Museums

I love museums!  Especially the ones in London, England that I got to know when I was there researching my Ph.D. thesis. Sometimes I dream about visiting a London museum that's a combination of all of them!

When I visit London today, the first place I visit is the National Gallery next to Trafalgar Square.  If I could be anywhere in the world right now, I think I'd choose the National Gallery in the section with the 18th-century paintings! And next door to it is the National Portrait Gallery, with portraits of famous people in British history. That place interests me so much that I have to go there twice in each visit.  And I always visit the British Museum, of course.

There are several museums in the South Kensington area that Prince Albert helped develop.  One is the Victoria & Albert Museum, devoted to applied art.  (What I like about applied art is that I don't have to worry about what it means; it's enough for it to look nice.) And just around the corner are the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum.  When I visit these places I walk around so much that afterward I go north a short distance to bathe my feet at the Princess Diana fountain.

And there are lots of other museums.  The Tate Gallery is another place full of classic paintings.  The Museum of London tells the whole story of the city's incredible history.  And I also visit the Imperial War Museum--for me, it's the uniforms that make it real. (That building had once been a mental institution, which is oddly appropriate:  Sigmund Freud said that war serves as an outlet for the craziness that accumulates in a society!) And places like the Royal Academy always have interesting exhibits, though I don't care so much for Tate Modern.

One impressive thing about these museums is that they mostly have free admission!  But they do encourage you to donate a few pounds, and you'd be a cheapskate not to do so considering how good they are.

Cartoons

I've been into cartoons for as long as I can remember.  Disney, of course, but also the Warner Brothers cartoons with their sharp writing.  When I was young I would have said that my favourite cartoon character was Bugs Bunny, but now that I'm older I prefer Daffy Duck!  I also watched The Flintstones, which shows that I had no taste.

Among more recent cartoons, I used to watch South Park, which is very uneven.  A lot of it is vulgar, unfunny schoolboy humour, but there are also sharp bits like an underclass parody of Fat Albert and lines like "They can't tell me what to do, I'm eight years old!" I've also watched The Simpsons, which has often been brilliant, at least in its first decade.  And Canada's National Film Board has produced some incredible animated shorts over the years!

In recent years I've also got into Japanese anime.  Hayao Miyazaki's one of the medium's greatest storytellers, surpassing even Disney himself in features like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away.  His manga comic book version of Nausicaa of Wind Valley is even better the movie!

And then there's One Piece, which has been running for over twenty years. (In Japan it's an even bigger phenomenon than The Simpsons--there are shops that only sell One Piece merchandise!) It's about a group of mostly adolescent pirates led by Monkey D. Luffy, who's resolved to become King of the Pirates and find a mysterious treasure left behind by an earlier pirate king. He's happy-go-lucky and often foolhardy, but he's a natural leader.  He also ate a devil fruit that allows him to stretch his body like rubber, but he can no longer swim.

Great writers create worlds: Eiichiro Oda created a universe here!  What really makes it great is that every major character (and some minor ones) have a detailed, interesting backstory.  Take Nami, the crew's navigator and treasurer.  In the early episodes we only know her background as that of a thief who specializes in robbing pirates. Later it turns out that a gang of pirate fish-men have been subjecting her home village to extortion and the proceeds from her theft will go to ransom the place and free it from their grip. Then we find out that her foster mother was a soldier who found her and her sister as wandering orphans after a battle, took them home and raised them hand to mouth.  Then when these pirates arrived they charged everyone a "pay or die" amount, but the mother couldn't afford to pay for all of them so she calmly sacrificed herself to save the girls. Really great storytelling!

Another character that interests me is Nico Robin, the crew's resident genius. (The devil fruit that she ate allows her to form extra hands all over the place.) I have Asperger's Syndrome, and I think she's an Aspie too.  While the others are fooling about or quarrelling, she's generally off in the background reading something or observing them with quiet amusement.  She's emotionally reserved in an East Asian sort of way that can make her seem colder than she really is.  

I should add that the soundtrack has superb movie-quality music!