Libraries

I love libraries!  I remember the Sackville, Moncton and Halifax libraries, and the Mount Allison and York university libraries.  I sometimes dream about them today.  I’d spent forever reading the latest newspapers and magazines there.  I also learned to read microfilm scans and go through old issues of papers like The New York Times. (I sometimes read newspapers that were published on the day I was born!)

One of the big things I miss during the pandemic is going to the library.  Toronto has a superb library system!  You can request a book at one branch and have it sent to a branch that’s close to you.  There’s also a Kanopy system that gets you access to a lot of online videos.

The library branch that’s closest to my home is Davenport, but it’s one of the smaller ones.  A bigger branch that’s also close to me is Wychwood, which is now undergoing renovations anyway, and its reopening may come not much later than the general system’s reopening.

I have a friend who works at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s library.  Something like that would be a dream job for me!  About 15 years ago I did have a temporary job at the Reference Library in the Human Resources department.  It didn’t lead to anything else, but I did enjoy it, though the place was a bit dusty.  Lots of sorting files and unearthing stuff from the regional systems that got taken over with the metro amalgamation.  I also shredded a lot of files, which is fun.

Museums

I love museums!  Especially the ones in London, England that I got to know when I was there researching my Ph.D. thesis. Sometimes I dream about visiting a London museum that's a combination of all of them!

When I visit London today, the first place I visit is the National Gallery next to Trafalgar Square.  If I could be anywhere in the world right now, I think I'd choose the National Gallery in the section with the 18th-century paintings! And next door to it is the National Portrait Gallery, with portraits of famous people in British history. That place interests me so much that I have to go there twice in each visit.  And I always visit the British Museum, of course.

There are several museums in the South Kensington area that Prince Albert helped develop.  One is the Victoria & Albert Museum, devoted to applied art.  (What I like about applied art is that I don't have to worry about what it means; it's enough for it to look nice.) And just around the corner are the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum.  When I visit these places I walk around so much that afterward I go north a short distance to bathe my feet at the Princess Diana fountain.

And there are lots of other museums.  The Tate Gallery is another place full of classic paintings.  The Museum of London tells the whole story of the city's incredible history.  And I also visit the Imperial War Museum--for me, it's the uniforms that make it real. (That building had once been a mental institution, which is oddly appropriate:  Sigmund Freud said that war serves as an outlet for the craziness that accumulates in a society!) And places like the Royal Academy always have interesting exhibits, though I don't care so much for Tate Modern.

One impressive thing about these museums is that they mostly have free admission!  But they do encourage you to donate a few pounds, and you'd be a cheapskate not to do so considering how good they are.

Cartoons

I've been into cartoons for as long as I can remember.  Disney, of course, but also the Warner Brothers cartoons with their sharp writing.  When I was young I would have said that my favourite cartoon character was Bugs Bunny, but now that I'm older I prefer Daffy Duck!  I also watched The Flintstones, which shows that I had no taste.

Among more recent cartoons, I used to watch South Park, which is very uneven.  A lot of it is vulgar, unfunny schoolboy humour, but there are also sharp bits like an underclass parody of Fat Albert and lines like "They can't tell me what to do, I'm eight years old!" I've also watched The Simpsons, which has often been brilliant, at least in its first decade.  And Canada's National Film Board has produced some incredible animated shorts over the years!

In recent years I've also got into Japanese anime.  Hayao Miyazaki's one of the medium's greatest storytellers, surpassing even Disney himself in features like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away.  His manga comic book version of Nausicaa of Wind Valley is even better the movie!

And then there's One Piece, which has been running for over twenty years. (In Japan it's an even bigger phenomenon than The Simpsons--there are shops that only sell One Piece merchandise!) It's about a group of mostly adolescent pirates led by Monkey D. Luffy, who's resolved to become King of the Pirates and find a mysterious treasure left behind by an earlier pirate king. He's happy-go-lucky and often foolhardy, but he's a natural leader.  He also ate a devil fruit that allows him to stretch his body like rubber, but he can no longer swim.

