Science experiments

I’ve never cared for science experiments at school.  We knew exactly what was going to happen, but we were expected to pretend we didn’t, then write up the results as if we were learning it for the first time, in the name of developing a “scientific mind.” And we were even expected to come up with a “source of error,” and suggest why the results shouldn’t even be believed anyway!

In Grade 8 they showed us a British film about school lab safety. (It started with a slapstick western involving dynamite, complete with a Native American saying “White man speak with forked tongue”! No relation to the rest of the film, but it grabbed your attention.) Then it showed a big doofus played by one the Carry On movie actors, making every mistake in the book. (“My microscope bulb’s burnt out—I’ll use the sun!”) One section was titled “Hoxygen Horrors.”

In Grade 7 I had a science teacher who shall remain nameless.  My father was a university professor and had given her husband a failing grade, with the result that he couldn’t graduate.  So she bore a grudge against me.  We did these experiments in teams of two, but one day we were doing a complicated experiment with Bunsen burners, so the teams doubled up into teams of four.  Now she paired me and my partner with two nasty guys she knew good and well I didn’t get along with. (I pleaded with her to reassign us, but she wouldn’t listen.) The result was that I ended up hitting one of them, and got sent to the principal’s office.

When I told my mother about it, her second reaction was to be mad at the teacher and the school. (Her first was to get mad at me.) My parents wrote a letter to the New Brunswick Department of Education about it!  They even pulled me out of the school for a week, then lost their nerve.

Later on during gym class we were playing volleyball and it was my turn to serve.  The guy I’d hit shouted “Hit the ball as hard as you hit me!” Later on, I heard that he was still struggling to finish high school, but I’m not sure it was the same guy.

The tenacity of life

“If at first you don’t succeed, try again.  Then quit.  No use being a damned fool about it!”—WC Fields

I turned 60 this year.  I guess I’m oldish.  I’ve been thinking about the people I saw when I was young who were that age, and by now the Grim Reaper’s caught up with almost all of them!

I’ve had a pretty good life.  But I still want to contribute more to the world.  I haven’t worked much over my life, and I’m not proud of it.  I hope it isn’t too late to do more.

Langston Hughes wrote a famous poem, “Mother to Son,” comparing life to a staircase.  There’s one line, “Don’t you set down on the steps/ ‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.” Sometimes I feel like I’ve been sitting on the steps of my life…

A few years ago Greta Thunberg was complaining about the problematic world older people were bequeathing to the younger generation.  I couldn’t help recalling that fifty years ago, many of us were saying the same thing about the world we were being left.  I guess it’s every generation’s fate to turn into their forebears.  We turned into our parents and our children will turn into us.

Treasure

When I was young I read a fable about a farmer who was dying.  He told his sons, “I have a treasure buried on my land,” but didn’t tell them where it was. After his death, they dug up every inch of the land to find the treasure, but found nothing.  But their digging left the land in such good shape that it produced big crops, and they made a fortune after all.  That father understood motivation!

I’ve always been interested in gold rushes.  I was reading Pierre Berton’s book about the Klondike gold rush, and there was one fact I noticed.  Thousands of prospectors went there, and the total amount of money they invested in their adventure—travel expenses and food supplies and equipment—was even greater than the value of all the gold the place produced! (That gives you an idea of the odds they faced.) People made fortunes without going there, just by selling them supplies.  There’s a country song that goes “All the gold in California is in a bank in the middle of Beverley Hills, in somebody else’s name.”

I read that pirates burying treasure is a cliche, like walking the plank.  Captain Kidd’s the only pirate known to have buried his treasure.  With most pirates, if they made a big score they’d spend it as soon as they could because they didn’t know how long they’d live to enjoy it.

When I was young, we had a treasure for the eyes.  Every fall we’d get the Christmas catalogues from Eaton’s and Simpson Sears.  It was fun to look through them and feast our eyes on the wares, especially the toys and candy. (The clothes didn’t interest me much.) Indeed, I mention this because just the other night I was dreaming about the catalogues’ candy pages!

