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October Optimisms

This week I’m back taking a cue from John at The Sound of One Hand Typing and his weekly writing prompts for a bit of inspiration. This time around it was to write about what we were looking forward to next month.

That would be October already. Where’s 2024 gone? October’s never been one of my favorite few months on the calendar, but as with all months, it has its charms and own appeal. Besides, any time we get to go to the calendar and flip the page, that’s something to be thankful for to begin with.

Of course, not to be flippant about it, but I can hope for a month when one country won’t be detonating remote-controlled explosives to wipe out people they don’t like as well as hundreds of folk who just happen to be going about their daily business around said people. And in turn, for those masses not to figure the best answer would be to fire a volley of missiles back in the country’s direction to take out a few of their schools and hospitals. But with the state of the world that’s the sort of thing that might require an old lamp full of one benevolent genie at our beck and call to accomplish.

On a personal level though… well, unlike the last three or four years, it won’t be playoff baseball since my beloved Blue Jays are playing out the string with a losing record and will be heading to their own winter homes once the regular season ends on the last weekend of this month. Sigh. So goes the life of any sports fan. Of course, I’ll probably still watch some playoff games, but it’s not quite so compelling when “my” team (nor my sweetie’s…she backs another team, but one having the same fate as mine this year) isn’t involved.

What I am looking forward to with anticipation, much to my younger self’s surprise, is some cooler weather. Some days when I can go out in an ordinary pair of jeans and a short-sleeved shirt in the afternoon and not be soaked in sweat after five minutes. A night or two when we can open the window and get a breath of fresh air blowing through. Maybe even give the AC an hour or two downtime!

Thinking about it, what jumped out at me was “perspective”. Because now October means something quite different to me than what it did back when I lived in Canada.

There, of course I still looked forward to the post-season baseball, but all in all, it was a mildly depressing month, because it meant a sure and steady descent into a long and cold winter. There would be some nice days, almost certainly, but probably rather few. Most October days tend to be brisk and frequently dreary, drizzly and dank where I came from. The few nice “Indian Summer” days would be welcomed, but even they had their own downside. With the sun and rising thermometer would also arise swarms of Yellow Jackets and other wasps that would make a nice walk outside a perilous pursuit it seemed. One could forget about sitting out on a patio to enjoy the sun and a cold Oktoberfest brew or tasty brat. Here, they don’t seem any more prevalent than any of the other 350 or so days of the year the temp’s risen above 50 degrees.

The two things that were highlights up there in October were Thanksgiving and fall colors. Because, yes, in Canada, Thanksgiving falls on the second Monday of October, not a snowball’s throw from Christmas at November’s tail-end. That still seems peculiar to me; eat your turkey then put up your Christmas tree! So, second Monday of October meant a nice meal, typically with one of my parents and some of their friends, plus a day off with pay (or else a day with wild overtime pay if I volunteered to work). Not so different than fourth Thursday of November here actually, it’s still a day of a nice meal and family time, just a different page on the calendar.

Now the colors… people up on either side of the Great Lakes are really spoiled in that department. I was somewhat aware of that, but became much more so when I moved! As dreary as Ontario Octobers usually were, you could rely on having some dazzling colors and postcard-ready scenes on nearly every block. The predominance of maples which turn neon orange or flag red in fall, in every forest, city park and front lawn alike, with a few of the yellow-leaved birches, rusty-clad beeches mixed in and sprinkle of truly ever-green evergreens in their midst create landscapes that I would imagine many newcomers can scarcely believe are even of this planet! It didn’t matter precisely where I was up there, or what I was doing, I’d always try to be out for at least an afternoon and run through a roll or two of film, trying to capture the ultimate fall scene. Never did, but I got a lot of pretty spectacular ones. Maybe some year I’ll go on a jaunt back there for one more go at it.

Here, by comparison, the colors also  “peak” around the local Thanksgiving – late November, early December perhaps. But to say “peak” is a bit of an exaggeration. They are rather second-rate by comparison. Live Oaks go dull brownish, pecans work hard at showing a little yellow before they dump their leaves and half the other deciduous trees figure it’s warm enough that they might as well hang onto their coat and let them just drop off one or two leaves at a time throughout the year.

So, October, not one of my real favorite months but when it comes down to it, isn’t what really matters is finding something great in it. I keep a ceramic pumpkin on my desk that has “thankful” written across it. Ironically, it’s the one month of the year no one questions it; its close to standard decorating fare come October. But I leave it out year-round. To remind myself. Finding something great and to be grateful for each and every month of the year is what it is all about. I hope you do just that yourselves!

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Flashback Photo Friday 2

Me ‘n’ Bruce.

A couple of weeks back I posted an old childhood pic of my brother and I, spurred on by a Flashback Friday segment my friend Keith, the Nostalgic Italian runs. It seemed to be of interest to some of you, so I give it another go today.

