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!