricket (who's more judgemental here than in the Disney version), Pinocchio flattens him with a hammer, later the cricket appears as a ghost, eventually he's alive again.  But it isn't boring.

Parks

My favourite part of a city tends to be its parks.  Whenever I visit London, I'm sure to go to Leicester Square and Primrose Hill and Hampstead Heath.  And what would New York City be without Central Park?

Toronto has a lot of fine parks, including some I've hardly ever visited.  I live near Cedarvale and Nordheimer ravines.  You can walk through them and forget that you're in the big city.  I like walking under the bridges and hearing the distant traffic on Spadina Road or Bathurst Street.  If I walk to the southern end of Nordheimer Ravine, I'm already halfway to the downtown!

My brother John met his girlfriend Kathrine when they were walking dogs in High Park.  They also have an allotment there which they use to grow vegetables.  I should visit High Park more often.

Bird watching

Veronica: "Have you ever seen a nuthatch?" Archie: "No, I wasn't around when Jughead was born!"

I grew up in Sackville, near the southeast corner of New Brunswick.  That area is close to a lot of bird migratory routes, so it's a good place for bird watching.  The local university has had a bird watcher's club.

Birding doesn't interest me so much.  I remember one spring when four robins appeared on our lawn and my mother called them Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, after the recent sex comedy movie.  And there was a time when I identified a bird on our lawn as a flicker, from an illustrated guide. (Flickers are cousins of woodpeckers.) And there were a lot of seagulls around our cottage near Northumberland Strait.

There was also the time when we had some pheasants in our back yard. (In our garden we'd grown some corn in cobs too small for us to eat, so we left it out for them.) The male pheasant has fancier feathers than the female, which always seemed odd to me.  Shouldn't the females be the fancy-looking ones?

Did you know that Ian Fleming got the name James Bond from the author of a guide to Caribbean bird watching?

Making a snowman

I like the kind of snow that's close to rain and comes down in big, moist flakes.  That's the sort of snow that's suitable for snowballs and snowmen.  Yet I like just the feel of it as it comes down.

But it doesn't last long.  Either it'll melt or it'll freeze overnight, in which latter case it turns into icy snow, my least favourite type.  As the Robert Frost poem goes, "Nothing gold can stay."

Too bad that this sort of snow often falls in April, when people are tired of snow and waiting for spring to come. (You appreciate it more when it falls in the autumn.) In New Brunswick it sometimes snows in May!

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird has a funny scene where the kids build a snowman. (Since this is Alabama, they have to make its core from potting soil and coat it with a layer of snow.) The snowman looks a lot like a male neighbour, so their father gives it a woman's hat so the neighbour won't be offended!  Later a female neighbour calls it a hermaphrodite.

Hans Christian Andersen wrote another wonderful story, "The Snowman." It's about an outdoor snowman who looks inside a window, sees a hot stove and feels an odd love for it!  After he melts it turns out that his backbone was made from the stove's coal shovel.  In a way, we're all snowmen living out a few days and looking in the window...

Movie epics

One of my favourite movie epics is David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia.  It was one of Peter O'Toole's first movies, but he never outdid this role!  Mind you, it's so long that I don't always stay to the end.  A couple of times I left when they started blowing up trains.  And I go to the lobby during the scene with Jose Ferrer as the kinky Turkish officer.

It helps to see this kind of movie on a big screen.  Back in 1982 I saw the Warren Beatty epic Reds at the huge University cinema, before they tore it down. (The Eglinton was also a good place to see epics.) A couple of months ago I saw Spartacus and Giant on nice big screens at the Lightbox cinema.

The Japanese make some good epics.  Akira Kurosawa raised the samurai action movie to an epic scale with The Seven Samurai, and also did Throne of Blood and Ran, epic adaptations of Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear.

Some TV miniseries manage an epic scale too.  There's The Jewel in the Crown, about the British in India, and the Larry McMurtry western Lonesome Dove.  And I also enjoyed the series Rome.

T-shirts

T-shirts don't particularly appeal to me. (I'm not the Marlon Brando type.) But I recall that when we went to the C.N.E. 40 years ago I bought a tee with a picture of Asterix, the short Gaul in the French comic book who drank a magic potion, got super-strong and beat up Roman soldiers. (His catchphrase is "These Romans are nuts!") In my mid-teens I read a whole lot of Asterix books in their original French, with the help of a dictionary.  They're really funny:  writer Rene Goscinny and artist Albert Oderzo were a brilliant team.  I remember one moment when Asterix sees them building one of those Roman aqueducts and says, "The Romans are ruining the countryside with their new construction!"

The '70s was the golden age of fancy tees.  I recall that a lot of people were wearing tees showing Robert Crumb's Mr. Natural, with the caption "Just passin' thru." There were also Fonzie tees.

Around this time we went to a T-shirt store called Crazy David's, where you could get them customized. (The store had a poster saying "Crazy David loves you!") My brother John was a big fan of Monty Python, which just then was getting a cult following on PBS. (I never really got it.) So John got them to make him a tee with the John Cleese line "Wot's all this then?"

When the Pope visited Canada in 1984, my brothers considered wearing Martin Luther tees!