Cold nights

I grew up in New Brunswick, where winters can get pretty cold. (Occasionally, it would snow as late as May!) I remember the feeling when your hands get so cold that they feel hot!  Toronto isn't like that, with its heat island...

I remember one episode of All in the Family where their heating conked out on the coldest weekend of the year.  Archie tried turning on the stove for its heat, but Edith said, "President Ford says you aren't supposed to get heat from the stove!"

And I remember reading the Jack London Story "To Build a Fire" in school.  It's about a man in the Yukon, travelling in weather so cold that his survival depends on starting a fire with numb hands, but it doesn't work.  His last thought is that freezing to death isn't so bad--it's like taking an anaesthetic.  I found the story depressing. (I got a D grade on it.)

My father's favourite suit

My father's anything but vain.  I can't recall him ever having a favourite suit.  But he used to have a deerstalker hat like Sherlock Holmes wore!

I do have a formal black suit that I could wear to a funeral.  I also have a pair of fancy Bata shoes, but they're so old they need replacing!  Anyway, I never seem to have occasion for dressing fancy.

I don't care for this idea of favourite clothing.  Clothes are clothes!  But I do have a soft spot for my Steve McQueen-style black turtleneck. (To complete the look, of course, I'd need a shoulder holster and a Mustang!)

As for favourite soups, I used to eat wonton soup at Chinese restaurants, but haven't had it in recent years.

Construction

There's a lot of construction in my St. Clair West neighbourhood just now.  There's an aparment building they just finished a block over from our house, which also has a What a Bagel! bakery. There are a couple more that'll soon be going up, so they've set up a shop for condo buyers.

It looks like we're in one of those "happening" neighbourhoods realtors talk about.  In recent years they rebuilt the streetcar line and gave it a dedicated lane.  The construction itself with something of a mess, taking a lot longer than it should have.  But now that it's finished, we're getting the benefits.  One is that there are a lot fewer accidents.

On Youtube I like to watch videos about building and engineering and city planning. One channel I watch a lot is City Beautiful.  I just saw a video of theirs where they talked about how you can improve traffic by slowing down the rate at which cars enter the freeway and reduce accidents with traffic roundabouts and double diamond-shaped intersections.  There's also one about the city of Savannah and how it was laid out in an 18th-century grid system that's improved the quality of life there today.

In China the hoardings around construction sites have government slogans written on them!

Balloons

I'm sensitive to loud noises. They literally make me jump!  One example is the sound of a balloon bursting.  As a result, I'm afraid of balloons.  I look at an inflated balloon and imagine the noise it'll make as it bursts.

Back when I was taking dance lessons at the Arthur Murray studio, they had a big sales event where if you bought lessons they'd have a ceremony for you that involved bursting a balloon.  When they had a ceremony for me, I had to go out of the room, which was a bit embarrassing.

I've never been in a hot-air balloon.  It sounds fun.  I did see a three-part film on The Wonderful World of Disney, "High Flying Spy." It was set in the Civil War and involved two Union men and a boy using a balloon to spy on the Confederate armies.  The part I remember is that one of the men said to the boy, "Someday you'll see the face of war, and know it for what it is." In the last episode the boy saw his older brother killed in a skirmish.  So he did see the face of war.

Roger Ebert, the movie critic, had a Balloon Rule:  No movie with a hot-air balloon in it is any good. (The exception is The Wizard of Oz.)

The Internet

What would I do without the Internet?  Just this morning my brother was renovating our house and had to turn off the power in my room for a short spell.  I actually went downstairs and talked to my father and sister for a bit!  Something like that makes me appreciate the Internet.

I first got online back in 1996.  Back then I was a fan of the Sailor Moon anime series and found tons of info online.  I'd also been playing the computer game King's Quest 7 but was stuck, until I found enough online cheats to complete it!

I got onto Twitter a couple of years ago, which is pretty fun.  I have almost 2500 followers! (You can only follow 5000 Tweeters, so after you reach that maximum you can only get more followers by purging those you follow who don't follow you.) I post links to my blogs there.

My new online interest just now is dating webpages.  I found the site OKCupid where they ask you tons of questions and you can search for potential relationships by which people have answered closest to you.  For me answering the questions is as fun as dating itself!

One question you can answer is "I could probably beat you at..." and my own answer was "Trivia." One artist I came across answered, "Chiseling mortar off bricks from old houses." I commented, "You'd be useful in our current renovation!" (We were recently removing the bricks in a disused chimney to make more room.)