This shot would’ve been around 1992 or so, give or take a year. I was the Assistant Manager of a camera store/one hour photo place in the city’s biggest mall…and big it was. It ran straight north-south for over a quarter mile and had something like 200 stores and services back then, anchored by three department stores – Canada’s trifecta back then, Eaton’s, Sears and The Bay – and a grocery store. It had a big food court, a multi-plex movie theatre with, if I remember correctly, 8 screens, you name it.

I was in my mid-20s at the time, and with it being only a couple of blocks from my apartment, it was like a second home to me. This was back when people still went to the mall! I shopped there, I worked there, sometimes I’d be a typical ’80s youth and just hang out there. That wasn’t as utterly futile as it sounds; working there for a long time I got to know a lot of people that worked in the 199 or so other stores, most of them it would seem around my age. It was a bit of a social magnet back then for young singles (young married types too, but I wasn’t that). I could therefore be just about guaranteed to run into a number of friends whenever I went by, day or night.

Now to the store itself. It was back in something of the Golden Age for not only malls but for photographic retail. Film was still king – the few digital cameras around were obnoxiously bulky, overly expensive and stunningly low resolution. Every picture looked like a Minecraft creation. (Hence I and many others in the industry didn’t think they’d ever really take off. Little did we know!)  But the advent of 35mm point-and-shoot cameras at reasonable prices in the ’80s meant suddenly almost anyone could afford to have a halfway decent camera… and they did. We were always busy, more or less (some days and times more so than others, obviously) and sold a ton of film and good numbers of the little cameras. Oddly, we made most of the profits on the photo-printing and on accessories like frames and albums, when people still bought them. We only pulled in a couple of dollars per camera typically, so tight was the competition and low the markup on them. We had a few SLR cameras as well, the more expensive, more professional sorts which I preferred playing with and selling, but the market was for the beginner cams with a little zoom and tiny built-in flash that worked to about six feet away… and when it worked gave people devilish red eyes.

The store developed film and had a printer which spat prints out on a sort of conveyor belt They popped out right by the big front glass windows; when photo labs like it were new it was quite a novelty for people to see photos coming out of the machine and up onto a sorter. This was great if it was cute pet photos, or nice wedding shots, or family picnics but should have been a red flag to people who had taken, shall we say “naughty” shots. If you didn’t want pretty much anyone you knew or didn’t know happening by and seeing your little foray into the fine art of pornography, this was probably not the lab to come to! Never stopped some people though, and our staff were about divided down the middle as to whether or not this was a good thing! Of course, there were guidelines about what we would or wouldn’t touch, but for the most part if it was legal, we printed. I figure savvy home-made X-rated enthusiasts probably therefore represented a good chunk of our customer base for Polaroid instant cams!

I could run the film processors and printer, trouble-shoot them, mix the smelly chemicals for them but the bosses seemed to prefer me out front, dealing with customers. This didn’t make a lot of sense to me, I didn’t think I was that personable or outgoing. But somehow people seemed to ask for me by name and I sold more cameras than most other employees…probably because of my low-pressure, laissez faire approach. I was anything but high pressure and I wasn’t going to sell someone a $400 fancy camera with all sorts of buttons for slow-sync flash and multiple self-timers and white balance if they just wanted a couple of photos on the beach come vacation time and previously had used nothing more complicated than an Instamatic. They’d be happy with the $89 special and that camera would get used; the other one would probably be in the closet after one trying roll of film with poor pictures caused by buttons being pushed randomly and they’d be cursing us to everyone they could tell.

So onto this actual photo. You see me in the front area of that store, crowded camera showcase behind me. I’m the one on the right, by the way! And with me…”Bruce”. Crikey, he’s a kangaroo, mate! Someone in the store had a sense of humor and a knowledge of Monty Python I guess (for those unfamiliar, a classic skit of theirs involves a university where all the faculty except one are called “Bruce” …) so we nicknamed him that. As you can see, there was some sort of promotion going on co-sponsored by Konica (before they merged with Minolta, they were a mid-level camera company and maker of our house brand of film) where if you bought some of their product, you could enter to win a trip to Australia.

Looking at it now, I figure this was a good evening. We males were supposed to wear ties in there at all times (unless we had permission to wear a branded polo shirt) but it wasn’t enforced that rigorously unless we were expecting head office to drop by. My hair was longer than I remembered back then! And it’s odd, I have a few remaining photos from that era and I’m not in regular glasses in them. I found out when I was 16 and went for my driver’s license test that I was basically blind as a bat. This came as a shock to me since I was used to thinking anything more than about five feet away was blurry by nature! But I did have a brief spell where I wore contacts. Those I found hard to get used to and gave up on before long as they kept ripping and in winter when it was dry, made my eyes itch and water. But I guess this was still in that timespan; most of my adult life I don’t go anywhere without goggles so to speak!

