Street names

I grew up in Sackville, N.B., in a house on West Avenue.  It was named after a guy called West, but it actually was on the west side of town!

You can learn something about a town from its street names.  One of the oldest roads is called Charlotte Street, probably after Charlotte of Mecklenburgh, wife of George III.  Sackville has three streets named after Canada's Governors-General:  Lansdowne, Lorne and Dufferin.  The town was a big Methodist center, and there's a Union Street that was probably named for the 1926 union of Methodists, Congregationalists and some Presbyterians that produced the United Church of Canada.

In my part of Toronto two of the newest streets are called Acores and Minho, reflecting the growing Portuguese community. There are also several streets with a "wood" name:  Oakwood, Wychwood, Cherrywood, Maplewood.  My own street is Greensides Avenue, which sounds pretty bland, like something a developer would come up with to sell real estate.

In St. John's, Nfld., they have a Strawberry Marsh Road.  That's a nice name for a street.

Drive-in movies

I haven't often been to drive-in cinemas.  There was a place called the Grand View Drive-In near my hometown, where I saw Saturday Night Fever at sixteen. (The other people insisted on smuggling me in to save on my admission, which didn't please me.) 

Saturday Night Fever was OK, but it was on a double bill, followed by Sorcerer.  In the first scene of that movie we see a man on a hotel balcony who looks down at a fiesta, pours a drink, then sees a guy in a blue suit and shades come in, pull out a gun and shoot him dead!  In the next scene we see a bus in Jerusalem, which ends up exploding!  After that we went home. (In the part I missed, I later found out, Roy Scheider murders a priest for bingo money, and he and the other desperadoes end up driving two trucks full of volatile nitroglycerin through a treacherous jungle to put out an oil well fire.)

Five years later I went there again and saw a double bill of Night Shift and Creepshow. Night Shift was a comedy with Michael Keaton and Henry Winkler working in a morgue and opening up a bordello there. Creepshow was a horror-comedy based on the notorious E.C. horror comics of the 1950s. (Lots of stuff with people being drowned by the tide or killed by gorillas, and skeletons rising from the grave.) 

I really don't care for the horror genre--don't like being manipulated--by I am fascinated by '50s horror comics. This was an age when many people were being relentlessly positive, with books like The Power of Positive Thinking.  Meanwhile, these comics were an outlet for all the suppressed negativity of the post-World War II era.

Cliches and stereotypes

I've noticed a lot of cliches in TV and movies.  Like when the hero doesn't wait for the cops but takes unilateral action, and it turns out that the villain was counting on him doing this all along. (It even turned up in one of the Harry Potter books!)

Or when a character has a change in his appearance at the same time as a change in his character. (That makes it easier for the less attentive in the audience.) Or even just with a change in how we're supposed to see the character!  Like in Pretty Woman, which begins with hooker Julia Roberts working the streets in miniskirt and thighboots, but also a blond wig.  In a later scene when we learn she's a nice girl at heart, the wig comes off and we see her real hair.  Pretty Woman was directed by Garry Marshall, the world's expert on cliches, going back to sitcoms like Happy Days.

On Youtube there's a channel called Dating Beyond Borders, with videos showing what it's like to date people of various nationalities.  I suppose these are stereotypes, but it's still fun.  Like they say that if you date a German girl she'll be brutally honest with you. ("Don't you think you should get a haircut?") Or if you date a Mexican woman she'll expect you to be an old-fashioned gentleman and walk outside her on the sidewalk.

Passion

My family has never been the passionate type.  I never saw my parents kiss each other.  And I'm not so passionate about things myself.

True, there are some things that make me angry.  I'm still mad about the Reagan presidency and the enablers who responded to him deferentially, for instance in The New York Times.  I'm also angry about so-called "welfare reform," which has made life even worse for a lot of vulnerable people that too few of us care about.

I used to play piano.  I could play most of Mozart's sonatas and some of Haydn's, but Beethoven's were largely beyond me!  My sister Moira, on the other hand, is a very good pianist, so I got to hear her play them.  I'd have to say that my favorite Beethoven piano sonata is the Appassionata. (Other people like the Pathetique and the Moonlight sonatas.)

Has anyone here eaten passion fruit?  I'm not sure I ever have.

Alternative facts

Remember the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes?  When he got in trouble, he'd tell his parents these outrageous, transparent lies that often involved space creatures!

Myself, I try not to tell lies.  I may occasionally lie to someone who's being unreasonable and would just make things worse if he knew the truth.  But there was one time when I was little and my mother asked if I'd had any interesting dreams, and I made up this story of a dream where I was being eaten up by pixies and had ten seconds to die! (She was rather alarmed.) Why do I do things like that?  It must be the Imp of the Perverse.

