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!

Ocean tides

Time for a corny joke:

Q:  Why do sailors measure a ship's speed in knots?

A:  Because they have to keep the ocean tide (tied)!

I come from southeastern New Brunswick, near the Bay of Fundy coast, with the world's highest tides. (It has something to do with being near the 45th parallel halfway between the North Pole and the Equator...) Nearby Hopewell Cape has the Rocks, "the world's largest potted plant," with trees growing on isolated rocks due to the strong tidal erosion.  In recent years they've finally started to develop the tides' electrical potential.

One of my childhood memories is of passing the tidal flats in March after the full-moon spring tide, when big chunks of dirty ice would wash ashore.  It's odd what we remember.

Tides result from the gravitational pull of the moon, and are biggest at the full moon, because the sun and the moon are on opposite sides of the earth, both pulling in their direction.  These tides have played an important role in evolution, because life started in the sea, and tides stranded sea life on the land, where some of it evolved into land life.