My Ph.D. experience

I spent the 1990s at York University working on my Ph.D.  It got pretty difficult.  The trouble really started after I did my comp exams in 1993 (on which I did very well). When I submitted my first thesis proposal to my supervisor, it was already a few weeks overdue, though neither of us took the deadline very seriously.

As for the thesis proposal, he said it didn't have enough focus and wanted me to improve it.  A week later I submitted a revised proposal.  The following week I asked about it, but he hadn't had time to look at it yet.  The week after, he had looked at it but all he had to say is that it was the same as my first draft!  Three weeks down the drain, three weeks further overdue, of which I spent two weeks waiting for feedback.  For the next draft, I went over his head and submitted it to the Graduate Programme in History.  I wasn't happy about doing things this way, but I didn't know what else to do, and I wanted to get started on my research!

This was only the start of our troubles.  I remember that when I wrote some report on my research, I mentioned some anecdote about a foreigner in a local club wanting to go "where the dead are not so present." His response: "So?" So I'm sorry I mentioned it!

In 1996, just before he went away for the summer, he wanted me to add an "overview" to my first chapter.  I wrote it in a hurry because I had already prepared to write my second chapter and had to do it soon while the material was fresh in my memory.  He told me that it reflected "basic weaknesses." I wanted to talk to another committee member about it, but nobody was available!  I spent this crucial summer on my own.

What frustrates me is situations where they tell you it isn't good enough, so you try to make it better, but they don't really have anything more to say.  Even worse is when you try to improve something, and it just seems to make things worse.  When I made my first revision, I decided to add an appendix of historical subjects related to the thesis (my father's idea).  I had to write three more revisions until he finally told me, a year after I first submitted it, that it contained "numerous" inaccuracies and irrelevant items.  So much time had passed that I felt my only choice was to remove it completely.

The worst part of it was the waiting.  For an overcommitted professor like my supervisor, someone's Ph.D. thesis is the low priority that has to get sacrificed.  I submitted my first revision in April 1997 and met with my committee after the fifth revision at the end of September 1998.  In this 18-month period I spent close to 12 months waiting for feedback, which was very demoralizing.  It didn't help that I didn't have my first committee meeting till after my third revision.  He wanted me to improve it before meeting the committee, but how was I supposed to do so without their input?  It wasn't like we'd been making such wonderful progress together.

After I submitted my sixth revision, in early 1999, they told me the thesis was "unexaminable." After a week, I decided to demand an examination anyway.  After three more revisions, I had my final examination in October 1999, and actually passed!  I'd written a long letter to the assistant dean of graduate studies describing my experience, and she attended the examination. (She later told me she loved my thesis, for what that's worth.)

At the start of the long journey, I'd told myself: "I don't really care about the degree.  I just want the experience of writing a Ph.D. thesis." But even though I passed in the end, I'm not sure it was worth it.  I know I'm not interested in teaching history.  The best thing about it was the researching time I spent in London.

What the plot requires

Of course, it annoys me when movie and TV plots require people to do things that aren't credible.  Roger Ebert famously used the term "idiot plot" to describe a plot which requires the characters to be uniformly incapable of perceiving something that's perfectly obvious to non-idiotic moviegoers from the start, lest the central problem be solved too soon.  One example, I imagine, is the Princess Diaries sequel (directed by Gary Marshall--who else?) where Anne Hathaway's mother the Queen wants to marry her off because she's worried about a pretender to the throne, who happens to be male, single, young and handsome...  I haven't even seen the movie, but I think I can already guess how things will work out.

One thing that definitely bugs me is plots that require a character to be careless at a crucial moment.  There was an episode of THE WALTONS where Jason was considering becoming a conscientious objector and discussed it with a recruiting officer.  Just as he was leaving and a couple of guys were coming in to volunteer, the officer added, "I hope you talk to your parents ABOUT BECOMING A CO." (My emphasis.) Of course he could have omitted the emphasized part, but then the guys coming in wouldn't know enough to bully Jason shortly afterward.

Another example is Spike Lee's JUNGLE FEVER.  In that movie Wesley Snipes confides in his friend (Lee) that he's cheating on his wife.  Soon after Snipes comes home to find his wife throwing him out.  It turns out that Lee was careless enough to tell his wife about it, and the latter promptly informed Snipes' wife.  Don't tell any secrets to Spike Lee!

If one thing bothers me more than a plot that requires a character to be careless, it's a plot that requires a character to be childish!  The whole plot of Lee's SUMMER OF SAM requires John Leguizamo to be a philandering, hopeless douchebag. (Lee's characters tend to do whatever the plot requires.) Other such characters are Tom Cruise in EYES WIDE SHUT and Julia Roberts in several romantic comedies.

War and me

When I'm in London one of the places I always visit is the Imperial War Museum. (For me the uniforms make it real.) Their exhibit on the Holocaust showed a film of Joseph Goebbels making a racist speech, in which he tried to wag his finger but ended up wagging his whole hand.  Pretty strange.

I've also visited the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, where two exhibits have connections to my parents' hometowns.  One is a cannon from Fort Louisbourg, near where Mother grew up.  The other is a wartime diary kept by Father Raymond Hickey of the North Shore Regiment.  He was a priest in the vicinity of Father's hometown of Cambellton, New Brunswick. (Father recalls that Hickey had plenty of anti-Catholic prejudice to deal with.)

On this last visit to London I also went to the National Army Museum for the first time, and it made me feel sad.  Other London places I visit include the Canadian war memorial near Buckingham Palace, and Tavistock Square with its statue of Gandhi and monument to draft resisters through the ages.

How do I feel about war?  I'm anti-prowar, which isn't quite the same as being antiwar.  There may be good wars in theory, but in practice I tend to view each individual war with skepticism:  even the best ones are usually messy.  My Huffington Post avatar is of JS Woodsworth, first CCF leader and an uncompromising pacifist.  Stephen Harper made an issue of Woodsworth voting against Canada declaring war on Germany in 1939, but didn't mention that he was isolated even within the CCF caucus.