Yet it didn’t occur to us to want the stuff bought for us.  My parents didn’t raise materialist kids!  In fact, when they asked me what I wanted for Christmas I could rarely think of anything in particular…

Anyone remember the Buried Treasure treat?  It was a cone-shaped combination of ice milk and sherbet that would have a little figure inside that would appear once you finished it, a bit like a Kinder toy or a Crackerjack prize.

Remembrance of music

I have a huge Chinese dictionary with thousands of characters in it.  Lately I’ve been writing the characters down one at a time, fitting the meaning of each mostly into a single line.  And when a character is also used in Japanese writing, I’ve included its pronunciation in that language. (My computer has fonts for writing Chinese and Japanese characters.) I’m almost finished, and all that’s left is some of the characters under the water radical.

As I work on this summary, I’ve been listening to classical music on YouTube.  Stuff like symphonies and concerti and sonatas.  A lot of it I was already familiar with:  there are a couple of melodies I remember hearing when I was young, and I’m hoping to hear them again somewhere.   One of my favourite piano concerti is Edvard Grieg’s A Minor piece.  I read somewhere that when Grieg was a boy he spent a lot of his time in dreams, which sounds like me.  Just now I’m listening to Chopin’s polonaises:  he composed over two hours worth!  

Before that I heard all 32 of Beethoven’s sonatas.  Hearing them today, these sonatas are a revelation.  I think my favourite is the one called “Appassionata.” There’s one melody that I’m pretty sure I heard in a TV commercial back in the 1960s, for bathroom tissue or something. I used to play piano when I was young.  I could play just about all of Mozart’s sonatas, and some of Haydn’s.  But Beethoven’s sonatas were out of my league!

On the other hand, my sister Moira was playing piano in university, and I got to hear her playing just about all of Beethoven’s sonatas.  Listening to them now, I remember hearing them back then.  I was really lucky to be exposed to all this incredible music at that age.

Faith

 Dostoyevsky said, “You can’t be a socialist and believe in God.  You either believe in the Kingdom in this world, or the one in the next.” I’m a half-assed agnostic, but I do believe in the socialist movement.  I believe that a society’s success should be measured not in its overall prosperity, but in the prosperity of its least prosperous members.  And I also believe that the power of big business is something that must be confronted rather than appeased.

One of my heroes is Bernie Sanders.  His vision of social democracy may be milder than mine, but it’s an important step forward.  I think that the Democratic Party were foolish to choose Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden over him, and I still hope that 2024 will be different. (And if you can believe that they won the nomination “fair and square,” you can believe anything.) Some people keep saying “Bernie’s not a Democrat.” Well, he’s more of a Democrat than Trump, isn’t he?  Who’s being a self-defeating purist now.

Another thing that bugs me is Democrats blaming Clinton’s 2016 defeat on Sanders not being more supportive.  Firstly, that’s blatantly unfair.  Bernie could have double-crossed the Democrats and defected to the Green ticket, and might even have won!  But he played it safe, campaigned for Hillary and actually delivered an even more solid share of his supporters than she’d delivered for Obama back in 2008.  

Secondly, two can play the blame game.  The polls during the primary showed Clinton with the same dicey narrow lead over Trump she’d have in November, and Sanders with a much wider lead:  he was clearly the safer bet.  But some Democrats kept insisting that Hillary was more “electable” because she was a centrist…

Another hero of mine is Jeremy Corbyn.  His detractors keep saying “He lost twice,” as if that were the last word about him. (The same with Bernie.) Yet in 2017 he managed to take away the Conservative majority.  And the accusation that he enabled anti-Semitism within the Labour Party is nonsense.

Opponents of Brexit have some nerve blaming their failure on Corbyn.  He campaigned against it, despite his past criticisms of the EU, then took a pragmatic approach and tried to effect as less drastic break.  He would have actually succeeded, but the Liberal Democrats abstained on the key vote!  Then Keir Starmer persuaded the party to demand a second referendum, which backfired badly in the 2019 election.  A second referendum wouldn’t have been wrong, but the proposal was disastrously ill-timed and turned a crucial bloc of voters against Labour in crucial seats.  Voters who rejected Labour over the second referendum made the wrong decision for the wrong reason, but it was a predictable backlash.

