Tintin

I started reading Herge's Tintin comic books serialized in CHILDREN'S DIGEST in the early '70s, translated into English.  But since then I've learned enough French to read them in their original language.  It was shrewd of Herge to introduce the hard-drinking, irascible sailor Captain Haddock as a companion for his rather bland young hero.  But I never cared for those goofy twin detectives.

I have a copy of the colorful TINTIN IN TIBET and read a few others. (THE CASTAFIORE EMERALD is especially funny.) The French versions were easy to find in bilingual New Brunswick than in Toronto.  But I've managed to buy TINTIN IN THE LAND OF THE SOVIETS and TINTIN IN THE CONGO, which are hard to find in English.  The Russian adventure was the first Tintin story, and Herge's inexperience shows.  The Congo adventure is controversial because of its old-fashioned racial attitudes.  I've written my own English translations of those stories just for the experience.

When I was in London last September, I picked up the two volumes of Tintin's moon adventures.  Unfortunately, this edition is physically smaller than the versions I'm used to.  I've started translating the first one, but took a break for a while.  I suppose that when the TOR is finished I'll regain interest in that project.

The myth of the Melting Pot

It's always seemed to me that the American "melting pot" is a myth.  It's the kind of myth that some liberals like because it elides the issues of ethnic and cultural conflict.  At the very least, it's a simplistic metaphor for the complex, gradual process of cultural assimilation.

Look at New York City, past and present.  When did Irish-Americans, Jewish-Americans and Italian-Americans get "melted"? What makes New York such a great city is the variety in its many ethnic communities.  It's appropriate that the United Nations has its headquarters there.  (Los Angeles also comes to mind.)

Lately, the Melting Pot has become a harmful myth.  Those intolerant of immigrants invoke a dim, nostalgic memory of a time when immigrants were assimilated overnight.  Never mind that eighteenth-century Pennsylvania had German-language newspapers!

Unlike these people, I look at "multiculturalism" not as something imposed by government but as something going from the bottom up.  Some people disapprove of bilingual education, but does it matter if Jose learns math in Spanish, so long as he learns it?  They prefer the "sink or swim" method, under which kids are expected to learn English by themselves, but too many are already sinking.

My Amazon book review

Anyone can post a book review at amazon.com , and a couple of years ago I reviewed Stephen E. Ambrose's TO AMERICA:  PERSONAL REFLECTIONS OF AN HISTORIAN.  Here's the review, to which I gave the heading "Pretty sad":

Stephen E. Ambrose sold a lot of history books in his later years, on subjects like D-Day. Yet he ended up a mediocre historian, devoted beyond reason to the "America the Good" talking point (a talking point most Americans want to hear, of course). At least that's what I have to conclude from reading TO AMERICA.

Ambrose mentions as one of his early influences a professor whose rule for writing history was "No editorials!" Yet TO AMERICA is full of almost relentless editorializing. As the title suggests, he doesn't have much bad to say about his native country. Ambrose's America-worship requires a certain selectiveness in his observations. For example, it's easier to insist that imperialism is not part of Teddy Roosevelt's legacy when your book says almost nothing about Latin America in the 20th century. (Ronald Reagan, the unpunished despoiler of Central America, is conspicuous in his absence.)

In addition, Ambrose isn't above blatantly unfair comparisons. Of course the American occupation of southern Korea proved far less brutal than the Soviet occupation of eastern Germany, but Korea hadn't launched a devastating invasion of the United States that left over 20 million Americans dead. His paean to Washington's nation-building in Korea, indeed, carefully omits any mention of the Syngman Rhee regime that Washington installed, full of Koreans who had collaborated with the hated Japanese occupiers and just as much a "puppet" regime as the communists in the north; of the massacres of Korean civilians by panicky GIs during the retreat at the start of the Korean War; or of Washington's acquiescence in the South Korean military's suppressions of democracy in 1961 and 1980.

I actually skipped the two chapters on World War II because I knew exactly what Ambrose was going to say. (It's that kind of book.)

The best thing about the book is Ambrose's personal reminiscences. I liked the story where he was conversing with a Native American, then looked at his watch and said, "It's time for lunch!" The Indian responded, "Only the white man has to look at his watch to know whether he's hungry!"

***

I should write another book review someday.

The DVD I didn't see

This evening I was going to watch the DVD I got from zip.ca of the silent Swedish movie EROTIKON.  Directed by Moritz Stiller, who discovered Greta Garbo, it's said to be a very daring study of love for its time. (One of the sexiest movies I've ever seen is also Swedish:  Ingmar Bergman's SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT.) And it promised to give me something to write about here.  Unfortunately, the disc had a crack and couldn't be played.  I've reported it as unplayable, and they promise to send me a free one.

Instead I watched an episode from "The Best of GUNSMOKE." (They've sent me three whole discs from that series!) It was the first episode where Burt Reynolds appeared, as Quint the Metis blacksmith.  This episode, from 1961, also featured Harry Carey Jr., the western actor who died the other month, and the actor who played Scottie on STAR TREK.

This afternoon Moira came to see the TOR as we put on HOFFMANN. (The parents feel too weary to come.) She doesn't like the opera as much as I do, but I think she did enjoy this performance.

