The autism spectrum

I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome at age 40.  How do I feel about being on the autism spectrum?  Well, I’ve been hesitant about labelling myself autistic:  compared to what low-functioning autistics deal with, my problems look pretty small.  Like Popeye the Sailor, I yam what I yam.

But I saw a TV show on Youtube that made me rethink my identity.  It was an episode of Longstreet, a 1971 series with James Franciscus as a blind detective. (It requires some suspension of disbelief.) It’s unusually mature for its time:  the stories are about his personal development as much as the cases he cracks.  Despite his handicap, Longstreet still strives to be a super-achiever:  he even hires Bruce Lee to teach him martial arts!  He lost his sight to a bomb that killed his wife, so there’s also an element of survivor’s guilt.

In the episode I’m referring to, Longstreet goes undercover to investigate cases of sabotage in a factory.  The factory has a work program for handicapped people, which provides him with entry.  But as his investigation continues, he has trouble getting friendly with the other handicapped people.  Part of it is being distracted by his case, but he comes to realize that he’s still in a measure of denial about being handicapped!

He finally figures out who’s behind the sabotage, and at the end of the episode, when he says goodbye to the other people in the program, he says, “We handicapped people have to look out for each other!” For him that’s a step forward.

There was something similar in the movie The Men, with Marlon Brando as a paralyzed soldier.  At the end of the movie, when his wife brings him home, he finally lets her push his wheelchair!

How does this apply to me?  I was thinking that maybe I’ve been in denial about being autistic.  Maybe I should be saying, “We autistics have to look out for each other.” Time will tell.

Anime

Why do I like Japanese cartoons so much?  At their best they’re real works of art!  Studio Ghibli has made some wonderful features, especially Grave of the Fireflies, a heartrending story of two doomed Japanese orphans in World War II.

But I also like a lot of their TV cartoons.  Japanese animators have worked around the limitations of TV animation and given it style.  The show that really got me started on anime, of course, is Sailor Moon.  I originally watched that in the ‘90s when I was in my mid-thirties, struggling with my Ph.D. thesis.  A lot of people hate the dubbed version, and while I admit it isn’t as great as the subtitled original, it’s still pretty good on its own terms.

Sailor Moon is about a schoolgirl of 14 called Serena, a goofy, disorganized crybaby.  But a talking cat called Luna comes along and tells her she has a destiny to turn into Sailor Moon and fight monsters from the Negaverse!  Her superhero outfit rather resembles a fashion model:  micro-miniskirt, go-go boots, long white gloves and a tiara that she throws as a weapon to turn the monsters to dust.  

Four other girls come along and they form the Sailor Scouts and fight the Negaverse together.  In her fights, Sailor Moon tends to get in over her head, but then along comes a guy named Tuxedo Mask—for his costume—who throws down a rose and gives her new strength to win the fight.  Tuxedo Mask bears a certain resemblance to Darien, an arrogant college boy who drives Serena up the wall by calling her “meatball head.” (Her hairdo resembles two meatballs on the top of her head!) So there’s an element of romance in it too…

All this may sound silly, and the first episodes are rather conventional.  But the show’s brilliantly structured and becomes emotionally moving.  There’s an incredible moment in the middle of the first season when Molly, Serena’s civilian friend who’s fallen in love with the Negaverse villain Neflyte, stands in front of him to protect him from Sailor Moon’s tiara.  Then in the next episode Neflyte dies protecting Molly, giving him a certain redemption.  That’s a turning point for the show as it becomes more and more affecting.  

The first season ends with a powerful pair of episodes where they’re up against the villainess Queen Beryl, and the other Sailor Scouts and Tuxedo Mask die protecting Sailor Moon, then Sailor Moon takes on Queen Beryl alone and feels the spiritual presence of the others.  In defeating Queen Beryl, she dies too—but then they all go through some transformation that takes them back to before they knew they were Sailor Scouts. (It’s better to see this ending subtitled—the dubbed version edits the two episodes down to one and softens it considerably.)

