Alec Elixir

The Good Old Days (updated)

2008-02-10T23:43:00.003-05:00

This uproariously anachronistic comic strip is an example of the didacticism kids were subjected to back in the 1950s. I found it on the reverse of a 1950 DICK TRACY Sunday in my comic-strip collection. (It's the 1.8.50 episode where Tracy runs off from the middle of his honeymoon to chase a crook. Bride Tess: "I should have known being married to Dick Tracy would be like this. I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN!" Can't disagree there.) The strip is about a pair of 20th-century kids plunked down in the land of the Bible to learn lessons in morality and obedience.

Now watch it go crazy in the second half!

Nice to know that teachers complained about one kid's "attitude" endangering the whole group 2000 years ago. (Yet another World War II legacy.) And note that Christianity comes down to obeying the ones in charge. All religions seem to tend in that direction, don't they?

BTW, wasn't Peter called Simon when he was younger? Every Sunday school teaches that!

Update: I finally figured out how to post the images right side up without cutting off any of the strip!

"Aren't you rather fond of him?" "I'm rather fond of rabbits, but they need to be kept down"--THE LADY VANISHES

Translation is everything

2008-02-03T23:40:00.000-05:00

In THE TORONTO STAR today I was reading a review of Michael Dirda's CLASSICS FOR PLEASURE. Reviewer Michel Basilieres mentioned that he doesn't think much of Sappho's poems, and cited this translated poem that appeared in the book:

The moon has set
And the Pleiades. It is
Midnight. Time passes.
I sleep alone.

But I recall seeing a different translation some years back, which went like this:

The moon has sunk, and the Pleiades,
And midnight is gone.
And the hours are passing, passing...
And I lie alone.

Still think Sappho is overrated? That's the difference between a translation of a poem and a translation that's a poem itself.

Milhous: "My mom... says you're a bad influence on me." Bart Simpson: "Bad influence my butt! How many times have I told you not to listen to your mom?"

GIL THORP's Sunday companion

2008-02-03T22:29:00.002-05:00

One of the odder comic strips I've been following on The Comics Curmudgeon is GIL THORP. It's a remarkably goofy daily strip about the eponymous high-school coach, who resembles the post-plastic surgery Mickey Rourke and teaches life lessons as well as athletics to various impressionable teenagers who go through bizarre adventures. The supporting cast includes Thorp's family; assistant coaches like Kaz, who once bodyguarded a Carole King-like singer over a summer tour and had to figure out who was sending her poison-pen letters, and Clambake, an aged Negro sage who told aspiring pitchers inspiring stories about training legends which turned out to be made up; Marty Moon, the snide, goateed sportscaster who often gets made a fool of and has drinking and gambling problems to deal with. And of course there's the kids, like the guy who saved someone's life but let another kid take the credit because he was enough of a hero already; the guy who lost a leg in a chainsaw accident; the new kid trying to live down his manslaughter trial that resulted from careless wrestling; the guy who bopped himself on the back of the head with a thick branch and said he'd been mugged. The current story involves Andrew Gregory, an attitude-challenged hotshot basketball shooter who nicknamed himself "the A-Train." All this is accompanied by some of the most bizarre visual compositions in the current comic-strip scene.

It may or may not interest some of the current fans to know that GIL THORP was once a better strip, as regards both writing and artwork. That was back when it was drawn by its original artist, Jack Berrill. (I actually read it for a while in my college days, when I started looking at a wide range of newspapers in the university library and often checked out the funnies pages.) All of this is an indirect way of answering the question two or three people must be wondering: Why isn't there a GIL THORP Sunday? The answer is that while it's always been dailies and nothing but, back in the late '60s through the mid-'70s Berrill actually drew a teenage Sunday strip for the same syndicate: TEEN-WISE! (That exclamation point was part of the title, which usually suggests a writer trying too hard. Another example is Upton Sinclair's OIL!, the book THERE WILL BE BLOOD is based on.)

Anyhow, TEEN-WISE! is a Sunday strip showing adolescents in challenging everyday situations, to teach them good sense. (Teen--wise, geddit?) It featured an annoying little owl giving the moral at the end. This was an old-fashioned concept for the time, and it's good for a few cynical laughs today.

Yeah, right. In the real world, of course, it's the well-informed teenagers who feel like misfits. (Take it from me.)

Gil Thorp himself had a cameo in a few episodes.

Another thing you could do is move to another school, get onto that school's team, play dirty against your old school and beat the pants off them. (Of course, if the new school's team takes you, chances are they aren't as good.) Or else you could avoid being a jock to begin with.

Happily, we get some multi-episode high school soap opera stories.

What do you think will be the outcome here?

But there are also dangerous situations. (Nice girls don't hitchhike!)

And there's the 13-year-old girl who lies about her age to get an 18-year-old boyfriend. (It helps to be tall.)

He fobbed her off on his friend Roman.

Somewhere in my immense comic-strip collection, on the reverse of some superior strip, I have a couple of TEEN-WISE episodes about The Marijuana Menace, in which a couple of users decide to retaliate against a girl who's threatening to squeal on them by giving her a beating. (Still think it's harmless?)

"I can allus tell a man who's married a good housekeeper from the way he brightens up when I speak kindly to him"

Comics are my life!

2008-01-15T18:56:00.001-05:00

Well, not quite but I've found some great websites concerned with the comics medium.

One is The Comics Curmudgeon, in which Josh does for contemporary comic strips what Mr. Cranky does for movies, ie he never likes anything. He's popularized such catchphrases as "More zippers, mule!" (said to Margo Magee when she was going undercover in a sweatshop in APARTMENT 3-G) and "Work it like a claw and call me Randy" (a line from the ineffable JUDGE PARKER). It's at http://www.joshreads.com

A similar site is http://qomicsforqueers.blogspot.com which reads endless gay subtext into strips like BEETLE BAILEY. (I enjoy it, and I'm straight!) Unfortunately, it hasn't been active for over a month.

