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!