SHOW ME A HERO

Bourgeois homeowner: "They don't live like us!"--Show Me a Hero

Last evening I got the book about Genghis Khan at the Lillian Smith library.  I'd gone to the Maria Shchuka library in the afternoon, but it turned out that I was looking for the wrong book there!

This morning we tried to make up for the choir rehearsal that got cancelled last week. (We were going to do it on Wednesday, but that fell through.) It took place at Ashleigh United church, but only half a dozen people could make it, and I was half an hour late!  Oh well, better than nothing.

Tonight I went to a Karaoke Meetup at BarPlus.  There were 17 people there, so I only had time to sing two songs.  I've developed the habit of making B.J. Thomas' "I Just Can't Help Believing" my first song. (If you ask me, a better title would be "More Than Just a Day.") Someone was singing a Rammstein heavy metal song with German lyrics!

We're now watching the excellent David Simon-Paul Haggis miniseries Show Me a Hero.  It's the true story of the young mayor of the New York suburb Yonkers, who was elected in 1988 and  immediately faced with a crisis when a judge forced the city to stop stalling on an unpopular plan to desegregate the city by building low-income housing in white middle-class areas. (His upset victory resulted from making an issue of the incumbent mayor voting against appealing an earlier order.) The cast has a lot of familiar faces, like Alfred Molina and Jim Belushi and Winona Ryder and Catherine Keener.

Now that the weather's getting warmer, I've started going for short walks in the evening, just to get out of the house. (After being online a while, I feel like either doing that or going to bed for a nap!)

You can't handle the truth

As a principle, I try to be truthful.  I'm willing to make an exception for unreasonable people.  I guess I'd lie to the Nazis about the people I was hiding from them.  There have been a couple of occasions when I lied to my mother, because if I'd told her the truth she'd just have caused a fuss and made things worse.  But I try to avoid it.

I don't believe in hiding unpleasant truths from children. (They can adjust more quickly than we often think!) There's no use in telling kids that crime doesn't pay when it sometimes does.  That's putting didacticism ahead of truth.

Specious half-truths bother me.  Like when people insist that the Iraq invasion wasn't Hillary Clinton's fault.  It's true that the White House took the lead, and might well have got their way anyhow, but Mrs. Clinton served as a useful enabler.  People will say that she was just voting to provide the option, which wasn't supposed to be used until the United Nations agreed.  I say, everyone knew that the President would interpret a yes vote as a green light for invasion and any accompanying qualifications were just "face-saving." Mrs. Clinton couldn't have been naive enough to think otherwise, and I think she was voting yes simply to avoid looking "soft." (Typical enabler!)

A lucky streak

I try not to think about luck too much.  Either you're lucky at a particular moment, or you aren't.  I think it was Carol Burnett who said that it isn't what life gives you that's important, but what you do with it.  But I have to admit that there were times when I've had good luck.

For example, I was lucky to pass my Ph.D. examination.  It was a very difficult process and after I did my seventh draft they told me it was "unexaminable." I had to demand an examination anyway, which happened after three more drafts.  I ended up feeling like in Easy Rider when Dennis Hopper said "We did it!" but Peter Fonda said "We blew it."

And I'm lucky that a certain Meetup group I was in made an event of this memoir group. (I don't think they did it again.) It was from that event that I discovered the group and made a lot of friends.  Imagine if I'd been busy with something that day!

I remember a joke from when I was young where a guy parachuted out of an airplane but the parachute broke, but he fell toward a haystack, but there was the sharp end of a pitchfork sticking out, but he missed the pitchfork, but he missed the haystack!

Talk shows

One of the only things I miss from the 1980s is Phil Donahue's talk show.  He had on a wide range of guests, people like Vladimir Posner, a Russian who defended the Soviet system.  I first became familiar with contrarian journalist Christopher Hitchens from seeing him on the show.  I especially liked the earlier years when the show was filmed in Chicago and the audience felt like middle Americans!

I also watched David Letterman's late-night talk show back them.  The show started as 12:35 A.M., and I lived in the Maritimes so we didn't get it till 1:30!  While waiting for it to come on I'd watch the CBC late show where they showed old Warner Brothers movies.  Most of them were short enough that they'd be over by the time Letterman came on, but I didn't see the end of G-Men or Dark Victory of The Life of Emile Zola.

Does anyone remember Mike Douglas' talk show?  I once saw a show where his guests included both six-foot supermodel Margaux Hemingway and the members of Monty Python!

Life-changing event

This event didn't exactly change my life, but I remember it strongly.  Just over twenty years ago I spent eight months in London, England, researching my Ph.D. thesis on the Chinese treaty port of Chongqing and the British community there.  Most of my research was at the Public Records Office in Kew, which meant a long commute.  But I also found some stuff at the School of Oriental and African studies, which was a lot closer.

I stayed at Goodenough College in Bloomsbury.  It's a residence for graduate students from all over the world pursuing their studies in London, so I met a wide range of people.  In the later months I really got involved with activities, helping to manage the video club, doing spadework for the recycling program and singing in the choir.

The College has two main residences.  William Goodenough House (where I was staying) had a lot of married people, some with children, so it was like Chongqing's missionary community.  London House was mostly single people, so it was like Chongqing's foreign business community.

I also went to a lot of museums and saw about ten plays.  I've visited London several times since then. (I like Toronto but I love London!)

Just before leaving I ate Chinese food and got a fortune cookie that said, "You will go on a delightful adventure." Can't disagree.

