Australia

I've never been to Australia. But I like the Australians I've met.  Such an eccentric place:  it's the sort of society where the national animal jumps around! (I once got some Australian fruit cocktail that was packed in pear juice.) It's something of a frontier society, like the Canadian or American west.  They even had a big gold rush about the same time as California.

The Australians make a lot of good movies, like My Brilliant Career and Gallipoli and We of the Never Never.  Their culture has certain egalitarian squareness that appeals to me.

Australia does have its racist side.  After 9/11 the government managed to get re-elected by having a big crackdown on refugee claimants, appealing to the voters' xenophobia. (I hope Canada doesn't get that way.) And alas, they've treated their native peoples as badly as we've treated ours, if not worse.  I read somewhere that back in colonial days young men would shoot aborigines just for fun, like shooting birds!

Canada has produced few songs even nearly as good as Australia's "Waltzing Matilda." (And most of them are from Quebec and Newfoundland.)

Loss of a pet

I've never had a pet.  Too much responsibility!  My brother John had a dog called Theseus, acquired through animal rescue.  He was part collie and I'm not sure what else. (Mongrels make the best pets!)

Theseus was very smart.  He recognized several words, including "stick." Hearing that word would always make him excited, because it meant they'd be taking him outdoors to play with the stick! ("Walk" had a similar effect on him.) It was tempting to say "Stick!" to him just to see him get excited, like Pavlov ringing the bell to make the dog drool.

Eventually, Theseus got old and they put him down.  I suppose that saying goodbye to a pet is one of the ways we learn to say goodbye to a relative.

In one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books there's a wonderful chapter called "Growing Up," about Jack the family dog, who'd accompanied them on all their travels, walking under the wagon in the shade.  But now, as the family prepared their last journey, he was too old for more walking.  Laura got thinking about how Jack had always been around to protect her, but now she'd have to take care of herself. (That's a Garth Williams illustration at the top.)

They were going to carry him inside the wagon, but he saw the familiar preparations and must have sensed his time was over, and one morning he was dead.  After burying Jack, Laura's father told her, "Good dogs have their reward."

I remember this CBC radio comedy show did a skit about someone arranging a funeral for his dog Fluffo.  The funeral arranger said, "And then there's the bargain special--we put Fluffo in a sack and throw him in the Fraser River!" He also suggested an epitaph, like "He ain't around, he's in the ground."

THE GODFATHER

When I was twenty, I saw Francis Coppola's The Godfather and The Godfather Part II on TV.  They showed all eight hours on Saturday and Sunday nights between midnight and 4:00!  Staying awake was a bit of a challenge, but I managed it.

There's a really great scene early in Part II when the Marlon Brando character, back when he's a kid, arrives in New York City, sees the Statue of Liberty and goes through Ellis Island. (You can find it on Youtube!) The movies have some great acting.  But Part III didn't have Robert Duvall, alas.

I like a lot of gangster movies. Another one is Martin Scorcese's Goodfellas, a true story that plays like a black comedy and is really fast-paced, with some great dialogue! ("What do you expect me to do, shoot him?" "Well, it wouldn't be a bad idea...")

And I like the early Warner Brothers gangster movies from the 1930s with stars like James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart.  They showed them on the CBC late show back in the '80s, and I'd watch them while waiting for David Letterman to come on.

And there are some good recent gangster movies too.  I like Mike Newell's Donnie Brasco, with Johnny Depp as a fed who infiltrates mafia circles by getting to know a Willy Loman-type gangster played by Al Pacino. (It has the line "Find him, kill him, leave his body in the street!")

I've also watched the TV series The Sopranos, about Tony Soprano, a gangster who goes to a psychiatrist.  There's a great episode where Tony finds out that his daughter's soccer coach is a sexual predator and considers murdering him.  And there's a funny episode where his son is into Nietzsche but pronounces him "Nich"! (His grandmother tells him, "You die in your own arms.")

I could go on for hours about my favourite gangster movies!

