Bureaucracy

One of the comic strips I follow on gocomics.com is Pluggers.  It's a cartoon strip about the life of "pluggers," square rural blue-collar Americans of a certain age who lack the health, wealth and sophistication of the big cities. (The anti-Kardashians, you might say.) The strip shows them as cartoon animals, with the writing coming from readers like in that old strip They'll Do It Every Time.  The other day one episode had the caption "Senior pluggers have always been 'green,'" and showed a dog-man paying for a cafeteria meal and saying, "I hope you take cash here."

That cartoon reminded me of something.  Thirty-two years ago I was playing Bureaucracy, an interactive computer game created by Douglas Adams for Infocom. (Their most popular games were the Zork cave adventure series and an adaption of Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) We got this game at the same time as our new Atari 2600 computer, and that was one of the only games compatible with it.  You have to do stuff like feed a llama so you can get a letter from a mailbox without his tongue getting in the way, or withdraw money from a bank by making a negative deposit, or climb up an airport pillar and sneak into the air traffic controllers tower so you can tell them to delay the takeoff of a flight that you'd otherwise miss! (Adams later created the game Starship: Titanic, which sounds fun but I never got around to buying it.)

In one part of the game, you eat food in a restaurant that only accepts cash, which you don't have, so what you have to do is sneak out and stiff them!  This actually happened to Adams in real life once, which I know because of the game's cheat tips.

Back in 1987 you couldn't get cheat tips online, but you could buy them in a booklet where you could see the questions you wanted answered but the answers only became visible when you rubbed a special marker on them. Except that we got the computer and the game in Moncton, N.B., and it was Donald who got the cheat sheet in Toronto, so we'd have to phone him and ask questions that he'd answer from the booklet.  The booklet also had cheat tips for the game Hollywood Hijinx (it was a sort of scavenger hunt on an eccentric movie mogul's estate), which I also ended up buying and playing, but by this time I'd got hold of the booklet and could look up the answers myself.

Another thing I remember is that when we first inserted the game in the computer, all we could get was a notice saying, "Warning:  contents may be damaged!" (It was some glitch in the computer-- Father always would buy the cheapest model in the store...) Which fit into the spirit of the game, of course.

Another thing that Pluggers cartoon reminded me was that I'd read (in Harper's, I think) that today things are developing into a system where the rich use plastic and the poor use cash!  It's similar to how every economy with two types of currency will do that:  it used to be that the rich used silver and gold coins while the poor used copper coins...

Crowdreads

"Among humans, nothing is more valued than a person of unquestionable character." "Among humans, nothing is more demonic than a person whose character may not be questioned"--Pibgorn

"As President I have no enemies and can have none....  There are only the enemies of the nation.  And these the nation must judge"--"Papa Doc" Duvalier

Today was the last Crowdreads for a while. (Sergei and Maria are going to visit his folks in Odessa.) But we had a good time, and the Meetup went on for three hours!  I read a couple of Robert Browning poems, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" and "How They Brought the Good News From Ghent to Aix." (Browning was a genius for finding rhymes!)

We also did a thing where we took the sentence "Some people think that the most important thing in the world is..." and wrote down different ways to finish the sentence!  I offered these endings:

...defeating the Bad Guys.

...keeping people from aiming too high.

...giving poor people a kick in the ass.

...accepting force majeure.

...Doing Something about whatever has you afraid.

As you can see, I'm a bit of a cynic.

I've just got to the part of the Haiti history about "Papa Doc" Duvalier's sinister dictatorship in the late 1950s and '60s. (He terrorized the country with a network of tonton macoutes, named for a figure in Haitian folklore who carried off naughty kids in his sack!)

Just now I'm reading the early years of Pibgorn, Brooke MacEldowney's  comic strip about the "frenemy" pair Pibgorn the fairy and Drusilla the

succubus.  I read the first couple of years in spring of last year, but this time I'm going to read the whole thing!

I'm still playing the computer game Elvenar.  There's a production facility where you can make magic potions, and whenever I see it, I think of Elton John's "Your Song":

If I were a sculptor, but then again no[?],

Or a man making potions in a travelling show...

I'm funny that way.

Wednesday would have been my mother's 100th birthday if she'd still been with us. (She did make it to 94!)

Air conditioning

This weekend we turned on the air conditioning for the first time this year.  Which meant keeping the windows closed. (I rather like hearing the noises out on the street.)

