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.