Another site is Mister Kitty, who has an ongoing "Stupid Comics" series discussing, well, stupid comics. I can't resist posting a scan from "Gorilla My Dreams," a page devoted to the gorilla theme in comics. You can see the whole thing at http://misterkitty.org/extras/stupidcovers/stupidcomics106.html

Mr K comments: "I know this has been seen around the internet for a while now, but it bears repeating, because this is pretty much what most people think of when they hear the phrase 'stupid comic.' Let's just forget about the fact that it's a talking gorilla for a moment-- he's using a gun to take books out of the public library. DUDE IT'S FREE ALL YOU NEED IS A CARD. For that matter, he could just read the books in the library and never check them out at all. Oh, well! Just further proof that gorillas are dumb!"

Another question I would add: If he's this big gorilla, why does he need a gun? Why can't he just overpower the librarian? He's a shame to gorillas everywhere! It's also interesting to learn that you can conquer the world with the help of boy's adventures like ROBINSON CRUSOE and TREASURE ISLAND. You'd think books like DECLINE OF THE WEST or NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or MEIN KAMPF would be more useful.

Just recently I discovered http://www.comics.org, a site full of cover scans from a VERY wide range of comic books. Looking there, I found covers I remembered from my childhood, from series like TWEETY AND SYLVESTER and THE THREE STOOGES and JERRY LEWIS. My parents weren't keen on the superhero genre, but I do recall reading this one from the JIMMY OLSEN series. (I also remember one where Jimmy had to live in a slum for an investigative report. They were trying to be Relevant then.)

The cover depicts a story in which Jimmy Olsen went undercover as a hippie for another investigative report. In this story there were some bad men posing as hippies who wanted to kill Superman (who'da thunk it?), and decided to make Jimmy their tool. They introduced him to this magic incense or something that put him into a dream he could manipulate, to pretend to get even with people he was mad at. For example, he was POed that Perry White wouldn't advance him a raise, so he got to manipulate his own dream so that he went to the Daily Planet and decked his boss, leaving Clark and Lois appalled. Except what he didn't realize was that his dreams were REAL! (Jimmy isn't too bright.)

So next the bad guys made Jimmy think Superman was mad at him, which he wasn't really. (It has to do with the protest suggested on the cover, but it's too convoluted even for this description.) Then they got him to "dream" he was killing the Man of Steel with hippie beads made of kryptonite, with vibrations from his super-watch removing their protective coating. Except that at the last moment Jimmy wised up and figured out it was real, because of the paint stains on his knees, and saved Superman by putting the beads in a tank of leaded gasoline.

The other story in the comic had Jimmy inheriting these kachina powers from an old Hopi Indian, which meant that with the touch of his finger he could bring pictures to life. So he managed to foil crooks by animating the kings on playing cards and the Jolly Green Giant. (One group of these crooks was robbing a library--did they get the idea from a gorilla?) But then some other crooks got ahold of a stamp with a picture of Lex Luthor holding a piece of kryptonite...

Did you ever notice that Jimmy's super-watch, as well as Lois Lane's ring or whatever it was she used to call Superman, were always getting broken or swiped at just the times when they had most use for his help?

Chief: "Until your mission is a success, Max, she'll [Agent 99] learn to live without you." Maxwell Smart: "Yes, but what if my mission is a failure?" Chief: "Then we'll all learn to live without you"--GET SMART

My Pissing Match with Harry Shearer

2008-01-10T00:28:00.000-05:00

I've been a faithful reader of THE HUFFINGTON POST since shortly after it started a few years ago. I also write posts under the name Fearless Freep. (That handle comes from the classic Warner Brothers cartoon HIGH DIVING HARE, in which Fearless Freep was the daredevil who was going to perform the high diving act in Bugs Bunny's show, but he didn't show up, so audience member Yosemite Sam demanded that Bugs do the dive instead, except that Bugs kept arranging it so Sam would do it instead.)

One of that website's regular columnists is comedian Harry Shearer, who moved to New Orleans after Katrina and has written a great deal about reconstruction in the city. Unlike most of the columnists, he often responds to the comments, usually starting with "Harry Responds." (There's an exception below.)

A few weeks ago I asked a question in one comment, resulting in the following exchange. (84 CHARING CROSS ROAD it isn't.)

Fearless Freep: If they built enough high-density housing on the city's higher ground, could New Orleans support the same population--or even more people--without rebuilding in the lower parts? They might then turn the lowest ground into a wetlands park.

HARRY MUSES; I love comments like this. Are you folks aware that New Orleans people, while you sit and theorize about what they should be doing, are slowly, patiently, painstakingly rebuilding their city?

Fearless Freep: Well, that was a rude non-answer.

HARRY RESPONDS: I don't think it was either. The notion you espouse was around as early as the day the waters finally left the city. The problem with it, then as now, is that it would have required someone--feds? city? state?--to say to thousands and thousands of homeowners, "You're not allowed to rebuild your home." Also, if you've ever been to New Orleans, you would know it's not a "high-density housing" kind of city--even the controversial housing projects are only two or three stories tall.

Fearless Freep: So the "muser" finally condescends to explain why my idea was a bad one! (I was supposed to know it without being told, I guess.)Are YOU aware that some of us outside theorizers are hoping to actually make some kind of positive difference in New Orleans? But I guess it's better to just ignore the city and let the residents slowly, patiently, and painstakingly solve their own problems,in the good old Republican way. ("I love comments like this one" indeed! If that's polite, I'm Harry Conick.)

HARRY RESPONDS: Pardon my use of a non-routine verb in my heading. Harry Connick is spelled with two n's, and there are two of them, Jr. and Sr. Outside theorizers should, I propose, know a little bit more about the factual situation in the city if they wish their kibitzing to be greeted with the gratitude you seem to expect. You are "supposed to know" something about the subject you're opining on if you desire to be taken seriously, no?

Fearless Freep: Ooh, correcting the other guy's spelling and usage--that's SO impressive! Yessir, you have to be an intellectual heavyweight to win an argument with Harry Shearer. (He's up there with John Simon and the late SI Hayakawa.)

