Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Fences

Robert Frost wrote a funny poem, titled "Mending Wall." People associate Frost with the saying "Good fences make good neighbours," but this poem's actually a criticism of fences and walls.  It's about Frost and his neighbour going through their spring ritual of walking along the stone wall between their properties and trying to restore the stones that have been falling away. ("Stay, until our backs are turned!") It has the line, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down."

I've never fenced, but I love this Japanese cartoon Revolutionary Girl Utena.  Utena is a tomboyish girl in a fancy private school who ends up in swordfights with kids on the Student Council, and the winner gets "engaged" to the Rose Bride, an East Indian girl called Anthy.  I like the show's whole look, reflecting Japan in the early years of the 20th century when the Japanese elite got superficially westernized in their clothes and such.

When Utena gets engaged to Anthy, of course there are lesbian overtones.  The whole show is very gay.  One of my favorite parts is just before the duels when the Shadow Girls appear and tell a story.  I'm straight, and even I can see how gay that is!  And there's a great cast of supporting characters, like Utena's "civilian" friend Wakaba and the Student Council Presidents' bitchy little sister Nanami.  I also like the eclectic music.

The ending of the last episode brings to mind the ending of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Tea & coffee

I never drink. (It's a habit I inherited from my parents.) I read that Britain's Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn doesn't drink either.  He's my kind of guy.

My parents spent some time in Scotland some thirty years ago and got to know an Iranian couple there.  One thing they had in common was that the Iranians didn't drink either, being Moslem.  In the Iranians' home there was a big picture of Ayatollah Khomeini!

But I go a step further and don't drink tea or coffee either!  They just don't appeal to me.  It's like the Mormons who don't drink liquor or coffee or tea or even soft drinks!  I've heard that some Mormons eat a lot of candy bars because that's the closest they can get to a vice...

I was thinking about the Boston Tea Party.  The reason that's so legendary is because the story appeals to little boys!  Only the vanguard actually dressed as Native Americans, but that's what they remember. "Let's dress up as savages and kick some limey butt!"

I read somewhere that coffee houses are most fashionable in times of speculative frenzy.  Like Holland during the 17th-century tulip mania, or New York City in the 1920s and 1990s.  I guess caffeine gives people an urge to play the markets.

Sunday, April 21, 2019

Candles

The great earthquake in Lisbon in 1755 happened on All Saints Day, so there were candles everywhere and fire quickly spread.  Writers like Voltaire waxed cynical.

Remember the sitcom Maude?  There was one episode about her 50th birthday, when her birthday cake had fifty candles, so she blew them out with a hair dryer!

I also remember an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man involving the Bionic Boy.  At the end of the episode he blew out his birthday candles and was supposed to make a wish, but he said, "I have nothing to wish for.  Everything's perfect for me!" Ah, the world of cheesy '70s TV shows...

The nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons" ends with the lines:

Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head!

Some of those nursery rhymes are pretty violent, but most of us don't grow up to be psychopaths.

Elton John wrote the song "Candle in the Wind" about Marilyn Monroe, and later reworked it into "Goodbye, England's Rose" for Princess Diana.  When I was taking dance lessons at the Arthur Murray studio, I heard it in the most annoying form of all: "Goodbye, England's Rose" is waltz time!

Monday, April 15, 2019

Yellow

Yellow is the traditional colour of cities, Chinese people, taxis, gold, warning lights, Jewish people, Dick Tracy's trench coat.  And it's the colour of cowardice, of course.

Did you know where the term "yellow journalism" comes from?  It's from the time around 1900 when tabloid newspapers often published sensationalistic stories for people who could barely read, and often used yellow ink because it was attention-grabbing.  That also explains why the first comic strip, The Yellow Kid, was about a boy dressed in yellow.

Don't get me started on yellow journalism!  I remember after the Central Park rape thirty years ago when The New York Post did a big front page story claiming that the accused had used the word "wilding." (It contributed to their wrongful conviction.) It later turned out that the word, which aroused racial fears, had been made up by the reporter!

A big warning sign was that the claim was attributed to an anonymous source.  The British magazine Private Eye has said that when a reporter is getting close to the deadline and his story isn't up to scratch, the temptation is to fabricate a conveniently anonymous quote.  They once made a list of the Fleet Street reporters who'd written the most stories with unnamed sources!

Oh dear, it looks like I did get started on yellow journalism...

Sunday, April 7, 2019

Newspaper comics


I followed lots of weekend color comic strips when I was little:  stuff like Peanuts, Li'l Abner, Blondie, Dick Tracy.  The first daily story strip I followed was Alley Oop, featuring a caveman who met some time-machine people from the 20th century and went through a wide range of adventures in various ages. (In one he climbed a beanstalk into a land of giants!) He had a pet dinosaur, a sidekick called Foozy who spoke in rhyme, and a sometime girlfriend Ooola who was smarter than him!

Back then The Star Weekly also had weekend comics, which they somehow arranged to release a week before the regular papers!  Their strips included The Heart of Juliet Jones (my favorite character was her single sister Eve), Doonesbury (which I didn't get) and Prince Valiant.

When I was eleven or twelve, the coolest guy in the world was the brainy comic-strip detective Rip Kirby.  That's who my father would have been if he'd been a man of action!

When I was twelve, we spent a year near Toronto and subscribed to The Toronto Star.  Among their daily strips, the best was Little Orphan Annie (which was actually in reruns from the '30s), and the worst were Nancy and The Family Circus.  Their weekend section introduced me to Mary Perkins On Stage (set in the theatre world) and Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, which teamed an investigative reporter and a truck driver!

For a while I bought Sunday comics on Ebay.  I have a big collection of stuff like Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon.  I also got a complete collection of The Menomonee Falls Gazette, which reprinted a whole lot of strips in the early '70s and introduced me to stuff like Britain's Modesty Blaise and Australia's Air Hawk.

These days I subscribe to a couple of comic strip websites.  Among new strips, I particularly like Brooke McEldowney's 9 Chickweed Lane and Pibgorn.

Thursday, April 4, 2019

(Least) favourite teacher

Lately I've been spending a lot of time on the website quora.com .  That's a site where people can ask questions, and other people can offer answers.  One question that's been asked is "Who was your worst teacher?" A Russian called Yevgeny told about having a teacher who had it in for him.  One day she asked the whole class, "How many of you are friends with Yevgeny?  All of you stand up!" Nobody dared take her on by standing up, even the people Yevgeny thought were his friends, and he cried.

In his comic strip Life in Hell, Matt Groening once repeated stories from a diary he'd kept in Grade 5 or 6.  One teacher was so nasty that when Matt got caught talking in class, he made him wear tape on his mouth!  On one occasion he had the whole class doing exercises outdoors, and concluded by making everyone run in a big race, where the three people who finished last would have to do extra exercises afterward! (The three losers cried.)

Some teachers can be mean.  I remember a class where one girl came in late and the teacher told all of us to turn around and look at her!  My sister had one teacher who divided the class into the favoured and the unfavoured, and the latter weren't allowed to answer her questions. (I think she marked your spelling wrong if you crossed a double "t" with a single line!)

And I remember when one teacher commented on what I'd written, "You missed the whole point!" That rather bugged me
--she could have just said, "You missed the point."