Bruce was a good mate who got along well with everyone. People figured he’d be good to throw a shrimp on the barby with and have a cold Fosters, and he liked to meet people. Especially young ladies. A couple of us young guys working there would accompany him around the mall and go meet the lovely ladies working in other stores around us. He made friends with them quickly and most of them loved to have their picture taken with good ol’ Bruce. I wish I still had those photos! No one from higher up really questioned it and we were ready to argue “he” was helping promote our store far and wide anyway.

There were a lot of busy, hectic days there in the seven years I was there; a lot of long hours, frequent colds caused by it being so busy with sneezy customers at Christmas time. Our boss, who showed up rather erratically, wasn’t always the easiest to get along with though looking back, I was probably more quarrelsome than I might now have chosen to be. But I made some good friends there and every once in awhile we had some really good times. When all is said and done, can’t ask for a whole lot more out of a job than that. 

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Honesty Is Seldom Ever Heard. Particularly In This Arena

This week take a cue from John at The Sound of One Hand Typing and his weekly writing prompts for a bit of inspiration. One of his suggestions this week was a post on “honest”. Boy that got my mind thinking right away!

”Honesty is such a lonely word, everyone is so untrue, honesty is hardly ever heard…” so opined Billy Joel in one of his great early songs, simply called “Honesty”. Well, I don’t know that everyone is so untrue, but man, it sure does seem to apply rather well to one branch of society, doesn’t it? Politicians!

Now let me state right here clearly – << I do not intend this to be a political blog. I have my opinions and preferences but this isn’t the forum and I don’t want to be having a lot of sniping opinions insulting one politician or trumpeting the praises of another here, be they American, Canadian, British, Zimbabwean… you name it. >>  But I want to talk in general about the field of politics.

Now, possibly at the grass-roots, local level you might find a totally honest, clear-speaking… alderman. Or school board trustee. Or so on. But when you get to the level of  big stages, politicians running for the top offices of a state, province or the country itself… well, that seems to be a rare commodity, like Billy Joel sang, doesn’t it?

Part of that comes from a bit of delusionism that I think is common among most of us and even more so when one rises to those levels. We tend to over-estimate our own abilities and overlook obstacles in our path. Male, female, left, right, it doesn’t matter… it takes a lot of ego to truly think you are the best person possible to run an entire country.

There’s also probably a certain under-handed honesty involved, which is to say, being wise or pragmatic perhaps. Jimmy Carter was probably the last American president who basically said things were a mess and he couldn’t fix it all by himself and the public couldn’t wait to show him the door and go for someone much more optimistic. So it is logical perhaps to over-simplify and exude optimism if you want to be elected.  That said, I would so love to hear something like this from a candidate running for a high office:

“We have a lot of problems to deal with and frankly, I can’t fix them all – especially not in just four years before the next election. There are no dead simple, easy solutions to things like inflation, the economy, crime, immigration, the environment and climate change, our energy needs and supplies, rising costs of health care, fixing our infrastructure, homelessness and so on. These are complicated problems that have developed over decades and they won’t be fixed in months by any one simple measure. If there was a simple solution to these problems, they wouldn’t be problems because my predecessors would have done them years ago.

We need to develop long-term, multi-tiered responses to those problems and be patient because improvement is going to be gradual, not overnight. Some of the solutions will involve some measures you won’t like, and I won’t like either because we simply can’t keep everyone happy on every issue and still get things done.

That in mind, I will listen to my opponents and if they can contribute useful ideas, I won’t hesitate to accept them. But for that they need to be constructive and develop ideas, not just criticize others.

Even with all these caveats, we still need to realize that some problems can never fully be solved and our progress might be stalled along the way by unforeseen events. In 2018 or thereabouts, no one truly expected a new disease becoming a pandemic and shutting down so much of our world for a year or more. We don’t know what lies ahead and though we can take advice from experts and come up with contingency plans for probable disasters or surprise events, unexpected things will occur and may require deviation from out plans. To be effective we need to be flexible.

If you elect me, at the time of the next election, we’ll still hear of senseless crimes taking place in our cities, gasoline may well cost a bit more than it does now, our summers could well be a degree hotter than they are now, there’ll be people on our downtown streets that seem impervious to assistance offered, and though there’ll be new industries and jobs being made by the day, very likely some of our current factories and services will have closed. Our highways may still have potholes, but there will be fewer. More people will be able to access affordable health care and good education, but some will unfortunately still fall through the cracks. But we will be making progress and walking forward, not backward. Wars will likely still be raging overseas, and some of them we may need to offer our assistance in, while in more we will have no realistic option but to sit on the sidelines and let things transpire. But we’ll speak for what is right, here and everywhere.

That is all I can promise and all we can realistically hope for.”