Blue

The colour blue gets used with music a lot.  One of the songs my singing group has been the 1920s song "Blue Skies." (I like the Willie Nelson version.) We also sing "Blue Moon," one of my favourites.  And of course there's a whole musical genre called blues, like with Gershwin' Rhapsody in Blue.

I actually prefer grey skies to blue ones.

On American TV channels like Fox News they show election results with Republican states red and Democratic states blue. That's always annoyed me:  I thing they should be doing it the other way around, like red Liberals and blue Conservatives on Canadian TV.  Another Fox News innovation that annoys me is their showing news headlines on a moving crawl at the bottom of the screen.  It would be better to show fixed headlines like the BBC News channel.

In France they have blue smarties!

Kites

My hometown had a lot of wind, which was convenient for kites. On one occasion our kite landed in the cemetery!

Did you know that a water skier can carry a kite behind so that he gets lifted into the air?  That would be a cool experience!

In the movie Mary Poppins, the finale has them flying kites and the song goes, "Let's go fly a kite!" That movie had some brilliant songs.

You know that experiment where Benjamin Franklin flew a kite with a metal wire to see that lightning is electric?  If it sounds dangerous, that's because it was:  a couple of other people who tried to do it got killed!

I think there's a bird called a kite too.

Stephen King

I've never read and of Stephen King's books. (Horror isn't my thing.) But I have seen some of the movies based on his writing.

I liked Brian de Palma's movie of Carrie.  That's the one with Sissy Spacek as a girl with a religious nut mother and nasty schoolmates, who develops telekinetic powers and burns down the whole school.  It captured that feeling of being caught between your parents and your peers and not being understood by either.

I also liked The Shawshank Redemption, with Tim Robbins as a lifer who forms an unlikely friendship with prison fixer Morgan Freeman and ultimately transcends their institution.  The Robbins character seemed to have Asperger's Syndrome, like me.

I've also seen Stanley Kubrick's movie of The Shining, with Jack Nicholson as the caretaker in an isolated, mysterious hotel who ends up going berserk and hunting his own family.  It's a controversial adaptation that King himself hated.  I get the impression that the book was about the family, while the movie was more about the hotel itself: 

a haunted-house movie on an epic scale.

I did like some of the shots, like when Nicholson looks down at a model of the hotel maze and then we see his wife and kid playing in the maze, and it's done so smoothly it's like he's looking down at them!  And I like how Nicholson held his menacing axe near the end, with the gait of a caveman.

Cigarettes

I've managed to stay clear of smoking.  But if a smoker is considerate enough to ask "Mind if I smoke?" I give him a break and let him. (Steve Martin says that if someone asks you that question you should answer, "No, mind if I fart?")

Does anyone remember the candy cigarettes they had fifty years ago?

When you see a period show like Mad Men, the characters are always smoking, which makes them rather pitiful.

Sadly, Hollywood has done a lot to promote smoking over the years.  If you see Breakfast at Tiffany's today, you'll notice that Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard smoke constantly--even in bed!  In Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea they show people smoking on board a submarine!  As recently as Titanic, they showed that Kate Winslet was a "free spirit" by having her smoke despite her mother and fiance's disapproval. (Does she smoke Virginia Slims?) That isn't just wicked, it's trite!

And it's pretty clear that the cigarette companies knew their product was harmful long ago.  Back in the 1950s they came up with the ad line, "More doctors smoke Camels"!  I say that all cigarette companies should be nationalized.  And I think that tobacco and marijuana should be treated the same.

"It's a guy thing"

Speaking as a man, I've never understood this business of women saying, "I have nothing to wear!" You aren't naked, are you?

I remember a scene in the movie Bull Durham where Kevin Costner and Tim Robbins started quarrelling and Susan Sarandon said, "Don't be such guys!"

I was reading an Arabian Nights story involving two brothers and a sister.  They had to go up this hill where all the stones were calling out to you, and if you turned around and looked at them, you'd turn into a stone too! The brothers tried to reach the top but ended up yielding to the voices and became rocks.  But when it was the sister's turn, she put cotton in her ears and got to the top.  She cheated and won.  That's the sort of way women can be smarter than men. (They have less to prove.)

