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...