Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin's comedy always had a melodramatic element. (Buster Keaton made purer comedy.) He grew up in a London slum and became the most famous man in the world in his twenties, like the Beatles.  He was one of silent cinema's great artists.  He was also a fine composer, writing musical scores for his films.

I saw several Chaplin movies for the first time when I was twelve and the showed them on the CBC on Sunday nights.  The Gold Rush and City Lights and Modern Times are amazing.  His sound movie Limelight isn't as great, but it does have a great moment where the music hall star brings down the house, comes out to take a bow but sees an empty theatre. (A succinct conveying of becoming a has-been.)

I saw one early film where Chaplin's stunts included running up what almost looked like a vertical wall!  He must have kept very fit.

Chaplin directed A Woman of Paris, a silent movie he didn't act in (except for a tiny cameo as a porter).  It isn't well known but I found it compelling.  I want to see it again someday.

Robert Downey Jr. played the title role in the biographical movie Chaplin.  The film itself is rather pedestrian, but Downey's performance is uncanny!

Nostalgia

"Nostalgia isn't what it used to be"--Simone Signoret

Ever watch the TV show Mad Men?  That series reminds me of everything that was wrong with the early 1960s:  the littering, casual sexism and racism. (One character says, "I have nothing against Negroes, but I worry about my car.") Yet while watching it I still feel the pull of nostalgia for that time.  Go figure.

I grew up in a small town and one thing I miss is the grey hoarfrost on the front lawn in the early autumn.  I also miss the big vegetable garden we had in the back yard!  I grew up in southeastern New Brunswick, where nearby tides are among the highest in the world.  I remember how after spring tides in March big pieces of dirty ice would wash up on the tidal flats!

I don't feel much nostalgia for the past, though I miss Phil Donahue's talk show.  And I have a soft spot for the cheap local TV shows of the past, since everything is so slick these days.  And I remember when they delivered milk in bottles, and on an early winter morning the milkman would leave frozen bottles where the ice at the top would form a little hill!

Curls

I can't think of much to say about curls.  My hair's always been straight and I couldn't imagine it any other way.  Curling is a sport I've never played.  I've eaten curly fries a few times.  I remember Paul Robeson's song "My Curly Headed Baby."

And there was the time that these hillbillies took Rocky and Bullwinkle to see Devil Dan, who turned out to be Boris Badunov, pointed a rifle at them and sang, "On top of Old Smoky, all covered with curls, I'm shooting with rifle at mooses and squirrels!"

One of the Three Stooges was Curly.  And one of the first movies I ever saw was The Three Stooges Meet Hercules.  By this time Curly was dead and had been replaced by Curly Joe.  The plot had something to do with a time machine taking them back to ancient Greece, and there was a chariot chase at the end. (I also saw Snow White and the Three Stooges on my local TV station's Saturday morning kiddie movie.)

Cartoons

I loved Warner Brothers cartoons when I was young! (Still do.) When I was a kid my favorite Warner Brothers character was Bugs Bunny, but as a grownup I prefer Daffy Duck, especially the curmudgeonly later character. (My favorite Daffy Duck cartoon is Duck Amuck, where the cartoonist keeps changing the scenery on him!) My favorite Warner Brothers cartoon of all is One Froggy Evening, in which a man finds a singing frog but gets nothing but grief.

My favorite Disney animated feature is Lady and the Tramp, which is romantic in a nice '50s way.  I don't care so much for the later Disneys:  the only part of The Little Mermaid I thought truly worthy of Hans Christian Andersen's story was the melody of her voice trapped in the bottle!

I like quite a few Japanese anime. (Twenty years ago the series Sailor Moon got me into it.) There's a really compelling anime, Grave of the Fireflies, about two Japanese orphan children trying to survive in the last days of World War II.  The whole world should see it!

I have never been in a...

I've never been in a helicopter or an airship. (I imagine they're pretty noisy anyway.) I've never been in a submarine, but I don't want to do that! And I've never been in a desert or a jungle.

I've never been in jail, but I'm young yet.

I've been to China and Japan, but I've never been to India, not that it interests me that much.  Is seeing the Taj Mahal in person so much better than looking at pictures of it?

One place I haven't gone to that I do want to go to is the Prado art museum in Madrid, Spain.  That place is on my bucket list:  Velazquez and Goya are two of my favorite artists. (Another place on my list is Greenland!)

I haven't been to Russia either. (My sister Moira spent about six months there just at the time of the Chernobyl accident.) Lately I've been having this repeating dream of visiting Russia, which is odd because when I'm awake I don't have any conscious desire to go there!

The Trans-Siberian Railway does appeal to me slightly, as does St. Petersburg's Hermitage art museum. (Kandinsky is another artist I like.) I saw this documentary about it a while ago that talked about how the paintings were removed for safekeeping during World War II and the tour guides would continue to show people around, pointing to the empty frames and describing the pictures that had been in them!  How Russian can you get?

Surprise

I'll admit that Donald Trump's election surprised me.  It wasn't that I had so much confidence in Hillary Clinton--I'd just given up doubting.  It's like this psychologist I knew who was a Croatian Serb before fleeing to Canada.  She told me that when the war broke out nobody could believe it:  they all thought someone would stop it!  It only takes a few true believers to ruin everything.

One cliche in TV and movies that annoys me is people pulling a surprise on you just because it wouldn't be as dramatic if you were forewarned.  For example, if someone disappears and gets reported dead, but later turns out to be alive after all, he won't phone ahead before returning to you; he'll just show up unannounced. (See Ben Affleck in Pearl Harbor, directed by cliche-master Michael Bay.)

I remember this cartoon where Bugs Bunny served the Tasmanian Devil something called "wild turkey surprise." As he served it he sang this song "Atsamadda for you?" in an Italian accent.  The Tasmanian Devil travelled in this cyclone that made all the other animals run away.  I've read that real-life Tasmanian devils are endangered because of an epidemic of this cancer of the snout.

Gratitude

What am I grateful for?  That I live in a society generous enough to support freeloaders like me.  That my nation is one of the world's more tolerant multicultural societies. (I'd hate to imagine what it would be like living in the U.S.A.!) That my city has a good transit system--for its minimal financial support--a good library system, good parks and a lot of Meetup groups.

I'm grateful for friends, whom I appreciate because I didn't get a lot of them when I was young.  And for the internet, which ensures that I never get bored.  And for foreign languages, which ensure that I can always have something new to learn.

I'm grateful for two parents who set a good example for me. (I really appreciate my mother's love now that she's no longer with us.) I'm grateful for people who inspire me, like the kooky genius Mohandas K. Gandhi and the politician Bernie Sanders.