On the other hand, consider this Chinese movie Raise the Red Lantern.  It's about these four women living together, all married to the same man (whom they never show). Of course, the wives keep scheming against each other, with dire results.  It seems to me that if those wives were smarter they'd unite, and scheme against the husband!  If I had four wives, that's what I'd be afraid of.  I guess that teamwork doesn't come as naturally to women as it does to men.

Resolutions

I'm not big on resolutions. (Years ago one of the wars with Iraq caused me to stop swatting flies.) It seems to me that when people talk about "will power," they really mean the power to do what other people want you to do, so it's really about their will!

One thing I don't like is movies with lame resolutions.  Years ago I saw this movie Mr. Holland's Opus, with Richard Dreyfus as a high-school music teacher.  One of the storylines involved him dealing with a smart pupil in a rather jerky way.  How do they resolve it?  Years later, when he's retiring and his former pupils come to see him again, it turns out that the smart kid has forgiven him!  Yeah, right.

I also remember in Forrest Gump where Gary Sinise is this Vietnam veteran with a severe case of PTSD, but then he spends hours raging at a hurricane and when it's over he's cured!  Yeah, right.

An eccentric person

I have to admit that I'm on the eccentric side.  You know how frozen French fires look before you put them in the oven?  I used to like eating one while they were still frozen!  I used to rub orange peels on my face.  And I have exactly 24 shirts that I wear in a regular cycle.

Some of my biggest heroes are eccentrics.  Like Mahatma Gandhi, who was a first-class kook even by India's liberal standards.  And there was Queen Desideria of Sweden.  She started out as Desiree Clary, daughter of a Marseilles silk merchant, became one of Napoleon's many lovers, then married a French general, Marshal Bernadotte, who was chosen as the next King of Sweden.  There's a Hollywood movie about her, Desiree, with Jean Simmons and Marlon Brando.  But the movie barely mentions how kooky she was:  she liked to visit the opera house after the performance was over, and take her carriage out for long nighttime rides.  And she'd invite kids in off the street and give them candy. ("Come, come" was about the only Swedish word she knew!)

For some reason, you get a lot of eccentrics in frontier societies, like Johnny Appleseed and Emperor Norton of San Francisco.  And British Columbia in the late 19th century had a politician who took the name Amor de Cosmos, meaning "love of the universe."

The fragility of life

The Chinese have a saying, "We take our socks off at night, not knowing if we'll put them on in the morning."

Speaking of fragility, I had a set of drinking glasses that broke easily.  The last of them recently developed a crack near the bottom, but I didn't care because it wasn't leaking.  The other week a relative visited and my room got Marie Kondoized. (I admit it was on the messy side.) One of the changes was that I got a big new table for my computer.

The crack in that glass had grown longer, but I still didn't care.  So of course, when I sat down at my new computer table, my glass came apart spontaneously and the table got drenched!  Hello again, mess. (I didn't tell anyone because it was my problem.)

I once had a laptop computer where the screen got cracked. (I think one of my little nieces must have sat on it.) It turned out that the warranty didn't cover a cracked screen.

Songbooks

When I was young we had a couple of old songbooks that went back to pre-World War II times, when my parents were young!  They had stuff like "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie" and "I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard." (One of them I think we still have.) There were also titles like "She May Have Seen Better Days" and the barber-shop quartet "She Was Happy Till She Met You." (My mother remembered millions of those songs!)

Several of us played the piano in my family.  We also had books like Everyone's Favorite Gilbert and Sullivan and one with all the songs from Mary Poppins, which I memorized.

In recent years I took some solo singing lessons from Giuseppe--classical and opera stuff.  I'd go to his house in Scarborough, where he's lived since coming to Canada in the 1950s.  He has a fancy garden with speakers that play opera music, and an indoor fountain!  So I bought some new songbooks with songs in Italian and French and German.

German's a surprisingly difficult language, considering how close it is to English.  I did the Schubert song "Wohin?" (German for "Where to?"), about a "Bachlein," which is German for brooklet.  The original Bach (brook) has a female gender, but the "-lein" suffix means that Bachlein is neuter in some ways, but stays female in others.  So you get a line that literally means, "It's singing of water fairies beneath her depths"!

Cookies

I guess my favourite brand of cookies is those Peek Freans Assorted Creme, especially the round ones without the jelly in the middle.  Another one I used to like was those French vanilla cookies with raisins. (I think they showed impressionist art on the package!) But they seem to have disappeared.

