Marijuana

I've never tried marijuana.  I think I'd rather eat it in cookie form than smoke it.  But I'm definitely in favour of legalizing it.  It's only a "gateway" drug toward more dangerous stuff because of its illegal status.  We hear about "skunk" strains with dangerously high THC levels, but that actually strengthens the case for legalization:  if it's legal, the government can regulate it and remove skunk the way they regulate liquor and ban moonshine.

Legalizing marijuana will also mean legalizing hemp, a crop that could revolutionize farming in North America.  It's a plant that grows like a weed anywhere and has lots of important uses, like making paper in the place of cut-down trees.

It may be true that excessive use causes brain damage.  So the government should give the message: "Responsible adults, use it at your own risk."

When I was in college, I used a desk on which someone had written, "Washington owned slaves and blew dope and they won't admit it"!

Comic books

When I was little our house didn't have a lot of superhero comics. (My parents didn't seem to approve of them.) But we got a lot of the more family friendly-ones.  Stuff like Little Lulu and Little Archie and Richie Rich.

Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge were among my favourites. I with they'd build a tiny car like Donald Duck drove.  Some of Uncle Scrooge's adventures brought him to places like Valhalla and the Battle of Marathon! (When I was little, I already knew that the Greeks fought the Persians at Marathon because of the Uncle Scrooge comic.)

Did Richie Rich die and become Casper the Friendly Ghost?  Or did he go to hell and become Hot Stuff?  Harvey Comics' official line was that Casper's the son of ghost parents, which begs the question of what happened to his parents, who are never around.  Did they get resurrected?

One unusual comic I remember is Swing With Scooter, about an English pop star and his swinging friends. (Why yes, this was the 1960s!) The best character was Malibut the weirdo.

My mother really like Jerry Lewis. (She took us to a few Jerry Lewis movies, including The Big Mouth and Hook, Line and Sinker.) And we got several Jerry Lewis comics too.

And we had a lot of Classics Illustrated comics, both the regular series and a junior series with fairy tales. (Each issue had a fairy tale, an Aesopian fable, a poem and a page about a member of the animal kingdom.)

Immigration

It's immigrants that make a country interesting.  Toronto a century ago must have been a pretty bland place compared to today.  I have a Chinese doctor and a Czech dentist and an Arab shrink.  There's just been a big international soccer tournament, and street pedlars have been selling flags representing dozens of nations!  I wonder if you see that in New York and Los Angeles too?

A few weeks ago I went on a march between Jane and High Park stations in support of Moslem refugees. (It was in response to a march by an anti-Moslem group the week before.) We were chanting, "Say it loud!  Say it clear!  Immigrants are welcome here!"

Someone said that Toronto is the most multicultural city in the world.  If you ask me, true multiculturalism goes from the bottom up!  The United States has been called a "melting pot" for immigrants, but that's always struck me as a simplistic take on the complex, gradual process of assimilation.  Even the log cabin was introduced to America by German immigrants!

I think that the Americans should give their Columbus Day the new name Immigrant Day.  After all, Columbus was the first immigrant to America!

Courtrooms

I'm not the sort who visits courtrooms much.  Back in 1992 I had jury duty for a couple of weeks. (It was a bit of an adventure.) But I never got chosen for a jury, because I was a student and students are too unpredictable.  There really isn't any point in calling up students, since they never get chosen.

I don't follow trials in the media either. (I'll admit I was surprised when I learned that O.J. Simpson had been acquitted.) My feeling is that I'll never know the truth about whether someone is guilty or not, no matter how much I learn about the case.  I hope I never end up serving on a jury!

I was reading about the trial of the Chicago Eight in 1969.  Abbie Hoffman and the other hippies were convicted, though their convictions were later quashed on appeal.  After being convicted, following normal procedure, they were booked at the local jail before being released on bail pending their appeal.  Except that on this occasion the jailers made a point of cutting their long hair while these hippies were in their power!  Not long afterward the Republican governor of Illinois appeared at a party rally where he produced Hoffman's long locks and declared, "Republicans get results!" What petty bullies!