Great writers create worlds: Eiichiro Oda created a universe here!  What really makes it great is that every major character (and some minor ones) have a detailed, interesting backstory.  Take Nami, the crew's navigator and treasurer.  In the early episodes we only know her background as that of a thief who specializes in robbing pirates. Later it turns out that a gang of pirate fish-men have been subjecting her home village to extortion and the proceeds from her theft will go to ransom the place and free it from their grip. Then we find out that her foster mother was a soldier who found her and her sister as wandering orphans after a battle, took them home and raised them hand to mouth.  Then when these pirates arrived they charged everyone a "pay or die" amount, but the mother couldn't afford to pay for all of them so she calmly sacrificed herself to save the girls. Really great storytelling!

Another character that interests me is Nico Robin, the crew's resident genius. (The devil fruit that she ate allows her to form extra hands all over the place.) I have Asperger's Syndrome, and I think she's an Aspie too.  While the others are fooling about or quarrelling, she's generally off in the background reading something or observing them with quiet amusement.  She's emotionally reserved in an East Asian sort of way that can make her seem colder than she really is.  

I should add that the soundtrack has superb movie-quality music!

The autism spectrum

I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome at age 40.  How do I feel about being on the autism spectrum?  Well, I’ve been hesitant about labelling myself autistic:  compared to what low-functioning autistics deal with, my problems look pretty small.  Like Popeye the Sailor, I yam what I yam.

But I saw a TV show on Youtube that made me rethink my identity.  It was an episode of Longstreet, a 1971 series with James Franciscus as a blind detective. (It requires some suspension of disbelief.) It’s unusually mature for its time:  the stories are about his personal development as much as the cases he cracks.  Despite his handicap, Longstreet still strives to be a super-achiever:  he even hires Bruce Lee to teach him martial arts!  He lost his sight to a bomb that killed his wife, so there’s also an element of survivor’s guilt.

In the episode I’m referring to, Longstreet goes undercover to investigate cases of sabotage in a factory.  The factory has a work program for handicapped people, which provides him with entry.  But as his investigation continues, he has trouble getting friendly with the other handicapped people.  Part of it is being distracted by his case, but he comes to realize that he’s still in a measure of denial about being handicapped!

He finally figures out who’s behind the sabotage, and at the end of the episode, when he says goodbye to the other people in the program, he says, “We handicapped people have to look out for each other!” For him that’s a step forward.

There was something similar in the movie The Men, with Marlon Brando as a paralyzed soldier.  At the end of the movie, when his wife brings him home, he finally lets her push his wheelchair!

How does this apply to me?  I was thinking that maybe I’ve been in denial about being autistic.  Maybe I should be saying, “We autistics have to look out for each other.” Time will tell.

Anime

Why do I like Japanese cartoons so much?  At their best they’re real works of art!  Studio Ghibli has made some wonderful features, especially Grave of the Fireflies, a heartrending story of two doomed Japanese orphans in World War II.

But I also like a lot of their TV cartoons.  Japanese animators have worked around the limitations of TV animation and given it style.  The show that really got me started on anime, of course, is Sailor Moon.  I originally watched that in the ‘90s when I was in my mid-thirties, struggling with my Ph.D. thesis.  A lot of people hate the dubbed version, and while I admit it isn’t as great as the subtitled original, it’s still pretty good on its own terms.

Sailor Moon is about a schoolgirl of 14 called Serena, a goofy, disorganized crybaby.  But a talking cat called Luna comes along and tells her she has a destiny to turn into Sailor Moon and fight monsters from the Negaverse!  Her superhero outfit rather resembles a fashion model:  micro-miniskirt, go-go boots, long white gloves and a tiara that she throws as a weapon to turn the monsters to dust.  