How would I have voted if I'd been an MP then?  Well, Canadians took a more honorable course in 1939 than did the Americans, who hid behind arrogant, short-sighted neutrality for two long years until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on them. (Remember that the next time some US loudmouth attacks the cowardice of the French, who undeniably showed more courage than Uncle Sam did at that not unimportant moment in 1939.) If I thought the vote was going to be close, I'd have voted yes.

But the vote clearly wasn't going to be close, so I would have voted no just to remind the government that not all Canadians were on board.  As it is, I'm glad Woodsworth prevented the vote from being unanimous.  Unanimity is overrated.

Cold weather

"November is the Norway of months"--Emily Dickinson

Our house is about a hundred years old. We bought it from a family returning to Portugal almost twenty years ago.  The first time I entered it I thought, "What are we doing here?  We'll never be able to afford this place!" But we managed to swing it, and it's about doubled in value since then.

It was originally owned by a guy who had a whole orchard just south of St. Clair West:  we continue that tradition with big cherry and plum trees in the back yard.  It was built next to that avenue, until he sold the strip of land just next to the street--it had become very valuable--and moved his house a short distance to the south, to the property he still owned. (People put houses on trucks and moved them a lot more back then.)

The house is made of red brick, and had an extension added in the 1930s or so, and you can see the line where the brick pattern is interrupted.  My bedroom is on the second storey of that extension. (They added an extra sun room in the 1960s or so.) Unfortunately the first extension wasn't well-built on the second story.  My room only has electrical outlets on the wall facing the older part of the house, and only one vent for heating and air-conditioning.

The single vent doesn't matter in spring or fall, and even in the summer I'm just as happy to cool the room by opening the windows.  But it's a disadvantage in the winter, so I got an electric heating element for that season.  I brought it up from the basement just the other day. (I've also been bringing out extra blankets for my bed, and wearing a blanket for when I'm on the computer in my room.) To tell the truth, I rather like the time of year when things are starting to get cold.  Indian summer, on the other hand, feels a bit unnatural to me.

One month!

A month ago I revived my blog.  Since October 1 I've been steadily writing a new post every day, and I want to see how long I can keep it up.  I'm starting to imagine how Joe DiMaggio felt in 1941 when he managed a record hitting streak of over fifty games!

I got the idea to revive my blog when I was in London, because I figured the trip would give me a lot to talk about.  But so far I've been able to rely mostly on other topics. (In the days to come, no doubt I'll be talking about London more.)

I've set a rule that every post will be long enough that when I'm writing it, the scroll bar will form.  I also intended the rule of not discussing similar topics on consecutive days, but I've already broken that rule once, thanks to a headache.

One way I've tried to keep it up is by writing down a list of potential topics.  Four of them I've already done, and I have three left over.  If I have several topics not yet written, that should reduce the pressure, at least in theory.

Sometimes I'll realize that I finished a post without including something I intended to mention.  For example, when writing about the art walks the other day I omitted one detail.  In the previous walk I'd mentioned to Betty Anne that I hoped to ride London's new cable car over the Thames, and also that I'd started singing the song "Finiculi, Finicula" (which is about a cable car, of course.) So she dared me to sing that song while I was on the cable car.  I said I would, but when the time came I lost my nerve.  The other night I had to admit to her that I'd "funked it," as the English would say.

Visiting my shrink

Yesterday I visited my psychiatrist at his office near Lawrence station. (I could have talked about it yesterday but I wanted to talk about the art walk while it was fresh in my mind.)

Dr. Hassan is a Palestinian-Canadian, and one of what I imagine must be very few psychiatrists in the Toronto region who can speak Arabic.  He must fill a big need.  I think he sometimes treats children, because there are some toys around his office.

I started seeing him about ten years ago and that was when it got diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome.  These days I visit him every couple of months.  I sometimes have trouble thinking of things to say. (In particular, when he asks me questions involving sex I tend to clam up.)

This time I had more to talk about than usual.  I had my September trip to London to tell him about.  And I also talked about my blog. He says he's impressed by my efforts to be socially active through groups like Meetup.

He prescribes me anti-depressant pills like Cipralex.  I used to take one every day, but I worry about getting dependent on them. (My mother fears that even more.) These days I take one every couple of days, though in wintertime I go back to taking them daily.  I ran out of pills when I was in London and had one unpleasant nightmare--I was really angry at some woman--but I survived it pretty well.

Betty Anne's art walk

Another of my Meetup groups is Betty Anne Jordan's Queen Street art walk.  On the first Thursday evening of the month we meet somewhere on Queen Street West and she gives us a guided tour of a few art galleries and boutiques.  She tends to get pretty big crowds.

Today we started at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (a place we visit frequently), where several finalists in the competition for the annual Sobey Prize had their work on display.  One had created what looked like a barrow for a travelling artist.  Another had a leaning ten-foot pile of record albums (I noticed a Lawrence Welk).

Then we went several blocks off Queen Street to see the Museum of New.  Lumir Hladik talked about his exhibit of symbiotic baroque and arboreal gothic. (He achieved the latter by cutting and burning holes in canvas to create hollows for sketched lines and wolf hair.) We also met the director Joseph Rappell.

After that we went to Bluebird, a boutique selling objets d'art from around the world.  Then we retired to a restaurant called Harlem Underground.  Queen Street West is dense with interesting little places I know nothing about.

Betty Anne is pretty friendly.  She often gives me a hug and always seems to be interested in what I say.  She says she likes to know how I think, so I hope she reads this.

DRACULA & FRANKENSTEIN

We were lucky in Toronto:  after sobering weather Monday, Sandy largely passed us by.