My personal favourite episode is “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall,” from the Doom Tree arc in the second season, involving Alan and Ann, two aliens pretending to be schoolkids while stealing energy for their Doom Tree.  It’s about Darien is putting on Snow White as a play and all the girls want to play Snow White, but Ann gets the role through drawing straws and cheating!  Then Alan sends a clown monster to steal everyone’s energy, and it turns into a Power Rangers show!

If I had more time I’d talk about Dragon Ball, less famous than its sequel Dragon Ball Z but a show I love in itself.  And about One Piece, a show about a teenage boy with flesh like rubber who wants to become King of the Pirates.  It’s still going strong after twenty years, a Japanese counterpart to The Simpsons.

Shenanigans

I call shenanigans on the Democratic primary before the 2016 US presidential election.  The process that gave Hillary Clinton the nomination over Bernie Sanders may not have been "rigged," but it was clearly stacked!

Consider the Puerto Rico primary.  In most places, logically enough, the presidential primary voting happens at the same precincts as the voting for down-ballot primaries like governor or state legislature.  In Puerto Rico's primary, however, the Democratic Party made the very late decision to move the presidential primary to a different and smaller group of precincts.  The inevitable result was a much smaller turnout for that primary than the others--it's usually the other way around--and a Clinton victory in a place where Sanders had been leading in the polls.

Clinton's biggest advantage, of course, was the numerous closed primaries where only people who'd registered as Democrats months before were eligible to vote.  And the Democrats purged their rolls so that even thousands of longstanding members found they couldn't vote either. (I'd be more sympathetic to Democrats trying to make an issue of Republican vote suppression in the general election if they weren't in aggressive denial about their own vote-suppression problem!) And of course, there's the super delegates who were largely on Clinton's side.

Maybe none of these individual factors is enough in itself to explain Clinton's victory.  But taken together, they're hard to ignore. (An election for Teamsters union president was thrown out because of much smaller irregularities.) I fear that history may repeat itself in the race between Sanders and Joe Biden.

Folk music

I love folk music!  When I was young I used to watch the Irish Rovers on TV.  Will Millar used to sign off with the blessing, "May you be half an hour in heaven before the Devil knows you're dead!" I also watched a show with Ryan's Fancy and Tommy Makem, who'd sign off with blessings like "May your cat have a long tail!" and "May all your duck eggs have double yolks!" I also saw some concerts with the Celtic music of John Allen Cameron.

Pete Seeger was a folk singer I admire both as a musician and as a person. He'd been a communist when he was young and got blacklisted in the 1950s, but he never gave up!  He also led a movement to clean up the Hudson River.

I like some of those Newfoundland songs like "She's Like the Swallow" and "I's the B'y That Builds the Boat." Back in the 1960s my mother wrote to the TV show The Friendly Giant and asked them to sing "I's the B'y That Builds the Boat," and they did!

The Carter Family sang some great folk songs, like "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" It's about finding joy in grief.

The folk song "Red River Valley" was the original country song!  That's what they call "hurtin' music"!

Favourite writers

One of my favourite writers is Mark Twain.  His writing is really smart!  He came from Missouri, nicknamed the Show Me state, and he exemplified its famous skepticism.  His writing dealt with slavery during the post-Civil War era when most Americans were trying to forget it.  Some people associate his writing with nostalgia for the past, but his true sensibility was very much anti-nostalgic and anti-romantic.

Another writer I like is Charles Dickens.  I've read most of his novels by now.  Victorian London was the world's first super-city, and he depicts it so vividly that it's like a character in itself, like Balzac's Paris.  I especially appreciate this now that I've lived in London and come to know and love it better.

One of my favourite poets is New England's Robert Frost.  His poems are sometimes misunderstood in terms of aphorisms: "Mending Wall" contains the line "Good fences make good neighbors," but the poem's actually a criticism of walls and fences! (Its first line is "Something there is that doesn't love a wall.") "Death of a Hired Hand" has the line "Home is where they have to take you in," but some people miss its ironic tone.

I also like poets like William Butler Yeats and Henry Longfellow and Walt Whitman.  And one of my favourite producers of witticisms is Samuel Johnson.  I think he was the one who first said, "Puns are the lowest form of humour."