I was just reading in that book of 50 physics ideas about the EPR paradox. (That stands for Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen.) I'm afraid it was all a bit over my head.  But I've finally finished most of the stuff about quantum mechanics, so I hope I'm over the hump.

Trotsky in Amherst

Tonight the TOR put on BARBER, so we had some long breaks.  I was talking to Rosa, who was reading a three-volume biography of Trotsky.  We got to talking about history.

I've always been interested in the brief period in 1917 when Trotsky was taken off a ship in Halifax and sent to an internment camp in Amherst, Nova Scotia for a month or so until Russia's post-Tsarist government decided to force his release.  The place was one of Canada's largest internment camps during World War I, with many captured German sailors and Ukrainian immigrants who had come to Canada from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  In his short time there he became very popular with most of the prisoners and when he left they saw him off with an improvised band playing (what else?) the Internationale.

This interests me because Amherst is just a short distance from my hometown of Sackville, New Brunswick.  After I got home I went online and learned more about the place.  I found an article about his stay written by Nova Scotia journalist Silver Donald Cameron, and some other information.  The camp was a converted foundry at the intersection of Park and Wickham streets.  I was particularly interested in finding its address since I'm familiar with parts of the town, and it isn't often you get to make a connection between an area you have some familiarity with and an important episode in history.

I love the internet!

The 50 IDEAS YOU REALLY NEED TO KNOW series

When I was in London last September, I bought several books in the 50 IDEAS YOU REALLY NEED TO KNOW series.  I started reading 50 MATHEMATICAL IDEAS and really enjoyed it.  I learned from it that if something increases exponentially at 1% per year, in 100 years it'll increase by a factor of "e" (an irrational number that comes from the series of inverse factorials, equal to about 2 and 5/7). That finding really interested me, because I was wondering why exactly that increase would lead to doubling in 72 years.  I now see that it relates to increasing in 28 years by a factor of e divided by 2.

After I finished that I started reading 50 PHYSICS IDEAS, but got bogged down in it.  Some of the stuff in it, like Newton's laws of motion and the temperature of absolute zero, were familiar enough.  But there are also things like Brownian motion and the Fraunhofer diffraction and Schrodinger's cat that are a bit over my head.

It reminds me of the time I started learning Grade 11 physics.  I was not quite 15 and not quite ready for it.  I ran into trouble learning about torque because I confused it with levers.  My father got a doctorate in physics and became a physics professor, but it wasn't for me.

One of these days I'm going to get around to finishing 50 PHYSICS IDEAS, then read others in the series. (They have books on subjects like art and philosophy too.)

MAD magazine

When I was young, we had some paperback reprints of MAD magazine, though Mother disapproved.  In recent years I've been rereading them and found a lot of it is pretty sharp satire, some of it in ways I couldn't appreciate at the time.

I did appreciate some of their kiddie humor, like a set of children's definitions that included "An aunt is to give you clothes for your birthday instead of toys," and "An uncle is to pinch your cheek, and you can't pinch back." And like "If famous authors drew comic strips..." where they show Edgar Allen Poe's version of DENNIS THE MENACE, in which Dennis burns down his house with his parents in it. ("No more spanking, Nevermore!")

One part I remembered has parents in the '50s lecturing their teenage children about how the younger generation's clothes, dances and language are ridiculous.  Then they show the parents when they were young in the '20s, wearing raccoon coats, dancing the Charleston and saying things like "Twenty-three skidoo, small change!"

And there's also "TV shows we'd like to see..." "How did you know our mystery guest was Alfred E. Neuman?" "I peeked!" And the Anacin commercial: "What do doctors take for headaches and pain relief?...  How should I know, I'm only an actor!" And how high-class magazines use the photo "Millionaire playboy shot by sweetie in lover's quarrel": HOUSE AND GARDEN says "Furniture is by Rancid, and draperies are by the Window.  Entire room is set off by Chartreuse-tinted indirect lighting.  Entire apartment is set off by dynamite."

And there's the Jack and Jill story as told in various magazines:  SEVENTEEN ("It was more than a teenage crush..."), OFFICIAL DETECTIVE STORIES ("Double death for 2 illicit lovers"), TRUE ("The last climb... Lucky for Jack he had a hangnail!"), CONFIDENTIAL ("Did they really go up for water?"), and MODERN ROMANCES ("The last thing I remember was Jack lunging at me...").

They made fun of Bobby Darrin a lot.  They did a feature "Inside Bobby Darrin's wallet," which included an order form for the book "How to be Popular" by Shlock Publications.  And they had a Dick & Jane-type guide to Greek mythology which showed Darrin as Narcissus!

The Keystone XL pipeline

Sunday they had a big rally in Washington DC against the Keystone XL pipeline.  I wish I could have been there.  The Alberta oil sands are an environmental disaster and are making a farce of our concerns about climate change.  For the first time in my life I'm ashamed to be Canadian.

Much blame should go to Alberta's Conservative government.  Premier Alison Redford recently had the nerve to say, "It's not good enough to do the easy thing and raise taxes." Well, if raising taxes is so easy why is it so seldom done?  Alberta should have raised its very low income tax and introduced a sales tax (like every other province has) twenty years ago, but Ralph Klein was an anti-tax ideologue, and so is Redford.  If the provincial government has trouble balancing the books, they prefer to slash spending and produce more and more oil.