Hippocratic Oath

I've been learning ancient Greek lately.  Just the other day I came across a famous quote attributed to Hippocrates: "Life is short,  medical art is long,  crisis is quick,  experiment is risky, judgement is hard."

My problem with Greek is that the small letters are hard to read! (That wasn't such a problem when I was younger.) When a word starts with a vowel, it either has a single start quote (like an apostrophe) over the vowel, or a single end quote.  If it's a start quote it's a regular vowel, but if it's an end quote it corresponds to a word that starts with "H" in the Roman alphabet.  The problem is that I have trouble seeing whether it's a start quote or an end quote.

So when I read Greek writing I write it down in Roman transliteration.  That isn't so hard, except that there are two "E" vowels and two "O" vowels, so with the hard E and O (eta and omega) I add a carat accent (E^ and O^) while the soft E and O (epsilon and omicron) are unaccented.  And the vowel upsilon had a "U" sound so I write it as U except when it comes between two consonants, then it write it as "Y" because that's the general practice (hence words like "hyperbole").

And with the dative case there's this little mark under the last letter, pronounced a bit like "I" but slighter, so for that I add a tilde (~).  And sometimes I'll add an "H" between vowels, like with Lahis. (The Greek writing sometimes puts an umlaut over the second vowel to make clear that they aren't a diphthong.)

Boarding house

I've never been in a boarding house.  My mother used the expression "boarding house reach" whenever someone managed to reach a long way to pick up food at the dinner table.

I do remember the comic strip Our Boarding House.  It was about Major Hoople, a fat, pompous work-avoider. (His favourite expression was "FAP!") When its creator Gene Ahern left the strip and moved to another syndicate, he created Room and Board, which was essentially the same strip except that Major Hoople became Judge Piffle!

There was also a one-hit rock band called Major Hoople's Boarding House. (Not to be confused with another band called Mott the Hoople.) I don't remember the title of their only hit single.  I wonder how much difficulty they had getting permission from the syndicate to use that name.

Books I want to read

I have a pretty long list of books I want to read someday.  I've read most of Dickens, but there's still Dombey and Son.  I also want to read George Eliot's Middlemarch someday, like a lot of people.  And Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth.  And John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy.  And just about anything by the Texan writer Larry McMurtry.

Every time I finish a book on my list, I seem to get another to replace it.  Like last year when I read Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' superb The Yearling, and now I want to read her Cross Creek too!

I've developed an ambition to read every book that's been made into a Classics Illustrated comic book.  In recent years I've crossed off James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans and King of the Mountains and Erckmann and Chatrian's Waterloo and Jules Verner's From the Earth to the Moon--except that in the last case, I've only read the first of the two books.  But the next one on my list is Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, and that one scares me! (I should read his The Hunchback of Notre Dame first.) There'll be quite a few by Verner and Cooper and H.G. Wells.

Years ago I read a big part of the first half of Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  I want to read the whole of it someday.  Likewise this long Chinese novel by Cao Xueqin, Dreams of the Red Chamber.

Science

I've never really got into science fiction.  I did like Frank Herbert's epic sci-fi Dune series.  Someone said that science fiction is the last moral genre in literature.

My father was a nuclear physicist.  He's still concerned about the issue of nuclear armament. (We've been watching the TV series Manhattan, about the scientists who built the first A-bombs.) In the early 1960s he went to a peace conference in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, and heard a speech by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

I don't see how religion and science are so incompatible.  Sure, some literalists insist that the theory of evolution goes against the Book of Genesis, but I imagine scripture as allowing flexible interpretation.  Religion and science really operate in different areas, it seems to me.

I may know more about subjects like geography and chemistry than William Shakespeare did, but he seemed to know everything about life!

The more I learn, the less I feel like I know.  I guess that's wisdom.