And I'm grateful for music and poetry and classic movies, and Daffy Duck and Uncle Scrooge and Mark Twain and London, England, and heroes. (My idea of a hero is anyone who gets the work done, like foot soldiers and nurses and mothers.)

Cemeteries

When I was growing up in Sackville, N.B., we lived not far from the town cemetery.  I hardly ever went into it.  There's someone buried there with the name Hiawatha Dixon.  I also noticed a small marker saying "Sailor."

Here in Toronto, I've visited the Mt. Pleasant Cemetery several times.  If you keep your eyes open you can notice some interesting things there:  in one corner I saw the small headstone of CBC journalist Norman DePoe.  I read somewhere that there's an eccentric buried there whose only stone is an unmarked boulder!

In Palermo, Sicily, they have a monastery full of mummies from the 17th through 19th centuries.  What's really creepy about it is that you can tell when they lived because they're still wearing the same clothes!

In India the Parsee sect, who go back to Iranian followers of Zoroaster, have high towers where they put out their dead for the vultures to eat. (They do that in Tibet too.) I must admit that's eco-friendly!

In China some people have a "tree burial" where they cremate you and plant a tree over your ashes.  I think that's what I'd like done with my body. (I like the idea of having a living memorial.) I have nothing against worms, except that they work slowly, while fire can reduce you all at once.  And I don't like the idea of taking up ground that posterity has to treat with sanctity!

Celebrations

I'm not big on celebrating things.  Neither of my parents were.  I recall the time of their golden anniversary when my sister Margaret wanted to have a celebration but they weren't interested.

I recall that we had a bit of a celebration after I finished my Ph.D. (We ate Indian food.) I celebrated somewhat, but felt rather burnt out inside.  It was like the scene in Easy Rider where Dennis Hopper said "We did it!" but Peter Fonda said "We blew it." I imagine that's a common feeling among Ph.D.s.

Christmas doesn't mean so much to me.  I look at it as a time to stay home and do nothing.  And at New Year's Eve I make a point of being in bed at midnight, though the noise outside tends to wake me.  And I don't care so much about birthdays, though I always get this cake with white chocolate and strawberries.

Even an event that's good news to me, like Bernie Sanders winning the Michigan primary, doesn't make me so excited.  I've seen too many disappointments in my time!

I remember in junior high when I was in this dispute with a friend of mine, who got his way in the end. But he insisted on celebrating, and kept saying "I won!" for some time after. Ultimately, he lost a friend.

Roadkill

They say that you can learn a lot about someone from what he finds funny.  Now to show you something about me!

When I was young, there was this Loudon Wainwright song that I found really funny.  It went:

Dead skunk in the middle of the road,

Dead skunk in the middle of the road,

There's a dead skunk in the middle of the road

And he's stinking to high heaven!

I remember a story in the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes where Calvin entered a road safety poster contest.  He drew a picture they never showed, colored with ketchup, with the caption "Be careful, or be roadkill!" Calvin imagined winning the contest and the city putting up a statue of him, but he lost in the end.

I read that as part of the so-called welfare reform movement in the 1990s, New York City forced its welfare recipients to pick up roadkill.  That city sounds like an unpleasant place!

LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE

I've read all of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books.  She was a wonderful writer.  But I must say that the TV series Little House on the Prairie was shameless '70s cheese, made for the sort of people who voted for Ronald Reagan or buy Thomas Kincade prints.

Laura's father was a great character in the books. But the way Michael Landon played him, I always felt that if his kids gave him any real trouble he'd burst into tears!  The show had such an anachronistic feel--one episode even involved telephone gossip!--that it could have been called Little Suburb on the Prairie.  And of course, everyone had clean white clothes (unlike the real frontier).

Shall I compare the TV show to the books?  In one book there's a chapter where Laura goes to Nelly's birthday party but when she tries to touch the dress on her new doll Nelly snatches it away, leaving her feeling humiliated.  In the TV version, she also knocks Laura down!

There was one episode where a guy convinced the town to entrust their money to him so he could buy them seed corn, but he went and bought it alone, and on the way back his wagon crashed and the townsfolk thought he'd absconded and started bullying his pregnant wife.  You know, he should have taken some assistants with him, but then there'd be no story! (I hate that kind of plot that depends on characters being careless at crucial moments.)

There was another episode where a boy was dying of leukemia and his last wish was to see California before he died.  So he and Pa Ingalls sneaked onto a train and they went out to California, where they boy died in view of the surf.  Sob, sob.

The show could be very predictable.  I remember one episode where Mrs. Oleson went out in all her finery to meet the new schoolmistress.  I thought, "The new schoolmistress will turn out to be African-American!" and she was.

Don't get me started on The Waltons either! It was truly cheesy to end each show with the family bidding each other goodnight. (That house must have had thin walls.)

I admit that I actually watched The Waltons at the time, but I'm ashamed of myself now.  The French writer Gustave Flaubert grew up in the provincial city of Rouen, and later said about his hometown, "Disliking Rouen is the beginning of good taste." For me, the beginning of good taste was disliking The Waltons!

Water

I read somewhere that fresh water will be as valuable in the 21st century as oil was in the 20th.  And the nation with the most fresh water is Canada!  I wonder if the U.S.A. will take us over for our water?  Here's a prediction:  if the U.S. ever acquires Canada, we'll stay much the same, but they'll be transformed!

I remember another cartoon (Aqua Duck) where Daffy Duck was wandering through the desert with a big nugget of gold, but couldn't find water!  There were some funny bits where he started hallucinating and saying things like "Belly up to the bar, boys!" There was also Wet Hare, in which Bugs Bunny found his river being dammed off by a French-Canadian desperado called Blaque Jacques Shellac. (They never explained what he wanted to do with all that water.)

Kevin Costner made this movie Waterworld where the ice caps have melted and most of the earth is underwater, and he plays a character who's so evolved that he can breathe through gills when he's underwater.  Anyway, there's this attention-grabbing scene at the start where he filters his own urine to obtain drinking water.  Two questions!  Why hasn't he developed a tolerance for salt water, a much shorter evolutionary leap than sprouting gills?  And why doesn't he just filter sea water?

Chickens

The Royal Winter Fair is on just now.  One of the things they have there is prize-winning chickens.  I wonder how judges choose the best chicken?  You'd think they'd eat them, then decide which one tastes best!  

I remember this cartoon You Were Never Duckier, where Daffy Duck was at some fair but the prize for best chicken was a lot bigger than for best duck, so he put a glove on his head Howie Mandel-style and pretended to be a chicken.  Of course he got carried off by Hennery the little chicken hawk and almost got eaten!

When I was at Mecklenburgh Square in London, England two decades ago, the nearby children's park of Coram's Fields had chickens, and I heard roosters crowing in the morning!

