A Brief Interlude

(Actually, these are boxer shorts, not briefs.)



In light of the Christmas season (pun intended), I will be taking
a brief hiatus from blogging for a week or more. In the meantime,
have a great Christmas, everyone, and Happy New Year!

The Presses Are Rolling - All Over Us

I understand that newspapers are losing readership to electronic
media, but I also hear that newspaper publishers everywhere are
being bid for at rising prices. What is going on?



Freedom of the press
has been the approved moral position of our culture for centuries.
During those same years, however, monopolization of the
press &mdash which began with moveable type and now charges
ahead in this mystifying time of digital "yes" and "no" &mdash
has had its loyal supporters.



In the sea of media in which we are engulfed, there is an
endless supply of such contradictory stances.
We have mounting evidence of the dreadful cost to society of
obesity, together with increasingly skillful manipulation of
our eating habits by advertising agencies (in the direction of
more calories). We witness encroaching centralized control of
media, and simultaneously unfettered freedom for individuals,
as exemplified by this very blog (among
millions).
We are lectured to by those who would guide us to financial
freedom through prudent savings, and we are overwhelmed by
vendors promising us:
"Buy now, and don't pay anything for 12 months!"



Free enterprise and freedom of the press must mean that we
are free to read, to look, to listen, to do whatever we like.
No doubt there are some who turn everything off as they go about
their mental lives, but they are indeed few. Most of us abhor
silence, and welcome input. When forced to wait, we pick up
something to read or listen to or even to watch. Of course,
it must be our own fault if, in so doing, we invite pressures
on ourselves &mdash or is it?



Philosophize as we will, in the meantime the free presses are
rolling, and rolling all over us. All this begs the question:
Are we as "free" as they are? That should make us think. At least
we are still free to do that &mdash the last time I checked.

Words Of Wisdom

Recently, I bought a book at a temporary stall set up in the
entrance to a
Salvation Army
hospital. It cost $11.99, and in retrospect I should have bought
more of their books. It is called "8000 Things You Should Know",
and thanks to
plagiarism,
it could supply blog material for as long as I live.
I suppose not all 8000 will be "words of wisdom", but undoubtedly
some of them will. In the spirit of that book, here are
a few other insightful (and pithy) remarks. These are taken
from an old clipping of unknown origin, and I hereby borrow them
for "my" column.

• Mark Twain: Golf is a good walk spoiled.


• Lily Tomlin: The trouble with the rat race is
  that even if you win, you are still a rat.


• Groucho Marx: Military intelligence is a
  contradiction in terms.


• Voltaire: The art of medicine consists in amusing
  the patient while nature cures the disease.


• Gioacchino Rossini: How wonderful opera would be
  if there were no singers.


• John Ciardi: There is nothing wrong with sobriety
  in moderation.


• Woody Allen: I took a speed reading course and
  read "War and Peace" in 20 minutes. It involves Russia.


• Dorothy Parker: Brevity is the soul of lingerie.


• G.K. Chesterton: To be clever enough to get a
  great deal of money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

I have some words of wisdom of my own that I have amassed over
the years. But enough — I don't want to overdo it.
As Solomon mysteriously admonished,
"Do not be overly wise".

Age Equals Incompetence, Right?

As we grow older, our senses and physical abilities tend to
become less available and less effective, but many of us take for
granted that this happens on something of a time schedule, just as
the leaves fall in the fall, and then comes winter. I suppose,
as it is December and the leaves are long gone, and as I will be 93
the day before Christmas, that I am being personal again.



I have
written before
about the tendency of people to regard me as changed since I am
over 90. Some of those closest to me are among this lot. I do
observe that I drive more carefully now, but this is because
I want to avoid any discussion with the authorities about age
if I commit some tiny infraction. I accept that eventually
time
conquers all, but I also know that individual schedules are
hard to predict.