Tonight being Halloween, I went to see the double feature of DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN at the Fairview Cinema near Don Mills station. It was an event in the new Classic Movie Meetup.  The Fairview has a special screening room for small audiences, and they may be renting it for future events if enough people are interested.  In a few weeks they plan to show Hitchcock's VERTIGO; unfortunately, it's on the same day I'm going to an opera screening. (In theory I could attend the opera in the afternoon and the movie in the evening, but in practice I'd get a huge headache.)

The two movies we saw were restored versions of two Universal horror classics from the early '30s.  That was in the first years of talking pictures, and they're both a bit slow and talky like many films of that time, DRACULA especially.  But FRANKENSTEIN has some great set pieces (the birth, the fiery windmill climax), and they both have some good lines, like Dracula's "I never drink... wine." I spotted two actors who were in both movies:  Dwight Frye as Renfield/Fritz and Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing/Baron Frankenstein.

On the way home I was chatting with Cecilia, a Brazilian who lives near my neighborhood.  She's been in Canada less than a year, but she already speaks pretty good English.

Still reading Herodotus

I've resumed reading Herodotus' history.  I couldn't remembered where I'd left off, so I started in the middle of the fifth book.  After a great deal of rereading, I found that I'd got all the way into the sixth book!  (I remembered most of what I reread.)

I'm now close to the end of the seventh book.  The fifth book is about the rebellion against Persian rule of the Greek cities on the west coast of Asia Minor, led by the foolish Aristagoras.  The Athenians were careless enough to send a naval expedition in support of the rebels, leading to Persian retaliation, and the sixth book is about that retaliation:  Persia's first attempt, under Darius, at conquering Greece, leading to defeat on the Plains of Marathon.  The seventh book, which I've almost finished, is about the second Persian attempt under Xerxes, leading up to the Battle of Thermopylae.

As always, Herodotus has an eye for a good story.  Near the end of the sixth book, there's the story of Hippokleides wooing Kleisthenes' daughter. (Back then courtship meant winning over the father.) Hippokleides was thought to be a leading candidate among the army of suitors until Kleisthenes threw a party for them.  Let Herodotus tell the rest:

"As the drinking progressed Hippokleides, who was already commanding much attention from the others, ordered the flute player to play a dance tune for him.  The flute player complied, and while I suppose Hippokleides pleased himself with his dancing, Kleisthenes, as he watched, was annoyed at everything he saw.  After pausing for a moment, Hippokleides ordered that a table be brought to him; then he stepped up on the table and first danced some Laconian steps, and then some Attic ones, too.  But the third thing he did was to turn upside down and, with his head resting on the table, gesticulate with his legs waving in the air.  Now during the first and second of these dances, Kleisthenes restrained himself and did not blurt out his thoughts, although he felt somewhat disgusted at the thought that Hippokleides might still become his son-in-law, but when he saw him waving his legs around, he could no longer contain himself and said, 'Son of Teisandros, you have just danced away your marriage!" And the young man replied, 'For Hippokleides, no problem!'... And that is where the saying came from." (He's referring to an Athenian catchphrase, "For [insert your name], no problem!"

That's right, there's breakdancing in Herodotus!

Coro Verdi

I'm a baritone in the Giuseppe Verdi Chorus (its Italian name is Coro Verdi), which rehearses Monday nights--except in summer-- at the Columbus Centre near Dufferin & Lawrence.  It's conducted by Giuseppe Macina, also the man behind the Toronto Opera Repertoire.

In recent times we've been presenting two operas in concert form every year, but this year we've cut back to one.  I prefer it that way:  it'll give us more time for folk songs and such.  The opera we're doing this year is Verdi's MACBETH.

For the first month or two this year we rehearsed MACBETH, but now it's time to prepare for our Christmas concert.  My favorite among our Christmas pieces is Pietro Yon's "Gesu Bambino." We also do stuff like "The Little Drummer Boy," in which the men keep repeating "Prum, prum..." for the first verse, then "Prum, pum-pum..." in the second, and in the third verse it gets complicated, with stuff like "Prum, puddly-pum..." (That song always reminds me of TRU, Robert Morse's sad one-man show about Truman Capote, in which he talked about Christmas a lot and they played that song near the end.)

A lot of people were absent tonight, what with the weather already getting raw as Sandy approaches.  Also, some people didn't know what we'd be rehearsing and didn't bring their Christmas music. (I've solved that problem by carrying all my Coro Verdi music in the same bag.  I have strong arms.)

Cliches

Movies have their own notorious set of cliches, especially genres like the western ("Head 'em off at the pass!") and the horror movie (the sluttiest girl dying first, the virgin surviving). But what really bugs me is movies that use TV cliches!

One example is PRETTY WOMAN.  In the first scenes, when we see Julia Roberts working the streets in miniskirt and thigh boots, she's wearing a blond wig.  Later on, in the scene where we learn that she's really a "nice girl" underneath, the wig comes off and we see that her true hair is different.  TV shows will often use a change in appearance to mark a parallel change in character, or in this case mark a change in how we're expected to view the character. (That sort of thing makes it easier for inattentive people to follow what's happening.)

It shall come as no surprise that PRETTY WOMAN was directed by Garry Marshall, who started out making sitcoms like HAPPY DAYS and never really stopped.  Now there's a director who knows his cliches!  I'll bet that when he was starting out some old-timer sat him down and explained all the cliches to him. (Sort of like in the baseball movie BULL DURHAM, where Tim Robbins couldn't think of anything to tell an interviewer beyond "It was really OUT THERE!" so Kevin Costner taught him to say things like "I just want to be good for my team," and "I'm taking things one day at a time.")