Just for the record, I never expected "gratitude" for my input. I asked a question and hoped for an answer. I even hoped that I might learn a bit about New Orleans, but it turns out I was supposed to know it already and had to fight for any answer.

Did I want to be "taken seriously"? Who doesn't? But what most posters specifically hope for is a modicum of respect. Your flipness, I propose, was (and is) a poor excuse for "respect." And I think most people would agree on that. You're hardly the only prick in the blogosphere, of course.

Homer Simpson on READER'S DIGEST: "My favorite part is 'Increase Your Word Power.' It's so... so... good!"

I Hate Software!

2008-01-06T21:30:00.000-05:00

Last spring I wanted to upgrade our Safari software from level 1 to level 2, where you get things like Google Earth and there isn't as much crashing. But that meant upgrading our OS X 10.3 Panther operating system by buying 10.4 Tiger. So I went to a computer store, where they told me 10.5 Leopard was coming out in October. So then I waited another six months, ordered it online, and got a disc in the first week of its release. But when I tried to install it, it turned out our computer didn't have enough ROM.

So I waited a few more weeks, then Father and I drove out to Queen Street East to buy a new gig of ROM at a computer store we'd been to before. I was going to get my hair cut that afternoon, but decided it could wait. When we got to the area, it turned out the store wasn't there anymore. (Why didn't we check the net first?) So we went home, and by that time it was too late in the day to try anywhere else or to get my hair cut. I was 0 for 2 that day.

Eventually we did get the new ROM, so I installed Leopard. Or rather, I tried to install Leopard, but the installation couldn't be completed for some reason that still isn't clear to me. And the frustrating thing was that I couldn't figure out how to get back to Panther. I'm lucky that my brother Donald is a professional computer technician, and as usual it took him to figure everything out.

We ended up getting Diskwarrior software to reorganize the computer without losing files, and an auxiliary hard disc. It was decided that we should copy everything onto the auxiliary and clear the first hard disc before trying again to install Leopard on the latter. I emptied the first hard disc after copying everything, but the computer wouldn't even wait until I tried installing Leopard again before going haywire! Just after the disc was cleared, the computer ended up in a kernel panic, and I had to phone the Apple people to figure out what to do. (I'm so knowledgeable about computers that I thought it was spelled "Colonel Panic.") I even made a new installation attempt because I figured there was nothing left to lose.

Again it took my brother to set things right. I hate depending on other people to solve these problems, and really wish I could rely on myself. I got so frazzled about the computer that I had a strong bout of insomnia, and as I lay abed still awake I could hear my sister getting up. And then we started having Safari crash on us more and more, until it reached the point where it was automatically crashing on being opened, so we had to switch to Internet Explorer and Foxfire for a while. Also, there's some bad apple in our applications that keeps me from using the disk utility to set all the permissions in order. Donald managed to restore Safari, but can't figure out the disk utility problem as yet.

There've been quite a few complaints about Leopard. Donald says Apple is expected to release an updated version of Leopard this month to patch all those bugs people have been complaining about. No doubt I'll be able to exchange our Leopard disc for the newer version. But I suspect that in our case it's the disc itself is defective, as our problems with it have gone so far beyond normal. I'll tell them that a witch has put a spell on it, and advise them to send its atoms into the outer void.

Oh, for an abacus!

Rocky: "They don't call him 'Wrong-Way Peachfuzz' for nothing!" Bullwinkle: "You mean you have to pay?"

2007-06-16T19:50:00.000-05:00

Paul Feig's KICK ME

I've been reading another Paul Feig memoir, titled KICK ME: ADVENTURES IN ADOLESCENCE. It's as funny as SUPERSTUD!

They [teachers] simply should have figured out what the most important subjects were that we would need later in life and then told us that they were forbidden to teach these things to us. We would have paid every penny of our allowances just to hear tales about the taboo isosceles triangle or the verboten declarative case, and the con job would have been complete. But, no, they would simply try to convince us how important these subjects were and so the only attitude we rebellious children could possibly adopt was one of total indifference. It's because of this that I've always felt the school system is designed completely backward. Because when you're in school, the last place you want to be is IN school. And once you graduate and get out in the world and start learning just how much stuff you should have paid attention to when they were teaching it, school's the only place you truly want to be. And yet, by that time, you're stuck smack-dab in the middle of the adult world, and going back to school at that point just makes you seem like kind of a... well... loser."

Notice that I've started to apply my HTML learning.

2007-06-09T23:17:00.000-05:00

I'll Be Back!

I recently picked up the book HTML 4 FOR DUMMIES, so I'll soon be able to improve the quality of these posts, including fancier titles and thumbnail images.

The Good Old Days (updated)

2007-05-17T22:47:00.000-05:00

The Good Old Days

This uproariously anachronistic comic strip is an example of the didacticism kids were subjected to back in the 1950s. I found it on the reverse of a 1950 DICK TRACY Sunday in my comic-strip collection. (It's the 1.8.50 episode where Tracy runs off from the middle of his honeymoon to chase a crook. Bride Tess: "I should have known being married to Dick Tracy would be like this. I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN!" Can't disagree there.) The strip is about a pair of 20th-century kids plunked down in the land of the Bible to learn lessons in morality and obedience.

Now watch it go crazy in the second half!

Nice to know that teachers complained about one kid's "attitude" endangering the whole group 2000 years ago. (Yet another World War II legacy.) And note that Christianity comes down to obeying the ones in charge. All religions seem to tend in that direction, don't they?

BTW, wasn't Peter called Simon when he was younger? Every Sunday school teaches that!

Update: I finally figured out how to post the images right side up without cutting off any of the strip!

2007-05-13T22:11:00.000-05:00

I've Been Interviewed

Marty Weil interviewed me on his blog about my comic-strip collection! This is the URL:

http://ephemera.typepad.com/ephemera/ 2007/04/1_when_did_your.html

2007-05-11T23:27:00.000-05:00

What Do I Think About the Iraq War? Part III

Should the US get out of Iraq quickly? Speaking for myself, I'll support that option until I'm convinced of a better alternative. "Staying the course" isn't it. The current surge is based on wishful thinking: this isn't the kind of military problem that can be solved by temporarily intensifying your efforts. And the policy of many Democrats to vaguely split the difference between staying and going does not impress me. That's just self-protection.