Desserts

When I was young I used to make Duncan Hines cake mixes. (I read that the reason those mixes require an egg was so that housewives could feel they were doing real cooking instead of just mixing!) I remember liking Pepperidge Farm layer cakes.

The gooiest dessert I've ever eaten would be Vachon's caramel cakes.  Once was definitely enough for me--even today I wouldn't want to try it again.

What's my favourite cookie?  I like those oatmeal cookies with raisins in them. (I prefer soft cookies to hard ones.) I also like Peak Freens assorted cremes, especially the round ones that don't have jelly in the middle.  I think I like Oreo Thins too.

When it's my birthday I go to Loblaw's and buy a big strawberry cake with little curls of white chocolate.

When I was young we used to eat these Robin Hood brand puddings with hot sauce.  But they don't seem to sell them anymore.

I remember from the 1980s this really annoying commercial for Jello Pudding Pops.  Bill Cosby would say in this really smarmy voice, "Mom won't give you the Evil Eye because it's made of real pudding!" So what?  The point is that consumers are supposed to have some dim notion of pudding as "wholesome," of course.

Pie

My sister bakes good apple pies.  But she hasn't made any for a while because we needed a new oven.  We got a new one just a few weeks ago!  So now she can bake pie and I can bake gingerbread again.

I like rhubarb pie.  For me, June is rhubarb season.  What bugs me is when people don't put in enough sugar and it tastes sour.  I also like coconut cream pie.

When I was 13 or 14 my brother dared me to eat a whole can of cherry pie filling, and I did it!

Did you know that pumpkin pie filling is mostly made from squash rather than pumpkins?  Or at least that's what I read somewhere...

On Youtube I sometimes watch videos about mathematics.  There's one that shows an infinite product that equals the irrational number pi: pi/4=(1-1/9)*

(1-1/25)*(1-1/49)*(1-1/81)*... (The proof was a bit hard to follow.) Similarly, pi/2=(1+1/3)*(1+1/15)*(1+1/35)*(1+1/63)*... Also, 2*pi=(4/3)^2*(6/5)^2*(8/7)^2*...  These mathematical formulas fascinate me.

March 14 is Pi Day!

Abolish

I believe that they should abolish the "first past the post" system we use in Parliamentary elections.  The new system doesn't have to be unstable.  We could replace it with something like the German system, where about two-thirds of MPs are elected in the same way as now, while the rest of the seats are allotted to match each party's share of the popular vote.

They should also abolish nuclear weapons.  The United States should have made a bigger effort to do so in the late 1940s when they had a monopoly on them.  The Truman Administration actually did make such a proposal to the United Nations, but stipulated an inspection system that was ahead of its time to the point of naivete. (Stalin was never going to agree to that, and the Americans probably knew it.)

I think it was Ian Shoales who said, "If I were American president, I'd get rid of all our nuclear weapons.  That's why I'll never be elected President."

But I mostly think in terms of all the new things I want created rather than things to remove!  Like, I think they should introduce a tax on stock speculation and currency exchange.  Not only will it provide money to build infrastructure, it'll probably make the financial system more stable.

Skating

I used to skate when I was young.  But I never played hockey--team sports just didn't interest me.  We sometimes skated at Allison Gardens on the Mount Allison University campus.  The rink sometimes played recorded music like "Wonderful Copenhagen."  Sometimes we'd bring our lunch there.

I also had a pair of roller skates once, but I didn't get much use out of them.  And I've never tried rollerblading.

I remember the rule the Red Cross or someone had on judging how safe ice was for skating from its thickness.  One inch, keep off; two inches, one may; three inches, small groups; four inches, OK!

Figure skating is one of those sports they show on TV a lot, like golf.  It's a sport that you have to dress up for, whereas most athletes dress down. Does anyone remember the TV show Stars on Ice?  That was on over thirty years ago!

I used to play Emile Waldteufel's piano piece "Skater's Waltz."