I wonder how farmers can tell when an egg is going to hatch?

This subject reminds me of a joke!  A woman comes to a doctor and says, "Can you help us?  My husband thinks he's a chicken!" The doctor says, "Really?  How long has be been that way?" "Six weeks." "Six weeks!  Why didn't you tell me before now?" "Well, I would have, but we needed the eggs."

It also reminds me of a story from the Actors Studio in the 1950s.  The actors were given an exercise where they pretended to be chickens in a coop that's about to have an A-bomb dropped on it.  Everyone else squawked around wildly, but Marlon Brando just sat down and pretended to lay an egg.  He explained, "A chicken doesn't understand anything about A-bombs!"

Also in the '50s you had the game of chicken.  When governments played chicken with A-bombs, it was called "brinksmanship"!

And there's this The Far Side cartoon where a farmers wife collects eggs from the henhouse, only to see a hen carrying a baby out of the farmhouse! (Another one features a "boneless chicken ranch"...)

Government

In our time neo-conservatives like Ronald Reagan have sold a spin that Big Government is the enemy.  This appeals to middle-class suburbanites who don't want to take responsibility for society's problems, don't want their tax money spent on people they don't identify with, and feel a vague fear toward the poor. The result is a system in which big business gets their way and even the liberals are afraid to take on corporations. (Witness Britain's New Labour.)

I'm rather sore about the current situation.  There are some problems that can only be resolved by the Black Hand of big government.  Some even call for government ownership!  I think that the way to achieve gun control is by nationalizing the weapon manufacturers.  And they should also nationalize the companies that sell cigarettes and cheap wine.

You may denounce me as a socialist, but I know where I stand.  Ecological problems like climate change can only be solved through regulation and aggressive taxation, not through free markets for big business.  Without assertive government, there's no hope for the future.

The unpopular child in school

Yes, I was one of the less popular kids in my school.  In Death of a Salesman, Biff says about a schoolmate, "He's liked, but he's not well liked." I would have been happy just to be liked.  It's like there's well-liked, there's liked, there's not liked, there's disliked, and there's "people enjoy being nasty to you"!

I remember in phys-ed class when they'd choose their own teams, and I'd always get chosen last.  On one occasion both teams insisted that the other team take me!  Now that's just mean.  They were drunk with power.

Back in the middle grades, I had a vague hope that people would be more mature in high school.  Wishful thinking!  I actually don't mind if people talk about me behind my back--it means they respect me.  What gets me is when people see you coming and that reminds them to talk about you so that you can overhear.  I suppose that status in school is a zero-sum game, where you raise yours by lowering someone else's.  Like in prison.

Learning to drive

I've never learned to drive.  I haven't even tried.  It's just too much of a responsibility for me! There are too many mistakes you can make and accidentally hurt someone.  I've never even ridden a go-cart.  But I like bumper cars.

I can ride a bicycle, but haven't done that for years.  I wish they'd make adult-sized tricycles!  I also like those vehicles you can rent on the Toronto Islands that have four wheels but run on pedal power like a bike.  They should have them everywhere!

Not having a driver's license can be inconvenient.  A few months ago I bought a cellphone and they needed my photo ID, but they didn't accept health cards!  So I had to go home and bring them my passport.  I think they now have a provincial photo ID for non-drivers.

I've always said that most of North America is too dependent on cars.  They're willing to spend a fortune on roads and airports but neglect rail traffic and buses and such.  Among other things, this isn't conducive to creating happy neighbourhoods where people walk around and talk to each other!

Diaries

I started keeping a written diary about fifteen years ago, at the age of forty.  I was fanciful enough to address the first entries to a non-existent girl in her early teens called Dinah! (After seeing Gangs of New York, I wrote: "I know how much you love Leo Di Caprio, but I can understand your parents not letting you see it.") But before long it turned into a conventional diary.

Then five years ago I decided to switch to a daily blog.  For several months I actually managed to come up with something new almost every day! (I repeated myself a bit.) I slowed down around the time of my mother's death, but these days I write three entries almost every week.  This was also around the time when I joined this memoir group, and started a second blog from the pieces I write there.

Writing an interesting blog is an art.  I like to start with a quote from a book I'm currently reading. (Just now it's Jack Kerouac's On the Road.) I occasionally post an image, but that's a harder habit to get into.

About ten years ago we subscribed to The National Post. Every day they'd print a day from Samuel Pepys' diary.  One day at a time is the best way to read it!

A snowstorm

When I grew up in New Brunswick we used to have some big snowstorms, cancelling school and everything, as late as mid-March. (I guess they still have them there.) But Toronto has a heat island so they aren't common here.

I think my favourite weather is just after a snowstorm, when there's a lot of snow on the ground, but the weather turns mild so you can almost feel the snow melting! (I guess my least favourite weather is a severe frost with no snow on the ground.)

When I was little I loved snow. One of my favourite Dr. Seuss books is The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, which is set in the snowy outdoors.  I used to ski, but it doesn't really appeal to me.

My favourite snow is the snow that's really close to rain, so that it comes down in big flakes and you can make snowballs and snowmen.  But then the temperature usually gets colder and it turns into icy snow, my least favourite kind!

Memories of Mother

The best thing I remember about my mother is that she was a great listener. (I wish I could listen half as well!) She always had time to listen to me, and it wasn't always easy.

I learned from her example to take a sympathetic view of people. (She even felt sorry for Nixon!) That's probably the most important thing she did for me.

I must also mention that she was well-read.  She liked to talk about people like Samuel Johnson and Abraham Lincoln. (She was also sympathetic toward Lincoln's unbalanced wife.) I'd come home from the university library and tell her the latest things written by columnists in the British magazine The Spectator.  There was "High Life" written by the shameless millionaire Taki Theodoracopolous (he once came on The Oprah Winfrey Show as a man who preferred younger women!); "Low Life" by sportswriter Jeffrey Bernard; and "Long Life" by Nigel Nicholson, son of writers Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West, who became an MP and publisher.  I liked telling her what they'd written, and she liked hearing it.

She also told me a lot of stories about her Cape Breton youth. Like the time she was in a candy store with her sister, my aunt Alma, and said, "Let's get ten cents of this!" Alma said, "Ten cents, me eyeball!" A grownup overheard them and the next time he met them he repeated "Ten cents, me eyeball!"

I joined this memoir group shortly after her death, and I really with I could tell her some of the stories I've heard here!  I know she'd be interested in them.

Plumbing

The word "plumbing" comes from plumbum, the Latin word for lead. That's because in Roman times they used lead for water pipes.  There's a theory that these pipes caused lead poisoning among the population, leading to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire!