Sure, people say that Washington's departure will be followed by a bloodbath in Iraq. But is the US campaign preventing this outcome, or just delaying it and adding to the harm? My feeling is that the US departure will offer Iraq its only chance--albeit a slim one--of escaping it. And the longer the departure is delayed, the more certain disaster becomes.

Some leftists were unhappy with Congress' plan to basically give Bush Jr. what he wanted, accompanied by a departure timetable he shouldn't have much trouble evading. But I look at it as just an opening move. It was pretty clear all along that Bush was going to veto it anyway. My biggest worry was the remote possibility that the President would change his mind and sign the bill. But he wasn't smart enough.

So what should they do now? It's clear that Bush thinks if he just sticks to his guns and makes no concessions, Congress will have to cave in the end to avoid the accusation of undermining the troops. And his assumption is understandable: the Democratic leaders are giving the impression that they'll accept even tiny concessions and declare victory. But there comes a point when you can't fudge the difference. Congress has made as great an effort to work with Bush as anyone could ask for, and sooner or later they'll have to say "No."

I think Congress should vote to deauthorize the war. If the well-being of the soldiers were really the important thing, they should be brought home right away. The longer Washington delays, the longer the GIs will be stuck in limbo, and the greater the chance that the war will spread into Iran (like the Vietnam War spread into Cambodia, costing millions more lives). This is the time for leadership, not self-protection.

And while they're at it, they should impeach both Bush and Cheney. They must not repeat their mistake of 20 years ago when they spared Reagan impeachment. Iran-Contra ultimately did far greater harm to the United States than Watergate did, because it showed what an unethical president could get away with. (The Republican Party's obtuse celebration of Reagan is strong evidence of its moral bankruptcy.) In fact, the legacy can be seen in the current administration's crimes. If Bush gets spared impeachment, fascism may be next.

2007-05-03T22:13:00.000-05:00

What Do I Think About the Iraq War? Part II

When Bush Sr. decided against removing Saddam at a fairly convenient time, he took the risk that Washington would end up doing it at a far worse time, which is essentially what happened. (It's like the story of the man who spotted Death in his hometown and fled to Samarra, but Death had an appointment in Samarra...) It's almost as if the US was waiting for the WRONG time to remove him!

IMHO the "War on Terror" was misconceived from the start. The carpet-bombing of Afghanistan struck me as gratuitous overkill, bombing for the sake of bombing. Depending on air power to win your wars single-handedly is a bad habit, both her and in the former Yugoslavia. But perhaps we can look at the bombing as a minor issue. What isn't minor is the question of timing. Washington would have been well-advised to focus first on catching Osama and all the al-Qaea leaders they could, and then deal with the Taliban. Firstly, as regards terrorism al-Qaeda was the bigger fish of the two; secondly, in tactical terms al-Qaeda was more of a moving target so attacking them first made strategic sense. Instead, the Americans tried to eliminate both at the same time, and failed to do either completely enough. They took the lazy path of fighting the same war they'd fought in the past, with varying degrees of success.

Many people have called the Iraq invasion a distraction from fighting al-Qaeda, yet the Afghanistan invasion was also a distraction. And it was a crucial precedent for invading Iraq. I don't think that's hindsight judgement; it was pretty obvious at the time. That's why the many liberals who supported the Afghanistan campaign while hoping Iraq wouldn't be next were naive. But don't expect them to give any credit to the leftists who opposed it because they saw what was coming next. "Balance" is more important than far-sightedness.

My own nation of Canada, then under Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin, sent our troops into Afghanistan, largely to appease Washington after he rejected joining the Iraq invasion. (Such difference-splitting is typical of today's Liberals.) I have real misgivings over whether we should still be there, particularly after reports that our soldiers have handed over POWs to a regime that often tortures them. If we can't operate in Afghanistan without doing that, we shouldn't be there at all.

But Afghanistan is a sideshow compared to Iraq. Oddly, it seems that the largely disastrous Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld originally had the right idea about how to invade Iraq: go in, get rid of Saddam, get out. I wouldn't have objected if they'd done things that way. But most of the Bush Jr. administration was infected with hubris and planned on a longer presence.

Bush Jr. had frozen the United Nations out of the war process, but didn't have to continue that way after the invasion was completed. Once the whole country was occupied, Washington might then have deferred to the United Nations and brought in forces from other countries, particularly Iraq's Arab neighbors, to make the occupation genuinely international. In fact, the Americans did encourage other countries to join, but made a mockery of this "internationalization" by insisting on retaining sole control of the things that counted. (How much control do they have in the country now?)

In my last post I said that the best case for removing Saddam was that it meant taking responsibility for Iraq, in theory. I can pinpoint the moment when things started going wrong with the US occupation, after the rash of looting in liberated Baghdad. A reporter at a press conference asked Rumsfeld, "Why did you let the looting happen?" He could have answered, "We only had a limited number of GIs on the streets and had to make hard decisions about what was most important to protect to prevent total chaos. And things could have turned out far worse than they did." But instead he belittled the question and said, "We didn't let it happen, it just happened," like a little boy saying "The window broke!" Rumsfeld sent a signal to the Iraqi people that Washington was going to continue the "power without responsibility" approach.

Many people have gone into detail about the incompetence of the American regime, in matters such as the premature decision to disband the Iraqi armed forces and police. The question is, what do we do now? That'll be the subject of Part III.

2007-04-28T21:44:00.000-05:00

What Do I Think About the Iraq War? Part I

First, allow me to say that Americans have a genius for learning the wrong lesson from their experiences. We see this, for example, in the progressive movement's scapegoating of Ralph Nader. (If Al Gore couldn't afford to lose even a few votes to Nader, surely the real problem wasn't Nader's presence on the ballot but Gore's own inadequacy. Bush Jr. might well have won the 2000 election even without the Nader campaign, and Gore might well have succeeded even with it.) Another example is the people who look at the present-day mess in Iraq and say that it proves Bush Sr. was right not to remove Saddam Hussein back in 1991.

