THE GODFATHER

When I was twenty, I saw Francis Coppola's The Godfather and The Godfather Part II on TV.  They showed all eight hours on Saturday and Sunday nights between midnight and 4:00!  Staying awake was a bit of a challenge, but I managed it.

There's a really great scene early in Part II when the Marlon Brando character, back when he's a kid, arrives in New York City, sees the Statue of Liberty and goes through Ellis Island. (You can find it on Youtube!) The movies have some great acting.  But Part III didn't have Robert Duvall, alas.

I like a lot of gangster movies. Another one is Martin Scorcese's Goodfellas, a true story that plays like a black comedy and is really fast-paced, with some great dialogue! ("What do you expect me to do, shoot him?" "Well, it wouldn't be a bad idea...")

And I like the early Warner Brothers gangster movies from the 1930s with stars like James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart.  They showed them on the CBC late show back in the '80s, and I'd watch them while waiting for David Letterman to come on.

And there are some good recent gangster movies too.  I like Mike Newell's Donnie Brasco, with Johnny Depp as a fed who infiltrates mafia circles by getting to know a Willy Loman-type gangster played by Al Pacino. (It has the line "Find him, kill him, leave his body in the street!")

I've also watched the TV series The Sopranos, about Tony Soprano, a gangster who goes to a psychiatrist.  There's a great episode where Tony finds out that his daughter's soccer coach is a sexual predator and considers murdering him.  And there's a funny episode where his son is into Nietzsche but pronounces him "Nich"! (His grandmother tells him, "You die in your own arms.")

I could go on for hours about my favourite gangster movies!

The dollar store

In the pre-inflation days, dollar stores were called five & ten cent stores.  I recall there was a song that went, "I found a million-dollar baby at the five and ten cent store"!

I remember the Woolworth's in Moncton.  I liked the lunch counter's strawberry shortcake.  It also had the first escalator I ever rode on.  I also recall there was a monkey in the basement.

Moncton also had a Kmart.  I remember their white cylindrical trash cans with a round dome on the top.

Remember Terrytoons?  They were these cartoons that got shown on TV a lot, including Heckle and Jeckle, a couple of obnoxious birds who'd say things like "You can do anything in an animated cartoon!" There was also a neurotic elephant called Silly Sidney, with a lion character who was always saying, "Crazy elephant!" (The African-style music was cool.) Why am I mentioning all this?  Because the studio head, Paul Terry, once said, "Disney is the Tiffany's of animation, while Terrytoons is the Woolworth's."

Candy

Have you ever noticed?  A box of chocolates has a narrower range of goodies than it used to.  I remember when the Moir's Pot of Gold included a chocolate covered lozenge! (That sort of thing shows my age.) Do they still have Cherry Blossoms?

The novel Forrest Gump starts with the line "Bein' an idiot ain't no box of chocolates." But in the movie version they had his mother say, "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you'll get." How shameless!  If they couldn't be faithful to the original line, they could at least have left it out, instead of turning it on its head.

Easter was a few weeks ago. After Easter is over I buy a ton of chocolate at reduced prices. (I especially like the chocolate with crispy rice pieces.) This year I even got some jelly beans!  I wish I could eat jelly beans without thinking of Ronald Reagan, pray for his worthless soul.

I think my favourite candy is Ferrero Rocher.  That's the one with a hazelnut inside that you can eat in two bites.  I also like nougats and creams.  Don't like caramels.

Does anyone remember the Neilson Cinnamon Danish from the '70s?  I remember how the Neilson company sent big wall maps of Canada to every school in the country.  In a shameless bit of product placement, they put their candy bars in each corner of the map! (I recall Crispy Crunch over Greenland...)

I also remember Life Savers.  Does anyone remember when they came in root beer flavour?

Moving to a new place

I haven't moved that much in my life.  I've lived at the same Toronto address for the last 25 years, except for the eight months when I was researching my Ph.D. in London.  Before that, I spent 25 of my first 28 years at the same address in Sackville, N.B. (I heard that Eudora Welty lived in one house for her whole life.  Someone said that such stability is good for a writer.)

When I was young, my father was a physics professor who went on sabbaticals every seven or nine years.  In 1965 we went to Brighton, England, for a year, just when it was a big mod scene, though Father remembers none of that. (He does remember seeing the live TV talk show where Kenneth Tynan used the F-word.) My older siblings went to an English grammar school, but I was still a pre-schooler.

In 1974 we went to Mississauga for a year.  Then in 1981 we spent four months in England (near Canterbury), then eight months in Toronto.  In 1988 we spent a year in Glasgow, Scotland:  by this time my older siblings had gone their own way, and it was just the parents and me.  It was in 1995 that I went to London, and for me that was a bit like another sabbatical year.  Otherwise I've mostly stayed in the same place.  But I've done some travelling, including China and Japan:  I recently calculated that I've spent a week of my life in the air!

Math class

I was always good at math.  I remember one test on ratios in Grade 6 where I got 21 out of 20! (I got the bonus question right too.) I've always been fascinated by whole numbers and primes and integers and real numbers and complex numbers...

I recall that in Grade 8 math class we had a student teacher called Mr. Christie, so of course we kept saying, "Mr. Christie, you make good cookies!" Another thing I remember was that in Grade 5 we were learning about large numbers like sextillion, and some girl said, "That's David Cassidy's number!"

Mathematics and geometry and logic puzzles still interest me today.  There's this website brilliant.com that has a lot of math puzzles that I like to work on.