I recall Alberta's last provincial election when the Conservatives faced a threat from the even more right-wing Wild Rose Party.  What saved them was numerous NDP and Liberal voters who voted for them to defeat the WRP.  I hope those voters are happy now! (If more voters had stayed loyal to those parties, there might have been a minority government and even some real change.)

Some people warn about the dire economic effects of reducing emissions.  I grant that if we reduce emissions more than we need to, there's a serious chance of hurting the economy.  But if we reduce emissions LESS than we have to, it may mean the end of modern civilization.  I know which direction I'd err toward.  For the sake of argument, let's accept that there's a possibility that the experts are wrong about climate change.  The significant possibility that they're right is still enough to justify action.

Master class

This evening was the start of Giuseppe's master class for TOR singers.  It's on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the next three weeks.  He's done it for the last two years.  Fortunately, he has Adolfo to play the piano accompaniment.  Two years ago I sang "Le Veau d'Or" from Gounod's FAUST and Schumann's "Widmung"; last year I did "Scintille, Diamant" from TALES OF HOFFMANN and "Bella Sicome un Angelo" from Donizetti's DON PASQUALE.

This year I'm singing "Il Balen di Suo Soriso" from Verdi's IL TROVATORE and "Wohin?" from Schubert's DIE SCHOENE MULLERIN. (Like my earlier songs, these are all numbers I've studied in my singing lessons with Giuseppe.) Half a dozen people came to the first class, and it isn't all opera:  someone sang "I Dreamt I Slept in Marble Halls" from the operetta BOHEMIAN GIRL and someone else did "There Is Nothing Like a Dame" from Rodgers & Hammerstein's Broadway musical SOUTH PACIFIC.

Yesterday I made it to choir practice. (Giuseppe was anxious that I come this week:  I'm an important part of the baritone-bass.) But this week the men got to come late because the first part was just for the women rehearsing the witches' choruses in MACBETH.  Giuseppe turned out to be latest of all:  when Yvette was driving him to rehearsal, they were in an auto accident.  Nobody was hurt, but they had to go make statements.  So Adolfo rehearsed the women on his own.

Records

When I was little, we had a record player and a lot of children's records.  Our Golden Records and Spear Records singles were 78 RPM, from back in the time when you could still buy 78s.  The Goldens were in yellow vinyl, while the Spears were red and even white!  

Our Peter Pan Records singles were mostly 45s, with the extra-big holes that required a special setup on the player.  One of my favorites was a Peter Pan of George Cohan's showtune "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy."

We had several LPs in Golden Records' Child's Introduction series.  One was "A Child's Introduction to the Great Composers," with thirty cuts of famous pieces of music, stuff like Liszt's Liebestraum Nocturne, Verdi's Anvil Chorus, Rimsky-Korsakov's Dance of the Tumblers and Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, all arranged by the famous Mitch Miller.  We also had "A Child's Introduction to the Nutcracker Suite," narrated by Bob Keeshan (Captain Kangaroo), and "A Child's Introduction to Gilbert and Sullivan."

And we also got a Disneyland Records LP of the soundtrack of the 1961 Disney movie BABES IN TOYLAND.  Particularly memorable was a dirge that went "Slowly, slowly, he sank into the sea..."

Comics

I liked comics when I was young.  In my house they frowned on the DC and Marvel superhero stuff, I recall, but I read a lot of Gold Key material.  Stuff like Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. (Carl Barks was a master!) I also liked Little Lulu, and read quite a bit of Archie and Harvey Comics.  And I read a lot of Classics Illustrated, though that can seem dorky.

My interest started when we were in Britain, and we read British comics like Beano, Dandy, Beezer and Topper. (We also collected some of those comics' annual hardcover publications, a particularly British institution.)  The British approach can be more literal than American equivalents:  when showing someone tugging something, they'll write "Tug, tug!" in the same way as writing "Bang!"

And I also followed comic strips for a long while.  Our local paper's weekend comics included LI'L ABNER, DICK TRACY and PEANUTS. (Re-reading LI'L ABNER in recent years, I noticed that the Lower Slobbovians speak in Yiddish accents!) There were also MARY WORTH and REX MORGAN MD, but I didn't follow them much.  And we often got the magazine THE STAR WEEKLY, which somehow arranged to publish their weekend comics a week earlier than the regular papers.  Their comics included TERRY AND THE PIRATES, PRINCE VALIANT, MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN and THE HEART OF JULIET JONES.

I also developed an interest in daily comics.  The first daily story strip I followed was probably ALLEY OOP.  And my first daily adventure strip was RIP KIRBY, the coolest man in the world when I was 10 or 11.

My earliest memories

When I was newly born my family lived in a house on Lansdowne Street in Sackville, New Brunswick. (Sackville has several streets named after Canadian Governors-General, also including Lorne and Dufferin.) We moved to our West Avenue house--that street's named after a guy called West, though it is in the western part of town--when I was about a year and a half.