In our bathtub, if the water reaches the spillway level, some of the spillway water will leak and drip through the ceiling below.  I don't know where the leak is exactly, though it must be near the tub itself, so all we can do is not fill up the bathtub too high.  There's a problem to solve!

Speaking of problem solving, I now have the problem that I'm doing too many things at once.  Last week was my opera group's first rehearsal--this year we're doing Fidelio and The Magic Flute.  But I missed it because I'd completely forgotten about it!

Problem solving

When I was thirteen or so, I first heard the expression, "That's your problem!" When I thought about it, it really bothered me that some people would look at somebody else's problem as something they wouldn't help with!  I like to help other people with their problems whenever I can. (My mother was like that too.)

I have Asperger's Syndrome.  Is it a problem for me?  Some people say I'm on the "spectrum" of autistic disorders.  I myself don't care for that view, because compared to what low-functioning autistics are dealing with, my problems look pretty small!  To me it's more of a partial inconvenience.

I like logic problems.  Remember the one that asks, "Who drinks water?  Who owns the zebra?" (I've solved it:  it's the Norwegian and the Japanese respectively.) There was one puzzle I couldn't solve involving parents who have either a son or a daughter.  One of the clues was "Jane is Al's daughter," and I didn't realize that this meant that Al had a daughter instead of a son.  But to my mind, the sentence doesn't mean that! ("Al's daughter is not Jane," on the other hand, would mean that.)

Royalty

I've recently been watching on Netflix the British series The Crown about the early years of Elizabeth II's reign.  It's very intelligent and well-made. (I especially like the actress playing Princess Margaret.) Winston Churchill doesn't come off well--when London's suffering from the deadly pea soup fog, he wants to talk about Prince Philip taking flying lessons!

Prince Philip recently retired from active duties--he's 96 and has been getting senile. (Did you know that when he was a kid, his first language was mainly French?) When I think of Prince Philip I think of Spitting Image, the '80s satirical puppet show that made fun of the royals a lot.  They had him singing songs like "Way down among the common people..." and had dialogue like this:

"Say, are you Prince Philip?"

"Oh, bugger off, you tit!"

"I knew it was him!"

Prince Charles has made some serious mistakes, but I still like him.  And I agree with him that most modern architecture is ugly! (Someone said that the key to understanding Prince Charles is his German roots...)

Personally, I think it's sill for Canada to have a hand-me-down monarchy.  I'm well-disposed to republican government in general, but we could at least have our own king! (It's mostly celebrity worship, of course.)

Soap on a rope

Can't think of much to say about soap.  On the subject of rope, when I was a little kid spending a year in Brighton, England, there was this weekly comic called The Beezer.  One of its running strips was "My Pal Ropey," about a kid and his pet rope.  You read that right--his rope had been animated by some East Indian magic spell and had a mind of its own, moving about by itself and often causing trouble for the kid.

I watched The Wonderful World of Disney a lot, and one story was "Hog Wild," about a family raising hogs on the western frontier.  At the story's climax this kid had to raise money to finance an operation for his crippled father, allowing him to walk again.  So he bet his whole wad that he could rope a hog! That's normally impossible, but his rope caught some hairs on the hog's back and he won.  That must be a nice thing to be able to do!

Remember skipping rope?  There were rhymes like "Old Black Joe from Mexico!  Hands up, stick 'em up, don't forget to pick 'em up!" (Not so PC!)

Broken bones

I don't recall ever suffering a broken bone.  I remember that my brother Donald fell out of a tree and broke his arm once. (I remember his expression immediately afterward.)

In ancient times medicine men, or whatever they were, had a thing called trepanning where they'd make a hole in your skull to make the bad spirits flow out and see if that would cure what ailed you.  I suffer headaches a lot, and sometimes wonder if trepanning would cure that.

I did sprain my ankle skiing once. That was the year we lived in Mississauga, and went out to Milton to ski.  I was never particularly interested in skiing, but my sister Margaret decided that I was going to take it up. (She was at that age where she thought she knew everything about what was best for me better than I did!)

After the sprain, which kept me off my feet for a week or more, she insisted that I ski the same slope again.  When I resisted, she said, twice as determined, "What do you do when you fall off a horse?  You get right back on it!" I still resent her for it--it wasn't something important like swimming--and I never ski today.

That's why I've never tried horseback riding. (Besides the expense, the safety issue, the combined responsibility of a vehicle and a pet, and the smell.) Because when I fell off they'd insist that I get on again, and I owe it to myself never again to let other people make the decision for me!

Being kept waiting

I remember once when I was doing my Ph.D. thesis and was having difficulties and had to speak to someone on my thesis committee, but nobody was available!  I had to do a lot of waiting for feedback at that time--in the eighteen months after I finished my first draft I waited a total of almost twelve months!  It was a difficult time for me. (I was lucky to pass.)

A few months ago I go a cellphone so that when I'm late I can phone home and they'll know to wait.  But I still haven't got into the habit of taking it with me!

I remember this Sesame Street sketch where Big Bird had a rendezvous one of the show's humans, but the latter was late. Big Bird started thinking, "Maybe he's tied up somewhere and a monster is tickling him!" Then he imagined, "Maybe he's in the hospital with a broken leg, and a monster will come along and start tickling him!" Fortunately, he turned up safe and sound.

Wednesdays

What can I say about Wednesdays?  Well, this Wednesday I'm going to have lunch with my friend John Snow at the Schnitzel Hub.  And in the evening I'm going to see a documentary at the Bloor about some silent films they found in the Yukon in good condition. (I would have seen it a few weeks ago, but I misplaced my glasses.)

How did Wednesday get it's name?  Well, the days of the week were originally in the Roman calendar, and named after Roman gods, except that Sunday and Monday were named for the sun and the moon.  The English names came from our words for sun and moon, and the Saxon gods equivalent to these Roman gods. (Except that Saturn had no Saxon equivalent, so it stayed Saturday.)

The Latin equivalents of Wednesday and Thursday were named for Mercury the messenger god and  Jupiter, the chief god and thunder god, respectively.  This made an interesting challenge for the Saxons.  Their Jupiter equivalent could have been chief god Odin or thunder god Thor.  But Odin was a better fit for Mercury because he sent birds all over with messages. (Hence the saying "A little bird told me"!) So Wednesday's named for Odin and Thursday for Thor.

My apologies for showing off my knowledge--I just couldn't think of anything personal to write about Wednesday!

A favourite book

One of my favourite books is Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I first read at age eleven! (I'd also read the Classics Illustrated comic book version.) The edition I read had fine illustrations by Donald Mackay.

