The first Historian

A few months ago, I started reading the Landmark edition of Herodotus' HISTORIES.  Herodotus, of course, was an ancient Greek who wrote a nine-volume history of the wars between the Greek city-states and the Persian Empire in the early fifth century BC.  Landmark has done an excellent job with this translation, inserting plenty of maps and footnotes to prevent confusion.  My book got out in the rain, damaging the cover, but the text inside wasn't affected, and it now has a nice travel-worn look, like the book Count Almasy was carrying in THE ENGLISH PATIENT. (Incidentally, IMHO people who accuse that movie of moral relativism don't give the story's complexity its due.)

Herodotus wrote what was basically European civilization's first book of history.  But it isn't history the way we imagine it today.  The text is full of tall tales, like the one about Arion the minstrel sailing toward Corinth, getting thrown overboard, and completing his voyage on a dolphin.  You'd be well advised to take many of his stories with a grain of salt, and even ancient readers were often skeptical.  But it's a very entertaining book:  at times Herodotus reads like a folklorist similar to the Grimm brothers.

The first book is about Lydia's conflict with Persia (ending with Croesus' hubris and nemesis) and Persia's rise under Cyrus; the second, Egypt before its conquest by Persia; the third, Persia under Cambyses and the succession of Darius; the fourth, Persia's campaigns north into Scythia and west into Libya.  I'm now on the fifth book, which will bring me into the first war and its culmination at Marathon.

Some of the liveliest writing is in the second book.  Its stories are relatively reliable, and most people think Herodotus actually lived there at one point. (The part about Scythia, on the other hand, has only second- and third-hand accounts.) I especially enjoyed his account of the Boubastis festival:

"Men sail with women, large crowds of them together in each barge.  Throughout the entire journey, some of the women play castanets, some of the men play flutes, and the rest of them, both men and women, sing and clap their hands.  Whenever they approach some city along the way to Boubastis, they skirt the shore with their barge, and while some of the women continue as before, others shout at the women of the city, mocking and ridiculing them, and some dance, and still others stand up and lift their robes, exposing themselves.  They do this at every city along the river, and when they arrive at Boubastis, they celebrate their holiday by performing huge sacrifices.  They consume more grape wine at this festival than at any other time of the year, and according to what the native inhabitants say, there may be as many as 700,000 men and women (but no children) gathered together here."

I also liked his account of a couple of Thracian kingpins who wanted to grab Darius' attention, so they hired a statuesque woman to walk near him, spinning flax with both hands, leading a horse with her elbow in the rein, and balancing a pot of water on her head. (I'd notice that!) Like much of Herodotus, I can't be sure it's a true story, but it's fun to read anyway.

Herodotus brings to mind a line from the western THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend!"

Translating comics

One of my hobbies is translating foreign-language comic books like Herge's Tintin series into English. (Sure, I could just read the existing English translations, but that's so EASY!)  I recently wrote out a translation of TINTIN IN TIBET, and I've started translating the two books where he went to the moon, which books I'd picked up in London in their original French.  Comics are easier to translate than non-visual "literature": they tend to use pretty basic language.

Another series I've been translating is F. Ibanez' Spanish-language MORTADELO Y FILEMON.  I don't know Spanish as well as I do French, but I find it's a fairly easy language. (Ask my sister how difficult German can be!) I own an excellent Spanish-English dictionary published by Collins.

The series itself is fairly slapstick in a way that appeals to little boys. (I first encountered it in a French translation when I was fourteen.) It's a James Bond parody with Mortadelo and Filemon as two goofy secret agents who bumble through various adventures, helped by Mortadelo's wide range of disguises.  My favorite supporting character is the zaftig secretary Ofelia, whom they're constantly driving up the wall.  The latest one I'm translating is PESADILLA! (nightmare), a NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET spoof "guest-starring" a Freddy caricature.

Walk on, walk on...

One of my Meetup groups is for karaoke.  I used to be the organizer, until an event where I thought five people would come but only five people showed up. (It's those cold winter evenings.)  Now Jonah Libster bears the burden of organizing it.

Every month I go to an event at BarPlus near Yonge & Dundas, where a group can rent a room and sing songs with a much shorter wait than in regular karaoke bars. (Jonah also has an event at the Gladstone Hotel, but I don't bother with that because there's a huge wait between songs, and we have to get there early to boot.  But it does have a very wide song selection.)