Naturally, I remember very little about that first year and a half, but I think there are actually two things!  We had a tire swing attached to a tree, and I remember noticing the water that accumulated in it. (At least I think this was on Lansdowne Street.) Also, there were three French-Canadian boys living next to us called Patrice, Daniel and Rene.  The last one we called "Weenie," and I remember this name.

When I was three and a half, we moved to Brighton, England for a year while Father, a physics professor at Mount Allison University, was on sabbatical.  We sailed there and back on the Greek Line ship the ARKADIA.  I remember when we boarded the ship and entered our cabins for the first time.  I also remember that we had a comic book based on the Disney movie THE MONKEY'S UNCLE, which I'd seen not long before, possibly the first movie I went to. (I recall that when we left the cinema it had gone dark outside.) I also remember the swarthy Greek waiters serving tomato juice, which I've never liked.

I also have memories of Brighton, especially the smells of coal smoke, diesel bus fumes, and butcher and grocery shops, which have a different smell from their North American counterparts. (I recognized those old smells when I visited Britain years later.)

Some of the other movies I remember seeing as a pre-schooler include MARY POPPINS, THE GREAT RACE (which we saw on Donald's birthday) and THE THREE STOOGES MEET HERCULES.

The opera continues

We've now finished both dress rehearsals and premieres at the TOR.  Tonight we premiered THE BARBER OF SEVILLE. (Coincidentally, I was just reading the part in WORKING where Studs Terkel interviews a barber!) We got what looked like a hundred people, which is better than usual for this early in the season:  the TALES OF HOFFMANN premiere was more typical with something like fifty people.  On a really good day we can get as many as 300 people, still barely half the auditorium's capacity.

For some reason I don't feel I have as much energy as in previous years.  I would have helped out with moving the scenery, but I'm not completely sure I can make every performance and if I start doing that they'll need me to be there every time.

Yesterday I was talking with Giuseppe about the Met production of A MASKED BALL.  He also mentioned the scene where the king was supposed to be hiding but was in full view. Remember when I compared it to a FRENCH CONNECTION scene with Gene Hackman?  That night I dreamed about Hackman.  To be precise, I recalled reading Candice Bergen's fine memoir KNOCK WOOD back in the '80s, where she wrote about filming the 1975 western BITE THE BULLET with Hackman. (Its title coincided with the slogan of President Ford's anti-inflation initiative, which didn't help the movie any at the box office.) When Bergen griped that she'd been given a stupid role to play, Hackman said, "Look, when I agreed to make this movie I made a commitment to do all I could to make it a success!" She found it a useful lesson, and it was that incident that I dreamed about.

Accounts

Father and I have started doing the 2012 accounts for our family's used book business.  (There was a delay because our old account books were filled, and we had to get new ones.) We have the first five months completed.  Since we do it month by month, if we were better organized we wouldn't wait till the end of the year and do it all at once but do the early months earlier in the year.  But it's so easy to let it slide...

We sell our goods under the brand name Aquilon Books, through the website ABEBooks.  It's a hobby that nets a few thousand dollars every year.  We did unusually big business in February, but the next two months were in the red.

We have the same routine for doing each month.  We start with expenses, and I'll write $25 for our Sympatico internet bill.  Then Father takes up our biggest expense and reads off our Canada Post receipts one at a time, and I'll write them down and when he's finished I'll total them up and write down the sum.  We often have expenses for envelopes and printer paper and ink and such from Staples.  And  there are also expenses for the new books we've bought with an eye to future sales:  we buy a lot from Goodwill and an Iranian with a bazaar-like store called Buy and Sell just north of St. Clair. (TORONTO LIFE magazine mentioned him once!) But recently we've been buying fewer of those.

Then we turn to income.  Most of that is from ABEBooks, and Father will tell me the weekly statements from that source.  But we also sell a few books directly to people in the Toronto area, and the proceeds from each of those sales also get written down.

After determining the overall balance, Father will give the money to me and Moira, partly because he doesn't need it, and partly because our own income is low enough that we won't get taxed for it.

The TITANIC

Moira subscribes to THE LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS.  I was just reading a recent issue with an article on the TITANIC.  That's a subject that's fascinated me for a long time.  I've sometimes dreamed of being on the TITANIC. (I often dream about being on ships or trains.) According to this article, when the ship's wireless operator received a message from another ship saying "There are icebergs in these waters.  We've stopped for the night," he responded "Shut up, I'm busy contacting Newfoundland." (With a period a bad weather just ended, he had a big backlog of personal messages to send.)

Yes, I have seen James Cameron's shameless movie TITANIC. (I saw it a second time in its 3-D re-release last year, but left when the ship started sinking.) Technically, it's expertly made, but Cameron can't resist cheap tricks and obvious cliches. Remember in ALIENS when he ended a scene by having Sigourney Weaver suddenly give birth to an alien and then revealing this was just a dream?  It was particularly contemptible to show that Rose was a "free spirit" by having her smoking--Virginia Slims?--despite the disapproval of her mother and fiance.  Cameron has admitted he had Jack and Rose smoking because teenage moviegoers are stupid enough to think that smoking is "cool." I wonder how many teenagers got hooked on cigarettes because of that movie?

I actually prefer the 1958 British movie A NIGHT TO REMEMBER. (I liked Walter Lord's book too, and also read his sequel THE NIGHT LIVES ON.)