The novel was controversial even when it was first published back in the 1880s, mostly because its dialect English was seen as "vulgar.  But the glory of the book is in the authenticity of its language!  I know that its use of the N-word still causes controversy--a recent edition changed the word "nigger" to "slave everywhere in the text!--but it makes a profound anti-racist statement.

Just the other day at my Reading Out Loud Meetup group, where the monthly topic was humor, I read the part in the book where the King grifter goes to a religious revival meeting, tells an outrageous lie about being a reformed pirate going back to the Indian Ocean to reform the other pirates, and collects lots of money.  Mark Twain took a rather cynical view of people.... He came from Missouri, "the Show Me state," and he certainly exhibited skepticism!

Protest marches

I've been in a few demonstrations over the years...

I once went on a peace march in Toronto, when I lived there back in 1982. (I think it started at Christie Pits.) Our chant went: "What do we want?" "Peace!" "When do we want it?" "Now!"

In 1995 when I lived in London I went on a couple of marches for Bosnia after Srebrenica got overrun.  In one of them we walked down the middle of Park Lane!  In Trafalgar Square I heard Vanessa Redgrave and former Labour Party leader Michael Foot denouncing the inaction of the West.

I wa also at a non-marching protest outside the Nigerian embassy after they hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa.  I think I was the only white guy there!

A year or two ago, after some white supremacist group denounced admitting Syrian refugees to Canada, I went on a march in support of the refugees. We started near Jane station and walked east along the Bloor Street sidewalk.

Last spring I was in the Toronto march for action on climate change.  They had a First Nations drum up front, and at the University & Queen corner some of us danced in a circle around it!

Fortune telling

I try not to be superstitious.  But there's one side of me that wants to hear predictions of my future, just in case they turn out to be true.

Someone looked at my palm once--I think this was at the Arthur Murray studio where I was taking dance lessons--and said that one of my lines shows that I'll have a very long life!

Whenever we eat Chinese food, I read my fortune cookie and take it seriously for a moment. (Did you know that fortune cookies actually come from Japan?) Someone said that any fortune cookie prediction can be improved by adding the two words "...in bed." As in "You will become rich and powerful... in bed!" Have you noticed that fortune cookies never say "You have a bad attitude" or "Tonight you will be robbed"?

Now that I think about it, people who predict what will happen with the stock market and other investments are basically just like fortune tellers.  Women tell fortunes, men predict stock prices.

Town vs. country

I'm from a small town originally. The country doesn't appeal so much to me because I'm used to it, unlike some city-slickers. There are a lot of respects in which I prefer the town.

For one thing, I've never learned to drive.  Torontonians are lucky to have a public transit system as good as this one is, considering how little public money gets put into it!  I'm especially glad that Toronto still has streetcars.

In addition, I'm in a lot of Meetup groups.  It takes a big city like Toronto for significant groups of people with the same interest to come together. (Other examples are my opera group, and this memoir group.) And the library system has a wide range of books, some of them in big enough numbers to facilitate book clubs.  And you can see a lot more movies in a cinema instead of waiting for the video.

What don't I like about the city? It can get noisy, and my ears are sensitive.  And I don't see as many stars as I used to see in the country. (I remember the night of the big blackout of 2003 when more stars were visible than usual.) And with so many people, some are unpredictable, so I'm more on my guard here.  But all that's a pretty small price compared to the advantages!

New Year's

Christmas is for children, but New Year's is more for grownups.  I no longer stay up to midnight then; I prefer to be in bed, though I'm usually still awake when the fireworks and stuff go off.

East Asians have their own New Year's about a month later, at the time of a new moon.  I was actually born on the Chinese New Year's in 1962 (a water tiger year), at the same time as a solar eclipse and a conjunction of five planets in Aquarius had some astrologers predicting the end of the world! (The world almost did end that October with the Cuban Missile Crisis.) Others see it as the start of "the Age of Aquarius"!

I always used to think of the new year as starting in September, because that's when each school year starts.  I think the Jewish new year starts around then.

Remember New Year's in 2000 when people were worried about the Y2K turnover bringing down computer systems? (I actually backed up some files to be on the safe side.) But it turned out that the problem had been solved in time.

In Scotland, people used to visit their neighbours on New Year's Day.  We should bring that tradition back!

Baking

I'm the family baker.  I used to bake in our bread machine every week, but lately I've been getting lazy.  I bake a wide variety of bread:  whole wheat, multigrain, rye (actually a mix of white, whole wheat and rye), raisin cheese and even plain white bread.  Without such variety baking gets boring suprisingly quick.

For whole wheat, multigrain and rye, I use molasses and honey instead of regular sugar.  The main challenge for me is getting the flour-water ration right, so the loaf won't be too small or too big. Of all the varieties, whole wheat has the best smell when baking!

I also bake gingerbread sometimes.  One trick I've learned is to put a little oil in the measuring cup before measuring out molasses, and move it about so it covers most of the inner surface.  That way when you pour the molasses out hardly any will be stuck to the measuring cup!

In one of the Little House books, the family came to a new town just before the land rush, and made some money boarding people in their house who hadn't found their own places.  Some of them liked the mother's baking so much that they asked for her recipes, but she didn't have any; she'd just learned from years of experience!

The Christie people used to have a big cookie factory near the lakeshore in Etobicoke.  I passed it once and there was a nice smell!

Pigs

I've read that pigs are most intelligent animals in the barnyard. (Except for the humans, I guess.) I once saw a thing on TV--on the show Real People, maybe?--where a guy had his pigs trained so that they wouldn't start eating their feed till he'd said grace!  And wild pigs are probably even smarter.

Pigs will eat anything, which must be why Jews and Moslems consider them unclean.  I've also read that they don't naturally overeat:  famers have to thrust tons of food in front of their snouts to get them to do so.

After seeing the miniseries Lonesome Dove, I read the Larry McMurtry novel.  On the second page or so Gus McRae says "You pigs git!" and reading that, I immediately saw Robert Duvall in the role!

There's the Warner Brothers cartoon character Porky Pig, who stutters. On Youtube you can find a home movie the cartoonists made for an office party, where carpenter Porky Pig hammers his thumb and keeps stuttering, "Oh, son of a b-b-b-..." Finally he says "Son of a gun!" points at the audience and says, "Ha ha, you thought I was going to say 'Son of a bitch,' didn't you?" One of his funniest cartoons is Porky in Wackyland!

When I was little I read a comic book where Uncle Scrooge was up against a pig character from the Klondike called Soapy Slick, where saving his fortune came down to a big dogsled race. (I recently read that this character was based on a real guy called Soapy Smith!)

Bookstores

It used to be that the store in a mall that interested me the most would always be the bookstore. Today there are malls that don't have bookstores at all!