The dollar store

In the pre-inflation days, dollar stores were called five & ten cent stores.  I recall there was a song that went, "I found a million-dollar baby at the five and ten cent store"!

I remember the Woolworth's in Moncton.  I liked the lunch counter's strawberry shortcake.  It also had the first escalator I ever rode on.  I also recall there was a monkey in the basement.

Moncton also had a Kmart.  I remember their white cylindrical trash cans with a round dome on the top.

Remember Terrytoons?  They were these cartoons that got shown on TV a lot, including Heckle and Jeckle, a couple of obnoxious birds who'd say things like "You can do anything in an animated cartoon!" There was also a neurotic elephant called Silly Sidney, with a lion character who was always saying, "Crazy elephant!" (The African-style music was cool.) Why am I mentioning all this?  Because the studio head, Paul Terry, once said, "Disney is the Tiffany's of animation, while Terrytoons is the Woolworth's."

Candy

Have you ever noticed?  A box of chocolates has a narrower range of goodies than it used to.  I remember when the Moir's Pot of Gold included a chocolate covered lozenge! (That sort of thing shows my age.) Do they still have Cherry Blossoms?

The novel Forrest Gump starts with the line "Bein' an idiot ain't no box of chocolates." But in the movie version they had his mother say, "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you'll get." How shameless!  If they couldn't be faithful to the original line, they could at least have left it out, instead of turning it on its head.

Easter was a few weeks ago. After Easter is over I buy a ton of chocolate at reduced prices. (I especially like the chocolate with crispy rice pieces.) This year I even got some jelly beans!  I wish I could eat jelly beans without thinking of Ronald Reagan, pray for his worthless soul.

I think my favourite candy is Ferrero Rocher.  That's the one with a hazelnut inside that you can eat in two bites.  I also like nougats and creams.  Don't like caramels.

Does anyone remember the Neilson Cinnamon Danish from the '70s?  I remember how the Neilson company sent big wall maps of Canada to every school in the country.  In a shameless bit of product placement, they put their candy bars in each corner of the map! (I recall Crispy Crunch over Greenland...)

I also remember Life Savers.  Does anyone remember when they came in root beer flavour?

Moving to a new place

I haven't moved that much in my life.  I've lived at the same Toronto address for the last 25 years, except for the eight months when I was researching my Ph.D. in London.  Before that, I spent 25 of my first 28 years at the same address in Sackville, N.B. (I heard that Eudora Welty lived in one house for her whole life.  Someone said that such stability is good for a writer.)

When I was young, my father was a physics professor who went on sabbaticals every seven or nine years.  In 1965 we went to Brighton, England, for a year, just when it was a big mod scene, though Father remembers none of that. (He does remember seeing the live TV talk show where Kenneth Tynan used the F-word.) My older siblings went to an English grammar school, but I was still a pre-schooler.

In 1974 we went to Mississauga for a year.  Then in 1981 we spent four months in England (near Canterbury), then eight months in Toronto.  In 1988 we spent a year in Glasgow, Scotland:  by this time my older siblings had gone their own way, and it was just the parents and me.  It was in 1995 that I went to London, and for me that was a bit like another sabbatical year.  Otherwise I've mostly stayed in the same place.  But I've done some travelling, including China and Japan:  I recently calculated that I've spent a week of my life in the air!

Math class

I was always good at math.  I remember one test on ratios in Grade 6 where I got 21 out of 20! (I got the bonus question right too.) I've always been fascinated by whole numbers and primes and integers and real numbers and complex numbers...

I recall that in Grade 8 math class we had a student teacher called Mr. Christie, so of course we kept saying, "Mr. Christie, you make good cookies!" Another thing I remember was that in Grade 5 we were learning about large numbers like sextillion, and some girl said, "That's David Cassidy's number!"

Mathematics and geometry and logic puzzles still interest me today.  There's this website brilliant.com that has a lot of math puzzles that I like to work on.