Hell Week

The TOR has started "Hell Week." Over six days, we'll be putting on two dress rehearsals and four performances.  For me, the challenging part isn't so much performing onstage as waiting in the wings:  time seems to slow down then, like in those movies with a time bomb about to go off, where the counter seems to slow down as it gets close to zero.

This evening we dress-rehearsed TALES OF HOFFMANN.  The chorus wore makeup for the first time.  I can put it on pretty quick.  It was pretty chaotic when I first started nine years ago, but now they've posted the system on the wall.  First you put on foundation over your face and visible forehead. (You apply it with a sponge which you've wetted, squeezing out the excess water.) Then you apply shading under your chin, below your cheekbones and around your eyes.  Then you lighten your upper cheeks, nose and chin.  Then you use an eyebrow pencil to darken your eyes.  Then you add some rouge and lipstick. (For men it's a bit simpler than for women.)

The dress rehearsal went fairly smoothly, except at the start of Giulietta's story:  they had just 15 minutes to prepare the stage, and there was nobody to bring in the tree and statue decorations.  Some soloists had been helping with that, but now they're occupied with costume changes, so in future they'll need chorus people like me to volunteer our assistance.

A MASKED BALL

This evening I played hooky from choir practice to see the HD telecast of the Met production of Verdi's A MASKED BALL at the Sheppard Grande. (I'd normally see it on a Saturday, but both Saturday broadcasts were on the same day as my ROLT Meetup.) I was interested in seeing it because we recently put it on in concert at Coro Verdi.  With those Verdi operas, the more you learn the music the better it sounds.

A MASKED BALL is the one where King Gustavo (censorship made Verdi change him to a colonial governor, but this production had his original version) falls in love with Amelia, wife of his best friend Renato, who responds by joining a conspiracy to murder him at the ball of the title.  Some great music, including Renato's famous aria "Eri Tu" (a title you find in NEW YORK TIMES crossword puzzles).

It was an odd production.  The minimalist sets, twentieth-century costumes and stylized staging seemed better suited to a modern opera by John Adams or Philip Glass.  Gustavo's mortally wounded in his final aria, yet he manages to stand up in the middle of it.  During the scene where Amelia consults the witch privately and everyone else leaves but a disguised Gustavo lurks, the director didn't do enough to make it clear the king was in hiding:  Amelia and the witch could seemingly see him!

(That reminded me of a scene in William Friedkin's THE FRENCH CONNECTION where Gene Hackman was tailing a drug kingpin, who dined in a fancy restaurant while Hackman was stuck out on an adjacent sidewalk eating a slice of pizza.  As one review pointed out, the kingpin simply has to look out the window to notice there's a guy tailing him!  In Friedkin's eyes, the sheerly obvious contrast of such a scene trumped credibility.)

Oh well, I still think it's a matter of time until the Met starts staging more traditional productions to please the less sophisticated audiences coming to the HD telecasts.

Straight Edge Meetup

Today I went to a Straight Edge Meetup event.  We met at the Eglinton West station and walked south on Spadina Road from St. Clair to Bloor, passing by Casa Loma.  I was afraid that the snow would cause no-shows like with yesterday's event, but seven people showed up, as many as were expected.

I met a guy from Brazil.  A Chinese woman was telling him all about how non-citizens had to be careful about crossing the Canada-US border because they might not allow you to return.

For a while I've been playing Candy Crush Saga and Pet Rescue Saga at an "intermediate" level, starting at level 12 and 14 every time, the lowest levels where the game started challenging. (The highest level I'd get to before using up all my lives was 21 or 22.) But I've decided to do something different, and started the game at the highest level I'd already reached.  Naturally, I've ended up reaching new levels, and now I'm at 28 and 26.

What with the opera rehearsals, I now have the Hoffmann-Giulietta duet going through my head.  (In previous years it's been stuff like the love duet in LUCIA DI LAMERMOOR.) I also have some of the MACBETH opera from the Coro Verdi rehearsals sticking around.  I must say that the more I learn that opera's music, the more I like it.

I'm good at this

This afternoon was going to be the ROLT February event.  We were going to read science fiction.  But what with the weather only two people showed up:  me and a new member called Kayla. (Jane, who's usually reliable, sent me an apologetic email, which is more than any of the other no-shows did.)

I read for Kayla an E.B. White story called "The Hour of Letdown," about a guy taking a computer into a bar.  It came from a collection THE WORLD'S BEST SHORT SHORT STORIES, which are all three to six pages long, convenient for reading here.  I only had one thing to read anyway.

I thought the event would give me enough for a whole post, but I'll have to think of something more to write about.  The last few days I've got into a pattern where I look at a DVD early in the evening, then I get sleepy enough to go to bed at eight or nine.  Then I sleep for a few hours and wake up toward midnight.  Then I go on the computer for a few hours before going back to bed.  I read things like the online version of the British newspaper THE GUARDIAN and the King Features Syndicate comics at dailyink.com .  The new day's comics become available just after one in the morning.

I must say, I think I'm getting good at blogging. (If I'm wrong, please tell me.) I've managed to think of enough subjects to keep going every day, though I imagine I have repeated myself on occasion.  And I've shown a wide range of interests too.