Four other girls come along and they form the Sailor Scouts and fight the Negaverse together.  In her fights, Sailor Moon tends to get in over her head, but then along comes a guy named Tuxedo Mask—for his costume—who throws down a rose and gives her new strength to win the fight.  Tuxedo Mask bears a certain resemblance to Darien, an arrogant college boy who drives Serena up the wall by calling her “meatball head.” (Her hairdo resembles two meatballs on the top of her head!) So there’s an element of romance in it too…

All this may sound silly, and the first episodes are rather conventional.  But the show’s brilliantly structured and becomes emotionally moving.  There’s an incredible moment in the middle of the first season when Molly, Serena’s civilian friend who’s fallen in love with the Negaverse villain Neflyte, stands in front of him to protect him from Sailor Moon’s tiara.  Then in the next episode Neflyte dies protecting Molly, giving him a certain redemption.  That’s a turning point for the show as it becomes more and more affecting.  

The first season ends with a powerful pair of episodes where they’re up against the villainess Queen Beryl, and the other Sailor Scouts and Tuxedo Mask die protecting Sailor Moon, then Sailor Moon takes on Queen Beryl alone and feels the spiritual presence of the others.  In defeating Queen Beryl, she dies too—but then they all go through some transformation that takes them back to before they knew they were Sailor Scouts. (It’s better to see this ending subtitled—the dubbed version edits the two episodes down to one and softens it considerably.)

My personal favourite episode is “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall,” from the Doom Tree arc in the second season, involving Alan and Ann, two aliens pretending to be schoolkids while stealing energy for their Doom Tree.  It’s about how Darien is putting on Snow White as a play and all the girls want to play Snow White, but Ann gets the role through drawing straws and cheating!  Then Alan sends a clown monster to steal everyone’s energy, and it turns into a Power Rangers show!

If I had more time I’d talk about Dragon Ball, less famous than its sequel Dragon Ball Z but a show I love in itself.  And about One Piece, a show about a teenage boy with flesh like rubber who wants to become King of the Pirates.  It’s still going strong after twenty years, a Japanese counterpart to The Simpsons.

Shenanigans

I call shenanigans on the Democratic primary before the 2016 US presidential election.  The process that gave Hillary Clinton the nomination over Bernie Sanders may not have been "rigged," but it was clearly stacked!

Consider the Puerto Rico primary.  In most places, logically enough, the presidential primary voting happens at the same precincts as the voting for down-ballot primaries like governor or state legislature.  In Puerto Rico's primary, however, the Democratic Party made the very late decision to move the presidential primary to a different and smaller group of precincts.  The inevitable result was a much smaller turnout for that primary than the others--it's usually the other way around--and a Clinton victory in a place where Sanders had been leading in the polls.

Clinton's biggest advantage, of course, was the numerous closed primaries where only people who'd registered as Democrats months before were eligible to vote.  And the Democrats purged their rolls so that even thousands of longstanding members found they couldn't vote either. (I'd be more sympathetic to Democrats trying to make an issue of Republican vote suppression in the general election if they weren't in aggressive denial about their own vote-suppression problem!) And of course, there's the super delegates who were largely on Clinton's side.

Maybe none of these individual factors is enough in itself to explain Clinton's victory.  But taken together, they're hard to ignore. (An election for Teamsters union president was thrown out because of much smaller irregularities.) I fear that history may repeat itself in the race between Sanders and Joe Biden.

Folk music

I love folk music!  When I was young I used to watch the Irish Rovers on TV.  Will Millar used to sign off with the blessing, "May you be half an hour in heaven before the Devil knows you're dead!" I also watched a show with Ryan's Fancy and Tommy Makem, who'd sign off with blessings like "May your cat have a long tail!" and "May all your duck eggs have double yolks!" I also saw some concerts with the Celtic music of John Allen Cameron.

Pete Seeger was a folk singer I admire both as a musician and as a person. He'd been a communist when he was young and got blacklisted in the 1950s, but he never gave up!  He also led a movement to clean up the Hudson River.

I like some of those Newfoundland songs like "She's Like the Swallow" and "I's the B'y That Builds the Boat." Back in the 1960s my mother wrote to the TV show The Friendly Giant and asked them to sing "I's the B'y That Builds the Boat," and they did!

The Carter Family sang some great folk songs, like "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" It's about finding joy in grief.

The folk song "Red River Valley" was the original country song!  That's what they call "hurtin' music"!