Composers create music, and musicians give concerts well into
their late eighties. We see people of that "ripeness" completing
marathons, even if not winning them any longer. Writers and
scientists do very well at similar ages. Understanding
accumulates, I think — I was party to matters in
my fifties that I am too "smart" to touch now. The
"been there, done that" flavour of wisdom does not suffer with
the passage of time.



Some societies, as
termites
and primitive human groups, pool their learned and instinctive
behaviour, acting as the group "knows" how to act, often avoiding
pitfalls thereby (sometimes literally). This collective wisdom
is passed down from generation to generation, a group inheritance
of sorts. However, it is difficult to find examples of such complete
cooperation in our Western society, or of such attention being paid
to the knowledge of elders. In the rush of modern culture, is the
voice of the older individual still heard?

In Mourning, Among Her Souvenirs

My first wife, as I have always reminded her she is, is in the
hospital, and has not been home for over eight weeks. She has had
many ongoing medical conditions, from hereditary thyroid deficiency
to Type 2 diabetes. Her heart efficiency is about 30% after
a heart attack in October, and now her blood sugar levels call for
monitoring and readily available insulin. And what can I say
about myself other than that I am in mourning?



Here I am, in a home where I am surrounded by her choices of
nearly everything I look at. As you come in the front door,
a lovely big bowl of fake flowers greets you, and the walls have
her framed selections, some of family memories. In the off-kitchen
eating area &mdash as we have eliminated a definite dining
room &mdash the wall decorations range from extremely good to
great, and the junk in the adjoining kitchen is definitely OK.
In short, Margaret Hilda MacLeod Crowdis, my present wife,
is just everywhere.



In the middle of the night, I am careful when I get up for
drainage purposes, so as not to disturb her who is not there.
In the morning, I always come downstairs early to read the papers,
and can't help thinking about her preferences for breakfast.
Since I am almost 93, what do you think I think of during
those early hours but the future, and what on earth
(good expression) I can do about it?



Between missing Margie, and wondering when we will again share
the same residence, I am simply reduced to this: I am in mourning
among her souvenirs.

We Begin To Die ...

As I am contemplating my 93rd birthday this coming Christmas Eve,
my thoughts are, of course, on life with all its mysteries, and
on death with some mysteries of its own. As has been said,
"If we knew all about anything, we would know all about everything".
I am still alive, but not as "alive" as I once was, and I realize
that this process has been gradual and inexorable. As I approach
death, I ask questions concerning when I was most alive, and I have
reason to think it was just following

that
lucky sperm being allowed into that lucky egg.

The speed of division and specialization was never so great again.
I am very aware that my cell replication and repair processes
are still slowing, and that this can only result in something vital
not happening, or not happening correctly enough. Then I will,
for the record, die, although many of my tissues will be sufficiently
alive to be usable by a lucky, compatible, somebody. This is a
fascinating thought, that parts of me might "live" after I have
died.



Taken all together, though, I would choose to stay here &mdash
in one piece and in good shape, of course &mdash indefinitely
longer. I would not object to being the oldest human on the planet
by a hundred years or so. Or would I? Some things,

like sex and good food, might lose their sensory appeal altogether.

In any case, this is not my decision to make. We cannot reverse,
or even alter, the
arrow of time.
Tissues will repair more slowly and less perfectly, and eventually
some tissue we need will fail entirely. As we slow, we prepare
to die, and then we do.

Thomas Edison Was Deaf, Wasn't He?

It is well known that
Thomas Edison
was deaf, but later in life, when he was famous (to say the least),
a specialist told him that it might be possible to repair his
hearing. However Edison declined the offer, saying that this way
he could hear when he wanted to hear (and sometimes he heard things
to his advantage that others obviously did not intend for him to hear).
It was a sort of tranquility on demand.



This brings up several questions in matters of morality, of ethics.
Was this honest, to pretend what was not (entirely) so? How many
of us tell others everything we know? Should we, no matter how
we acquire information? Why was Edison permitted to be left alone
to work productively because of his "affliction", when otherwise
his time (like ours) might have been taken up by someone wanting
to sell him some thing or some idea?