WORKING

I've started reading Studs Terkel's 1974 book WORKING.  It's very enjoyable.  Terkel went out and interviewed a wide range of working people, catching their perspectives on work and other things.  So far I've encountered flight attendants, newsboys, stonemasons, models, steel workers, actors, switchboard operators, farmers, hookers, miners, garbage collectors, secretaries and press agents.  And that's just in the book's first hundred-odd pages! (It's about 600 pages long.)

The interviews with two people in the advertising business are particularly remarkable.  They definitely bring MAD MEN to mind, and I wonder if the book influenced the show's writers.

Some of these people have incredible stories.  The flight attendant tells how when they were in stewardess school they were taught things like to look into a man's eyes when he lights your cigarette. (That part should interest Kathrine, who's a flight attendent herself.)

Running short again.  I've quit the game Coasterville.  I paid real money for the starter kit because it was a good deal, but when that was exhausted I wasn't motivated enough to buy more.  Dynasty and Megapolis I'm still playing:  they motivate me enough to keep spending a little.

TERMS OF ENDEARMENT

"I think... we'll have to get drunk"--Jack Nicholson in TERMS OF ENDEARMENT

This evening I saw James Brooks' Oscar-winning TERMS OF ENDEARMENT on  the Young & Dundas Event Screen. (I'd last seen it almost thirty years ago.) I saw it with the Movie Meetup group, but I was waiting for them in the downstairs lobby while they were waiting on an upstairs floor, so I didn't make contact with them until I got into the theatre.

The movie struck me as rather lightweight and middlebrow.  The best thing in it, of course, was Jack Nicholson as a veteran astronaut looking "a little older and a little heavier" (as Andy Warhol described Nicholson in his famous diary) but with his randy, boyish charm undiminished.

I'm running short again.  I must say how dumfounded I am by a Will Short article in THE HUFFINGTON POST insisting that Ronald Reagan would have opposed Obama's drone assassinations policy. (Does the expression "wishful thinking" mean anything to you?) I responded, "Reagan would have supported drones if his people told him to support it," a comment which the moderators blocked.  But they didn't block a poster ignorant enough to say, "Reagan was not a big supporter of the overseas empire and stupid wars." I responded, "Many Central Americans would disagree." (Remember Iran-Contra?)

The late Ed Koch

Last week THE HUFFINGTON POST responded to New York mayor Ed Koch's death with some laudatory columns and forums kept clear of comments criticizing him.  SALON, on the other hand, had some thoughtful and not uncritical pieces on him.  I liked Joan Walsh's discussion of the city's political and cultural shift between the John Lindsay era and the Koch era.

Speaking for myself, I always found Koch's in-your-face "How'm I doin'?" persona annoying.  He seemed to pitch all his statements to inattentive people.  I remember from when he was running against Mario Cuomo for state governor seeing an ad from his campaign attacking Cuomo, which made a point of mispronouncing his name "Mar-eye-o." Such aggressiveness must have annoyed a lot of voters statewide, because Koch blew a big early lead and Cuomo pulled an upset victory. (When Koch was elected mayor Cuomo was a pretty strong second, and I still think he would have made a far better mayor.)

"Gentrification" of Manhattan's better neighborhoods was perhaps the key New York event when Koch was mayor, and financially it saved the city, yet it was a mixed blessing. (It didn't help the growing problem of homelessness.) This trend was reflected in the rising profile of Donald Trump, with whom Koch had a famous falling out.  Koch called Trump "jerky," just about the first time I heard the word used that way.  Koch and Trump were bound to be fierce enemies because they had such similar extroverted personalities:  even New York wasn't big enough for both egos.  I remember seeing both of them on Phil Donahue's talk show in the 1980s and noticing that they were motormouths. (DONAHUE is one of the only things I miss from that decade.)

BTW, the other week in THE HUFFINGTON POST there was a report on Trump's latest pronouncement and someone wrote a comment: "That reminds me that I want to visit the orangutans at the zoo." I added: "And I want to buy a shag carpet." =)

The TOR costumes arrived!

Today Malabar shipped the costumes for the TOR shows to the Bickford Centre.  I came over to help unpack them as I do every year, and that's always fun.  I sometimes get a glimpse inside the women's dressing room. (I've never seen the witches' cauldron, but they do have more full-length mirrors than us men.) I usually get the chance to try on my own costume, though this year the time was lacking.

I got to wear my costume in the evening, when we did a dress rehearsal of TALES OF HOFFMANN.  This year I get to wear the same costume in both operas. (In THE BARBER OF SEVILLE, the male chorus also have police uniforms.) The shirt feels so comfortable I wish I owned one of that material!  This year we don't have to wear knee socks, which are a bit of a headache for keeping pinned.

At the rehearsal we also got masks to wear for the Barcarolle scene. (While Pablo was rehearsing Hoffmann's aria in that scene, Giuseppe told him, "This is a whorehouse, give us more dick!") I got a pink cat-style mask to wear and had a frustrating time tying the strings behind my head before I figured out that it's better to tie them before putting it on.

