Monday, June 27, 2016

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!

Friday, June 24, 2016

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.

Monday, June 20, 2016

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.

Friday, June 17, 2016

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!"

Monday, June 13, 2016

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!

Saturday, June 11, 2016

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!)

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

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...

Friday, June 3, 2016

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?)