Funerals

I have little experience with funerals. As for my own, I think I'd like a Chinese-style tree burial, where they cremate you and plant a tree over your ashes.  I like the idea of having a living memorial.

You know that music they used to play at the start of the TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presents?  The original version of it was Charles Gounod's "Funeral March for a Marionette."

In the Middle East, a bereaved family can hire a professional wailer to do the loud lamenting that they're ashamed to do!  Those women can wail up a storm.

Buddhists write messages to the dead on pieces of paper that they then burn.  I like that idea...

W.H. Auden wrote the poem "Funeral Blues":

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Wildflowers

The Carter family sung a lovely country song "Wildwood Flower." It's about a girl who was seduced and abandoned.

When I was young and lived in Sackville, N.B., there were wild lupins near our cottage so we took some of them back home and planted them next to the quarry near our house.  They improved its appearance a lot!  Some were red, some blue, some white, and they naturally crossbred into combinations like pink and purple.  Some fine arts students at the local university would come over and paint the scene.

I used to play Edward MacDowell's piano piece "To a Wild Rose."

When you think about it, even the fanciest orchid is ultimately descended from wild flowers, just as we're descendants of cavemen.

I can name all provincial flowers!

Newfoundland:  pitcher plant

P.E.I.:  lady slipper

Nova Scotia:  mayflower

New Brunswick:  purple violet

Quebec:  madonna lily

Ontario:  trillium

Manitoba:  prairie crocus

Saskatchewan:  prairie lily

Alberta:  wild rose

B.C.:  Pacific dogwood

I had to look up two out of the three territorial flowers:

Yukon:  fireweed (that's the one I knew)

N.W.T.:  mountain avens

Nunavut:  purple saxifrage

Wal-Mart

I remember in 1994, I think, when Wal-Mart came to Canada, taking over Woolco.  For a brief period it felt like a big deal.  The first one I went to was in Dufferin Mall.  Every Wal-Mart branch had a McDonald's restaurant, and a bench with a Ronald McDonald figure.  Like Toronto needed more McDonald's branches--even Dufferin Mall already had one!  I'll still go there for stuff like new pants, but I'm hardly proud of it.

I've heard very bad things about Wal-Mart in the USA.  Like how they'll open a branch in a new town and underprice all the local shops out of business, then sometimes they'll close that branch down and leave the community wrecked.  Sam Walton's family has a lot of clout in Arkansas--I heard that one relative got away with drunk driving because of her connections. (She had a "Don't you know who I am?" attitude.) I think Hillary Clinton was on the Board of Directors.

I don't have much to say about Wal-Mart, but I remember K-Mart.  I recall visiting the K-Mart in Moncton when I was young.  I remember their white, bullet-shaped wastebaskets, of a type I saw again in my local high school!

Mondays

There was a case of a girl who shot up her classroom and explained, "I don't like Mondays." (The Boomtown Rats made a song about it.)

For me, Monday nights used to be when I went to choir practice.  I was in the Giuseppe Verdi Chorus, which did a lot of Italian songs.  I especially liked my first year there when all the music was new and challenging for me.  I discovered a lot of good music there:  opera, classical, Christmas, Italian folk songs.

Today, Monday is the afternoon when I go to this memoir group.  I only discovered it seven years ago, because I'd joined a group on meetup.com that made an event of going there.  The group didn't last, but here I am in the group still.

One thing I like about this group is the chance to write by hand each week.  Cursive script may be a dying art, but it's a nice change of pace compared to typing posts online.

And of course, it's an occasion to meet friends.  That may not seem like much to some, but in the earlier part of my life I had few friends. (Friendships just didn't interest me.) If you asked me what I consider the biggest achievement in my life, I'd have to say, "Making friends."

Murder

Opening line of a story Malcolm Lowry submitted to a Cambridge literary magazine: "The first murder I ever committed was in a windmill."

I've never been murdered myself.  I haven't even committed a murder!  And I'm not a huge faun of murder mysteries--I feel stupid if I don't guess who the culprit is. (If I do, on the other hand, the mystery wasn't very good.)

