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!