In my childhood my father once told me that he'd been around when the Magna Carta was signed 800 years ago.  I guess his tongue was in his cheek.

In school they told us it wasn't true that Chinese schoolkids were taught to use real guns.  Who cares whether it was true, that sounded cool!

I remember the fuss over Watergate when I was eleven and they were questioning the veracity of everyone in the Nixon administration.  At least they cared about truth and ethics back then, unlike with Iran-Contra when I was 25.  Someone came up with a match puzzle where you moved matches around to produce "a crooked little man in a crooked little house": the answer was the letters N-I-X-O-N!

Here's a joke:  How do you know when Donald Trump is lying? His lips are moving!

Childhood games

In one game I remember from childhood one guy would be Mr. Wolf and turn his back to the others, who'd say in unison, "What time is it, Mr. Wolf?" He'd say "Twelve noon" or "Quarter to three" or something like that, and the others would creep closer to him.  But once in a while he'd say "Dinner time!" then catch the closest one.  The idea was to creep so close to Mr. Wolf that you could catch him after one of the regular times, but not so close that he'd catch you at dinner time.

There was also king's square, a sort of four-way tennis played with a big ball, with someone in one of four adjacent squares, and if you couldn't bounce the ball into someone else's zone after it had been in yours, you'd be out. (There was a neutral circle in the middle called the "belly button.") My sister Moira recalls how three of the players would unite their efforts to get the fourth one out. Not very sporting...

And there was a game where we'd start by reciting, "Chinese torture has begun!  No more laughing, no more fun!  If you show your teeth or tongue, you must pay a penalty!"

Remember on The Beverley Hillbillies how Granny was always going down to her root cellar?  We played the basement game Murder in the Dark, except that my brother renamed it Granny's Root Cellar!

Pests

Ever have the experience of swatting a mosquito just after she's bitten you and drawing a little streak of your own blood along your arm or leg? (Today I avoid swatting bugs out of vague principle...)

One kind of pest I dislike is a dog who runs toward you and barks at the same time.  That really frightens me!

I read that during Hell Week at South Carolina's Citadel military school, the upperclassmen march the plebs into nearby swamps and make them stand still as the mosquitoes bite them.  Another institution for the South to be proud of! (Here we have two kinds of pests.)

In the movie Mr. Holland's Opus schoolteacher Richard Dreyfus says, "Sometimes the best way to deal with a pest is to ignore him." Well, that's easy to say when the pest is bothering someone else instead of you!

Donald Trump has always struck me as a pest. (I'm just glad I don't have to work for him!) Dr. Phil also seems like a pest, as do Howard Stern and anyone on Fox News...

The bank

I have an account at the local TD Canada Trust branch.  There's a woman working there called Rosa who always remembers my name. (I try to say hello to her.) A month or two ago I got a new access card, but the ATM kept rejecting it!  They just issued me a new one.

I recently had to shift most of my money into term deposits that won't come due till I'm 65.  That allowed me to qualify for Ontario Disability Support Payments because of my Asperger's Syndrome.

When I lived in England 22 years ago, opening a bank account was a pain in the neck! (They seem to think that by letting you entrust your money to them, they're granting you some big privilege!) Also, while Canadian banks will give you an automatic readout of your balance, with British banks--at least back then--you had to keep track of it yourself.  I'll bet they had a lot of overdrafts!  I can only hope they've changed since then.

There's a really funny Stephen Leacock story, "My Financial Career," about a guy opening his first bank account.  At one point he mistakenly walks into the vault!

Hats

I used to own a Tilley Endurables hat.  But when I was in London five years ago, I was in a subway station and a sudden gust of wind blew it off my head and onto the rails! (I hadn't even reached the platform.) This was just before I returned home, so I didn't get the chance to wait for the staff to rescue it then claim it at Lost and Found, which I imagine would have taken weeks anyway.

After I got home I bought a classic fedora at a boutique in Eaton Centre that also sold scarves.  I also have a summer hat that I bought at Target.

Hats have gone out of fashion in recent decades.  I guess that's because of John F. Kennedy and the '60s counterculture.  I really started wearing a hat in my thirties because my hairline was receding and I was afraid of getting sunburnt on the top of my head.

My fedora is handy for a new Meetup group I've joined for people interested in vintage clothes.  I also have a green cardigan and a corduroy jacket.  I ought to buy a bowtie too.

Sometimes I wish I had a stovepipe hat like Lincoln wore...