To be sure, it was sneaky, but who isn't? As Jesus said, "Let him
who is without sin cast the first stone". Now think of
all that Edison accomplished —
and of the thousands of things he tried that did not succeed,
which he viewed as successful because he wouldn't try them again.
Apparently, Edison did not regard himself as lonely, for he could
communicate with others when he cared to. Another famous man who
valued being left along was
Alexander Graham Bell,
who often spent weekends on his houseboat to get away from
the telephone.



My title is a question, and the answer is: Define "deaf". Hearing,
like sight, mobility, and health in general, is so involved with
other considerations that we can only say, as in most matters,
"it depends".

In Living Out Of My Time

Watching television, including
CBC
and
TVO,
with which I had so much to do, and especially the programs
on museums, with which I also had so much to do, I realize to what
extent I do not belong. Those working under good pension schemes
retire after 35 years of service or less, and so people retiring today
from jobs in media and museums came into them as fresh recruits
just as I was completing my 35 years of service, and moving on.
They are the authorities now, and I am a generation "out of touch",
wondering what my opinions could possibly offer, or matter.
Yet perhaps that is too pessimistic. Very recently, I was asked to
give an interview for an article to mark the 60th anniversary of the
Canadian Museums Associations,
of which I am the only surviving founder and original member.



This is, of course,
how time flies.
Space travel is old stuff to the new retirees of today. Television
was old stuff in my day. My father worked for
Alexander Graham Bell,
and was out of university with three degrees by the time the
Wright brothers
flew. As I watch war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is all so
familiar to me at 92 — the good guys, the bad guys, loyalty,
slogans — and I remember that Germans and Italians were once
our enemies, then the Japanese, and now terrorists of all origins.



Of course, I am loyal, but sometimes confused as to whom that
loyalty should be directed. My grandfather was born British in
Nova Scotia, and as a blacksmith working in Virginia at the
outbreak of the
American Civil War,
was not yet Canadian —
Confederation
wouldn't happen for another six years. Since it was not his fight
(the Civil War, that is, not Confederation), he lit out for
home.
Now I am Canadian, watching on this TV gadget the never ending
struggle to determine what I am supposed to be loyal to.
Do you wonder that I feel like a spirit come back from the dead?

The Security Of The Insecure

Constantly, we, or at least I, deal with those who are sure
of something, usually of themselves generally. Of course, this lets
them get through each problematic day with an assurance that the world,
indeed the cosmos, is as they know it to be. That there are
millions of published papers
dealing with new insights into matters of science and of ourselves
as individuals and groups, concerns them not.
They know, and that is that!



The crux, or crutch, of all this is that if they recognized that
nobody knows very much -- in light of all these published
papers -- then the proper position would be "tell me more".
Only those who are secure in the sometimes hard-won awareness
of their partial-knowledge / partial-ignorance condition,
can relax in the security that they do not know, and therefore
can learn.



To me, the question is: Why can't we be content with our very
obvious inadequacies? We accept that foxes,
cows, ants, elephants,
and so on, cannot know everything, so why not accept that neither
can we?



The risk, no, the fate of someone who "knows" all is disaster
when it inevitably turns out that he/she does not.
I could rest my case, and I think I will.

Rumsfeld And The Reverend: Pretty Poor Stuff

I remarked in the last post about comments made to a preacher who
was satisfied with his orations. Here's another one: A preacher
was glowing with pride as the church members made their way out
of the sanctuary, and he asked an honest old farmer what he thought
of the sermon. The farmer, who just had to be truthful, shifted
his Sunday allotment of chewing tobacco from one cheek to the other
as he gave his verdict. "I was in the back pew, Reverend, and the
people up front were swallowing up all the best parts, so what
got back to me was pretty poor stuff, pretty poor stuff."