I for one would vote for that candidate. But I don’t hold my breath on having him or her emerge through the ranks any century soon. But wouldn’t that “honesty” be refreshing?

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A Lament For The Laughers

This week we go back to John from The Sound of One Hand Typing and his weekly writing prompts for a bit of inspiration. One idea this week was a post in 12 sentences. It’s going to be a challenge but here I go :

One of the things I miss most about the “old days” is newspapers. “Old” as in even just a few years ago. Just think about the TV show Friends for instance. The main characters were young, often superficial and shallow… but show after show, they’d be looking at the daily papers while chatting in their apartments or sipping at the cafe. Good luck finding that happening these days. I glanced at my watch and realized one more thing we lose with the disappearance of the daily newspaper as a routine part of life – the “funnies”. You see, the watch I have on today is a Peanuts one I was given, and it has a little Snoopy on it. When I was a kid, I used to love Peanuts; as I grew older, I found and loved new strips like Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side, and later still, Retail – one which reminded me of my own crazy experiences working in that sector. It used to be a little wee bright spot in the day, but I can’t remember the last time I actually looked at “the comics”. Most days now I couldn’t if I wanted to; our local “daily” paper prints three days a week now. I guess I could find most online if I was really dedicated, but I never seem to think of it. Tough times to be a newspaper reporter… or, I guess, to be a comic strip creator.

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Flashback Foto Friday Fun?

This week I give a tip of the hat to Keith, The Nostalgic Italian. If you read my music blog, you probably know his name by now as he’s often contributed guest articles…which he’s well-suited to do since he worked in radio for years. But his own site covers a range of topics that go well beyond music. One he’s been doing lately is a “Flashback Friday Photo” segment, and I figured it’s a good idea so I will do that today.

Photos are one of the biggest ironies in my life as I come to think about it. Both my parents liked photography. My dad had a Nikkormat SLR when I was a kid and would take it along on our trips. Mom was more an instant photo type, who also became the family “super 8” videographer in the ’70s when it seems every family had one of those portable movie cameras. It didn’t take me long as a kid to take after them, and by the time I was perhaps 6, I had a Kodak Instamatic box camera, I loved shooting pictures on vacation. Before long I’d “graduated” to an Olympus Trip point & shoot 35mm camera and by the time I was well into high school I had an SLR (the bigger cameras you can change lenses on). Working university summers at a conservation agency, one of my main “chores” was to document the parks… if nothing else was happening, there’s a decent chance I’d just be off to one of the local areas, photographing either events going on or else the landscape, the flowers, wildlife if I could snap them. It wasn’t too many years after that I ended up, almost randomly, working in a mall camera shop with one-hour photo lab and would end up spending nearly twenty years working in camera stores and photo labs, often doing a little freelance work on the side with my own gear.

So, you’d expect I’d have box after box of photos, albums, negatives and such, wouldn’t you?

Instead, the opposite seems the case. Most of my pre-2008 photos were lost, rather through my own stupidity. Story for another day, that. But some were held onto… and a number of those ended up at my dad’s place. He had a basement and garage for storage, I didn’t. Alas, pop passed away suddenly a few years ago and his house was cleaned out to allow for it to be sold very quickly and I wasn’t able to retrieve any (allegedly the people doing so couldn’t find any of my boxes nor photo albums of my dad’s pictures, of which I would guess there were a lot.) Anyhow, all that means that I don’t have nearly as many pictures of my youth and young adulthood as I have memories of those images, let alone the times themselves! Yet, somehow a few got moved along with me and to start today, one I discovered recently that I’d saved from a previous computer on a jump drive. I’d scanned it years ago, though not nearly as many years ago as when the picture was taken.

The pic above is of my older brother Rick (back) and myself when we were – obviously – kids, I probably was three, maybe four at the time? Anyhow, it brings back some good memories to me and probably shows a few common things from many people’s days back in the early-’70s.

It was taken in the living room of the house I grew up in, a nice suburban bungalow that would be tiny by most of today’s home standards but was comfy and had a lot that was big, by today’s standards. I think it was 110 feet deep, and there was a park behind us. The window in the picture though, looked out on the front, and you can see a lot of vegetation and clearly, a birch tree’s white trunk. We had a number of trees, and that meant we had a number of birds. If it had been winter there’d probably have been a feeder close to that window and hours sitting there, watching the various chickadees, Cardinals and Blue Jays come and go was probably significant in developing my love of nature.

That part of the room looks pretty sedate, but check out the orange-colored window frames. My family loved color when I was young, and I wish I had photos of the rest of the room. There was a kind of velour-fabric yellow sofa and love seat, a very cool lounge chair – also yellowish fabric – that dad and I both loved, a bright orange wall, and a back wall that was velvet red-and-gold wallpaper that, looking now, probably was close to matching that Persian style rug in this photo. And a huge built-in bookcase. My dad and mom both read a lot and put a big emphasis on having me do the same as a kid, something I’m grateful for to this day.