Another example is in Spike Lee's THE MO' BETTER BLUES, which starts with Denzel Washington and his jazz band being unhappy because their manager (Lee) made a bad deal for them.  But we don't see Lee making the deal; he made it before the start of the movie and we only hear of the deal and see its consequences.  They sometimes do that on sitcoms because dramatizing someone making a bad deal is too complicated and it's easier to just have people say what happened. (This happened more than once with JJ on GOOD TIMES.)

While I'm at it, another TV cliche may happen when an episode ends with a breakup, a dramatically convenient way to end an episode.  The show's structure, however, may require the relationship to continue, but reconciliations are a lot harder to write than breakups.  So one solution is to wait an episode or two and simply show the two of them back together with no explanation.  In other words, they simply FORGET about the breakup.  I've seen this happen on shows as good as UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS and THE SOPRANOS!

OTELLO

Each year I see several high-definition broadcasts of performances by New York's Metropolitan Opera.  I see them at the Sheppard Grande cinema near the Sheppard subway station.  I got a Scene card so I can buy tickets in late August earlier than the regular people, while there are still good seats. (I'm glad they started selling tickets to individual seats:  the good seats used to go to those who got into the auditorium first, except that some people would reserve seats for friends who hadn't yet arrived, which was unfair.)

Today I saw the Met production of Verdi's OTELLO.  It's one of the truly powerful operas.   Iago has a great aria in the second part, Otello in the third, Desdemona in the fourth.  I found Iago's aria especially disturbing. ("I'm evil because I'm human... I've absorbed the primordial slime of existence... That's what I believe.") I also liked the dancing in the drinking number.

One problem with these showings is that some of the people see themselves as in a theatre rather than a cinema, and get angry if you make the sort of noises moviegoers are accustomed to.  I've learned to only grab popcorn during breaks or applause, but once someone complained when I slurped a drink!

I used to go to the Canadian Opera Company a lot, but to tell the truth I've stopped going now that I have Met performances to go to instead.

Senate reform

I don't usually talk about similar subjects on consecutive days, but I've had a really big headache today.

If I got a chance to reform the Canadian Senate, I'd introduce a scheme where 60 seats would be federal and 40 provincial.

Out of the 60 federal seats, 20 would be assigned after each federal election in proportion* to the overall popular vote.  Each senator with a federal seat would effectively have a term of three parliaments.

Each province would receive 4 of the provincial seats, to be assigned after each provincial election in that province in that same proportion* to the province's popular vote.  A senator with a provincial seat would have a term equal to those in the provincial legislature.

What could be interesting is adding a few extra seats.  Each of the three territories would get a Senate seat, to be chosen at the time of territorial elections.  And there could also be a seat for the First Nations, and even one for non-status Indians.  Other possibilities are a seat for Canadians living overseas, Canadian children (because they can't vote), and even Canadians who don't vote!  These seats would provide representation for people with no influence over the House of Commons.

They can't take away my dreams...

(*=or as close as possible)

Proportional Representation

I'm a supporter of Fair Vote, an organization trying to introduce proportional representation in Canadian elections.  I thought up an scheme I'd like to see adopted.  My scheme would divide parliamentary seats into three categories.

Category A (about 70% of seats) would be seats chosen in the same "first past the post" way as before. (The three Territories, which each have one seat, would see no change.)

Category B (about 25%) would be a full quarter of each province's seats,  allotted to the different parties so that the total of A and B would be distributed in proportion* to the popular vote in that province.

Category C would be the rest of the seats.  Ontario would receive four seats in this category, Quebec three, BC and Alberta two each, and every other province one each.  These seats would go to the party with the largest nationwide popular vote, except in provinces where a party scored a landslide and its A seats alone were greater than its proportional share of A and B seats.  In that case, these seats would be distributed between the other parties to allow their full proportion of A and B. (If their totals are still below their proportional share, they'll lose out in equal* number.)

(*=or as close as possible)

To show how it would work, I'll first take the number of seats each province had in the 2011 election and divide them into (A/B/C).

Ontario:  106 (76/26/4)
Quebec:  75 (54/18/3)
BC:  36 (25/9/2)
Alberta:  28 (19/7/2)
Saskatchewan: 14 (9/4/1)
Manitoba:  14 (9/4/1)
Nova Scotia:  11 (7/3/1)
New Brunswick:  10 (6/3/1)
Newfoundland:  7 (4/2/1)
PEI:  4 (2/1/1)

Now I'll imagine the electoral results under this system. (I'm assuming that the parties would win the A seats in much the same proportion as they actually did with all the seats.)

Ontario:  Con 52 (52/0/0), NDP 27 (16/9/2), Lib 27 (8/17/2)
Quebec:  NDP 43 (43/0/0), BQ 15 (3/11/1), Lib 8 (5/2/1),
Con 9 (3/5/1)
BC:  Con 17 (14/1/2), NDP 11 (8/3/0), Lib 5 (2/3/0),
Green 3 (1/2/0)
Alberta:  Con 18 (18/0/1), NDP 4 (1/3/0), Lib 3 (0/3/0),
Green 2 (0/1/1)
Saskatchewan: Con 8 (8/0/0), Lib 1 (1/0/0), NDP 5 (0/4/1)
Manitoba:  Con 8 (7/0/1), NDP 4 (1/3/0), Lib 2 (1/1/0)
Nova Scotia:  Con 5 (3/1/1), NDP 3 (2/1/0), Lib 3 (2/1/0)
New Brunswick: Con 5 (4/0/1), NDP 3 (1/2/0), Lib 2 (1/1/0)
Newfoundland:  Lib 2 (2/0/0), Con 3 (1/1/1), NDP 2 (1/1/0)
PEI:  Lib 2 (2/0/0), Con 1 (0/0/1), NDP 1 (0/1/0)
NWT:  NDP 1  Yukon:  Con 1  Nunavut:  Con 1

Total result:  Con 128, NDP 104, Lib 56, BQ 15, Green 5

(Actual result:  Con 166, NDP 103, Lib 34, BQ 4, Green 1)

THE MAD MAGICIAN

"I don't play monsters.  I play men besieged by fate and out for revenge"--Vincent Price

Well, I went to THE MAD MAGICIAN at the Revue as planned.  It's a 1954 3-D thriller with a Gay '90s setting, clearly intended to repeat Vincent Price's success in 3-D HOUSE OF WAX the year before.  It doesn't have the man playing with the bolo bat, but the script is more clever.  Price plays a magician who finds he's lost the rights to the contraptions he created, motivating a killing spree.  A master of disguise, he steals his victims' identities in a twist no doubt borrowed from Camus' existential novel L'ETRANGER. (Only steal from the best!)