I'm in this Crowdreads Meetup, and every time Maria she brings cookies!  She does a different recipe every time.  She's popular with the rest of the group, of course.

I remember the Cookie Monster on Sesame Street.  Some grownups said that characters like the Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch were bad role models for kids, which I suppose is what makes them popular.  In more recent years they've had him eating fresh fruit instead!  Oh, dear.

The Christie company used to have a big cookie factory in Etobicoke near the Lakeshore area.  We drove past it once, and what a fragrant smell it had!  In school I had a math class with a student teacher called Mr. Christie, so of course some of us repeated the ad line, "Mr. Christie, you make good cookies." (Kids are mean.)

My first and true romance

On Twitter the other day someone asked, "Who was your first celebrity crush?" I answered Francesca Annis and showed a photo of her in a British TV series about Lillie Langtree.  I didn't see that series when it first came out in 1979 (we didn't get PBS then), but I saw a photo of her in it and she was very beautiful!  The series itself I saw a decade later. (It has wonderful theme music by Joseph Horovitz.)

When my sister was young she had a big crush on Leonard Nimoy, but not from his Spock role on Star Trek--it was from his role as Paris, master of disguise, on Mission:  Impossible!  And my other sister had a crush on Robert Vaughan as Napoleon Solo in The Man From UNCLE!

I've never yet gone in for serious romance.  I guess my greatest love is for the socialist movement.  It pained me when the Labour Party lost the British elections of 1992. (If it had happened just six months later, after the August market crash, they'd clearly have won!) And it pained me when Tony Blair took over the party and effected a "Third Way" sellout on crucial issues like privatization, in the name of "electability." Sure, they won the next election, but they would have even if they'd been led by Stalin! (Beware the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy.) But their new leader Jeremy Corbyn has given me hope again.  One thing I like about him is that he doesn't drink, something he has in common with me.

Owls

I don't know much about owls.  I read somewhere that if you dream about an owl it means you're in danger!

I recall that David Letterman's show once chowed a clip of barn owls eating mice, accompanied by "Tomorrow," the song from the musical Annie.

In junior high school we read a book by Farley Mowat about a boy and his pet owls. (The title was Owls in the Family.) I think they were called Wol and Weeps.

There was an owl in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories.  When I was young we had a miniature of that owl that came from a box of Shreddies or some cereal, that had a hole in the bottom so you could put it on the end of a pencil or pen.  I think it lost one of its wings.

I remember a rhyme from my youth:

There was a wise owl lived in an oak.

The more he saw, the less he spoke.

The less he spoke, the more he heard.

Why can't we be like that wise bird?

Frost

One thing I remember from my youth in New Brunswick was how in the early fall there'd be an overnight front and in the morning I'd wake up and see a grey sheet over the lawn.  But after a while it would thaw and the lawn would be green again.  That's one thing I miss from New Brunswick.

One of my favourite poets is Robert Frost.  He'd been a New England farmer and his poems often start with a realistic detail of country life, then develop it into a deep metaphysical theme.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" involves "Paradise lost," a great theme in American culture.  I think that what I liked about that frost on the lawn was precisely that it was gone so soon!

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

What I like about "Dust of Snow" is that it starts with a silly moment and draws back to reveal that it's about someone having a bad day.  Like a movie shot that starts with a closeup than draws out to reveal a whole panorama!

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

When I was young, I thought that "The Road Not Taken" was about the importance of doing things differently instead of conforming.  Now that I'm older, I realize that it's about the regret we inevitably feel when we look back at our choices and speculate on what a different choice would have meant.

Decision-making

You know that Proust questionnaire on the back page of Vanity Fair where they ask celebrities a set list of questions?  One of the questions they ask is, "What do you consider the lowest level of misery?" I think my answer would be, "Indecision."

I remember that Mad magazine did a quiz, "How neurotic are you?" For one question, they showed an illustration with a driver on a two-lane road seeing two big trucks bearing down on him in either lane, and the question was, "Do you have trouble making quick decisions?" The answers were Yes, No, and Maybe!

How is the word "indecisive" pronounced?  Is the third syllable pronounced like "is" or like "ise"? I can't decide!

I'd write more about this subject, but I'm not sure what to say. (Oh well, saying nothing in one type of decision...)

Celebrities

Celebrities don't interest me much. (I haven't really met any.) You can have reality TV.  The Kardashians aren't just famous for being famous, they've made a fortune from being rich!  Life's unfair, isn't it?  If only you could make a fortune from being poor...