Anyway, back to the photo. There’s some kind of wooden console or something behind us which seemed to have our LPS lined up in it. I don’t honestly remember that, but I do remember when I was really young, there was a big, long console stereo, also wood; one where you’d lift the top and there was a record player (and I assume a stereo too) inside.

As for us kids, thankfully I was dressed pretty normally in it! My mom eschewed jeans (I had to be about 14 and working an after-school part time job to start buying some for myself) and though she allowed cords for me (quite in vogue back then I think), she also loved things liked striped pants and Robin Hood-style vests for me and, if she could persuade him to wear them, my brother.

Obviously, we were playing with Hot Wheels. Obviously at least to those of us our age. The little cars are still made and popular, though I don’t know if they still make the track and accessories. The orange lines were track for the Hot Wheels, you could set it up from a high spot and race the cars down. They even made banked curves and things so you could get very elaborate with the layouts! I have absolutely no idea what it is we are running the track through here. It was easy to put up or dissemble.

I had two Hot Wheels in my hands, but alas, the picture isn’t sharp enough to see which they were. My brother was a more typical boy I guess, he’d throw his cars around, take them to school and race them off who knows what, and they got beat up. I on the other hand was fairly good at keeping them pristine. This came to be very fortuitous later on. I somehow saved a case with 24 of them into my adulthood, and I loved looking at them – they were cool designs. Some were realistic little models of real cars – I had a silver Mustang, a little red VW van with surf boards attached no less, a “souped up” Brinks truck and so on – but many were wild, futuristic looking designs like this Twin Mill of someone else’s.

hot wheels

Anyhow, amazingly I was far from the only one nostalgic for those old Hot Wheels. There was quite a collector’s market for them around early in the 2000s, and though I loved the cars, I decided to sell a number of them. Being in very good condition, they paid a surprising number of bills for me when times were a bit tough and financed a chunk of some time I spent in Atlanta. Most got me over $100 on e-bay; I think a couple went for at least $400. I spent a lot of time tearing apart other boxes of old belongings when I looked at a price guide (yes, there was one of those!) and found two that I had owned – top fuel dragsters – were valued in the four-digit price range. Unfortunately, I never did find those.

It was a good time by and large, even though I was often sick when I was that age. I spent a lot of time listening to music, even then, and reading, but my main toys were the Hot Wheels, model trains and Lego. I loved Lego too, I had big boxes and would make various houses of them. Back when Lego was just assorted blocks, windows, doors and things and you used your imagination to build with them rather than buy a kit and follow the instructions to build what Lego has decided you shall build, as we have now.

There was no internet, no video games, probably no more than 10 TV stations we could view and if the weather was nice, we’d probably be outside playing or riding bikes. Personally I wouldn’t trade that kind of childhood for today’s kids’ experiences in front of screens all day for … a box of old Hot Wheels!

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A Limey In Las Vegas? Fry Traverses The U.S.A.

I like travelogue books, particularly those with a sense of humor…Bill Bryson’s made a pretty good career out of just that. So I was particularly curious to read Stephen Fry‘s In America, which I finished recently. Mind you, it was published in 2008; I just hadn’t heard of it and by and large hadn’t heard of him before .

Fry’s a middle-aged British comic who decided to come to the U.S. to visit all 50 states and film it for a British TV show. The book outlines his adventures, most of them occurring in places he got to by driving an authentic London cab around… which doubtless drew a lot of odd stares on the highways! So, starting in a Maine lobster-fishing port in fall, he worked his way up and down and around the land, ending months later at the fish market in Seattle before flying to Alaska then Hawaii.

It’s an interesting read because he not only sees a lot of the quintessential American places and tourist attractions – the Gateway Arch, Mount Rushmore, the National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, Arches monument, the Golden Gate Bridge and so on – but also because he talks to a lot of ordinary Americans. Making it all the more interesting is, obviously, he’s a foreigner so we see the country through outside eyes. This is something I can relate to, being a Canadian by birth, but the differences between home countries is greater when there’s that ocean between them. For example, probably nothing surprises him more than college football … or rather the religious fervor fans view the sport with (which was eye-opening for me too when I first spent time in Georgia). He attends an Auburn – University of Alabama game and gapes in wonder at being almost unable to drive to the stadium because of all the tailgaters… six hours before the game started! “It is like some vast refugee camp. A refugee camp where everyone has beer, food, television, electric light, a sound system, barbeque sauce and (of course) more beer.” He’s floored by the beauty of the Utah Arches and desert scenery (“nowhere on earth looks anything like this”) but appalled by … well some things that are tough for most to take, like the homeless problem in so many cities. He loves a junior rodeo in Oklahoma but hated Waikiki Beach in Hawaii, but found solace there by hanging around with singer Jack Johnson’s wife on a more remote part of the island hearing about a school she helps run there. He enjoys a visit to the Ben & Jerry’s plant in Vermont; all the more when they let him blend some of his own ice cream.