When I visit London, England, I tend to spend a lot of time (and money) at the bookstores Foyle's and Watterstone's.  When I was there a couple of months ago, I bought several Portuguese books because I'm interested in learning that language.  One was a children's book about the history of Portugal.  Another was of Charles Perrault's French fairy tales, told in Portuguese. (Children's books tend to have pretty easy language.)

You can find a lot of interesting books in university bookstores. At the University of Toronto bookstore I once obtained a huge Chinese dictionary!

A few years back I got a couple of puzzle magazines at Indigo Books.  After I left the store, I realized I hadn't paid for them!  I went right back in and did so, but I could have just gone home and got away with stealing.  Yet there's enough injustice in the world without me adding to it.

The swimming pool

I used to swim when I was young.  Don't do it much today.

I remember how I failed a swimming course at age twelve. It was all very discouraging, right from the early lessons.  I would have quit early on, except that I didn't want to be a quitter.  I'll bet that the instructors looked at me in the first lesson and said, "That's the one who's going to fail!" And they let me sink (not literally!).  I should have just quit.

Three of my siblings failed a swimming course too, but at least they failed together, while I failed alone!

I recall that on the day I failed, we'd bought a new Royal electric typewriter.  So I've always associated that typewriter with my failure.

I remember that the Beverley Hillbillies called their swimming pool "the cee-ment pond"!

Family dinners

Occasionally we'll have the whole family over for a big dinner, often of Indian food. (There's a good Indian restaurant around the corner from our house.) Sometimes we'll put two tables together and bring in chairs so there'll be room for everyone.

I tend to be the first to leave the table afterward.  Small talk isn't my thing.  My father and sister make better hosts than I do: company sometimes wears me out.

My brother and his family are vegans, so that can be hard to plan for. (It makes me appreciate mere vegetarians!) When they come over for dinner, they often bring the food, which simplifies things.

Father's getting on in years and we don't eat out much these days. We used to to to the Swiss Chalet chicken restaurant in the month before Christmas because they'd throw in a Toblerone chocolate bar with the special.  We also went to the Mandarin Chinese buffet, but you have to be careful to avoid overeating at those places.

Does anyone remember the Ponderosa steak houses?

Wilderness

The "Little House" books were written by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and set in the wilderness.  So that's what I'll write about.

I really like the "Little House" books.  I read the first three when I was young, and the rest decades later.  They're children's fiction based on Wilder's actual family, who moved around the American frontier before settling down in South Dakota.

There's some controversy about the book.  Wilder's daughter Rose Wilder Lane, who wrote some novels of her own, served as her editor, and some people wonder how much of the books are her work.  Her daughter was an early libertarian, and it's been suggested that her story is told through the prism of the daughter's anti-government sentiments.  One example is the part in the books where the family sells a cow and makes economies to pay for her blind sister to attend a school for the vision-impaired.  In real life, the territorial government picked up the tab!  But maybe the change was just to make it a better story...

Michael Landon's TV show, on the other hand, I've always found quite shameless, cheesy and manipulative. (Notice how clean their clothes were!)

There's a spinoff book series focusing on Rose, after Laura, husband and daughter moved to a new farm in the Ozarks.  I ought to read those books too.

Morning rituals

What do I do in the morning that sustains me?  After I wake up and get out of bed, I go to my computer, open Facebook, and play the game Candy Crush Saga. I'm not sure that "sustains" me, but I do enjoy it.

It bugs me when my sister calls Candy Crush Saga a "video game." It's really a computer game that requires strategy!  You move around pieces of candy in six different colors, to form rows of three (or four or even five, as well as right-angle arrays). When you win a game at one level you get to move to the next, and I've passed Level 900! (I think there are over 1500 levels...) You can also use these boosters to put you over the top, but I never use them on principle.

The one thing I don't like about Candy Crush Saga is that when you lose a game, there's this little girl who cries! (That always makes me feel guilty.) When you win, she jumps for joy.  It also has sound effects, but I turn them off most of the time.  I get the impression that the game's really popular with East Asians.

The same company has a game called Pet Rescue Saga, where you remove blocks to save critters.

In the morning I also take iron and Cipralex pills.  And over breakfast I read The Globe and Mail.

East Indians

Indian civilization has deep roots, with a rarefied intellectual tendency.  They invented chess, our number system and several religions.  I should learn more about it. (Michael Wood made a good British documentary series about the history of India.)

I've liked a lot of movies from India, including Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay and Monsoon Wedding.  Some of the best are by Satyajit Ray from Bengal, including his three movies about young Apu.

One of the things I like best about India is the food!  I first discovered Indian food in my late twenties, when we spent a year in Glasgow, Scotland. (Britain is a good place for "ethnic" food.) Lucky there's an Indian restaurant around corner from our house!

India today is going through many of the same changes that Britain and much of the Western world went through in the 19th century, what with industrialization and urbanization. (Living in Mumbai is said to be as bad for your lungs as smoking!) In fact, the British director Michael Winterbottom recently made Trishna, a reworking of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles set in today's India.

Street names

I grew up in Sackville, N.B., in a house on West Avenue.  It was named after a guy called West, but it actually was on the west side of town!

You can learn something about a town from its street names.  One of the oldest roads is called Charlotte Street, probably after Charlotte of Mecklenburgh, wife of George III.  Sackville has three streets named after Canada's Governors-General:  Lansdowne, Lorne and Dufferin.  The town was a big Methodist center, and there's a Union Street that was probably named for the 1926 union of Methodists, Congregationalists and some Presbyterians that produced the United Church of Canada.

In my part of Toronto two of the newest streets are called Acores and Minho, reflecting the growing Portuguese community. There are also several streets with a "wood" name:  Oakwood, Wychwood, Cherrywood, Maplewood.  My own street is Greensides Avenue, which sounds pretty bland, like something a developer would come up with to sell real estate.

In St. John's, Nfld., they have a Strawberry Marsh Road.  That's a nice name for a street.

Drive-in movies

I haven't often been to drive-in cinemas.  There was a place called the Grand View Drive-In near my hometown, where I saw Saturday Night Fever at sixteen. (The other people insisted on smuggling me in to save on my admission, which didn't please me.) 

Saturday Night Fever was OK, but it was on a double bill, followed by Sorcerer.  In the first scene of that movie we see a man on a hotel balcony who looks down at a fiesta, pours a drink, then sees a guy in a blue suit and shades come in, pull out a gun and shoot him dead!  In the next scene we see a bus in Jerusalem, which ends up exploding!  After that we went home. (In the part I missed, I later found out, Roy Scheider murders a priest for bingo money, and he and the other desperadoes end up driving two trucks full of volatile nitroglycerin through a treacherous jungle to put out an oil well fire.)