October

October is the time of autumn, of harvests and iridescent leaves.  When I was growing up in New Brunswick it was the time of Indian summer after the early frosts. (I rather like the morning haze of Indian summer, but it's harder to notice in the big city.) It ends with Halloween, which I lost interest in when I was just twelve!

For me today, October is the start of Tuesday night rehearsals for the Toronto City Opera, whose chorus I sing in.  I live within walking distance of the Bickford Centre, and in October the weather is sometimes good enough  for me to walk there!  I always enjoy the first months when we're just concentrating on learning the music. (In the new year we're learning our movements onstage, which isn't quite as fun:  I start worrying about all the mistakes you can make!)

October was also the time of the October Crisis in 1970. (I remember a kid in school telling the joke: "When did the alphabet have only 23 letters?  When they couldn't find the FLQ!") And it's the time of the October War in the Middle East in 1973, which led to the OPEC boycott and the Energy Crisis, which I wrote about last week.  And it's the time of Oktoberfest, but I don't drink beer.

Dolls

I don't have much to say about dolls, being a boy and all, so I'll write some more about puppets.  I remember the CBC puppet show The Friendly Giant, which would start with Bob Homme saying "Look up, look way up..." Behind the closing credits the castle would close its gate, the moon would come out, and a cow would jump over it.  My mother wrote to the show asking them to sing the Newfoundland folk song "I's the B'y That Builds the Boat," and they did!

It was followed by the French show Chez Helene, featuring a puppet mouse called Susie.  The Friendly Giant had all male characters, so this show was all-female for counterbalance.  I didn't learn much French from it, but I do remember them singing "Il Etait Un Petit Navire." (Decades later on Mad Men Don Draper's Quebec wife was singing that song to his kids!)

The other week I had a dream where I was back in school and had to improvise a puppet show, and did so successfully.  I had a Popeye puppet and ended up singing "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man!"

Oil

I remember the energy crisis when I was eleven.  In the local newspaper some utility published tips on how to save energy, and they ended it with "P.S.:  You'll save money too!" I remember there were long lineups at gas stations, but that was really due to hysteria:  people thought that gas was about to run out and wanted to hoard.

I also remember seeing a skit on The Carol Burnett Show about a couple of old folks waiting in a gas line.  At the end the husband said to the wife, "Do you still know how to pucker?...  Maybe you could siphon the gas!" (That show had some good writers.)

In the long term, if you ask me, the energy crisis was the best thing that ever happened to the developed world.  We got serious about reducing fuel consumption, if only for a while.  In 1974 the U.S. Congress considered rationing gasoline, and was actually serious enough to start printing ration cards, though the White House resisted successfully.

It's a shame that the lessons of the energy crisis got unlearned during the 1980s! (A whole lot went wrong under Ronald Reagan's presidency.) Today climate change has become too serious to ignore because we let fuel waste and inefficiency return.  Our grandchildren are likely to pay a heavy price.

Swearing

I'm not the type who swears a lot.  Some comedians, like Andrew Dice Clay, make a big routine of every second word being unrepeatable, but it doesn't seem so funny to me. (Dirty nursery rhymes?  How old are you, eleven?)

Which reminds me of a joke from long ago.  A father said to his son, "There are two words I don't want to ever hear you saying!  One is 'swell' and the other is 'lousy.'" The son said, "OK, but what are they?" (My mother told me that one.)

I have to admit that George Carlin's routine sometimes makes me smile.  I'm talking about his "The seven words you can't say on TV." Of course, everything he said was funny, like the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman ("The temperature today is 68 degrees at the airport, which is pretty stupid, because I don't know anyone who lives at the airport!") and "Stuff" and Baseball vs. football" and "It's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe in it!" He got pretty cynical in his later years.

When I was little Ann Remy was the host of a local TV station's Saturday morning kiddie show Miss Ann.  Years later she was interviewing my sister Moira on TV after the latter returned from a stay in Russia.  Moira says that during the commercial breaks Miss Ann was telling dirty jokes!

I know quite a few dirty jokes, if you ever want to hear them.  Remember "Mommy, Mommy" jokes? ("Mommy, Mommy, why would pirates hide their treasure in the zoo?" "Shut up, kid, and search the lion pit!")

I once saw a cartoon that appeared in The New Yorker around 1930.  It showed a mother and daughter at the dinner table and was captioned with this exchange: "That's broccoli, dear." "I still say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it!"

Wildlife

When I was in the Wolf Cubs, we had a Cubmaster who worked for the Canadian Wildlife Service.  One time a flamingo flew into our area by mistake, and they were taking care of him before bringing him south.  He let us see the flamingo, but from a distance.  I also remember the "Hinterland Who's Who" ads that the CWS put on TV, with that flute melody at the beginning.

Or you can see quasi-wildlife at the zoo.  The London Zoo is a place I've often visited when in that city.  It was the original "zoo," short for "zoological gardens." What not everyone knows is that the word is properly pronounced with an extra syllable, like "zohological." (It goes back to the Greek alphabet having no letter equivalent to "H.") I once saw a zookeeper there talking to a monkey!

One thing to see at the Zoo is a statue of Amrika Paul.  She was a little girl in the 1960s dying of leukaemia, who went to England for unsuccessful treatment.  In the short time she had left she found great comfort from her zoo visits.  After her death her family stayed in England and became really wealthy in the Anglo-Indian trade. (Her father even got appointed to the House of Lords!) Years later, when the Zoo was in a financial crisis and in danger of closing, her family made a huge contribution that helped keep it going.

If you see a zoo animal running in a circle, that means he's stir crazy.