The leading lady is Mary Murphy, whose main claim to fame was THE WILD ONE the same year.  She had the immortal goofy line "My father was going to take me on a fishing trip in Canada once." This was the era when the big studios reciprocated their unlimited access to Canadian markets by inserting references to Canada into lots of scripts.  Another example is the Western BEND OF THE RIVER, where Jimmy Stewart says about a flock of birds, "They come from Canada."

And of course there are the 3-D gimmicks, like when Price concludes a magic performance by pointing his wand at the camera and having it squirt water. (Movies of the '50s were full of such corny phallus symbolism.  I remember the scene in the Doris Day vehicle CALAMITY JANE where a soldier had been tied to a tree by Native Americans, but not in the conventional way:  he was sitting with his legs forming a V-shape, with the tree inside the V-shape's corner!)

Query:  What happened to the bag containing a human head that was last seen heading to a police station?

A decent Canadian

I recently heard about a British Columbian called Jack Hallam who announced that his will includes a $700 bequest for Omar Khadr.  That's the kind of Canadian who makes me feel some pride for my country.  He's a gay atheist, not the sort who sympathizes with Islamic fundamentalists, but he recognizes that we must take responsibility for what the Canadian government does in our name to a fellow citizen.

Speaking for myself, I don't know what happened during that 2002 firefight.  Some people insist that Khadr couldn't have thrown a grenade to kill that US medic, but I wasn't there.  What I do know was that Khadr was only 15 at the time, and had been even younger when his family enlisted him in the Taliban fight.  Some African child soldiers who killed many people are now being rehabilitated far from prison because we recognize similar special circumstances in their case.

Some people want to view Khadr's Gitmo confession as the last word about his guilt, but it's clear that the Americans played dirty pool in obtaining it. (Canadian agents played some dirty pool too.) As for his trial, it's clear that Khadr was pleading guilty under duress, just like Stalin's enemies in the Moscow show trials of the 1930s.  The Canadian government disgraced itself when it dragged its feet and delayed Khadr's repatriation till a year after Washington was prepared to allow it.

Of course, some people have ridiculed Hallam.  It's too bad that some people see things in terms of the Khadr family's collective guilt.  I hope that people like Hallam will be a good influence on Omar and he won't see Canadian or American people as collectively guilty for his mistreatment.

Netflix

Since last February we've subscribed to the Canadian branch of Netflix downloads.  It's convenient for watching TV series and only costs the same as a few DVD rentals per month.  Yet I feel jealous because the Canadian selection is a lot smaller than the American version.

One series my sister Moira and I have been watching on Netflix is BREAKING BAD.  It's a real classic about a high school chemistry teacher opening a meth lab.  My parents and I have seen all four seasons of the late-'70s spoof sitcom SOAP, which was often broad but had a good cast. (Billy Crystal is the most famous today, but Katherine Helmond and Richard Mulligan were particularly notable.)  I've also been watching PRISON BREAK, which is something of a guilty pleasure for me.  The first season, in particular, has great narrative drive.

Lately, I've started watching HELL ON WHEELS, a western about building the Union Pacific railway just after the Civil War.  It's produced by AMC, which has been making a lot of interesting shows:  others are MAD MEN and the aforementioned BREAKING BAD.  This is a very violent show, and not just in the conventional "A shoots B" way; there's a great deal of hate and vengefulness.  The main character is a Confederate veteran hunting down and murdering the Union veterans directly responsible for his wife's murder.  Another character, the robber baron building the line, is played by that Irish actor Colm Meany. (I loved his line in THE VAN when he was learning to fry chips and was asked for an example of a simile: "Me chips are burnt as fuck!" The Irish have a great way of twisting the English language around.)

Netflix also has a lot of interesting documentaries.  I've also started watching a biographical series about Churchill.

JEKYLL & HYDE at the Revue

This afternoon I went to the Revue Cinema on Roncesvalles Street, which is celebrating its centenary.  It's a miracle that these repertory screens are still around today!  When I lived in Toronto thirty years ago I came to think of the Dundas West station as the station near the Revue. (I also identified Bathurst with the Bloor, College with the Carleton, Bay with the Cumberland, Royal York with the Kingsway...)

I saw the first presentation of the new season of silent movies at the Revue, with live piano accompaniment by William O'Meara! (The only thing that beats a live piano accompanying a silent movie is a live orchestra, which is how I saw Murnau's SUNRISE at London's Royal Festival Hall back in 1995.) First they showed two shorts:  DW Griffiths' EDGAR ALLEN POE, and the second chapter of the serial A WOMAN IN GREY, which ended with Arlene Pretty about to be knifed...

The main feature was John Barrymore's 1920 version of RL Stevenson's DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE.  It was a bit elliptical about the evil things Hyde did.  I've never read the book but I ought to someday. (Stevenson got the idea from the real-life story of an eighteenth-century minister who moonlighted as a highwayman.) Freud must have had a field day with it!

Wednesday night the Revue is showing an early Vincent Price horror movie THE MAD MAGICIAN.  I definitely want to see that one too!

Walkies!