Ever see the PBS documentary series The Civil War?  It made the historian Shelby Foote famous, but he didn't switch to an unlisted phone number like most celebrities use.  So every time they reran the show, he'd get lots of calls from people he didn't know!

It's odd to think how when you're famous you get into the dreams of people you don't know, so you can't dream about them!

I think it's better to be famous after you're dead.  It'll be too late for people to dig up most of the dirt about you!

Guilty pleasures

I'm ashamed to admit it, but I kind of like I Dream of Jeannie.  That's the 1960s sitcom about astronaut Larry Hagman opening this old lamp and finding himself master of Barbara Eden, a genie who goes by the name Jeannie.  It wasn't very PC, of course. Sometimes I imagine what I'd do if I had a genie...

Another guilty pleasure of mine is The Phantom, a comic strip about a masked vigilante who lives in the jungle in Skull Cave among a tribe of pygmies.  He comes from a long line of Phantoms, starting with an ancestor 500 years ago who swore an oath on the skull of his father's killer to devote his life, and his descendants', to fighting pirates and criminals.  The job's been handed down so smoothly that most people thinks they've been one continuous immortal hero, and they call him The Ghost Who Walks!

Back in my early twenties, I used to like Arnold Schwarzenegger movies like Conan the Barbarian.  One particular guilty pleasure is The Running Man, where he gets put on a violent TV game show, hosted by real-life game show host Richard Dawson.  When Arnie says "I'll be back!" Dawson says "Only in reruns."

Another guilty pleasure movie of mine is the 1963 slapstick comedy It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.  Someone called it vulgar, cynical and cruel, and it is, but it succeeds through sheer relentlessness. (And I like any movie with Terry-Thomas!)

My guilty pleasure western is the 1963 Cinerama epic How the West Was Won.  It's cheesy, vulgar triumphalism, yet I've watched it again and again!

In more recent years, there's the 1997 Jerry Bruckheimer comedy-thriller Con Air.  It's the sort of movie that starts with a fight scene at night in the pouring rain with a revolving oil well machine in the background because, well, it looks cool!  In one scene Nicolas Cage has to kill this guy so he starts a fight by saying, "Put--the bunny--back in the box!"

My favourite magazine

I don't read magazines as much as I used to.  I still read Harper's. Last Friday I went to the dentist and got a filling, and that afternoon in Harper's I read an annotation thing--in which someone shows a text or images and adds telling notes--by someone talking about the dental care problems she's had because she grew up poor in the U.S.A.

Back in the '90s I used to read the left-wing magazine The Nation faithfully, in big part for the colums of Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens.  But these days they're gone, and the current magazine has tended to take a disappointing "play it safe approach," as when they denied the fould play that resulted in Hillary Clinton winning the 2016 Democratic nomination instead of Bernie Sanders.

I'm ashamed to admit that I read Time magazine back in the '70s.  They've long been notorious for playing favourites like Nixon and Thatcher, shamelessly and repetitiously.  I recall that after Nixon resigned they put the new president Gerald Ford on the cover with the headline "The Healing Begins"! (A note of wishful thinking there...) And as for Ronald Reagan--they reported his 1980 election with the headline "A fresh start." In 1986 they put Reagan on the cover with the headline "Why is this man so popular?" (Hmm, could worshipful press coverage have something to do with it?)

I liked The New Yorker until Tina Brown ruined it in the '90s.

Only five minutes more

Sometimes when I was little my mother would call me and I'd say, "Just a minute." So she told me the story about how the journalist June Callwood was interviewing someone on a picket line or somewhere, and a policeman told her to move along, but she said, "I will in just a minute!" The result was that she got arrested and her husband got fired and very bad things happened, all because she took an extra minute...

I suppose that if I only had five minutes more, I could think of something more to write about this.  So it goes...

Labels

What is a label worth?  They say that making counterfeit designer labels today is more lucrative than forging counterfeit banknotes!  Does that mean that designer labels are the money of the future?

I have a friend whose boyfriend bought her an expensive purse with an elaborate designer label, Gucci or something.  She loved the purse, but ended up pulling off the label--not because she's an anti-label ideologue, but just because she preferred the purse without it.  When her boyfriend saw her with the unlabelled purse, that took the wind out of his sails! (Their relationship didn't last.)