Five years later I went there again and saw a double bill of Night Shift and Creepshow. Night Shift was a comedy with Michael Keaton and Henry Winkler working in a morgue and opening up a bordello there. Creepshow was a horror-comedy based on the notorious E.C. horror comics of the 1950s. (Lots of stuff with people being drowned by the tide or killed by gorillas, and skeletons rising from the grave.) 

I really don't care for the horror genre--don't like being manipulated--by I am fascinated by '50s horror comics. This was an age when many people were being relentlessly positive, with books like The Power of Positive Thinking.  Meanwhile, these comics were an outlet for all the suppressed negativity of the post-World War II era.

Cliches and stereotypes

I've noticed a lot of cliches in TV and movies.  Like when the hero doesn't wait for the cops but takes unilateral action, and it turns out that the villain was counting on him doing this all along. (It even turned up in one of the Harry Potter books!)

Or when a character has a change in his appearance at the same time as a change in his character. (That makes it easier for the less attentive in the audience.) Or even just with a change in how we're supposed to see the character!  Like in Pretty Woman, which begins with hooker Julia Roberts working the streets in miniskirt and thighboots, but also a blond wig.  In a later scene when we learn she's a nice girl at heart, the wig comes off and we see her real hair.  Pretty Woman was directed by Garry Marshall, the world's expert on cliches, going back to sitcoms like Happy Days.

On Youtube there's a channel called Dating Beyond Borders, with videos showing what it's like to date people of various nationalities.  I suppose these are stereotypes, but it's still fun.  Like they say that if you date a German girl she'll be brutally honest with you. ("Don't you think you should get a haircut?") Or if you date a Mexican woman she'll expect you to be an old-fashioned gentleman and walk outside her on the sidewalk.

Passion

My family has never been the passionate type.  I never saw my parents kiss each other.  And I'm not so passionate about things myself.

True, there are some things that make me angry.  I'm still mad about the Reagan presidency and the enablers who responded to him deferentially, for instance in The New York Times.  I'm also angry about so-called "welfare reform," which has made life even worse for a lot of vulnerable people that too few of us care about.

I used to play piano.  I could play most of Mozart's sonatas and some of Haydn's, but Beethoven's were largely beyond me!  My sister Moira, on the other hand, is a very good pianist, so I got to hear her play them.  I'd have to say that my favorite Beethoven piano sonata is the Appassionata. (Other people like the Pathetique and the Moonlight sonatas.)

Has anyone here eaten passion fruit?  I'm not sure I ever have.

Alternative facts

Remember the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes?  When he got in trouble, he'd tell his parents these outrageous, transparent lies that often involved space creatures!

Myself, I try not to tell lies.  I may occasionally lie to someone who's being unreasonable and would just make things worse if he knew the truth.  But there was one time when I was little and my mother asked if I'd had any interesting dreams, and I made up this story of a dream where I was being eaten up by pixies and had ten seconds to die! (She was rather alarmed.) Why do I do things like that?  It must be the Imp of the Perverse.

In my childhood my father once told me that he'd been around when the Magna Carta was signed 800 years ago.  I guess his tongue was in his cheek.

In school they told us it wasn't true that Chinese schoolkids were taught to use real guns.  Who cares whether it was true, that sounded cool!

I remember the fuss over Watergate when I was eleven and they were questioning the veracity of everyone in the Nixon administration.  At least they cared about truth and ethics back then, unlike with Iran-Contra when I was 25.  Someone came up with a match puzzle where you moved matches around to produce "a crooked little man in a crooked little house": the answer was the letters N-I-X-O-N!

Here's a joke:  How do you know when Donald Trump is lying? His lips are moving!

Childhood games

In one game I remember from childhood one guy would be Mr. Wolf and turn his back to the others, who'd say in unison, "What time is it, Mr. Wolf?" He'd say "Twelve noon" or "Quarter to three" or something like that, and the others would creep closer to him.  But once in a while he'd say "Dinner time!" then catch the closest one.  The idea was to creep so close to Mr. Wolf that you could catch him after one of the regular times, but not so close that he'd catch you at dinner time.

There was also king's square, a sort of four-way tennis played with a big ball, with someone in one of four adjacent squares, and if you couldn't bounce the ball into someone else's zone after it had been in yours, you'd be out. (There was a neutral circle in the middle called the "belly button.") My sister Moira recalls how three of the players would unite their efforts to get the fourth one out. Not very sporting...

And there was a game where we'd start by reciting, "Chinese torture has begun!  No more laughing, no more fun!  If you show your teeth or tongue, you must pay a penalty!"

Remember on The Beverley Hillbillies how Granny was always going down to her root cellar?  We played the basement game Murder in the Dark, except that my brother renamed it Granny's Root Cellar!

Pests

Ever have the experience of swatting a mosquito just after she's bitten you and drawing a little streak of your own blood along your arm or leg? (Today I avoid swatting bugs out of vague principle...)

One kind of pest I dislike is a dog who runs toward you and barks at the same time.  That really frightens me!

I read that during Hell Week at South Carolina's Citadel military school, the upperclassmen march the plebs into nearby swamps and make them stand still as the mosquitoes bite them.  Another institution for the South to be proud of! (Here we have two kinds of pests.)

In the movie Mr. Holland's Opus schoolteacher Richard Dreyfus says, "Sometimes the best way to deal with a pest is to ignore him." Well, that's easy to say when the pest is bothering someone else instead of you!

Donald Trump has always struck me as a pest. (I'm just glad I don't have to work for him!) Dr. Phil also seems like a pest, as do Howard Stern and anyone on Fox News...

The bank

I have an account at the local TD Canada Trust branch.  There's a woman working there called Rosa who always remembers my name. (I try to say hello to her.) A month or two ago I got a new access card, but the ATM kept rejecting it!  They just issued me a new one.

I recently had to shift most of my money into term deposits that won't come due till I'm 65.  That allowed me to qualify for Ontario Disability Support Payments because of my Asperger's Syndrome.

When I lived in England 22 years ago, opening a bank account was a pain in the neck! (They seem to think that by letting you entrust your money to them, they're granting you some big privilege!) Also, while Canadian banks will give you an automatic readout of your balance, with British banks--at least back then--you had to keep track of it yourself.  I'll bet they had a lot of overdrafts!  I can only hope they've changed since then.

There's a really funny Stephen Leacock story, "My Financial Career," about a guy opening his first bank account.  At one point he mistakenly walks into the vault!

Hats

I used to own a Tilley Endurables hat.  But when I was in London five years ago, I was in a subway station and a sudden gust of wind blew it off my head and onto the rails! (I hadn't even reached the platform.) This was just before I returned home, so I didn't get the chance to wait for the staff to rescue it then claim it at Lost and Found, which I imagine would have taken weeks anyway.

