Morning rituals

What do I do in the morning that sustains me?  After I wake up and get out of bed, I go to my computer, open Facebook, and play the game Candy Crush Saga. I'm not sure that "sustains" me, but I do enjoy it.

It bugs me when my sister calls Candy Crush Saga a "video game." It's really a computer game that requires strategy!  You move around pieces of candy in six different colors, to form rows of three (or four or even five, as well as right-angle arrays). When you win a game at one level you get to move to the next, and I've passed Level 900! (I think there are over 1500 levels...) You can also use these boosters to put you over the top, but I never use them on principle.

The one thing I don't like about Candy Crush Saga is that when you lose a game, there's this little girl who cries! (That always makes me feel guilty.) When you win, she jumps for joy.  It also has sound effects, but I turn them off most of the time.  I get the impression that the game's really popular with East Asians.

The same company has a game called Pet Rescue Saga, where you remove blocks to save critters.

In the morning I also take iron and Cipralex pills.  And over breakfast I read The Globe and Mail.

East Indians

Indian civilization has deep roots, with a rarefied intellectual tendency.  They invented chess, our number system and several religions.  I should learn more about it. (Michael Wood made a good British documentary series about the history of India.)

I've liked a lot of movies from India, including Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay and Monsoon Wedding.  Some of the best are by Satyajit Ray from Bengal, including his three movies about young Apu.

One of the things I like best about India is the food!  I first discovered Indian food in my late twenties, when we spent a year in Glasgow, Scotland. (Britain is a good place for "ethnic" food.) Lucky there's an Indian restaurant around corner from our house!

India today is going through many of the same changes that Britain and much of the Western world went through in the 19th century, what with industrialization and urbanization. (Living in Mumbai is said to be as bad for your lungs as smoking!) In fact, the British director Michael Winterbottom recently made Trishna, a reworking of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles set in today's India.

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!