Have you seen the red-haired girl in the label for Wendy's hamburgers?  I wonder if they took it from Anne of Green Gables...

Flags are a sort of national label.  Canada has a pretty good flag, unique without being complicated.  I especially like the stark simplicity of the Japanese flag:  a red circle on a white field! (The Japanese have a flair for minimalism--look at Hello Kitty!) As for American flag-worship, there's something pitiful about that.  Americans seem to think they invented national flags!

Impatience

I'm more patient than I used to be.  I play the online Elvenar computer game where you're gradually building a magical city and you can only advance slowly and have to keep maintaining the supply flow and rental incomes and keep the factories in production with each order taking three hours or more.  You can speed up the game by paying real money, but from my perspective that isn't just wasteful but cheating!

Some species of bamboo can grow really fast.  I read somewhere that there are Buddhist monks who sharpen their powers of patience to the point that they can see a bamboo shoot grow!

I had to exercise some patience in writing my Ph.D. thesis.  I ultimately wrote ten drafts, and what's more, I often had to cool my heels for quite a while until my supervisor got around to reading my latest draft.  There was one 18-month period where I spent close to 12 months in this waiting!  The worst thing about it was that the only thing I could do then was worry.  I did pass in the end, but I was lucky to manage that.  I guess most people who write a doctoral thesis end up thinking, "If only it had been a little better..."

There's a flower called impatiens.

Flirting

I'm not what you call a flirt.  And I'm the sort who's too clueless to notice when a woman's flirting with me.  I don't care for game shows about flirting, like The Dating Game and Studs.  And don't get me started on "reality TV" shows that involve flirting, like Temptation Island or this new show Love Island.  It should be called "unreality TV"!

I guess that flirts and teases make me impatient.  I want to tell them, "Fish or cut bait!" It's funny how in North American popular culture sex is important enough to be obsessed with, but not important enough to be serious about.  That leads to flirting and teasing.  Take something like Miss America:  that's basically a tease pageant, with girls who are virginal yet sexy, yet virginal...  Not to mention the jailbait pop of Britney Spears--and don't get me started on Miley Cyrus! (Back in the '60s flight attendants did the virginal tease routine, and got the sack when they married, got pregnant or turned 30.)

Of course, there's no American monopoly on all this stuff.  In Japan, the institution of the geisha is really the art of the tease. ("Geisha" is actually Japanese for artist.)

There was a funny Australian movie titled Flirting, set in a prep school.

Jigsaw puzzles

When I was little, we had a jigsaw puzzle with a picture of a canoer waking up in the morning and seeing a huge moose standing over him!  It's odd what you remember.  And we also had one where Beetle Bailey was supposed to be peeling potatoes but all he did was sculpt one into a likeness of Sarge's head!  We also had a couple that made maps of Canada.

And we had this huge British jigsaw puzzle with a round shape.  It showed half a dozen old English inns like the Trip to Jerusalem (the oldest in England) and the Tan Hill Inn (the highest in England).

You can do jigsaw puzzles online now.  I have Asperger's Syndrome and someone said that people like me don't like jigsaw puzzles, but I don't mind them so much.  It depends how much time you want to waste.

Ever see Terence Malick's movie The Tree of Life?  It's about crazy inventor Brad Pitt and his family  in the 1950s.  Except that it's told in a really non-linear way--it begins with the creation of the earth! (I remember one scene with some merry kids following a truck spraying DDT in the neighbourhood.) Anyway, I was thinking that watching this movie is like doing a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing...

Weddings

I've only been to a few weddings in my lifetime. (My mother didn't care for them herself.) And I've never actually married anyone...

Back when I was 19 I woke up early in the morning to watch Charles and Diana's royal wedding.  Today I feel a bit ashamed to admit that I cared about the Royals that much. (I didn't see William's wedding or Harry's.)

MTV used to show music videos connecting marriage to death, a rather adolescent cliche.  In Greg Kihn's "Jeopardy" his bride decomposes before his eyes.  In Billy Idol's "White Wedding," we see a coffin being nailed shut.  Commitment is death!

Remember the cartoon Herman?  In one episode someone asks a minister, "If you're dead set against gambling, why do you perform so many marriages?"

My parents were married for almost 60 years.  Which reminds me of a joke, of course.  This man has been married for sixty years and his grandson asks, "How have you stayed married for so long?  What's your secret?" And he answers, "My secret is, I decide all the big stuff and she decides all the small stuff.  And so far, it's all been small stuff!"