Although I was far from enthusiastic about the 1991 war, I always thought it was wrong to stop short of removing Saddam from power. IMHO Saddam's removal at that time would have done little more harm but a lot more good. Of course, I can't say for sure that if an occupation back in 1991 had been carried out with the same incompetence as post-2003, the results wouldn't have been equally disastrous. But several factors would have improved the odds of success considerably: there would have been a far larger force to keep order, a genuinely international force with Arab nations well-represented. And there was no Al-Qaeda back then to exploit the disorder.

My first objection to the "containment" policy that Washington settled for is moral. Leaving Iraq in Saddam's hands meant condemning the Iraqi people to the worst of both worlds, caught between Saddam's dictatorship and the privations of a strict sanctions regime, with no means of escape. If Saddam was too dangerous to be left in power without these sanctions--and I'll take their word for it--then he was too dangerous to be left in power at all. As it worked out, about 500,000 innocent Iraqis seem to have died just from the effect of these sanctions, a number greater than the previous war and still comparable to the later one. (It's always seemed to me that Washington's Oil for Food program was a spin operation, to distract people from the fact that the Iraqis had been abandoned to their fate.) Bush Sr. may have said that America's fight was with Saddam and not with the Iraqi people, but look who paid the price in the end! I shuddered when I heard Bush Jr. say that his quarrel was with the Taliban and not the Afghan people.

Bush Sr.'s decision to bomb Iraq halfway to the Stone Age and then leave Saddam in power struck some people as "inconsistent." The way I see it, these two choices actually reflected a contemptible underlying consistency: the pursuit of power without responsibility. The best argument for the 2003 invasion was that it meant taking belated responsibility--at least in theory-- for a nation that had borne the brunt of American power without any accompanying benefits.

For those who dismiss me as a naively moral pwog incapable of realpolitik, my second objection is strategic: containment embodied short-sighted prudence. It wasn't that containment couldn't work on its own terms, though we can't be completely sure that Saddam could never have found some new way to become dangerous again. Rather, effecting containment meant stationing a large US force in Saudi Arabia to prevent Iraq from invading its neighbors again. And there were a lot of Saudis who didn't like the foreigners' presence in Islam's central "holy" land. One of them, Osama Bin-Laden, responded by forming Al-Qaeda and declaring the US an enemy of Islam. At the very least, the Americans had handed Osama a convenient pretext for turning other Arabs against them. The result was that several of Osama's rich friends gave generously and helped finance the building of a terrorist army from scratch. In 2001 the policy literally blew up in Uncle Sam's face. Containment itself was the true "root cause": the US presence in Saudi Arabia was only inevitable to the extent that leaving Saddam in power was inevitable--in other words, not at all.

Since I'd always considered containment despicable, I wasn't really in a position to oppose the 2003 invasion that ended the policy. (Consistency, of course, is "the hobgoblin of little minds.") But I did feel more than a bit skeptical about whether the Bush Jr. administration had the skills to pull it off successfully. More on Iraq in my next post.

2007-04-20T20:15:00.000-05:00

"Plant a Tree, Laddie, It'll Grow While Ye're Sleeping!"

(old Scottish saying)

I often dream of my old home. For most of the time between 1963 and 1990 , I lived with my family in a ranch house near a quarry, at 8 West Avenue in the university town of Sackville New Brunswick. (My father was a physics professor at Mount Allison University.) The only exception was four years in which my father went away on sabbatical: 1965-66 we lived in Brighton, England, just when it was the big mod centre, something we were totally unaware of; 1974-75, when we lived in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga; 1981-82, when we spent the first half near Canterbury, England, and the second half in Toronto; 1988-89 when we were in Scotland. (I'm the youngest in the family, and by the time of his last sabbatical I was the only child still living at home.) That's a total of about 23 years.

At age 28 I finally moved to Toronto, visiting Sackville in May and August for the next few years. My parents eventually moved there too, and we finally sold the house in 1996, after renting it out for a couple of years. My parents and I came back to Sackville for a few days just before it was sold, and I'm glad I took that last trip.

My dreams about the old home feel funny because even as I dream, part of me remembers that it's now somebody else's house. I've sometimes dreamed that we're temporarily renting the house back from the owners! These dreams seem to take place in August, and sometimes I dream that it's time to return to Toronto and that we won't be coming there anymore. Other times I dream that I'm visiting the new owners. I feel like an intruder, even though I didn't ask to dream this way. We bought the house I now live in from a family that moved back to Portugal; I wonder if they dream about it too. (I also dream about a cottage we used to have near Northumberland Strait when I was a kid.)

About five years ago my parents and I were travelling in the Maritimes and we stopped in Sackville. We drove by the old house, and even parked at a discreet distance to look at it. (The new owners have laid a semicircular driveway on the front yard, like my aunt's house near Sydney, Nova Scotia.) What really impressed me were the trees. Over the years we've planted dozens of trees around the property, and some of them have grown really big. There's the weeping willow out back that's almost as old as me; the oak tree my brother transplanted from the other side of the quarry as a boy scout project (I think); the Scotch pine we planted in 1975; the fir trees we dug up out of town; the two maple trees we transplanted from the roof of the physics building auditorium in 1980 (they'd sprouted from leaves that fell off tall maples); the apple trees in the back yard; the poplar trees that emerged in 1985 as offshoots from our neighbor's poplars (they emerged because the early summer was really rainy, and my sister was getting married in Halifax so we didn't get around to mowing the lawn for quite a while).

Thinking about how the trees have continued to grow and grow after we left, I can't help thinking about how the trees you planted (literal and metaphoric) will continue to grow after you're dead, which gives me an odd feeling of comfort. I think I'd like to be cremated and have a tree planted over my ashes, as they often do in China. The Chinese have a proverb that goes, "Our ancestors planted trees; we sit in the shade." So let's all plant trees for our descendants.