Today was also my birthday. (I was born on February 5, 1962, the same day as the birth of actress Jennifer Jason Leigh and a rare combination of solar eclipse and planetary conjunction that had some astrologers predicting the end of the world.) The whole TOR chorus sang "Happy Birthday to You" for me.  We ate Chinese food and my fortune cookie said, "You will be showered with good luck." I'll believe it when I see it.

Recent DVDs

The other day I saw the first episode of the DVD of the series LEGACY, where Michael Wood visits the sites of ancient civilizations and draws lessons for the present world.  I've always enjoyed Wood's documentaries, on subjects ranging from Dark-Age England to the Trojan War to India to western art. (Last year I saw a show on Netflix where he retraced Alexander the Great's routes of conquest.) This is another vivid one.

For a while I've been watching DVDs of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATRE 3000, where they show cheesy movies and insert snarky comments.  I recently saw their masterful treatment of JACK FROST, an awkwardly-dubbed English version of a colorful but surreal Russian fairy tale production, from back in the 1960s.

I've also seen another DVD of short avant-garde films from the pre-1950 era, a collection of 1979 pop music clips from THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, some more episodes of MISSION:  IMPOSSIBLE and GUNSMOKE, one of the musical specials Barbra Streisand made for TV in the mid-'60s, and a couple of documentaries from PBS' THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE about the 19th-century laying of the first telegraph cables across the Atlantic Ocean, and the World War II construction of the Alaska Highway through the Yukon. (Canadians only got mentioned briefly.)

We've received the last of our 16 monthly discs from zip.ca and the next ones won't arrive for a couple of weeks.  But I still have three left to see:  an episode of the 1950s country-music variety show TOWN HALL PARTY, an expressionist German silent movie of OTHELLO starring the great Emil Jannings, and SHORT INFINITY, a National Film Board documentary about a community on of the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Questions of netiquette

Around fifteen years ago, I used to post in the forums at mrcranky.com a lot.  There was no moderation and I met several interesting people.  There was one who was rather thin-skinned, and eventually he stopped writing posts there, but continued to "lurk," reading other people's posts.  Some people say it's a violation of "netiquette" to keep lurking in a thread that you aren't contributing to.  But speaking for myself, it's no skin off my face if someone reads my posts without posting himself.

On one occasion, however, this ex-poster sent me an email taking issue with something I had posted, leading to a quarrel.  This seems objectionable to me:  someone posting in a thread can only write for the other people posting there.  If you can't reply by posting there, let it ride. (It wasn't like I'd been writing about him.)

A year later, it happened again.  I sent this person an email in an attempt to be friendly with him, and in his reply he attacked me over something I'd written there.  This resulted in another quarrel, and we haven't communicated since.  What particularly bothered me was that a few months before, after an earlier incident, he'd returned to the site and made a rather theatrical promise to stop lurking. (I should have guessed he didn't mean it.) I hate losing friends!

Some years back, I was organizing the Karaoke Meetup in Toronto. (That ended after an event where I thought five people were coming, but I was the only one who showed up.  Those cold January nights will do that!) One person attended an event I hosted, and I seem to have done something rude then.

This person was also a member of a Movie Meetup that I belonged to, and a short while later she posted a message saying that she was going to see a certain movie at the Cinematheque and inviting the other members to join her.  I was going to see this same movie so I sent her a message saying I'd like to see it with her.  She responded that the invitation didn't apply to me because of my "distasteful" behavior at this earlier event.  I replied by asking what I'd done, adding: "I wish I'd been told earlier." Crickets. (That's net slang for "No answer.") I skipped the movie.

So who needs the manners lesson here?  Does she think that if she doesn't tell me what I did, I'll search through the recesses of my memory and manage to figure it out myself?  Alas, all I can do is assume that she's out of her tree and that my behavior was perfectly polite.

LES MISERABLES

This evening I saw Tom Hooper's movie of the musical LES MISERABLES at the Varsity.  I haven't read Victor Hugo's book, but Moira tells me it's pretty shameless.  I saw a pretty good 1936 movie of it with Frederic March as Valjean and a witty Charles Laughton as Javert (in contrast to Anthony Perkins in the 1978 TV movie, who played Javert with unrelieved grimness).

As for this movie, meh.  The music--I've never seen the stage musical--strikes me as kitschy, with a general feel of sameness, though I do have a soft spot for "Bring Him Home." (It's Giuseppe's favorite LES MIZ song too.) The live singing feels rather slight.  Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter are pretty funny as the crooked innkeepers.

Trivia note:  The world's two shortest telegrams resulted after Hugo sent the LES MIZ manuscript to his publisher.  He sent a cable consisting of "?" and got the response "!" On the other hand, the novel has what may be literature's longest published sentence (thank goodness for cut & paste):