Skydiving

I've never parachuted.  My life isn't any emptier for it.

I read somewhere that in World War I the British air force didn't provide their pilots with parachutes because they wanted them to be motivated!

I remember when I was little reading about D.B. Cooper hijacking an airplane with a fake bomb, then parachuting out with a suitcase full of ransom money.  Neither he nor any of the money ever turned up again.  Even with his parachute, he probably didn't survive hitting the ground.

I remember this movie The Longest Day, about the D-Day invasion.  One character was a paratrooper played by Red Buttons.  He parachuted into France, but his chute got caught on a church steeple and he hung there helplessly for hours with this big battle going on around him.  When they finally got him down, he'd been left permanently deaf!  Somehow that got to me more than soldiers getting killed.

Getting lost

I usually avoid getting lost and the few times that I have been I feel ashamed to talk about.  You think, "This too shall pass," yet part of you wonders, "What if I stay lost forever?"

I read somewhere that when you're lost in the woods, the smart thing is to go downhill. And I've also read that if you see a blind person standing in the same place for a long time, it may mean that he's lost!

I've never watched the TV show Lost. (I heard that the later seasons got weirder and weirder...) And Lost in Space was before my time.  Though my brother put together a model of the Lost in Space robot.  He had a lot of models, like the car in Get Smart and the early airplane that Louis Bleriot flew across the English Channel.

Ring Lardner wrote a piece with this exchange: "'Are we lost, Daddy?' 'Shut up!' he explained."

Lost and found

Don't put down people as losers!  At the end of the day, we're all losers--we all lose to the Grim Reaper.

My problem with sports movies it that after the team gets their act together and comes from behind to pull off a dramatic upset victory, I'm left wondering, "How did the other team feel?" (A critic in The New Yorker wrote, "Only two kinds of people usually enjoy sports movies:  children, who like fairy tales, and businessmen, who like motivational lectures.")

Losing can benefit us. Remember the Falklands War in 1982?  Argentina actually benefited more from losing the war--they got rid of their dictatorship--then Great Britain did from winning!  It's a shame that both countries couldn't have lost.

There's a Gordon Lightfoot song, "If You Could Read My Mind," with the line, "The hero often fails."  It seems to me that this is something Canadians understand better than Americans, who are such believers in winning that they think a hero has to win all the time!  I guess people like the Russians and the Irish understand it too.

Halloween

I actually lost interest in Halloween trick or treating early, at twelve or so.  It just felt like a little kid thing to me.  Did you know that trick or treating was developed only in the 1930s and '40s, as an alternative to more rowdy behaviour?  

There was a funny episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David wouldn't give a treat to a teenage girl whose idea of a costume was a T-shirt with a scarf, so she trashed his whole front yard, then he complained to her father, who turned out to be this guy who'd been calling David a bad Jew and started shouting him down, so David hired an orchestra to play Wagner in front of the guy's house!

Halloween is interesting in its pagan roots.  It started out as the Celtic Samhain festival, and the jack o' lantern is very Celtic imagery.  Halloween as we know it was brought to America by the Scottish and Irish. 

The Christian church characteristically co-opted Samhain by putting All Saints Day on November 1 and All Souls Day the day after. (The first is a day for all the saints, and the second is for all the regular dead, sort of like Mensa and Densa.) In Mexico All Souls Day has become the Day of the Dead, with candy skulls and such, in a way that reflects pre-Columbian culture.

I haven't gone to a Halloween party for years.  Some years back I went to one as a beatnik, wearing a glued-on beard, a turtleneck and blazer, shades and my mother's beret. (She'd stopped wearing it because of that footage of Monica Lewinsky in a beret giving President Clinton a hug.)

STAR TREK

I've never really been a Trekkie. (Science fiction isn't usually my thing.) My sister had a crush on Leonard Nimoy, but not because of Star Trek--it was from his time on Mission:  Impossible as Paris the disguise expert.

Some of the writing was interesting.  There was one episode about this couple alone on a planet where these alien creatures were dying from lack of salt, and one of them killed the wife then took her form.  The twist was that the husband eventually admitted he'd known all along that this wasn't his real wife, but he humoured the creature anyway out of sheer loneliness!

I sometimes liked the second series The New Generation.  I remember one episode where Captain Picard visited earth, and the final shot was an old-fashioned image of a shepherd boy looking up at the starts.