Thursday night I saw Gillian Armstrong's movie of Peter Carey's novel Oscar and Lucinda (for the second time) with the History Meetup.  I usually can't stand movies about gambling, but this one is handsome and quirky.  I was thinking that Oscar is an Aspie like me.

Saturday at the Crowdreads Meetup we talked about things going viral, and I read some Walt Whitman poems: "There Was a Child Went Forth Every Day," "I Hear America Singing" and "Miracles." (That's why I bought the Whitman book the other day.)

Today at the Memoir group I added "jigsaw puzzles" to our canister of topics, and someone chose it the same day! (That happened before, paradoxically, with "being chosen last.")

I'm now reading the part of the Haiti history book about the two-decade American occupation a century ago.  It's hard not to notice parallels with the later Vietnam fiasco.

HAITI: THE AFTERSHOCKS OF HISTORY

"May the weapons given to the people for them to defend their liberty be turned against my own breast if ever I conceive of the impious and audacious idea of attacking their rights"--Alexandre Petion, being inaugurated President of the Republic of Haiti in 1807. (His rule was limited to the southern part of the country.)

I've started reading Laurent Dubois' Haiti:  The Aftershocks of History for my History Meetup.  It's an excellent book, sympathetic to the Haitian people yet sophisticated in its perspective. Many of today's Third World problems--a parasitic military elite, inescapable debt load, town vs. country--were already visible here in the 19th century.

I'm now going through the Youtube series Let's Play Myst. (That's a computer game I cheated my way through twenty years ago, which spun off many books and games.) I've also been watching the Michael Beach and City Beautiful channel, which go into lots of detail about urban planning.

Wrote another Korean letter to Hongmin.

Today I went out to the Chapters-Indigo at Yonge & Eglinton and bought a paperback with the poems of Walt Whitman. (We used to have a similar book, but it must have been sold.) I also bought The Bluffer's Guide to Poetry!

I haven't yet started reading Howards End.

Finished MAIN STREET

Well, I finally finished the Sinclair Lewis novel Main Street, and a pretty great novel it is!  The book's full of quotable lines, like these:

Sunday sermon: "Don't let any of these self-conceited fellows that are always trying to stir up trouble deceive you with the belief that there's anything to all these smart-aleck movements to let the unions and the Farmers' Nonpartisan League kill all our initiative and enterprise by fixing wages and prices.  There isn't any movement that amounts to a whoop without it's got a moral background.  And let me tell you that while folks are fussing about what they call 'economics' and 'socialism' and 'science' and a lot of things that are nothing in the world but a disguise for atheism, the Old Satan is busy spreading his secret net and tentacles out there in Utah, under his guise of Joe Smith or Brigham Young or whoever their leaders happen to be today, it doesn't make any difference, and they're making game of the Old Bible that has led this American people through the fulfilment of the prophecies and the recognized leader of all nations."

Same sermon: "...but still, as they are a smaller but more immediate problem, let me stop for just a moment to pay my respects to these Seventh-Day Adventists.  Not that they are immoral, I don't mean, but when a body of men go on insisting that Saturday is the Sabbath, after Christ himself has clearly indicated the new dispensation, then I think the legislature ought to step in..."

"It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.  I thought that myself, when I first came to the prairie. 'Big--new.' Oh, I don't want to deny the prairie future.  It will be magnificent.  But equally I'm hanged if I want to be bullied by it, go to war on behalf of Main Street, but bullied and bullied by the faith that the future is already here in the present, and that all of us must stay and worship wheat-stacks and insist that this is 'God's Country'--and never, of course, do anything original or gay-colored that would help to make that future!"

"In winter, California is full of people from Iowa and Nebraska, Ohio and Oklahoma, who, having traveled thousands of miles from their familiar villages, hasten to secure an illusion of not having left them.  They hunt for people from their own states to stand between them and the shame of naked mountains; they talk steadily, in Pullmans, on hotel porches, at cafeterias and motion-picture shows, about the motors and crops and county politics back home."

"Whenever it comes right down to a question of defending Americanism and our constitutional rights, it's justifiable to set aside ordinary procedures....  we're going to take these fellows, and if they ain't patriotic, we're going to make them be patriotic."

"She had her freedom, and it was empty. The moment was not the highest of her life, but the lowest and most desolate, which was altogether excellent, for instead of slipping downward she began to climb."

