Handwriting

My late mother was an amateur graphologist. (That's a handwriting analyst.) I was often showing her the signatures of famous people and asking her to analyze them.  I think gay men often have a dragging G-loop.  Charles Manson's handwriting kept running off the edge of the page, which shows that he didn't recognize limits.

A psychiatrist analyzed the handwriting of movie star Montgomery Clift and said it showe the most mixed-up person he'd ever dealt with!

I've shown my handwriting to a couple of experts.  They said it showed that I have a generous nature, I live in the now, I'm proud of my family and origins, I need to be with people and appreciated, I'm an observer and something of a perfectionist. (I often correct my writing.)

For me this group is an opportunity to write by hand every week, which is sort of a relaxing change from all the typing I do on the computer.  They say that schools may stop teaching cursive handwriting because it's obsolete in the age of the computer.  Sort of like they used to teach calligraphy in the age of the fountain pen but stopped when the ball point pen took over.  I think that would be a shame.

Sunset

I've seen quite a few sunsets in my life.  I wish I'd seen more sunrises, but that requires waking up early.  My sister Moira gets up really early. (There have been times when she woke up before I got to sleep!)

Did you know that the sky is blue because of the dust in the air?  And sunsets are read because the sunlight comes at a slant and passes through more air, hence more dust.

In tropical countries sunsets are really short because the sun takes a course through the sky close to the azimuth (a line perpendicular to the horizon), while here its course is more slanted.  On the other hand, in the north on summer nights you'll get a really long evening twilight followed closely by a really long morning twilight.

Anyone remember the instrumental hit "Canadian Sunset"?  We had it on the easy listening record James Last and His Musical World.  And one of my favorite songs in Fiddler on the Roof (one of my favorite musicals) is "Sunrise, Sunset." For a wedding song, it has a surprisingly elegaic tone!

A basket of deplorables

I'm a bit sore about the U.S. election.  For people like me who supported Bernie Sanders, it's a huge temptation to say, "I told you so!" Back in the spring Sanders' supporters pointed to polls that kept showing Sanders leading Republicans like Donald Trump by wider margins than Hillary Clinton did.  All the Clintonites could say to that was that such polls were unreliable.

Yes, I do believe that Sanders would have beaten Trump decisively.  He had greater support than Clinton among the crucial bloc of independent voters:  indeed, he probably would have won the nomination itself if key states hadn't excluded independent voters from their Democratic primary.  And he likely would have got a much higher turnout, especially among younger voters.

Sanders narrowly lost the nomination (among other bad reasons) because too many Democrats said, "he's not One of Us!" Yet at key moments like the vote on invading Iraq, Sanders proved to be a more reliable supporter of Democratic policy than Clinton!  The Democrats chose the wrong moment to be clannish.

When a Cassandra gets proved right, it's a cold comfort indeed.

Dreaming about the past

I sometimes dream of being back in high school or junior high.  Some of the time I'll remember that I'm finished with that and start feeling that I don't belong there.  After seeing the trailer for Silence of the Lambs--not the movie, just the trailer--I had a nightmare where I was back in school and the principal was Hannibal Lecter! [Sure, I mentioned this a few weeks ago, but I felt like mentioning it again!]

I also dream about our old home in Sackville, N.B., which we sold twenty years ago.  In some of my dreams we're visiting the new owner, a friendly French woman who doesn't really exist.  Sometimes it's May and I'm about to start planting our backyard vegetable garden.  Other times it's the end of August and time to return to Toronto, but my parents are procrastinating on the return.  In one dream, the whole street was inundated by a flood!

I also dream about London, England, where I lived for eight months two decades ago.  There are several museums I love there, and I often dream of visiting a non-existent museum that's an amalgam of them.

Occasionally I dream about visiting Russia, which is odd because I've never been there, nor do I have any conscious wish to go there!

Shopping malls

I sometimes dream about shopping malls.  They were a big deal when I was little, though not so much today.  There's a website that tells you all about closed shopping malls and what's happened to their spaces!