I like to say that when Picard says "Make it so!" Ryker says "Yeah, make it so!"

Regret

In Charles Frazier's Civil War novel Cold Mountain there's a line: "He tried to name which of the deadly seven [sins] might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret."

What do I regret?  Sometimes I regret that I didn't develop my singing talents at an earlier age. (I took it up in middle age, and now I can sing a range of two octaves!) And I sometimes wish I'd taken up acting back then. More importantly, there have been times when people were friendly to me and I wish I'd reciprocated.  But I just wasn't ready!

I suppose that life sometimes comes down to a choice of doing something and regretting it, or leaving it undone and regretting that.  Personally, I'm more likely to regret the things I didn't do than what I did.

My favorite line in Casablanca is, "If that plane takes off and you aren't on it, you'll regret it.  Maybe not today.  Maybe not tomorrow.  But soon, and for the rest of your life."

I like Willie Nelson's country song "Mama, Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Cowboys."

THE SOUND OF MUSIC

I saw The Sound of Music when I was little.  I remember feeling embarrassed for these poor kids, having to sing in front of all these people!

The Sound of Music is a musical for the fallout shelter era, all about joy in the face of dread. (That's most clear in the song "My Favorite Things.") They face the Nazis with music and reassurance, a comforting message for people worried about nuclear warfare and the spread of communism.  I think my favorite songs are "The Lonely Goatherd" and "Edelweiss." As Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals go, I prefer Carousel.

The true story of the Von Trapps was a bit different from the musical.  The real Captain wasn't the aloof martinet Christopher Plummer played, and he never sang with the family!  Also, their escape from the Nazis wasn't as dramatic as in the movie.  The Captain was born in a part of the Austrian Empire that Italy grabbed after 1918, and that gave him the right to claim Italian citizenship, which he did long enough to get them out of the country.

Train station

In my hometown of Sackville, N.B., the railway station was pretty small, with a central waiting room that smelled of dustbane.  Not like Toronto's majestic Union Station.

Of course, Union Station is so grand that you can get lost in it.  I remember once when my mother was coming to visit me in Toronto.  I was waiting for her in the arrivals area, of course.  But she went through a corridor meant for people changing trains and ended up coming out into the departures area on a different floor, and she couldn't find me.  She was a bit goofy that way.

The way things work now, freight trains have the right of way over passenger trains, which have to go to the side and wait for the freight trains to pass, which makes train travel a lot slower.  I think they should change the protocol to give passenger trains the right of way!  That'll make train travel a lot quicker and mean less people travelling by road or by plane.  If we're to be serious about reducing emissions and slowing down climate change, that's the sort of thing we need to be doing.

The desert

I've never been in a desert, though it sounds interesting. When I was little we visited the Warren Dunes on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan.  It isn't a desert, but it is a wide expanse of sand dunes.

Canada doesn't have a lot of deserts, though the Arctic tundra has been called a cold desert. There's an area around Osoyoos in British Columbia that's been called a desert, though according to Wikipedia it's a "semi-arid shrub-steppe."

I remember a cartoon where Bugs Bunny was in the Sahara Desert and met up with an Arab Yosemite Same who accused him of "getting footyprints all over my desert!" I've always liked that line.

Tacitus had a good line about Roman conquests: "They turn the land into a desert, and call it peace."

The world's deserts have been growing because of deforestation.  But in some places they've started to reverse the process. (They've been doing a lot of reforesting in China.) I like to watch videos on Youtube showing how that's done.  There's a guy in Africa who's been spreading around his knowledge about how to grow new trees!

Fish

Q:  How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?

A:  A fish.

I eat fish, but I've never gone fishing.  The idea of biting into a piece of food only to get your mouth stuck on a hook that bulls you out of your breathable world gets to me.

I wish they had more fish cakes in the supermarket.  Norwegian supermarkets are full of them!

One food I don't like is unfresh fish.  In my book it's up there with undercooked potatoes!

My mother taught school when she was young.  She told me of one kid who wrote, "The explores found big schools of codfish in the sea, so they knew they were near Newfoundland!"

I knew an Englishwoman who griped that fish and chips in Canada didn't include mushy peas. (How English can you get?) In British fish and chips shops they used to post the sign "Frying tonight," which goes back to the wartime grease shortages when they couldn't fry every night.  I think fish and chips were originally Jewish cuisine!