But I do like some Agatha Christie murder mysteries.  She was Catholic, I think, and Catholic writers often have a flair for the mystery genre.  She must have had "a mind like a steel trap." Once she created a real-life mystery by disappearing for several days and checking into a hotel under the name of her husband's mistress!  Her second marriage, to an archaeologist, worked better. (She said, "An archaeologist makes the perfect husband, because as his wife gets older he gets more interested in her!")

Her mysteries have a lot of wit.  I remember the movie of Evil Under the Sun where Diana Rigg told her surly teenage stepdaughter, "If you want to have fun, go play with the jellyfish." That's the sort of line only Diana Rigg could deliver!  She also wrote Tommy and Tuppence:  Partners in Crime, a cute series of mysteries about a married couple going into the private eye business. (I saw a cute TV version with gorgeous Francesca Annis.) I liked Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple in a British movie series.

But my favourite Agatha Christie mystery is And Then There Were None. (The original title was "Ten Little N*****s"!) There's a crackerjack movie version directed by Rene Clair, with actors like Walter Huston and Barry Fitzgerald.  Ten people arrive on a desert island and hear a recording saying that they've all committed crimes and they're all going to die...

Playboy

In one episode of Doonesbury from back when Mike was a college boy, he receives a package in the mail that he calls "my monthly guide to wisdom and beauty." He opens it and checks out the centrefold!

I've never read Playboy magazine myself.  But I recently saw a docudrama series about the magazine and its founder Hugh Hefner.  It's perversely fascinating.  This was a guy with a square background--middle-class Chicago Methodist--but he had a vision that he pursued relentlessly, and not only made a fortune but changed American culture.  And yet his actual vision was a rather pitiful one:  it's for young men who aspire to sophistication and the trappings of "manhood," while at the same time behaving like little boys on Never-Neverland.  The very title "Playboy:  Entertainment for men" is an oxymoron!

The incredible thing is that Hef didn't just sell this lifestyle:  he came to embody it!  Back in the '50s college boys smoked pipes to show how sophisticated they were, and that became part of his look, along with wearing his bathrobe in the middle of the day.  He became Mr. Shameless. (I recall that he was involved with three women called Brandy, Mandy and Sandy!)

All this has been ripe material for satire, especially as Hef grew older. (There were widespread rumours that he'd become impotent.) Like when Playboy did its 50th anniversary issue--a fifty-year-old magazine for nineteen-year-old readers!  Or when Jessica Hahn, after the Jim Bakker scandal, posed for the magazine and moved into the Playboy Mansion, and told one interviewer, "I am not a bimbo!" Eventually there was a reality TV show about Playboy Mansion women, The Girls Next Door.  And the magazine actually was culturally important, especially at its peak in the 1960s.

The satirical Spy magazine was comparing black playwright Anna Deveare Smith to white Playboy Playmate-actress-reality TV star Anna Nicole Smith.  Under ADS: "Attended Beaver College." Under ANS: "A lot of college boys have seen her beaver."

The Olympics

I've seen Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl's documentary about the 1936 Berlin Olympics.  She also made Triumph of the Will, about the 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremberg, which is the most sentimental thing you've ever seen!  (I always say that sentimentality and cruelty go together.)

Leni Riefenstahl's a very controversial figure. (She lived to be 100, unlike some...) Many Germans did as much as she did to enable the Nazi order, but they did it on the quiet and escaped the sort of postwar criticism for which she became a lightning rod.  When she later published a photo album showing African tribesmen, Susan Sontag read a Nazi-style white supremacist aesthetic into it, which sounds like an unfair prejudgement to me.

Some years back, the Academy decided to award a lifetime-achievement Oscar to director Elia Kazan.  This caused controversy because in the time of McCarthyism Kazan had "named names" before the House Un-American Activities Committee and destroyed other people's careers to protect his own.  The Academy people said the award was about art, not politics. "If that's the case," I would have asked them, "when will Leni Riefenstahl get her Oscar?" The answer is, there's politics and then there's Politics!

