HISTORY'S PEOPLE

I finished reading Bill Bryson's One Summer last week, and started reading Margaret MacMillan's History's People:  Personalities and the Past, based on the Massey Lectures she gave last year.  It's about leaders and such.  I noticed that when she talked about Mackenzie King she dated Canada's conscription referendum at 1940, when it was actually 1942! (You'd think an editor would have caught that goof.)

Wednesday night the History Discussion Group screened the video of the MGM movie The Good Earth, which I saw for the third time. (I'd borrowed it from the library.) Debi the host and I were the only people who saw it, because I was careless and forgot to post the event till a few days before!  But we had a good time anyhow.

I've started watching The Adventure of English on Youtube.  It's a British documentary series about the history of the English language, hosted by The South Bank Show host Melvyn Bragg. (The puppet satire Spitting Image made fun of Bragg's post-nasal drip, always showing him with nasal spray!)

I just figured out that I can do a zoom-in on the window of my Safari browser by pressing the plus sign with the command key. (I discovered it by accident, pressing the minus sign with the command key and getting a zoom-out!) So I reduced the browser's minimum font size from 24 to 18, and when I read the movie box-office figures at http://boxofficemojo.com --I'm a geek about things like box-office figures, though I pay them less attention than I used to--now I can see the movie title and its budget at the same time without shifting the scroll bar.

I finally finished reading Why Read Moby-Dick? a book John Snow gave me by Nathaniel Philbrick (In the Heart of the Sea). Moby-Dick, I imagine, is one of those books whose meaning deepens with each successive reading.  He might have talked more about Elijah, the old sailor they meet in Nantucket who warns them that Ahab is nuts and the Pequod is doomed.

brilliant.com

I've been getting lazy in this July heat!  Even doing one thing takes an effort just now.

Today was Reading Out Loud.  There were nine people, more than usual.  I read some of the character descriptions at the start of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Orwell's essay "Decline of the English Murder." Jane read Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit and a couple of Hamlet's soliloquies. (I borrowed her book and read Polonius' speech to his son!) Some other girls read Coleridge's "Kublai Khan" and Tennyson's "The Lady of Shallot."

I have a Facebook app for the website brilliant.com , which sends me a challenging puzzle every day.  There was one involving Fibonacci series, where the first two entries are 1 and the later ones the sum of the previous two:  1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597... This puzzle asked what the sum would be for 1+1/2+2/4+3/8+5/16+8/32+... I figured out that it must be 4. That's because this sum equals 1+1/2+(1+1)/4+(2+1)/8+(3+2)/16+... which equals 1+(1/2+1/4)+(1/4+1/8)+(2/8+2/16)+... which equals 1+ (3/4)*(1+1/2+2/4+3/8+...) (I never look up the answer:  either I know it or I don't.)

Just the other night there was another question where we know that a+b=a*b=3, so what does a^3+b^3 equal?  You can figure out the answer through simple algebra: a^3+b^3=(a+b)^3-3*a*b^2-3*b*a^2=(a+b)^3- 3*(a*b)*(a+b)=27-27=0.  

But I like to do things the hard way, so I imagined the complex numbers that a and be could be.  I figured out that a would be 3/2 +i*[3^(1/2)/2] while b would be 3/2 - i*[3^(1/2)/2] (or vice versa!). Alternatively, you could say that a= 3^(1/2)*e^[i*pi/6] and b=3^(1/2)*e^[i*-pi/6].  And I noticed some other interesting things:  a^2+b^2=3, a^4+b^4=-9, a^6+b^6=-54, a^8+b^8=-81, a^10+b^10=243, a^12+b^12=1458!

That's the sort of puzzle that keeps me awake late at night!  Imagine the puzzle where a+b=a*b=1...

Salsa weekend

This weekend was the Salsa on St. Clair festival, so my neighbourhood was pretty noisy again.

Wednesday night I saw The Free State of Jones at the Yonge & Dundas with the History Discussion Group.  It was pretty good despite being overlong.  Matthew McConaughey is getting meatier roles these days.

I was going to see another Hitchcock movie, North by Northwest, on Thursday night but it was on early and John and his family were coming over for dinner, so I had to cancel.  Today I planned to go to The Man Who Knew Too Much ('50s version), but again dinner was late so I cancelled again.

Yesterday the History Discussion Group met at Black Creek Pioneer Village to discussion Pierre Berton's Canada.  Getting there was an adventure: I took the express bus to the York University campus, then walked west.  I'd never noticed that the two places were so close together!

This afternoon the Classic Book Club discussed The Good Earth.  Which reminds me that I'll have to get Moira to order the library copy of the movie because I've misplaced my card!

Malware

Friday the internet connection went out on the downstairs computer.  Sunday it went out on mine!  Nothing like internet interruption to make you appreciate how important the web is.  I needed to set the location for tomorrow night's History Discussion Group screening so I went to the library.  I couldn't find my library card but Moira brought hers and I got online through her assistance!

Monday night my techie brother Donald came over and solved the trouble quickly.  It turned out that the downstairs computer had some malware that got downloaded a couple of years ago and only became active now.  And Father was fiddling with the connection Saturday night and lost mine too!

I'm now re-reading Bill Bryson's One Summer:  America 1927 for the History Discussion Group.  It's still a really entertaining read!  Lindbergh sounds like an Asperger's Syndrome case like me.

Thursday night I saw Hitchcock's Psycho again.  Only just now did I notice that when Anthony Perkins starts smiling at the end of his last scene--just before the last shot of the car being towed out of the swamp--for a few frames Hitch superimposes his mother's skull on his face!  Why didn't I notice that before?

I've started rereading my Menomonee Falls Gazette collection.  That's the paper from the early '70s that reprinted story strips like Secret Agent Corrigan and Modesty Blaise and Rip Kirby.  I've started compiling an index of it, listing the strips and their main characters and the stories covered in the MFG reprints.  It's one of those projects of mine that's easier to start than to finish!

More on my Ph.D. research

Some of my Ph.D. research material was missionary writing.  I did some research at the United Church archives near the U. of T. campus. (The Methodists, later the United Church, took over a mission from David Livingstone's London Mission Society shortly before the revolution of 1912.) 

The Protestant missions in Sichuan came together to form an organization for joint efforts.  I don't remember the exact name, but they had a great motto: "In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity." (The NDP should adopt that motto!) One of the things they did was put out a monthly journal, but after the Japanese started a full-scale war in 1937 there was such a paper shortage that they had to print it on tissue-like paper that could only be printed on one side!

One book I read was Test Tubes and Dragon Scales, written by someone who'd been a medical missionary in Chongqing in the 1930s.  He mentioned a colourful if shady foreign businessman, but not by name.  But I guessed that he was probably G.D. Lichfield because he had a motor-car in the city before anyone else did!

After finishing my thesis I actually went on a tour of China, which included Chongqing.  The city was smaller than I'd imagined it, of course. (Just like when you meet celebrities they're never as tall as you expect, except for basketball players and models.) One interesting thing in today's Chongqing is that they have a network of sidewalks that go over the street!  We should get something like that in Toronto too.

I just read that the Chinese are making a movie about the Japanese bombing of Chongqing, the Nationalist Chinese capital, between 1938 and 1943. (It was comparable to the Blitz of London, including death tolls.) It'll star Bruce Willis.

If this subject interests you, my thesis has been posted online.  It's at http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp03/NQ56244.pdf