Our latest event was tonight.  I'm always trying to think of new songs to try, and tonight I tried "You'll Never Walk Alone" from CAROUSEL (Tom Jones version).  I also sang "Ferry 'Cross the Mersey," making for two Liverpool soccer stadium songs in one night.  Coincidentally, I saw CAROUSEL in London just when the final report was released on the 1989 disaster when dozens of Liverpool soccer fans were killed at a stadium in Hillsborough, making it clear that the police had systematically lied afterward. (That report happened because a single MP kept pressing the issue.) I was in Britain at the time, and recall that people were singing both of these songs to commemorate the dead.

Another song I sang was the Sid Vicious version of "My Way," with which I always bring down the house.  I also sang Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark," in which I always get up close to the girl sitting near me for the final "Hey baby..." which also gets a laugh.  I try not to sing the same songs every time, but I seem to keep singing BJ Thomas' "I Just Can't Help Believing." (If it had been up to me, I would have called that song "More Than Just a Day" instead.)

He served a wrathful and angry god

When I was in London, I saw several excellent plays.  The Barbican had a wonderful production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's CAROUSEL, with some inspired choreography.  Now that I think of it, the female characters are mostly sympathetic (though Mrs. Mullin seems sinister in an almost pimplike fashion). I used to live in New Brunswick, next door to Maine, and I've always imagined Mainers as Cousin Nettie types:  more sensible than regular Americans.

But the men?  The mortal male characters (we'll put aside the Starkeeper and his angel) are largely, in their different ways, jerks.  Billy is irresponsible and lacking in courage; Enoch is set in the life he's planned and expects his wife to adapt to it, unable to appreciate his luck in finding in Carrie a woman willing to do that; Jigger is a user who relies on suckers like Billy; Mr. Bascombe is one of those rich people who moralizes about the less well-off; the local policeman is his toady; and even the Snow son who woos Louise is a twit.

I recently saw the HBO film of Richard Russo's EMPIRE FALLS, and its setting was like the factory town in CAROUSEL after a century of decline.  Theresa Russell as the waitress reminded me of someone, but I couldn't remember who at first.  After seeing this show I realized it was Barbara Ruick, who played Carrie in the 1956 movie of CAROUSEL. (That movie had its flaws--did we really need to learn that Jigger ended up in hell?--but Gordon Macrae and Shirley Jones had the chemistry to pull it off.)

I also saw a revival of Stephen Sondheim's SWEENEY TODD.  WOW!  When they made Sondheim, they broke the mold. (I like to think that afterward the judge managed to survive his throat-cutting and send the retarded boy to the gallows.)

I'm the family baker

We have a bread machine, and I bake bread every week.  It's a real art to add the right amount of water so that the loaf will be nice and big, but not so big that it reaches the ceiling. (I like to mix the dough than refrigerate it overnight to limit the loaf size.) For things like whole wheat and multigrain, I use molasses and honey instead of sugar.

Variety is important, because the baking routine can get boring easily.  I've developed a twelve-week cycle of different breads.

1:  Whole wheat bread

2:  Raisin bread

3:  Multigrain bread

4:  White bread

5:  Whole wheat

6:  Rye bread (actually a mix of white, whole wheat and rye flour)

7:  Multigrain

8:  Raisin

9:  Whole wheat

10:  Cheese bread

11:  Multigrain

12:  Rye

Manners and me

Good manners, of course, are about making other people comfortable in your presence.  So how many of us feel comfortable in the presence of etiquette experts?

Seriously, on the subject of manners I have a pet peeve:  aggressive rhetorical questions.  Someone who says "How could you be so stupid?" isn't seriously interested in finding out why you were stupid; she's just getting in your face.  Another example is Simon Cowell saying to some helpless AMERICAN IDOL singer, "What-the-hell-was-that??" (Of course, that's deliberate rudeness to grab the attention of scatterbrained TV viewers, which is contemptible.)

You know, some people are rude to everyone, and you really have to feel sorry for them. (How many friends do you think they have?) But what gets to me is the Eddie Haskell types, who will be perfectly polite to people they see as their equals, and especially to their superiors, but feel free to give rude treatment to those of lesser status.  One example is servants.  You hear these stories of Manhattan millionaires who chew out their servants in front of guests.  Even if they don't care about their servants' feelings, you'd think they'd at least care about not making their guests uncomfortable.  But maybe some of them actually do it to impress their guests!  It's really not so hard to make an impression on people, if you don't care what KIND of impression you make.

Another example is children.  I mentioned Eddie Haskell, and you often see teenagers being rude toward younger kids.  Their attitude is, "I'm more mature than you, so it's up to YOU to earn my respect!" In other words, they're acting semi-mature.