Leni Riefenstahl certainly had great cinematic talent.  There's this one shot in Olympia of these statuesque women throwing the discus together, which they later showed in the World War II documentary series The World at War as an example of the nationalist imagery the Nazis were promoting.  She was surely a big influence on TV commercial directors and photographers like Helmut Newton.

I also remember this scene of an equestrian event where a long succesion of horsemen (no women were admitted yet) had to get through this water trap. Editing is everything:  you can show a rider going down at such a place and then getting up again, and he'll look competent enough.  But Leni Riefenstahl edited it so that one rider after another was only shown at his most awkward moment!  The effect was like a statement about the futility of life...

Watching Olympia is a pretty sad experience, really.  I couldn't help reflecting that just a few years later many of these athletes would be contending over something a lot more important than Olympic medals! (Athletes tend to make good soldiers...) The thing about war is that one side being in the right requires the other side to be in the wrong, raising ethical questions for the soldiers on that side.  If only both sides could be right!

The boss

I was reading a music critic in The Village Voice who said about Prince and Bruce Springsteen, "I have the same mistrust for a revolutionary named for royalty as I do for a working-class hero nicknamed 'The Boss'"!

They've just released Bombshell, a movie about Fox News and how its boss Roger Ailes sexually abused the women under him.  Have you ever noticed that most of the women you see on Fox News have blond hair?  Very old-fashioned attitudes...

Deadwood was a TV show about a frontier town.  There were some Chinese people there living under the thumb of the local Chinese gang boss.  How tough was this guy?  About the only English word he knew, which he'd use when speaking to the white community's gang boss, was "Cocksucker!"

Ebert and Siskel did a show once about movie cliches.  One they mentioned was in buddy-cop movies like Lethal Weapon, where the two partners will get along badly at first, then go to their boss and ask to be reassigned, but the boss will say no. (If he said yes, of course, there'd be no more movie!)

The absurdist workplace comic strip Dilbert makes fun of bosses a lot.  In one episode, the first panel shows the big boss saying to Dilbert's boss, "You screwed up!  How could you be so stupid?" The second panel shows Dilbert's boss saying to Dilbert, "You screwed up!  How could you be so stupid?"  The third panel shows Dilbert saying to his coffee mug, "You stupid coffee mug!" (No doubt the army is like that...)

Mushrooms

There's a joke about mushrooms...

My first wife died after eating mushrooms.  My second wife died after eating mushrooms.  My third wife died after eating mushrooms.  My fourth wife died of a fractured skull.... She wouldn't eat the mushrooms. (BA-DUMP!) Can't beat those wife-killer jokes.

I saw a goofy Japanese movie once titled Attack of the Mushroom People.  It's about these people who land on a desert island and eat these strange mushrooms, and the result is that they all turn into big mushrooms themselves!  All except this one guy who's telling the story from a hospital bed.  But at the end of the movie he says "I ate them too!" and starts turning into one as well...

I've heard you can get LSD from mushrooms.  The thing about LSD is that a bad trip can be worse than you imagine--worse than you can imagine! You have to be really bored to try it. There was an episode of Mad Men where a character tried it and had this vision, and after he came to he ended up leaving his wife...

The Disney movie Fantasia has a funny scene, though not PC, with animated Chinese mushrooms.  That was from a time when all East Asians seemed funny. (I can remember when all East Indians seemed funny...) Because of scenes like that, Fantasia has a big following among practitioners of drug-using "head" culture.  But that culture isn't really in good taste.  Roger Ebert was reviewing a Cheech and Chong movie (one advertised with the line "Just what we need... a really good hit!") and cited a drug-using acquaintance of his, who'd told him, "Laughing at stoners isn't nice if you aren't one, and it isn't funny if you are."

Cheese

I've seen a lot of cheesy TV shows. How cheesy was Happy Days?  When a season was almost finished and the writers' already shallow well of ideas was running dry, they'd have the characters do musical numbers!

One cliche on TV shows is The Forgotten Breakup.  In dramatic terms, it's convenient for an episode to end with a breakup between two people, such as a boyfriend and girlfriend.  But the show's structure may require the two of them to stay together, and reconciliation is harder to do.  So they may just wait a couple of episodes, then show them back together with no explanation!  In other words, they just forget about the breakup and expect the audience to forget it too. (I've seen this happens even on shows as good as Upstairs, Downstairs and The Sopranos.)