I'm a member of dozens of groups at meetup.com .  Of course, the number whose events I attend is quite a bit smaller.  I used to go to board game events a lot, but not so much lately.  One type of event I often go to is walks. (Walking is my main exercise.)

Today I went on a walk of haunted Toronto sites sponsored by Newcomers Explore and Appreciate Toronto, connected to Culturelink, an organization that helps accustomize immigrants to this city.  The walk went from the Keg building near Jarvis and Wellesley to the Old City Hall (now a courthouse) on Queen Street, and was about haunted sites.

They had a few immigrants talking about the different places we were passing to improve their spoken English, but despite the bullhorn their voices were a bit too quiet for me to follow. (If I felt that way, how did the other immigrants who speak English as a second language?)

Along the way we passed by a group protesting the private member's bill to ban abortion.  And at the end of the walk I noticed a group of Syrian-Canadians protesting the Assad regime.  One of them told me that Hafez Assad had managed to turn the country's various cities and tribes against each other, but his son Bashir has managed to unite all of Syria against his regime.

On the way home, I passed by the Zombie Walk, which was bigger than I'd have expected.  One guy was dressed as an undead pope!

Posting at The Huffington Post

I write a lot of posts at THE HUFFINGTON POST.  I use the handle Fearless Freep, after the no-show daredevil in the Bugs Bunny-Yosemite Sam cartoon HIGH DIVING HARE. (That's the one where Fearless Freep is going to do the fabulous high-diving act in Bugs' show, but he doesn't show up so Yosemite Sam insists that Bugs do it instead, but Bugs keeps tricking Sam into doing it...) For my avatar I have a photo of JS Woodsworth, first leader of the CCF, forerunner of the present-day NDP and pioneer of Canadian socialism.

Unfortunately, because of the website FREE REPUBLIC right-wing trolls have been nicknamed "Freepers," so people see my handle and assume I'm right-wing (especially when I criticize Obama!). And some people think my avatar is of Lenin or Freud.  So I added a mini-bio calling myself "A lefty with an avatar of JS Woodsworth." (They can google Woodsworth's name.)

Some issues get me posting a lot, like gay civil rights (I'm not gay myself, but civil rights is something I believe in), Omar Khadr (the child soldier given a show trial that disgraced both the US and Canadian governments), and Bradley Manning (the little traitor being prosecuted for exposing the big ones). But just lately I haven't had much to post about.  What on earth can I say about the Obama-Romney debates?  It just doesn't mean much to me.

My parents have taken to reading my posts, which has made me a bit more conscious of what I write.  It isn't that they ever disagree with me, but knowing that they're looking at it has somehow got me wondering if I'm making myself look silly.

CIVILISATION

Since last weekend we've been watching Kenneth Clark's 1969 "personal view" documentary series CIVILISATION, which I first saw when I was a kid.  It's fascinating stuff.

Kenneth Clark came from a wealthy Scottish family that made its fortune manufacturing thread, and became director of the National Gallery when barely 30. (One of his sons became a Conservative MP and is known for his rakish diary; the other became a filmmaker and his encounter with Marilyn Monroe became the movie MY WEEK WITH MARILYN.)  I find that Anglicized Scots like him have a way of becoming more English than the English. (Other examples:  Tony Blair, Colin Firth, the Queen Mother...)

This series is a history of Western civilization as seen through its art.  That means mostly visual arts like painting, sculpture and architecture, though there's also some time for theatre, essays and music.  One thing that impresses me is the way cultures of the West have often "failed upward," as in the Renaissance happening so soon after the Black Death. (Oddly, Clark skipped over the Black Death, as well as Spanish culture so far.)

Clark was a pedant of the "old school": you don't see people like him on TV these days.  He narrates the series with a restrained diffidence I found curious in childhood, leavened with some dry wit.  He's full of observations like that atonement has done as much for art as megalomania and self-glorification.

This year's TOR

I'm singing in the Toronto Opera Repertoire chorus again this year.  We're putting on Offenbach's TALES OF HOFFMANN and Rossini's THE BARBER OF SEVILLE. (There are several really small male soloist roles in HOFFMANN, more acting than singing, and I might be cast in one!)

We usually do one opera with a big role for the chorus and one where their presence is smaller, and HOFFMANN definitely has the bigger chorus part of the two.  So we've been concentrating on that one so far; we'll only be starting BARBER next week.  I'm actually a bit behind so far this year:  I was in London during the first rehearsal, and had to leave the second early because I was still dealing with jet lag. (I'd flown home the day before.)

Tonight we had an acting class for choristers, which is always fun. David Roche and Tita Griffin preside. (Giovanni Menardi, who'd just had a hip operation, came in on crutches to give us a class on pronouncing Italian and French.) They talked about the HOFFMANN plot, and we ended up splitting into sub-groups and making conversation as characters in a scene from the opera.

I was looking up the story behind HOFFMANN on Wikipedia, and it's pretty interesting.  He was an actual romantic writer living in Germany early in the nineteenth century, and he wrote himself into  his stories as the main character. (He also wrote the stories that the ballets NUTCRACKER and COPPELIA were based on, and some early science fiction.) I've seen it performed, both in the 1950 British movie directed by Powell & Pressburger and in the recent Met production that was broadcast in cinemas.  Offenbach died before its premiere and there are several different versions, but the muse was really smiling on him during his last work!

Goodenough College

I spent eight months at Goodenough College in 1995.  That's a residence for international graduate students located around Mecklenburgh Square in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London, where I was researching my Ph.D. thesis on the British community in the Chinese treaty port of Chongqing. (I was fortunate that my sister Margaret had stayed there the year before:  her connection helped me get in.) I did most of my London research at the Public Records Office in Kew (consular reports), though I also did some at places like the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies.