Also high on his list of things he did not like was Atlantic City. This makes for some historically fascinating perspective; nothing there bothers him more than Donald Trump, his omnipresent appearance in the city and his casinos. Recall this was 2008… long before Trump the businessman became Trump the presidential candidate. He suggests whipping him with scorpions for the tawdry buildings he’s put up and for taking the name of “priceless mausaleum of Agra, one of the beauties and wonders of the world” and applying it to his gaudy, tacky casino – the Trump Taj Mahal. You can be a fan of President Trump or a foe but either way, it made an interesting couple of pages getting the perspective of an outsider about him when he was just a rich, loud executive and reality TV show face.

Fry was perpetually disappointed with the homogenization of American cities – the same fast food drive-thrus, Gap and Target stores and uniform strip malls from coast to coast – which I think is a sentiment quite a few Americans share. Thus he loved Asheville, a city with lots of small shops and not so many national outlets; loved the fish market in Seattle ( one place where he could find “real” bread and cheese, not to mention fresh seafood) but didn’t care much for the rest of the city, home of blustering  American icons Microsoft and Starbucks. Yes, Fry could be a wee bit condescending at times, and was almost unabashedly politically correct, which becomes tedious in a few spots. He’s appears appalled that there are a couple of older Black ladies working for a White woman at an estate he visits in Georgia but more appalled that they – the staff ladies – seemed happy to be there. I say “almost unabashedly politically correct” though, since he does refer to northern Natives as “Eskimoes”… and sneers at those who try to use other terminology. He says ones he’s met describe themselves as “Eskimo” so why should he differ?

He is baffled by the religiosity of the masses, mocks people who believe in Sasquatches, doesn’t like the diet of most Americans and finds the cities largely bland and lacking character. However…and this is a big “but” … he also mentions that most of the Americans he met coast to coast were friendly, had genuine smiles and were welcoming to strangers, more than he’s experienced in his own land. That made him love the country far more than when he began his journey. Which is a pretty good final impression for any country to leave with a visitor.

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An Acquired Taste I Was Born With

It’s been a bit of a long time since checking in here, so I figured it would be a great week to look at John, from the Sound of One Hand Typing‘s weekly writing prompts. One interesting one he had this week was to list foods you like but everyone else seems to hate. It didn’t take me long to think of one… or several actually. I guess my tastes are quite different than most people’s.

By and large I think two things stand out with me and my food/beverage tastes. One, compared to the Average Joe or Joanne, I’m not much into “sweets”. And two, I do quite like many things people find too bitter or spicy hot to be “palatable”.

The former isn’t an absolute. I do like most fruits for example – berries, pineapple, apples and so on – but that’s about as far that direction as I can happily veer. Once in awhile I might get a minor craving for vanilla ice cream or chocolate bars, but typically when I do, I have those with a cup of strong coffee to nullify some of that sweetness. Candy is just something I buy to make my wife smile. Similarly, I don’t much like pop, or as most call it down here “soda”. It’s odd maybe, because when I was a small kid, I loved Pepsi, Dr. Pepper (which is I think the “state drink” here), even sickly orange pop. Mind you, my mom watched my diet very closely as a small child so it was a rare treat for me to be allowed it back then. Nowadays I maybe will have one can or glass of pop every couple of months. The only exceptions are things like occasional European sodas that have about half the sugar and much less carbonization than the American ones, or real ginger ale (usually Jamaican) with the real, very spicy ginger dominating the taste palette. On the other hand, I do like beer. It’s not a drink I choose just to drink, or to be “manly”, I like the taste… particularly the more robust ones – IPAs, Porters and the like.

That ties into the second point. I seem to like very strong flavors. I’ve come to realize that’s because my actual sense of taste isn’t all that acute. My sweetie suggests I can’t smell a thing, and since smell is tied into taste, I can probably taste far less than most. Hence, something needs to be strong for me to really taste it. It got worse with the first bout of Covid I suffered through; for a few days I couldn’t even taste coffee. It was just hot water, no matter how strong it was brewed. In some weeks time, that sense came back, but it seems not to where it was before. Hence my tendency to pour hot sauce on, well some would say as in that Frank’s ad, pretty much everything.

I don’t worry excessively about it. It is what it is and I would be infinitely more concerned if my eyesight or hearing was as deficient as my sense of smell/taste. As it is, there are some advantages – if I open the garbage can the day before pickup day in the summer, I can smell it and don’t love it… but I don’t literally gag like some others. I can drive by a poor dead skunk and not be the wiser unless I see it’s body on the roadside. On the other hand, if someone says “does it smell like something’s burning”, I worry because unless it’s the Towering Inferno and I’m in it, I probably couldn’t tell if it did or not.