Soon after becoming Labour leader, Starmer launched an anti-left purge starting with Corbyn, as needless as it is dictatorial.  His thinking is clearly along the lines of “Screw the left, they have to vote for us anyway.  Or if they don’t, there aren’t enough of them to matter.  Or if there are, they can serve as a scapegoat!” What could possibly go wrong?  It’s time for the British left to form a genuinely socialist party.

Socialists often have to defy the Official Difference and risk the accusation, “If you aren’t with us then you’re with the Bad Guys!” Sometimes you have to risk making a bad situation even worse if there’s to be any real chance of making it better.

Collections

I’ve collected a lot of comics.  I got a lot of them 15 or 20 years ago when I was into Ebay big time.  A lot of them are comic strips, reprinted dailies and Sunday clippings.  I have the reprinted series of Peanuts for a period over 30 years, as well as stuff like Dick Tracy and Popeye and Little Orphan Annie and the theatre-themed On Stage.  I’ve had a lot of reprints of Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side.  My Sunday clipping collection includes stuff like Prince Valiant and Li’l Abner and Terry and the Pirates and The Heart of Juliet Jones and Steve Canyon.

I also have some comic books, though I’m not really into superheroes.  It’s more stuff like Uncle Scrooge and Little Archie and Richie Rich.  I also have some less-known stuff like Howard the Duck and the futuristic Magnus, Robot Fighter.

It isn’t just American stuff.  I have some British comics like The Beano, which would publish annual versions every December.  I have quite a few French-language comics with Tintin and Asterix the Gaul.  And I also have some translated manga from Japan.  Some of it is masterpieces, like Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of Wind Valley, about a teenage girl in a future world coping with environmental disaster. (I have a feeling they could turn it into the next Game of Thrones!) I also have Shigeru Mizuki’s four-part Showa series, which combines a history of Japan under Hirohito with his own autobiography.  He lost an arm in World War II, which actually saved his life because he got moved back from the front lines!  After the war, parallel to Japan’s recovery, he became a big comic book artist.

I also have some Mad magazine reprints.  They include a lot of comics, with some really sharp satire.  Like the time they showed 1950s parents lecturing their teenagers, “Young people today, their clothes and their dancing and their language—it’s all too much!” Then they showed the parents back when they were young in the 1920s, wearing raccoon coats and dancing the Charleston and saying “Twenty-three skidoo, small change!” Another time they had children’s definitions, like “An aunt is to give you clothes for your birthday instead of toys,” and “An uncle is to pinch your cheek and you can’t pinch back.” They made fun of singer Bobby Darin a lot, like the time they did a Dick & Jane-style feature on Greek mythology, with him as Narcissus!  And they also did “TV shows we’d like to see,” with a commercial where a guy in doctor costume says “What do doctors take for headache and pain relief?  How should I know, I’m only an actor!” And they did famous quotes in their true context, with Teddy Roosevelt saying “Speak softly a carry a big sticky gooey sundae up to my room!” and John Paul Jones a newlywed saying “I have not yet begun to fight with my wife.”

My photo

I’ve often performed in the chorus of the Toronto City Opera, and this photo was taken by Barbara’s husband (also called James) when we were doing Pietro Mascagni’s 1890 opera Cavalleria Rusticana back in 2010 or so.  I’m a peasant in 19th-century Sicily.

Let me say a bit about Cavalleria Rusticana.  It’s an example of a verismo opera of the late 19th century, more “realistic” than older operas.  The title translates as the sarcastic “rustic chivalry.” To the more sophisticated northern Italians, Sicily looked backward and Arcadian, something like Newfoundland looks to some Torontonians.

The plot is about how Turiddu was in love with Lola but while he was away in the army Lola married Alfio the local hawker, who’s well to do but out of town most of the time.  After coming home Turiddu took up with Santuzza, who ended up with a reputation as the village skank.  But then Lola reignited her torch for Turiddu—remember that her husband is out of town most of the time—and Turiddu dumped Santuzza.  So Santuzza squeals to Alfio about his wife’s infidelity and Alfio insists on a knife fight with Turiddu, who ends up dead.  There’s lots of great music.  

It’s only one act long, so we performed it with Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, another one-act verismo opera about a married couple in a travelling theatre group that performs commedia dell’arte shows, but adultery leads to murder.

I use that photo as my avatar on Twitter, with the handle Captain Snark.