Weird

What can I say about weirdness?  I remember this skit on Sesame Street where Ernie was upside down and Bert was right side up, but Ernie poured a glass of milk and it flowed up into his cup, causing Bert to say, "That's weird, that's weird!" (My brother saw it too and pointed out that it was really Bert who was upside down, along with the camera!

The subject also brings to mind Weird Al Yankovic, who sings parody songs and keeps having hits after thirty years!  When I'm at karaoke I sometimes sing "Eat It," his parody of Michael Jackson's "Beat It."  He recently did a parody of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" with the semi-porn video, but his version was "Word Crimes," devoted to grammatical pedantry:  it's way better than the original!  I too am bugged by solecisms like people using "literally" just to give emphasis to hyperbole, when it really means, "This isn't hyperbole, it's serious." (Like a fashion critic saying, "Kim Kardashian is literally drowning in silk.")

It's funny, but theses days I never seem to see anything that strikes me as truly weird.  I feel like I've seen everything...

Raccoons

Remember the TV show The Honeymooners?  Jackie Gleason played bus driver Ralph Kramden, who belonged to a lodge called The Raccoons.  That was a really funny show!  I remember one episode where he'd sent in his tax form and the tax people want to speak to him about it.  He got really worried that he was going to get into legal trouble, but it turned out that he had just forgotten to sign his name!  Well, I made that same mistake one year.

I remember one episode where he ended up telling his wife, "You know why I get into all this trouble?  Because I've got a big mouth!"

Of course, the animated show The Flintstones was basically a Honeymooners ripoff.  But that show's writing wasn't half as good!

If you ever visit New York City, in front of this big bus terminal they have a statue of Gleason in his bus driver uniform with a plaque that says, "Ralph Kramden.  Bus driver.  Raccoon lodge treasurer.  Dreamer."

X-rated movies

The first X-rated movie I saw was Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange when I was seventeen.  It has a witty performance by Malcolm McDowell, but the futuristic satire is pretty heavy-handed, especially the scene with the social worker.  Someone told me he had to leave in the middle because in the rape scene where he's singing "Singin' in the Rain," the young men in the audience were singing along with him!

There's also Last Tango in Paris.  My sister saw it when it played our small New Brunswick hometown Sackville.  She recalls that the place was packed and everyone in her row kept giggling!

Do you like Vincent Price movies?  In America they're considered good kiddie fun, but in Britain they got rated X! (The British also gave Tom Jones an X rating, though it doesn't seem so dirty today.) Marlon Brando's biker movie The Wild One actually got banned in Britain for over a decade.

And then there are the movies that should have been rated X but escaped through token cuts.  Like Basic Instinct, which is Hollywood at its most cynical.  Or The Exorcist, which scared a lot of people, but when I finally saw it, it left me cold.  And there's also Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which I just didn't get.  The orgy scene seemed elaborately silly.  In the end I found it all pointless.

Pets

My brother used to have a dog called Theseus.  He was half-collie, I think, and really smart.  He recognized several words, including "stick." When he heard the word "stick," that meant to him that someone would take him outdoors to play with a stick and have fun, so he'd get really excited in that canine way.  It was tempting to say "stick" to him just to watch him react, like Pavlov's dog drooling at the sound of the bell. (The word "walk" had a similar effect on him.)

I also recall that he liked being scratched behind his ears.  And if you drew your finger along his muzzle, that would make him sleepy.

My sister-in-law's friend had a dog called Lola.  Occasionally they'd be visiting at the same time as me.  Lola would always respond to my presence in the same way:  she'd bark angrily at me for a couple of minutes, then she'd settle down at start licking my arms all over. (I guess I taste good!)

Josh Billings wrote, "Money can buy a good dog, but it can't buy the wag in his tail!"

George Carlin wondered, "What do dogs do on their day off?  They can't lie around, that's their job!"

I wish I had my camera...

I'm not big on taking pictures.  The way I look at it, it's enough to preserve a sight in your head.  I'd rather record things verbally, like with my blog or this memoir group.

When Laura Ingalls Wilder was young her sister went blind, so she was always describing to her what she saw in words.  That was good training for her as a writer.  My mother told me a lot about her youth, yet after her death I felt there was still a lot I hadn't learned about her.

When I had a paper diary instead of a blog, I used to write about my dreams a lot.  That's another good exercise for a writer, because writing about a dream means taking various, diffuse sensations and bringing them together into a narrative, to the extent that you can.

My big hero is Samuel Pepys.  He managed to describe his life and activities in an authentic, unaffected way.  The National Post used to reprint his diary one day at a time, which is a good way to read it since that's the same pace at which he wrote it.

Comic duos

Good comedy never dates.  Look at Laurel and Hardy!  They started out in silent movies, but unlike most silent comedians they had a smooth tradition to sound.  They made some really classic shorts, including one where they were chimney sweeps in a mad scientist's house. (In the end Hardy got changed into a chimp!) The butler looked at them and muttered, "Somewhere an electric chair is waiting!"

The made a really funny movie called Sons of the Desert, where they sneaked off to a convention while their wives thought they were going to Hawaii for Hardy's health, but the boat they were supposed to be on sank! (Of course, The Flintstones stole the idea.) And another really funny one was Way out West, where they came to a frontier town to give an heiress the deed to a gold mine, but gave it to the wrong girl and had to steal it back...

Are there any funny duos today?  I like the movies Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson have made together, Zealander and Starsky and Hutch.  Peter Cook and Dudley Moore made some funny movies like Bedazzled.  And there was Wayne and Shuster on the CBC.

French language and culture

I come from the officially bilingual province of New Brunswick.  When I was in school we started learning French in Grade 2.  Back then they had more of a "natural" approach to teaching it:  I recall that we used the same textbook year after year in the middle grades. (The first dialogue started with the words "To connais Marcel Martin?") It wasn't till Grade 8 that we seriously started learning to conjugate verbs.

I remember the CBC show Chez Helene, a 15-minute show that came on just before--or was it after?--The Friendly Giant. (It seemed to be a female counterpart to that all-male show.) There was a mouse puppet called Susie, and they sang songs like "Il eat un petit navire." I don't think I learned much French from it.

When I was young, I read some French comic books. (You could find a lot of that in New Brunswick libraries.) My favourite was the series about Asterix, a short Gaul who drank a magic potion like Popeye's spinach, and beat up Roman soldiers.  In one adventure he saw an aqueduct being built and said, "The Romans are ruining the countryside with their new construction!" I also came across Tintin, and Petzi, a little bear cub who sailed a boat around the world with his friends:  the original was in Danish.

When I was in London, England, twenty years ago, I was making small talk with a Frenchman and mentioned that Canada had bilingual food labels so I knew that the French for bran flakes is "flocons de son." He said that in France they're called "les bran flakes"!