2007-04-13T00:07:00.000-05:00

My Current Reading Material

I'm now reading SUPERSTUD: OR HOW I BECAME A 24-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN. It's a memoir by Paul Feig (who created the classic TV series FREAKS AND GEEKS) about the time when he was a teenager in the late '70s, then a college boy in the early '80s, all the while trying to pick up girls. It's really funny!

"While I slowly and nervously maneuvered my grandmother's aircraft carrier of a car through the sea of souped-up Cameros, TransAms, El Caminos, and Dusters, I looked at the occupants of the other vehicles. It was at that moment I suddenly realized this was the first real rock concert I had ever attended. I'd managed to fool myself into thinking the Saturday-afternoon Beach Boys concert my friend Craig had taken me to the past summer at the pastoral Pine Knob outdoor concert theater had made me a veteran of live rock shows. But seeing the rough-looking mustached and bearded burnouts of all ages crammed into their muscle cars, swilling down cans of beer and bottles of Jack Daniel's, passing around joints and screaming "FUCKIN' A!" at the top of their lungs as their car stereos blurted out Ted Nugent and Led Zeppelin songs, I realized that I was completely out of my element. This crowd seemed like pure, mind-altered aggression. Chances were slim that if one of these guys decided he wanted to beat me up, I could win him over by doing my impression of Dan Ackroyd doing his impression of Jimmy Carter or by making a quarter disappear by doing the French Drop sleight-of-hand move I had leared in my Bill Tarr's NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON'T coin magic book. The most I could hope for was that the sight of Jill and her enormous bosoms walking next to me would get me the same respect that I seemed to be getting in the halls of my high school.

"Make sure Jill takes her coat off when we get inside, I mentally noted to myself."

I'll have to read Feig's other teenage memoir KICK ME.

2007-04-09T21:32:00.000-05:00

Toronto Opera and Me

Last month I finished my third season as a baritone-bass in the chorus of the Toronto Opera Repertoire, a non-professional opera company (toronto-opera.com) that puts on shows every February at the Bickford Centre. We do it in the form of a night-school course, learning the music Tuesday nights in the fall term, and rehearsing on stage and performing in the winter term. (In the fall us men go downstairs to a separate room to learn our lines, and the women always seem to learn faster than we do!) Instead of an orchestra, we have piano accompaniment by the brilliant Adolfo diSantis. In recent seasons, we've had surtitles!

The company is headed by famous Toronto journalist Gerald Hannon, who also sings baritone solo roles, and his comic performances are really funny. We rely on regulars like George Seppenwolde (also a soloist), who does our makeup every year. (The first time I looked in a mirror and saw myself in stage makeup, I reminded myself of Laurence Olivier in THE ENTERTAINER.) In particular, Barbara Thompson is the Girl Friday who gets most of the work done, from making sure all the costumes have arrived to being a den mother keeping an eye on all the choristers for potential problems.

In 2003-4 we did Donizetti's LUCIA DI LAMERMOOR and Mozart's DON GIOVANNI; 2004-5 I skipped the opera and took drama courses instead, then went to see the others in Puccini's MADAMA BUTTERFLY and Rossini's THE BARBER OF SEVILLE; 2005-6 we did Donizetti's L'ELISIRE D'AMORE and a double bill of Puccini's SUOR ANGELICA and Pergolesi's LA SERVA PADRONA. But this past season the combined work was harder than usual. It was our 40th anniversary, so we did an ambitious program: Verdi's LA TRAVIATA and RIGOLETTO. The one constant each year is that we'll do one opera with quite a few choruses and a second with not so much. (Last year SUOR ANGELICA had largely female choruses, with us men only coming in at the end with the celestial voices; LA SERVA PADRONE was soloists only.) Rig is shorter on choruses, but even that has lots of difficult stuff where we come in at the end of the bar etc. and I found it the more challenging of the two. We had an unusually long time learning all our lines, and even I, who previously had my lines down cold by Christmas, took longer this year. But the gamble paid off, and we had a successful season.

What makes it all possible is the vision of conductor-director Giuseppe Macina, who's been with the company from the start. (His favorite expression is "JESUS MURPHY!") He used to sing opera at the pro levels, and he does everything down to set design. At the nonpro level, the key is to do more with less, and he has an eye for every detail, like that the Trav doctor should remove his glove before taking Violetta's pulse, or that the Rig women can wear rubies or emeralds, but they didn't wear diamonds back in the Renaissance. I used my regular shoes for Trav, but brought my slippers for Rig. What was especially fun was at the start of the third act of Rig, just after we've kidnapped Gilda, when he had us hustling her across the stage Snidely Whiplash-style. The piano accompaniment actually added to the silent-movie melodrama effect here.

Performing in an opera, even in the chorus, is a unique experience. Giuseppe has always seen the company as providing an opportunity for nonpro soloists to sing, but for us choristers it's also a rare chance. You get a fuller appreciation of even the most familiar operas by learning to sing them. (Even listening to the DON GIOVANNI music again and again backstage, I never got tired of it.) For me, the time when the lights go down before the performance starts is like the time at a birthday party when they lower the lights just before bringing in the cake with candles. We're supposed to keep quiet in the wings, but it's a rule honored more in the breach than in the observance.

Our ticket price is $22, less for students and old folk. We do very well to fill half the seats, though I'm told we'd sell out back in the '70s when there was less competition. We also have fundraisers, and last fall we had a big event in the mezzanine of the Canadian Opera Company's new building. (The COC's Richard Bradshaw is our honorary chair.) Our main expense is renting costumes from Malabar, and we're lucky they give us a generous discount.

Acting as well as singing is a challenge. When we put on LUCIA, Giuseppe wanted us to react more when Edgardo grabbed Lucia in the wedding scene, so I bit my thumb. (More Italian than Scottish, I'll admit.) For that production I even imagined myself as a clansman who really didn't want to fight Edgardo but didn't want to look weak in front of his kinfolk. Last fall we had an acting class, for which David Roche printed out a long list of possible motivations for being at Violetta's party, like "You come to steal her knick-knacks, either to sell them or out of spite," or "You're homosexual, and they understand these things here," or "You've lost your faith, so you may as well lose your virginity too." We did an exercise where we pretended to be freaks in a sideshow, and I became a Wild Man who went around scaring people. Great fun!