Learning Greek

For the past few years, off and on, I've been learning to translate ancient Greek. (What got me interested in this was the classic movie THE BROWNING VERSION, with Michael Redgrave teaching Greek in a British boarding school.) I've been using a textbook from the "Teach Yourself" series.  I wish I had more exercises to do, though each lesson does have a supplement at the website tyancientgreek.org.

I've translated some impressive poetry, like this epigram attributed to an aging courtesan dedicating her mirror to Aphrodite:

I, Lahis, who laughed haughtily at the
Young men of Greece gathered at my front door,

Dedicate this mirror to you, o Paphian; 
For what I once was I can no longer see, and what I now see I don’t want to.

I've also been translating parts of Sophocles' PROMETHEUS BOUND, a play about the titan Prometheus who stole fire from Olympus and gave it to mankind, prompting Zeus to have the titans Might and Mayhem seize him and have Hephaistos chain him to a rocky mountain.

Might:

To this distant end of the earth we’ve come,

This Scythian tract, this desolate wilderness.

Hephaistos, you must heed your father’s words,

And bind the wrongdoer fast

To these lofty rocks above the cliffs

With fetters of unbreakable steel.

For he stole your glory, the flame that all arts come from,

And bestowed it on mortals.  For such an offence

He must repay the Gods, be certain, 

And so learn to accept Zeus’ majesty, 

And forsake his mortal-loving ways.

Hephaistos:

Might and Mayhem, Zeus’ command you’ve surely

Fulfilled completely, and that’s that for you,

But I don’t have the heart to bind

A divine kinsman to this stormy chasm.

Yet utter necessity forces resolve into me:

For to ignore one’s father’s will is dire.

High-minded son of wise Themis, I’ll bind you,

Both of us unwilling, with inextricable 

Brazen chains, to this deserted crag,

Where you shall hear no man nor see mortal form,

But be scorched by the sun’s radiant flame,

Leathering your shiny skin;  you’ll welcome

Night’s embroidered cloak hiding the light,

Then the morning sun scattering the hoar-frost;

Without end will your ill burden distress you,

For he who can free you is not yet born!

In a later scene Zeus (who overthrew his father Kronos, who had overthrown his own father Uranos) sends Hermes to warn Prometheus about spreading rumors that Zeus too will be overthrown:

Hermes:

Hey, Bright Boy, bitterest of the bitter, 

I’m talking to you, who wronged the gods 

By favoring the mortals and stealing fire!

Father Zeus orders you to speak about

That marriage by which, you boast,

He’ll lose his power; and Prometheus,

Don’t speak in vague riddles, but talk straight in 

Every detail, and don’t force me to return here.

You know such behavior won’t soften Zeus.

Prometheus:

For a lackey of the gods, your words are

Haughty indeed and full of arrogance!

You’re a new god with new power, and in your dreams

You’ll dwell in your citadel free of woe;

Yet haven’t I seen the first ruler usurped 

By a second, the second by a third? 

I perceive that the third one, now ruling,

Can expect a most shameful, quick fall too.

Surely you don’t expect me to cower

In terror before the new gods?  There’s little, 

Nay, no fear left in me.  Hurry back 

The way you came, for you shall learn nothing 

Of the things you question me about!

Back From London

A week ago I got back from my latest trip to London.  It was my fourth trip in eleven years. (In 2001 I was actually scheduled to fly there on September 11!  That flight got cancelled because of all the US planes being diverted to Toronto, but my travel agent did me a yeoman service and I was on the first flight out two days later.  I'm ashamed to recall being two days late, as it seems such a minor inconvenience compared to what thousands of New Yorkers were going through, and millions of Afghanis and Iraqis would soon be going through.)

Seventeen insane days!  I went to about a dozen museums. (Most of them have free admission, though they encourage you to donate a few pounds and you'd be a cheapskate not to.) I saw half a dozen plays, and even went on a tour of the Young Vic theatre during the "Open London" weekend.

But what I really like doing is walking through the streets and parks.  I wore out a pair of shoes that were still pretty new!  And I couldn't help thinking that it's something William and Kate can't do.

I also bought a ton of books at places like Foyle's and Watterstone's on Gower Street.  I found an interesting series of books "50 _____ Ideas You Really Need to Know": I've started reading the one about mathematics. (My father sells used books online, so we can dispose of the least interesting books easily.)

The Good Old Days (updated)

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

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

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!

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

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!

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?"

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.

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)

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!

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

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.

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.