Another cliche is to accompany a change in a character with a change in his appearance. (That makes it easier for the less attentive viewers to notice it.) There was this British show Tenko, about Englishwomen in a Japanese prison camp in World War II.  There was this older woman who was stiff-necked at first, but then became more sympathetic.  At the time of this change, she also started wearing a cone-shaped Chinese hat!

Such a change in appearance can also underline a change in how we're supposed to see the character.  In the first scene of Pretty Woman, we see Julia Roberts working the street in a miniskirt, thigh boots... and a blond wig.  In a later scene, when we learn that this hooker is a nice girl underneath, the wig comes off and we see her real brown hair.  Yeah, I know that Pretty Woman is a movie, but it's filled with TV cliches. (It was directed by Garry Marshall, who also created Happy Days...)

I could go on and on about TV cliches, of course.  There's the episode where one of the lead characters considers leaving town, but ends up staying. There's the one where a character makes a bad business deal, but before the show starts--we only see the consequences of it. (That cliche also turned up in a movie:  Spike Lee's The Mo' Better Blues.) There's the one where several characters are stuck in a malfunctioning elevator or locked in a bank vault...

Cookbooks & recipes

When I was fourteen, we bought the Betty Crocker Cookbook.  For a while, we were obsessed with baking bread using its many recipes.  We baked white, whole wheat, pumpernickel, muffins, even corn bread.  We had to knead the dough ourselves, not like with today's bread machines.

In more recent years, we got Craig Claiborne's New York Times Cookbook.  The main recipe I've used in that one is the gingerbread recipe on page 462.  I make really good gingerbread!  We also got a milk calendar with recipes for fettucine alfredo and stir-fry.

In one of the Little House books the Ingalls family got to a new town just at the start of a land rush, and made money cooking food for new arrivals.  Some customers like the mother's food so much that they asked for her recipes, but she didn't have any--she just measured things out by instinct! (My sister had a father-in-law who baked cakes that way.)

Dolls

Dolls are mostly a girl thing, of course.  Boys call them "action figures," like GI Joe and He-Man.

I saw a really funny German silent movie once, The Doll, directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch.  It's about this irresponsible playboy whose father is threatening to disinherit him unless he mans up and gets married.  So he buys a life-size doll to marry, so he can fool his father!  But before he arrives the doll's arm gets broken off, so the dollmaker's daughter takes her place, unbeknownst to the playboy...

One of the White House's most famous first ladies was Dolly Madison.  Someone said about her that after you met her you'd not only like her, but like yourself more than you did before! (She must have had great emotional intelligence.) She'd carry around a copy of Don Quixote and ask people if they'd read it.  If they hadn't, she'd say, "Neither have I--we have something in common!" If they had, she'd say, "Then you can explain it to me." She got the big hostesses around the country to send her their best recipes, and it was she who introduced ice cream to America.

Gratitude

I read that in a traditional Chinese classroom, when a teacher beat a pupil the pupil was supposed to thank him!

I don't expect gratitude as a rule.  I'm happy if people just don't respond to my favours by turning judgemental.

I'm grateful for parents.  In the Disney animated movie Mulan, a Chinese girl goes for an interview with the matchmaker and makes a big botch of it.  When she comes home, her father says, "Our tree has many beautiful blossoms this year.  But look, there's one that's blooming late.  I'm sure it'll be the most beautiful of all!" That's one thing we depend on parents for--to judge us less harshly than we judge ourselves.

And I'm grateful for the Internet. Because of it I'm never bored, and I've even used it to improve my social life through groups like meetup.com . Lately I've been taking another stab at online dating, and I've learned to write a pretty good profile.

I'm also grateful for this memoir group.  Sharing your memories is a great way to make friends!  And I'm grateful for Jagmeet Singh and Jeremy Corbyn.  There, I said it! (A year from now I'll be grateful to Bernie Sanders...)