"Always she was to perceive in Washington (as doubtless she would have perceived in New York or London) a thick streak of Main Street."

"The film was a highly advertised and abysmal thing smacking of simpering hair-dressers, cheap perfume, red-plush suites on the back streets of tenderloins, and complacent fat women chewing gum.  It pretended to deal with the life of studios. The leading man did a portrait which was a masterpiece.  He also saw visions in pipe-smoke, and was very brave and poor and pure.  He had ringlets, and his masterpiece was strangely like an enlarged photograph."

"Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them.  They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, is unembittered laughter."

"But I have won in this:  I've never excused my failures by sneering at my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them.  I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be!  I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe!  I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women!  I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith."

Salsa on St. Clair

On being pregnant: "I do not look lovely, Mrs. Bogart.  My complexion is rotten, and my hair is coming out, and I look like a potato-bag, and I think my arches are falling, and he isn't a pledge of love, and I'm afraid he will look like us, and I don't believe in mother-devotion, and the whole business is a confounded nuisance of a biological process"--Main Street

Is indicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein descended from Mexican War general and U.S. President Zachary Taylor?

Last weekend was the Salsa on St. Clair Festival, and once again my neighbourhood was noisy.  I bought a drink of freshly-pressed sugar cane juice--it cost ten dollars, but you don't get that every day.

I was happy to get away to Crowdreads Saturday afternoon, where I recited a couple of American patriotic poems since it had been the Glorious Fourth two days earlier.  One was Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle"; the other was John Greenleaf Whittier's "Barbara Frietchie." The latter ends with these lines:

Over Barbara Frietchie’s grave

Flag of Freedom and Union, wave!

Peace and order and beauty draw

Round thy symbol of light and law;

And ever the stars above look down

On thy stars below in Frederick town!

I don't usually care for that flag- waving stars & stripes patriotism, but I like this ending!

On Quora.com there was a question, "What's the shortest sentence you can write with the greatest meaning?" I posted the answer, "I'm me."

At the memoir group we usually leave the canister with the subject cards in the librarian's office. Today the usual people weren't there and they had trouble finding it.  For a moment I was afraid that I'd taken it home and forgotten to bring it back! (Last week was cancelled by Dominion Day, and I sometimes bring it home at such times.) But it did turn up in the end.

Just last night I had a dream of a movie about people in Hollywood making a movie during World War II.  Someone was playing the piano piece "Alone" from Yoshinao Nakada's Japanese Festival album. (I played that album when I was young.) I've posted a link to that piece above.

Dull week

Another week has passed and I have hardly anything to write about!

I've almost finished reading through my collection of Classics Illustrated comics.  The other week I read their version of Jules Verne's Off on a Comet, which interested me simply because that was the issue cover they showed on the back cover of the comics, along with the list of all their titles in print.  The story itself is about some people on a section of the earth that gets broken off by a section of comet, and its orbit eventually takes them close to earth again and they get back by building a huge hot air balloon! (It requires some suspension of disbelief.) The only one I have left is another Verne comic, Tigers and Traitors, which used to come at the very end of their list.

I've also been reading through my collection of Classics Illustrated Junior fairy tales.  But with those I've started at the end of the series and gone backward. (I also have some from a special history series they did with subjects like the Civil War.)

Last night was the latest History Meetup.  Our subject was Australia, and since I knew the most about it--which isn't saying much--they put me in charge of the discussion.  I talked a bit about Australia as a frontier society, with characteristic income inequality and macho culture.

Tonight I discovered a Youtube channel called Let's Play, where an expert goes through old computer games with running commentary.  I've watched his treatment of the first half of that old favourite of mine, Kings Quest VII:  The Princeless Bride.  He doesn't enjoy it as much as I did, but that isn't important.

I've been over a month behind in blogging my 2004 diary entries (it goes back to me being sick earlier this year), so I've started posting them two daily entries at a time twice a day, making for four entries a day.  When I'm up to it, that is.

I've been watching quite a few Youtube videos about swales and berms.  A swale being a ditch you dig along the contours of a sloping field, and a berm the raised earth you build up just downhill for it.  It's very useful for planting trees and restoring deforested land.  I've also been watching clips about slopes terraced for farming, like at Machu Picchu.  Anyone who builds swales and berms and terraces has my admiration.