After I got home I bought a classic fedora at a boutique in Eaton Centre that also sold scarves.  I also have a summer hat that I bought at Target.

Hats have gone out of fashion in recent decades.  I guess that's because of John F. Kennedy and the '60s counterculture.  I really started wearing a hat in my thirties because my hairline was receding and I was afraid of getting sunburnt on the top of my head.

My fedora is handy for a new Meetup group I've joined for people interested in vintage clothes.  I also have a green cardigan and a corduroy jacket.  I ought to buy a bowtie too.

Sometimes I wish I had a stovepipe hat like Lincoln wore...

Flat

For a few years my sister and I lived in an apartment (part of a triplex). This was just after we'd moved to Toronto and before we bought a house of our own.  It was located just south of the TTC place where they later set up the Wychwood Barns complex. Back then they kept old buses and streetcars there before junking them.  As a result, they had regular patrols to deter thieves, with the result that nearby houses were also safe from burglars.

Our apartment was on the second of three stories.  The downstairs neighbors once complained about the noise--slamming doors and such--but I noticed that one night they watched the Oscars show with a bunch of friends and whenever their favorite movie won they'd cheer loudly. (This was back when the Oscars show went on past midnight.)

The apartment's furnishings were somewhat old-fashioned.  We got heat from a radiator with white coils.  And our refrigeration was the sort that you had to defrost once in a while.  In the back yard was a pear tree, though it had seen better days.  There was a loud-mouthed neighbor you could often hear yelling at his wife in Russian.

Mice

My mother was terribly afraid of mice.  Just mentioning the word "mouse" freaked her out.  She might have made a good Victorian lady.

We used to have a problem with mice in our house.  Once I managed to catch one in my glasses case and release him outdoors. (What was I going to do, kill him?) I was surprised how little it was.

In one of James Thurber's stories, he wrote about an eccentric relative who'd leave food next to the mouseholes! (Mother liked Thurber.)

I once saw a cartoon of a cat singing:

Love to eat them mousies!

Mousies what I love to eat!

Bite their little heads off,

Nibble on their tiny feet!

The dentist

Dentistry isn't my favorite subject.  It reminds me that I'm naturally a coward.  Recently my current dentist mentioned that one of my old fillings was unusually close to a nerve.  I think I remember getting that one!

I remember getting my wisdom teeth pulled when I was about thirty.  The hard part is waiting hours for the local anaesthetic to wear off.  It's like being punched in the mouth times a thousand! I'll soon be getting root canal work, which doesn't sound fun.

I suppose that sugar causes tooth decay because there's a curse on it:  growing sugar cane is backbreaking work, and it was mostly sugar production that led to the big increase in New World slavery in the 17th and 18th centuries.

I still have all my non-wisdom teeth, but they're somewhat crooked, and I've thought of getting them straightened.  But it's likely to cost a lot of money, and I don't know if it's worth it at my age.

Once I was eating ice cream and a jagged little piece of plastic from the container got into it. When I felt it in my mouth, I thought it was one of my teeth and got quite a fright!

Mirrors

When I was in London, England, twenty years ago, I was in the Victoria & Albert Museum's glassware section once.  I was thinking, "There's an Englishman walking toward me," but it turned out I was walking toward a mirror!  I wonder if many people have had that experience? (It happened with the southern belle in the Civil War novel Cold Mountain.) I suppose it's a sign of maturity.

The medicine cabinet in our bathroom has three little doors in front of it, each with a mirror surface.  I've found that if I open them at the right angles, I can see the top of my head!

When European explorers found new lands, the indigenous people they met were often afraid of the mirrors they sometimes carried. The latter felt that if something could capture your image, it might capture your spirit too. First Nations people in Canada often dreaded cameras for the same reason.

There's an epigram in Classical Greek about an aging courtesan dedicating mirror:

Lahis, who laughed at Greece, with young lovers crowding 

Her door, dedicates this mirror to Aphrodite:

For what I used to see, I no longer can,

And what I do see, I no longer want to!

When I was twelve

I didn't have an easy time when I was twelve.  In school, I was the sensitive kid who was expected to ignore the meaner classmates. But I got angrier and angrier, and around this time I started getting into fights.

At this time I saw The Sword in the Stone, the Disney animated movie of T.H. White's book about King Arthur's childhood under Merlin's tutelage.  That movie meant a lot to me because I identified with the young hero. (I also liked the slapstick remake of The Three Musketeers that year more than I expected.)

This was in 1974, at the time of the energy crisis, when gas stations attracted long lineups of hoarders anticipating shortages. In the long run, the energy crisis was actually the best thing that ever happened to the Western world, because it got people serious about conversation, at least for a while. (Shame that the lesson got unlearned in the '80s!) What if they'd rationed gasoline, as some people wanted to do?  It was also the year of Nixon's resignation speech, which I heard on a car radio in a Cape Breton Campground.

And it was the year when Mikhail Barishnykov defected from the Soviet Union in Toronto.  We saw the Bolshoi Ballet tour he'd abandoned a few weeks later in Nova Scotia:  they had to change the program, and Mother's said they seemed demoralized.

That was the year of the college fad of streaking (running around nude). One hit single was the depressing song "Billy, Don't Be a Hero." And I recall hearing some funny Cheech & Chong routines on the radio.

I also failed a swimming course that fall, which was very discouraging.  I should have quit it, but I didn't want to be a quitter!

Daydreamers

When I was a kid I spent a lot of time in dreams.  I haven't done that so much in recent years, but I've had a few idle fantasies.  I think I'd like to go to China and get a job introducing western movies to Chinese audiences.  I don't suppose there's any demand for such people (my sister says all China wants to see movies like The Fast and the Furious) but I think I'd be good at it anyway!

And recently I was thinking that if I had a wife or girlfriend we should visit the state of Maine and climb up Mt. Katahdin at the northern end of the Appalachian Trail.  It would also be fun to climb the mountains in Maine's Acadia National Park or Cape Breton.

If I were rich, my big indulgence would be travel.  I was fantasizing about travelling on a cruise ship around the world, though that might get boring eventually.  I've recently been dreaming at night of visiting Russia, which is odd because in daytime I'm not interested in it.

Now if I were a billionaire, I'd buy some land in the Laurentians and hire sculptors to build an equivalent of the grotesque statues in Italy's Bomarzo Gardens.  It would be great to build a statue of Glooscap, the hero of Micmac nation legend, to be seen from a distance sailing away on his whale.  And I'd also like a statue of Humphrey Gilbert at the prow of his ship pointing upward, about to hit a rock face! And one of King Lear ranging on the moor...