They have two main residences:  William Goodenough House (where I stayed, which is nicknamed Willy G.), and London House.  It occurred to me that London House was like Chongqing's foreign merchant community, being mostly single people, while Willy G., with many married couples and families, was more like the foreign missionary community.  They also have a hotel-style Goodenough Club, where I stay whenever I visit London.

When I revealed to my friend John George that I have a Ph.D., he was really impressed and said I should make more of it.  But it really doesn't mean so much to me.  When it was over I felt like the scene in EASY RIDER where Dennis Hopper says "We did it!" but Peter Fonda says "We blew it." The thesis wasn't as good as I wanted it to be--I was too defensive--and I was lucky to pass.

But the eight months I spent at Willy G. were the best eight months of my life!  Besides my research work, I had time to get to know a great city full of history and culture, and even take part in several Willy G. activities--I helped run the video club--and get to know people.  I remember a moment when I was strolling through the University of London campus on a Sunday afternoon in the fall, and really felt at home. (Or maybe it's a composite of moments in my memory.)

Gold records

Youtube is a great channel for listening to music.  I have a coffee-table book titled THE BOOK OF GOLDEN DISCS, listing records year by year that sold a million copies or more up to about 1977.  Lately I've been going through the book backward from the last pages, listening to gold-record singles I don't recognize from the mid-'70s. (Some stuff I did recognize, of course.  I was happy to listen to Chicago's "If You Leave Me Now" again.)

A lot of this music was mediocre, of course, but there were quite a few "keepers," like Sweet's "Little Willy" and the Elton John-Neil Sedaka duet "Bad Blood." There was also stuff like Raydio's "Jack and Jill," which I remembered hearing before without knowing anything about it.  I also re-discovered Parliament's early rap album CLONES OF DR. FUNKENSTEIN, which I'd heard at a campus radio station. (One Youtube contributor managed to upload the whole album in a single post!)

And then there's the ear-worms, as the Germans call them.  Stuff that gets into your head and won't leave, Terry Jacks' "Seasons in the Sun" being a notorious example.  I discovered a perfectly ineffable Eurovision song by Brotherhood of Man(?) called "Save Your Kisses for Me." (Listen to it if you dare.) Another is "Get up and Boogie" by the German disco trio Silver Convention.  Less famous than their "Fly, Robin, Fly," its lyric consists of the title line repeated over and over, with an occasional "That's right" thrown in for variety.  Catch their costumes in the Youtube video--does any clothing item scream "70s" louder than the sleeveless pantsuit?

I've wearied of '70s music and now I'm going to start working forward from the front page and listen to the early hits.  I'm especially interested in the '30s song "Peanuts," because I remember Cary Grant singing the opening line ("Peanuuuuts!") in ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS.

zip.ca

For the past eight years, we've been renting most of our DVDs through the mail, from zip.ca . (That's the Canadian equivalent of Netflix.) They send us as many as 16 discs over a month--with a maximum of six out at one time--costing an average of just over $2.00.

Its biggest advantage is its extremely wide selection.  I have a "queue" of about 400 videos that I want to see eventually, though over half of them are currently out of stock.  And my tastes are wide-ranging.  I've been watching a lot of classic TV shows like MISSION:  IMPOSSIBLE, some episodes of which I remember seeing 40 years ago. (My sister Margaret was in love with Leonard Nimoy back then, but not because of STAR TREK:  he was master of disguise Paris on MISSION:  IMPOSSIBLE for a couple of years.)

I also like Hollywood classics (recently saw THE GUNFIGHTER, with Gregory Peck cast against type), documentaries (including FRONTLINE productions on subjects like the Apollo 8 expedition), operas (just returned a Munich production of Richard Strauss' DER ROSENKAVALIER), MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, and the earlier seasons of DOCTOR WHO.  Stuff I've recently seen includes a collection of early avant-garde short films (I didn't know Man Ray made movies!), Nicolas Roeg's BAD TIMING:  A SENSUAL OBSESSION, and the Canadian THE SILENT PARTNER (the one where bank teller Elliot Gould short-changes robber Christopher Plummer and keeps most of the loot for himself).

The monthly cycles start on the 16th.  Usually I have an easy time viewing all 16 films and returning them by the 16th, so I'll get a full six sent out on that day.  But last month I was in London until the 25th, so I started with a nine-day handicap.  In addition, some of the later discs were sent from Ottawa or Vancouver and took longer to arrive than usual, so I couldn't even be sure that I'd be sent the full 16 in time.  But I expect they'll be sending the last one tomorrow (the 15th), so I should get my maximum requisition by the skin of my teeth.

Reading aloud

I'm the organizer of the Read Out Loud Toronto Meetup group. (I usually avoid the hassle of organizing these groups, but it was something I believed in.) We meet every Saturday afternoon at Butler's Pantry in Mirvish Village.  At past events we've read stuff by American writers and opening passages, and this time, with Halloween approaching, we did scary stories. (Next month we'll do poetry.)

Only three people showed up, but that meant I got to read more stuff than usual.  Jane read from Dante's DIVINE COMEDY the part where he's in the inferno's lowest circle.  Collette read one of the ghost stories in Robertson Davies' HIGH SPIRITS, and the part in Dickens' OLIVER TWIST where the undertaker and Oliver come to pick up a dead girl. ("She'll only disturb the worms, not feed them.") And I read the Robert Frost poem "The Witch of Coos"; the Poe story "The Oval Portrait"; the part in Mark Twain's HUCKLEBERRY FINN where his father gets the DTs and almost knifes him; and the Grimm Brothers story "The Willful Child," which goes as follows.

"Once upon a time there was a child who was willful, and would not do what her mother wished.  For this reason God had no pleasure in her, and let her become ill, and no doctor could do her any good, and in a short time she lay on her death-bed.  When she had been lowered into her grave, and the earth had spread over her, all at once her arm came out again, and stretched upwards, and when they had put it in and spread fresh earth over it, it was all to no purpose, for the arm always came out again.  Then the mother herself was obliged to go to the grave, and strike the arm with a rod, and when she had done that, it was drawn in, and then at last the child had rest beneath the ground."