So with all that considered, which foods do I like that most don’t. I think it comes down to three, all green and weirdly, all quite healthy – peas, asparagus and most of all, Brussel Sprouts. I was the odd duck child who actually liked the Brussel Sprouts we’d have with Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners while others discretely avoided them, or if they had to face them, smothered them in gravy and butter; I devoured them. I still do when I get the chance. I like that flavor, I like their size and that they’re easy to cut, I even like that there’s something inherently organic and healthy looking about them. I’d probably buy and eat them a lot more if others around me shared my love of them… my sweetie thinks they’re OK, basically, most of the rest around here seem to hear “Brussel Sprouts” and think “I think we have to go out and get some fast food!”

Brussel Sprouts… if you had no sense of taste, you’d love ’em too!

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This One Stops Time

This week I have two fellow bloggers to thank for this one – as usual John from the Sound of One Hand Typing, who suggested the writing prompt (“book reviews”) and also Keith, the Nostalgic Italian who is a prolific reader and led me to this particular one, writing a full-length review of it a couple of years back.

The most recent book I finished reading was Matt Haig’s How To Stop Time. Arguably it fits the book itself, as it seems I could be reading it hungrily for an hour or so at a time and it would feel like just a few minutes had passed. It’s quite good and thought-provoking indeed.

About two years back, I read Haig’s Midnight Library, and thought it was quite excellent too, that one dealing with a depressed young woman who essentially got the chance to go and briefly step into alternate realities and see her life as it would have been had she made different choices. Ultimately she realizes she probably was just where she was meant to be after all.

How to Stop Time is equally interesting in concept. Its protagonist, Tom (much of the time) has a secret. A secret so big, he has to have a secret identity. You see, this rather mild-mannered English high school teacher is old. People figure he’s middle-aged… he has one or two gray hairs popping in. But he is old. Not “he saw the Doors play live” old, a fan of Shakespeare old. Not because he liked reading Shakespeare’s plays, because he was a friend of Shakespeare’s and The Bard once saved him in a brawl. He was born sometime in the 1500s. Tom however, has a different metabolism, to say the least and ages slowly. Very slowly. Problem is, back when he was young, people in the Middle Ages village thought it was unnatural (well…) and thus deemed his mom a witch and quickly killed her off as such. Tom soon learned that he was going to be deemed a freak should others figure out that he, more or less, never got older. So his life was spent moving from place to place, hoping to not be recognized.

Along the way, he finds there are some others like him, and they have a secret organization. Forget the Masons, the Albas are the “it”. People hundreds of years old, looking fairly spry, ruled by one even older Alba who had the wisdom and years of connections to provide them with new identities, false Ids, get them jobs…but ruled their day to day life. His main rule was keep moving, and don’t fall in love. You can’t have a 300 year old man who looks 23 fall for a similarly aged girl… in a couple of deccades, people would recognize she was now middle-aged, but he was still the same old 23 year old (maybe 24 by now) with movie star looks. People would talk. And the boss wanted more than anything to avoid “talk”. Being discovered.

Predictably, for the second time in about 400 years, Tom falls in love. And his lover finds out his secret. Will his loyalty be to her (and one other Alba friend whose life he’d saved centuries earlier) or to his all-knowing, all-powerful boss?

It’s really a page-turner … and that’s from a guy who isn’t the biggest novel reader. Typically I go for non-fiction. But when fiction gets me thinking this much and wanting to keep reading , that goes out the window. Would I want to live into the centuries? On the one hand, I could see the world. Feel like learning to play the cello? What’s stopping you – you have all the time in the world! On the other hand, always looking over your shoulder, listening for gossip about you and worse, knowing anyone you love will probably die off in what to you is a span of “months”? A tough trade-off.

“How to Stop time”. Recommended. Read it, then wait for the apparent forthcoming movie.

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Not Such A Swift Choice Of Motivational Speakers

This week one of the prompts from John (of The Sound of One Hand Typing) was to write a whole post in just nine sentences. Always a bit of a challenge, especially for me. I’m not ordinarily the most concise or short-winded of writers! But today I’ll look at the controversy surrounding NFL football player Harrison Butker and his recent controversial speech at a small Kansas religious college. Here goes-

Harrison Butker is sort of wrong; so too are his many, many, ever-so-many vocal detractors. Butker is a member of the winner of the last two Super Bowl-winning Kansas City Chiefs team, and one I doubt many people who aren’t big NFL fans had heard of before. Noteworthily, one of his teammates is the boyfriend of Gen Z’s appointed and anointed Queen, Taylor Swift.

Anyway, he addressed the graduating class of Benedictine College this spring and not only criticized Gay Pride (calling it a “deadly sin”) but told women they were being told “diabolical lies”. They could work and be successful outside their home – like his mother is actually – but their most important role was being homemakers and mothers.