What will we do next year? It all depends on Giuseppe's evaluation of the solo talent.

UPDATE:

It turns out that we'll be doing two of the following three operas: Verdi's UN BALLO IN MASCHERA, Puccini's LA BOHEME, or Offenbach's TALES OF HOFFMAN.

2007-04-07T22:28:00.000-05:00

The Amateur Editor

The opening paragraph of Lady Antonia Fraser’s MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS:

“The winter of 1542 was marked by tempestuous weather throughout the British Isles: in the north, on the borders of Scotland and England, there were heavy snow-falls in December and frost so savage that by January the ships were frozen into the harbour at Newcastle. These stark conditions found a bleak parallel in the political climate which then prevailed between the two countries. Scotland as a nation groaned under the humiliation of a recent defeat at English hands at the battle of Solway Moss. As a result of the battle, the Scottish nobility which had barely recovered from the defeat of Flodden before, were stricken yet again by the deaths of their leaders in their prime; of those who survived, many prominent members were prisoners in English hands, while the rest met the experience of defeat by quarrelling among themselves, showing their strongest loyalty to the principle of self-aggrandizement, rather than to the troubled monarchy. The Scottish national Church, although still officially Catholic for the next seventeen years, was already torn between those who wished to reform its manifold abuses from within, and those who wished to follow England’s example, by breaking away root and branch from the tree of Rome. The king of this divided country, James V, having led his people to defeat, lay dying with his face to the wall, the victim in this as much of his own passionate nature, as of the circumstances which had conspired against him. When James died on 14 December 1542, the most stalwart prince might have shrunk from the Herculean task of succeeding him. But his actual successor was a weakly female child born only six days before, his daughter Mary the new queen of Scotland.”

How I would have written it:

In December of 1542 the king of Scotland lay dying with his face to the wall. Snow fell heavily on the English border, with a savage frost that in a month would have Newcastle’s ships frozen into the harbour. James V had recently led the nation’s nobility, which had barely survived Flodden a generation before, to another English rout at Solway Moss. Many prominent lairds were dead or prisoners in England; the rest, putting their own interests before the troubled monarchy, turned to quarrelling among themselves. The national Church was also torn: some wanted to reform its manifold abuses from within, while others looked to England’s example and wished to break away root and branch from the tree of Rome, a move the Church would finally make seventeen years later. Circumstance had combined with the king’s passionate nature to produce crisis. James V passed away on the 14th, leaving a Herculean task for any successor. His weakly six-day-old daughter Mary became queen of Scotland.

2007-01-15T15:44:00.000-05:00

Things I like about the internet:

1. The forums. I've talked about several subjects, and even made some friends. I've also learned to upload images.

2. The ezines. Everyday I look at salon.com and huffingtonpost.com. (Does that tell you what my politics are?)

3. Ebay. I've bought tons of old comic strips, and also sold a lot. A feedback line I received saying "One of Ebay's best" is priceless to me.

4. Email. Though I get a lot of spam, it's very useful for quick communication everywhere.

5. Bookselling pages. You can find almost any book edition at amazon.com or abebooks.com.

6. Sites like meetup.com, meetin.org and torontolinkup.com, which help me meet people for common activities. Using the internet doesn't have to keep you isolated in your home.

7. Search engines like google.com. I can look up anything on a whim.

8. News sites. It's easy to keep well-informed on anything.

9. The DVD rental site zip.ca. (It's the Canadian equivalent of Netflix.) I appreciate having an extremely wide range of films to rent, and my queue has over 500 selections.

10. Blogs. Especially being able to write one myself.

2007-01-11T13:50:00.000-05:00

Can we all just pretend the following things don't exist? Part II

Dr. Laura
Visible navels
Rock Against Drugs
FRIENDS reruns
Family values
College athletics
The war on pornography
Body art
Back to School clothes
The swimsuit issue of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
Any issue of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
Rahm Emmanuel
Cheerleaders
"They hate freedom!"
Stiletto heels
The McCain-Lieberman partnership
Any show where young people establish that they're "cool" by smoking (ie TITANIC)
Communitarian values
Victoria's Secret
THE NEW REPUBLIC
The halftime show at the Super Bowl
The rest of the Super Bowl
Slylock Fox
Piercing
The war on divorce
THE WALTONS reruns
Mass balloon releases
Security Moms
Rock ballads
The war on "the war on Christmas"

2007-01-10T20:53:00.000-05:00

Things I like about Toronto:

1. The library system. You can order a book online from most branches of the Toronto Public Library, and arrange to pick it up at the branch closest to you. And they have a wide selection. (Very useful for book clubs.)

2. The transit system. My home is conveniently close to a streetcar line. (Yes, some cities still have them.) For less than $100/month I subscribe to the Metropass, which allows me to travel all over the city at no extra cost. What's remarkable is that the Toronto Transit Commission does such a good job with an unusually small subsidy: they deserve a far bigger one.

3. The ethnic communities. Toronto used to be a bland, fastidious white Protestant town which Alistair Crowley said made Edinburgh look like a witch's coven. But we've attracted immigrants from all over the world, who among other things have created a terrific restaurant scene. I have a Chinese doctor, a Czech dentist, a Palestinian psychiatrist and an Italian singing teacher.

4. The cultural scene. Toronto's a great city for live theatre, opera and concerts. I myself sing in an Italian choir and a non-professional opera chorus.

5. The Cinematheque. Run by the Toronto International Film Festival people and attached to the Art Gallery of Ontario, it shows an astounding range of classic movies from all over the world, going back to the silent era! (The silent movies are generally shown with live piano accompaniment.)

6. The night-school programs. The Toronto District School Board provides lots of reasonably priced "continuing education" courses in several of their schools Tuesday through Thursday evenings. I've taken courses in acting, creative writing, opera and taichi.