I remember when every shopping mall had a bookstore.  That would usually be the place I frequented most.  Lately there have been fewer of them because of all the shakeouts and consolidations.

today many malls are under pressure because so much stuff is being bought online.  I suppose you could look at the internet as a virtual supermall.  But I'm happier when I can see and touch what I'm buying, and have staff in the flesh to deal with.

Someone said that mini-malls are in danger of disappearing.  I'll believe that when I see it.  Something about the mini-mall makes me recall my small-town youth.

The end

My life doesn't have that many dramatic endings.  I remember twenty years ago when we sold our old house in Sackville, N.B.  By that time we were already living in Toronto, but when my parents returned to close the deal, I went along too.  The place was pretty empty, but I did go there one last time.

Some movies have great endings.  There's The Searchers, where John Wayne is outside, seen from the inside through a doorway, and the door closes on him.  And there's Goodfellas, where ex-gangster Ray Liotta picks up his morning newspaper and remembers Joe Pesci shooting people. (The background music is the Sid Vicious version of "My Way"!) Also, there's City Lights, where the formerly blind flower girl realizes that destitute tramp Charlie Chaplin was her benfactor.  Or Citizen Kane, where the sled gets incinerated without the reporters learning it's the key to their mystery.

And there are some good book endings, like when Huckleberry Finn mentions that Aunt Sally wants to adopt and civilize him as the Widow Douglas was trying to do at the start of the book, and says, "I can't stand it.  I been there before." (Someone said that a comedy story is about going from A to B back to A.)

Guns

Guns aren't my favorite subject.  I'm glad I live in Canada rather than the United States, where too many people see guns as the embodiment of their freedom.  It goes back to the Second Amendment, yet its language speaks of the need for "a well-regulated militia." Not just regulated, but well regulated!  Government in the U.S. clearly haven't been regulating their "militias" well.

I've never got into hunting.  It's different with Inuit, say, who have always hunted for their food and clothes. (I'll admit that eating game you've killed is no worse than eating meat from a factory farm.) But I don't like the idea of taking even an animal's life just so you can call yourself a rugged outdoors man.  Besides, my ears are too sensitive for gunfire.

On the animated TV show South Park, there's a character called Uncle Jimbo, who's a hunting enthusiast.  When he sees an animal, he yells "He's coming right for us!" so they can say that they shot it in self-defense.

There's a really funny movie, A Christmas Story, about a kid who wants a Red Ryder B.B. gun for Christmas.  The grownups keep warning him, "You'll shoot your eye out!"

I saw an editorial-page cartoon once where someone said "I'm sick and tired of hunters being depicted as pigs and morons!" and someone else said "The pigs and morons don't like it either."

The Wizard of Oz

When I was little we had a younger children's version of L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz  published by Random House. (They also did versions of Grimm's fairy tales and Alice in Wonderland.) Now that I'm older and have read the full version, I appreciate its brilliance.  One interesting thing about it is Baum's Germanic influences:  "munchkin" probably comes from "Menschen" (German for "little people"), and Glinda the good witch must get her name from the Wagnerian heroine Sieglinde.

I first saw the Judy Garland movie when I was not quite nine.  The part that really impressed me was the black and white opening sequence, especially the storm.  The book and movie are both rather brilliant, but in different ways. (C. Collodi's Pinocchio is the same.) I particularly like the Scarecrow's goofy dancing.

For all its brilliance, I have to admit that the movie has a lot of minor flaws.  In the scene where Dorothy meets the Scarecrow, she's reached a fork in the Yellow Brick Road and doesn't know whether to go left or right, leading to a conversation with him.  Then they head out to the right (or maybe the left?) with no explanation for why they chose that direction! (The screenwriters created a problem but didn't solve it.) And the scene in the wicked witch's castle is pretty lame:  they even threw in the "drop the chandelier" cliche.

There's also the black musical version The Wiz.  The movie version made the bewildering mistake of casting 40-year-old Diana Ross as Dorothy (they thought they needed a "star") and Richard Pryor's wasted in the title role, but I did like the colorful sets and the supporting cast, including Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow.  I want to see the recent TV version.  And I've also seen the odd stage musical Wicked, which presents the Wicked Witch of the West as an animal-loving antiheroine.