My grammatical pet peeves

On the subway today I saw a new advertising campaign by the McDonald's restaurant people inviting customers to ask questions about the food. (Speaking for myself, I don't ask questions I don't want to know the answer to.) One of them was, "How much preservatives do you put on your fries?" My solecism detector flashed red: "how much" shouldn't be used with plurals." You could ask "How many preservatives..." though then the question would be about variety rather than amount.  To ask about amount, you should say "How much preservative..." or "How much in the way of preservatives..."

An expression that bugs me is "one of the two or three most." Does it have a more specific meaning than a mere "one of the most"?  Only by a vague, trivial margin. ("One of the three most" or "the second or third most," on the other hand, have a specific, measurable difference.) It seems to me something that people say to sound extra-specific, not to BE extra-specific.

I don't care for expressions like "I'm going to the front and talk to the general." Maybe it isn't actually ungrammatical, but it doesn't FEEL right to me.  I just don't like having "and" join a noun and an infinitive.  I recall that back in 1996 the US Congress passed "The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act," which had "and" joining a vowel and a noun, which is clearly ungrammatical.

BTW, I'm actually more comfortable with "Ain't I?" than with "Aren't I?"!

Pick your own

When I was growing up in Sackville, New Brunswick, one of our September rituals was to go to Stirling Apples in Aulac and buy a whole bushel of fresh Gravenstein apples from the Annapolis Valley.  They'd start out really tart, but get mellower as we worked down to the bottom of the basket.

Gravensteins are harder to find in Ontario, but through the miracle of Google search I found Orchard Home Farms, a pick-your-own orchard out near Cambridge.  Toward the end of August we go out there and pick several bags of Gravensteins.  We also go back in early October to get Jonagold, Mutsu and Golden Delicious.

This year was a bust for apple growers thanks to a warm March followed by a cold April.  They didn't have any Gravensteins.  Then after I came back from London I didn't feel well, then Father didn't feel well, so we only got out there today.  They only had Golden Delicious to pick, not as big as what we were used to.  But they also had some nice pre-picked Ambrosias and Honey Golds.

I noticed they're growing some new Gravenstein trees there.  I hope they're bearing fruit before too many years.

In July we also go to Whittamore Farm just north of Steeles Avenue.  We pick our own strawberries and raspberries, and they also have peas and beans and such.  We always go early in the morning, before the summer heat reaches its daily peak.

The golden age of comic strips

For the past several years I've been subscribing to King Features comic strips at dailyink.com .  It's mostly for the strips they've been reprinting from the classic era before 1960.  One of them is Alex Raymond's detective strip RIP KIRBY.  When I was 10 or 11 that was one of the only adventure strips in my local newspaper (by that time John Prentice had taken over), and he was the coolest guy in the world!  He was an intellectual (he wore glasses, didn't he?) but also a man of action ready for fist fights and gunplay.

Another classic strip I follow is BRICK BRADFORD.  The interesting thing about that strip is how wide-ranging Bradford's adventures are:  from latter-day Incas and Vikings to going inside an atom! (In later years it got into time travel and mystical powers in a big way.) Right now I'm reading a story about his pursuit of a stolen First Nations doll with diamond eyes, which allowed for some Dick Tracy-type gunplay and now has him heading to the Wild West.

Lee Falk's MANDRAKE THE MAGICIAN and THE PHANTOM are guilty pleasures for me. (I also follow the present-day Mandrake, but that's sheer nostalgia:  now that Falk's dead, the stories are pretty lame.)

I also read FLASH GORDON (not Alex Raymond's golden age, but the '50s under Mac Raboy and Dan Barry, when it was still pretty darn good), Roy Crane's BUZ SAWYER, Stan Drake's THE HEART OF JULIET JONES (my favorite character's her erratic little sister Eve), John Cullen Murphy's BIG BEN BOLT (from the time when a Caucasian boxing champion wasn't laughable), Mort Walker's BEETLE BAILEY and the squarer police strip PAT OF THE RADIO PATROL.

One skill I value highly in cartoonists is the ability to draw pretty women.  In heaven the girls are drawn by artists like Raymond, Crane and Murphy!

There are some present-day strips I keep up with too, but that's mostly stuff like MARY WORTH and MARK TRAIL that I only read because Josh Fruhlinger writes about them (and makes fun of them) at his "The Comics Curmudgeon" blog at joshreads.com .
But I must mention that FUNKY WINKERBEAN has improved remarkably over the years:  it started out as a strip about high-schoolers but the characters have aged over the years GASOLINE ALLEY-style and it's now a remarkably mature strip about middle-aged people.

Facebook games

I got interested in Facebook games about three years ago, when someone drew me into Farmville.  I like these games where you develop a homestead or a city over time.  For quite a while my favorite game was Frontierville, because it involved so many different kinds of farming and ranching. (I even spent quite a bit of money on it.)

I've also spent time on games like Cityville and Castleville.  Recently, I spent a year on both Kingdoms of Camelot and Glory of Rome.  I've also had long involvements with Ravenskye City and Superhero City.  I'm still playing Castle Age, but I may quit before long.  I also play Hot Shot, which unlike the others is a virtual-rebound game.

The newest game I'm wasting time on (but still not much money) is Farmville 2.  The game really becomes fun when you get to the level of operating a country kitchen:  then the challenge is to grow the different crops and fruits and feed the livestock so that your production will have the right balance for your cooking and baking.  The main production bottleneck is the limited water available.  One advantage is has over the first Farmville is that crops don't seem to wither if you leave them unharvested too long.

Yeah, I know I'm a loser to be spending so much time on frivolous computer games.

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?"