"The son of a father to whom history will accord certain attenuating circumstances, but also as worthy of esteem as that father had been of blame; possessing all private virtues and many public virtues; careful of his health, of his fortune, of his person, of his affairs, knowing the value of a minute and not always the value of a year; sober, serene, peaceable, patient; a good man and a good prince; sleeping with his wife, and having in his palace lackeys charged with the duty of showing the conjugal bed to the bourgeois, an ostentation of the regular sleeping-apartment which had become useful after the former illegitimate displays of the elder branch; knowing all the languages of Europe, and, what is more rare, all the languages of all interests, and speaking them; an admirablerepresentative of the “middle class,” but outstripping it, and in every way greater than it; possessing excellent sense, while appreciating the blood from which he had sprung, counting most of all on his intrinsic worth, and, on the question of his race, very particular, declaring himself Orleans and not Bourbon; thoroughly the first Prince of the Blood Royal while he was still only a Serene Highness, but a frank bourgeois from the day he became king; diffuse in public, concise in private; reputed, but not proved to be a miser; at bottom, one of those economists who are readily prodigal at their own fancy or duty; lettered, but not very sensitive to letters; a gentleman, but not a chevalier; simple, calm, and strong; adored by his family and his household; a fascinating talker, an undeceived statesman, inwardly cold, dominated by immediate interest, always governing at the shortest range, incapable of rancor and of gratitude, making use without mercy of superiority on mediocrity, clever in getting parliamentary majorities to put in the wrong those mysterious unanimities which mutter dully under thrones; unreserved, sometimes imprudent in his lack of reserve, but with marvellous address in that imprudence; fertile in expedients, in countenances, in masks; making France fear Europe and Europe France! incontestably fond of his country, but preferring his family; assuming more domination than authority and more authority than dignity, a disposition which has this unfortunate property, that as it turns everything to success, it admits of ruse and does not absolutely repudiate baseness, but which has this valuable side, that it preserves politics from violent shocks, the state from fractures, and society from catastrophes; minute, correct, vigilant, attentive, sagacious, indefatigable; contradicting himself at times and giving himself the lie; bold against Austria at Ancona, obstinate against England in Spain, bombarding Antwerp, and paying off Pritchard; singing the Marseillaisewith conviction, inaccessible to despondency, to lassitude, to the taste for the beautiful and the ideal, to daring generosity, to Utopia, to chimeras, to wrath, to vanity, to fear; possessing all the forms of personal intrepidity; a general at Valmy; a soldier at Jemappes; attacked eight times by regicides and always smiling; brave as a grenadier, courageous as a thinker; uneasy only in the face of the chances of a European shaking up, and unfitted for great political adventures; always ready to risk his life, never his work; disguising his will in influence, in order that he might be obeyed as an intelligence rather than as a king; endowed with observation and not with divination; not very attentive to minds, but knowing men, that is to say requiring to see in order to judge; prompt and penetrating good sense, practical wisdom, easy speech, prodigious memory; drawing incessantly on this memory, his only point of resemblance with Caesar, Alexander, and Napoleon; knowing deeds, facts, details, dates, proper names, ignorant of tendencies, passions, the diverse geniuses of the crowd, the interior aspirations, the hidden and obscure uprisings of souls, in a word, all that can be designated as the invisible currents of consciences; accepted by the surface, but little in accord with France lower down; extricating himself by dint of tact; governing too much and not enough; his own first minister; excellent at creating out of the pettiness of realities an obstacle to the immensity of ideas; mingling a genuine creative faculty of civilization, of order and organization, an indescribable spirit of proceedings and chicanery, the founder and lawyer of a dynasty; having something of Charlemagne and something of an attorney; in short, a lofty and original figure, a prince who understood how to create authority in spite of the uneasiness of France, and power in spite of the jealousy of Europe, — Louis Philippe will be classed among the eminent men of his century, and would be ranked among the most illustrious governors of history had he loved glory but a little, and if he had had the sentiment of what is great to the same degree as the feeling for what is useful."

How do you define a religion?

I was thinking about the definition of a religion, and decided it has the following features:

1.  Oral or written traditions.

2.  Group activities and rituals.

3.  A professional priesthood.

4.  A behavior code.

5.  A theory of the creation and of the afterlife.

6.  A sense of mysticism.

And I define it so that something is a religion if it has at least five of the six features.  Something like Confucianism is close, but it has only four features.

That's one of those abstract things I sometimes think about.  I've been thinking recently about three-dimensional geometry, and Platonic and Archimedean solids. (They're the three-dimensional figures formed with regular polygons as their faces.  The most famous example is the cube.)

My diary decade

Before I started this blog, I wrote a diary.  I started it at the beginning of 2003, when I was not quite 41.  At first I was fanciful enough to address my writing to a non-existent 13-year-old girl called Dinah.  After I saw GANGS OF NEW YORK, I wrote: "Dinah, I know you want to see anything with Leo di Caprio in it, but I can understand your mother not wanting you to see it." But such fancy can only go so far, and I soon reverted to a more conventional approach.

Every day I'd write down what I'd had for dinner, simply because it was a guarantee that I'd have SOMETHING to write about every day. (Now I understand why Samuel Pepys talked about food so much in his diary.) And I'd often write about my dreams.  My writing will show that I often dream about my old home in Sackville, New Brunswick.

In the early years I wrote quite a bit, as much as six pages a week.  But in more recent years I slowed down and wrote just a couple of pages weekly.  I originally started this blog back in 2007 and wrote it off and one for about a year, then let it lapse because I couldn't think of things to write about.  It was when I was visiting London last September that I decided to resume the blog, since I felt I had a lot to write about now.  But lately I've been worrying about repeating myself:  I've written so much that it's hard to remember whether or not I've already written on a specific subject.