Not surprisingly, reaction was swift (no pun intended, but if it fits…) and irate. A petition is going around to have him suspended or barred from the NFL. To that I say, “get over yourselves.” Oh, make no mistake, I think he’s largely wrong. I support equal rights for the LGBT people and think society benefits from women being in the workplace, with many outshining most of their male colleagues in a variety of fields. But there is nothing wrong with women staying home and raising a family if that is what they decide. Either way, Butker just speaking his mind, his opinions. He has a right to do that like you have a right to do rebuking him.

The guy’s a football player. How to work out to stay strong or kick a football? He’s your guy. Sociology,  gender politics and deep philosophical matters? He’s a football player. Boo him if you like, boycott Kansas City, whatever. It’s fine, your right to do so. The bottom line is maybe next year the college can find someone more inspirational and aspirational than a dude who kicks a ball for a living.

(OK, that’s a few more than nine lines about him, but no more than 20. Which is about all the subject deserves!   Above pic from Cleveland.com)

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Police Would Have Needed Wisdom Of Solomon To Get This Right

Well, it’s Thursday again, and it’s time to go to a weekly writing challenge from John at The Sound of One Hand Typing. One of his prompts this week was to write about something that bothered you this week. Well in these days there’s never a shortage of things to bother anybody. I’ll pick one that was close to home yet many miles away for me.

I don’t check in on the Canadian media as much as I’d like really; living in Texas it is more relevant to read about local or American news than what’s going on “back home.” Nonetheless, I do check the Toronto news sites from time to time, and a few days back did just that. Initially it was to see what the local sports scribes were saying about the lacklustre performance of my beloved Toronto Blue Jays (and there’s something for a fan to be bothered by right there!), but headlines diverted me. “Four dead in wrong way police chase”, and attention-grabbers like that.

I started reading and was more disturbed, partly because it happened in a town I once lived in, on a stretch of highway I’d driven along countless times. Add to that the police force involved were my “locals” when I lived there, and in the day, I knew many of them – I worked for a business that had photo-work contracts with them. Most were excellent guys (and one or two, excellent women). One or two were personal friends. And it made me realize how difficult it can be to be a cop in this day and age.

Anyway, in this incident a couple of weeks ago, it seems there was an armed robbery of a liquor store in one suburb. Police, understandably, gave chase to the getaway van. What happened from there isn’t entirely clear from the articles I read, but a few miles and a couple of suburbs later, the idiot robbers got onto the 401, going the wrong way. This was happening in daylight, seemingly around rush hour. For those not familiar with Ontario, the 401 is Canada’s busiest highway, a multi-lane freeway linking the country’s two biggest cities. Even in the middle of the night, it’s busy. Police, at least six marked units, decided to continue the chase, dangerous or not. Now, from dashcam footage released from civilian cars, going in both directions, it does appear the van was driving exceedingly fast down the middle of the highway into oncoming traffic. Police on the other hand were flying along in a noisy parade along the paved shoulder. Predictably, the terrible happened. The van went head on into another vehicle, killing three people in that car, several other vehicles crashed into them, one caught fire, there were more injuries (none, at least from what I read) too severe thankfully. And the driver of the van, the alleged armed robber was killed too; his buddy in the truck badly hurt. Like it or not, I’m not shedding tears for them.

The worse part is that shortly before the crash, the “senior officer” in the chase radioed to call it off, it was getting too dangerous. The other cars apparently kept going; one was reported to have said it would be safer for oncoming traffic to at least see all the flashing lights and hear the sirens approaching and be alert than to suddenly come up on an idiot driving straight at them with no warning. Needless to say the police watchdogs there, the Special Investigations Unit is doing a thorough search into the events and will decide if charges are needed.

The Toronto Star, to their credit, did some fine investigative work and found that the driver of the van was already out on bail for another violent robbery of a liquor store plus large-scale thefts from Home Depot. His passenger has a similar criminal record, and the license plate on the van wasn’t registered to that kind of vehicle, making it seem likely it was a stolen vehicle.

It really bothers me when innocent people are killed by brain-dead, immoral criminals. This one bothers me a bit more, because of the location, and because it’s really a moral dilemma. What should the cops have done? It is easy and obvious to say they shouldn’t go on a high speed chase on a busy road, going the wrong way. But, they didn’t choose the route. The criminals chose to enter the highway that way, so would it have come out any better if the police held up? Certainly they could have tried to close off on-ramps a few miles down the highway and perhaps use units heading towards the van to attempt to create kind of a “rolling stop” of traffic, but that would take time and a lot of room – things they don’t have when some idiot is going 80 westbound in eastbound lanes. Seems to me any option they chose would have been the wrong one. 

Being a cop is tough.

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