7. The Meetup groups. Being such a big city, it's easier to attract enough people for Meetup events. (I'm into stuff like book clubs and movies.) There are also lots of Meetin and Linkup events.

8. The karaoke. 'Nuff said.

9. The video stores. I've found lots of rare high-quality stuff at places like Revue, Suspect Video and Hollywood Canteen.

10. The parks. I live near Hillcrest Park on the edge of the escarpment, which has an impressive view of the downtown and Lake Ontario. I especially like walking downtown through the Nordheimer Ravine.

2007-01-10T10:56:00.000-05:00

Does VANITY FAIR have any editors?

Here's a sentence from Michael Wolff's January column "Billionaires and Broadsheets." (Remember, it's a single sentence!)

"This was the cosmic joke: newspapers, once the singular province of big men, great sons of bitches, monsters, Citizen Kane himself--the TRIBUNE was run by one of the most outsize of news barons, Colonel Robert McCormick, grandson of a Chicago mayor, co-founder of one of the nation's biggest law firms, isolationist, militarist, show-off, star of the first newsreel, avid and odd personal crusader (spelling reform was one of his hot issues)--had become the land of nobodies."

2007-01-09T16:49:00.000-05:00

What's my tribe?

Do I belong to the "tipping tribe"? (Well, my father is in the tribe of lousy tippers.) The website applebeesamerica.com provides a curious little quiz to find out if you're in this tipping tribe, which is a fancy way of saying swing voters. (Props to digbysblog.blogspot.com for linking to it.) I went and tried to take the quiz, otherwise there wouldn't be any story.

1. You're at the counter of your local convenience store and have an extra dollar in change. You:
Save it for a rainy day
Buy a lottery ticket cause you're feeling lucky

That one's easy. Lotteries are for suckers who can visualize a hundred-to-one chance but not a million to one.

2.At a picnic with friends, you open a cooler full of soft drinks and reach for the:
Dr. Pepper
Sprite or Pepsi

I'd go for the Pepsi if they had it, but the Dr. Pepper if they only had Sprite.

3. You've won the jackpot on a game show and have a choice between two kinds of vehicles. You select the:
Audi
Saab

I don't know how to drive. (I live near a street car line, thank goodness.) My perception of the difference between these two models makes the difference between Democrats and Republicans look big, if only for a moment.

4. A free subscription to one of the following two magazines is offered to you. Which one do you choose?
US News & World Report
magazine
TV Guide

How about neither?

5.You're headed out to buy some groceries. You are most likely to visit:
A superstore like Wal-Mart or large supermarket such as Kroger
Whole Foods or similar organic grocer

They don't have Whole Foods in my area, and I don't know where to find any organic grocers. But it'll be a month of Sundays on February 29th before I buy GROCERIES at Wal-Mart.

6. You're at a cocktail party, and the only choices are gin, bourbon, scotch and vodka. Which liquor do you choose?
Bourbon or Scotch
Gin or vodka

I never drink. (Blame my parents.) I don't even have any idea of the differences between those choices.

7. If we opened your refrigerator, it is more likely that we would find which brand of bottled water:
Ozarka or local brand
Evian or Dannon

Two words: tap water.

8. You're at happy hour and there is a special on domestic beer. Which do you choose?
Coors
Bud

Once again, I know nothing about beer.

9. Which special event would you be more inclined to attend?
Monster Truck Show
Pro Wrestling Match

Life is too short to think about that.

10. If we checked your Internet history, it would more likely show that you had visited:
An auction site, like eBay
A dating site, like Match.com

For once, an answer I'm sure about. Ebay, though I've taken some embarrassing stabs at internet dating.

11. Nothing is on network TV you are interested in, so you click through cable, do you:
Stop on the Discovery Channel
Tune in to Court TV

I don't subscribe to either channel in the first place. (Sucks to be me.)

12. Between the following sporting events, which would you more likely watch?
X Games or college football
U. S. Open Tennis or Major League Soccer

I don't watch sports. I'm not even sure what the X Games are!

It all reminded me of an episode of the '70s sitcom GOOD TIMES I recently saw on DVD. The one where Michael the Militant Midget refused to take an IQ test because it embodied white oppression in asking kids what to pair with a cup when some of them had never seen a saucer, or fitting eight people into a four-room home they couldn't imagine. So his parents went to the geek who graded the tests and gave him the Black IQ Test, and he couldn't tell Malcom X' last name (Little) or what TCB stood for (taking care of business), and his adding machine short-circuited!

2007-01-09T12:30:00.000-05:00

Let's all pretend that the following things don't exist, OK?

Low-riding pants
The Family Circus
Supermodels
Right-wing blogs
Reality TV
American Girl dolls
Lindsay Lohan
Crosses worn for fashion
Mormons
MTV
Anne Coulter
Thongs
Dakota Fanning
Supermodels
Fox News
Jenny McCarthy
Harley-Davidson motorcycles
Britney Spears
The vital centre
That girl who says "That's hot!"
Grunge rock
Visible underwear
Shania Twain
Rock the Vote
Disney Princess stuff
Madonna
Lads' magazines
TomKat
Anything advertised in ROLLING STONE magazine
ROLLING STONE magazine itself
Brangelina
Gangsta rap
Hillary Clinton
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Jessica Simpson
Patriotic fashions
Clubbing
The middle class

2007-01-08T14:09:00.000-05:00

The other day I was translating Julius Caesar's account of the wars in Gaul, and I ran into this sentence: "For the immortal gods, in order that those whose crimes they would punish may lament their reversal of fortune all the more bitterly, sometimes grant them greater short-term prosperity and a longer wait before their nemesis." Needless to say, it was hard to translate. But it's worth learning Latin just so you can discover a gem like that. (I couldn't help thinking of the people in charge of the United States.)

2007-01-08T13:53:00.000-05:00

Last night I dreamed of a Gene Kelly musical where a group of American soldiers were coming home from Europe, arrived in Quebec by ship, then drove through a park in the Quebec wilderness. (Needless to say, that musical doesn't really exist, though I'd like to see it.)