Often this is the case. Right now in U.S. politics we have seen
the departure of
Donald Rumsfeld
and the startling power shift in the
Congress.
This is, of course, the fallout from the voters in the world's
most powerful country telling their Chief what they think of him.
His performance does not fit his statements, and what the people
really heard was not honest confidence but desperate bombast,
or to quote our church-going farmer, "pretty poor stuff".
Another familiar quotation that comes to mind is
Abraham Lincoln's
"You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of
the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people
all of the time".



Those responsible for misleading us don't always intend to mislead,
as they often sincerely believe what they say. Some simply want
to be followed, to be important, and they adopt causes and speak
accordingly. But eventually "the truth will out", and what gets
to "the back of the church" is "pretty poor stuff" indeed.
So what's the message for us in all this? To warp a couple
of well-known sayings: Listen before you leap, and listen
with your eyes open.

Before Blogs ...

... we had wise sayings. Many blog articles, like this one, are
just strung-out ways of passing on things that are clever, and
maybe even wise.
One that I'll always remember is the following anecdote: A young
clergyman had preached a trial sermon at a prominent, not to say
prosperous, church, and he was sure it had gone well. After the
service, he stood at the door and shook hands with the parishioners
as they filed out. At the end of the line was a little old lady,
who held his hand, looked up at him, and quavered, "Young man,
has anyone ever told you how wonderful you are?" "Why no,"
he said, nearly choking in his attempt to be modest.
She replied, "Then how did you ever get the idea?"
Now how could anyone improve on that put-down?



Some wise sayings are so obvious that they almost don't
seem wise, as in two of my favourites that I've used
before -- the Scots' "Many a mickle makes a muckle", and the
German-American "Too soon we get oldt, too late we get schmardt".
In keeping with these is the comment by
George Bernard Shaw:
"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more
useful than a life spent doing nothing".
And then there are the
Proverbs of the Bible,
and
Ali Baba
and the stories from Arabian mythology. In fact, I suspect the sayings
of any ethnic literature would be gold mines for blogs.
What are
Aesop's fables
but ready-made blog posts? In modern times, our
comics of stage, screen and Internet are of the same tradition.



Blogs are so easy, so convenient, so quickly disseminated to millions,
that they are here to stay, while they mine the resources of the
recent and distant past. Now I should finish with a good one,
but I am sleepy, so I will just say "Come back", because I know
I'll have something clever when I awake.

Don't Throw Out The Baby With The Bathwater

It is easy to make a case that we think in discrete steps when
trying to move from uncertainty to decision, and often each step
can involve a binary choice: Is it this, or is it that? A left
turn at the bridge, or a right? Fries or baked potato?
The sort of thinking many of us, including myself, regard as the
best the human mind can produce is the merciless process we call
scientific reasoning,
which is of this discrete kind. However, this wonderful method
of either/or can become a ruthless weapon in the hands of those
who start from unexamined premises, and demand that any opponent
stand, or preferably fall, based on the inexorable conclusions.



My point, if I still have it, is that we must be clear about
any position that is up for a "yes" or "no". History, whether of
philosophy, or religion, or empires, or families, records that
many a "no" threw out all sorts of promising implications that
were never considered. Truly
Thoreau's
"Simplify, simplify" has been much abused.



Gravity, which seems as obvious as an apple falling off a tree,
looks quite a bit more complicated when we consider that it holds
together the solar system, with its elliptical orbits, each of them
falling smaller as
time goes by.
Anyone bitten by a "vicious" insect can think badly of insects,
while enjoying no end of fruit made possible by insect-enabled
fertilization, not to mention honey from bees, or the beauty of
flowers whose function is to entice these insects to do their jobs.



If the oft-muttered wish, "Rain, rain, go away", were actually to be
granted, the consequences would be dreadful, and ultimately fatal,
as a desert climate crept over the earth. The counterbalancing maxim
has also been spoken over and over: "Be careful what you wish
for -- you might just get it". Or, as I'm fond of saying,
"It's not that simple".



So the lesson is to identify your premises, and then proceed
logically to a conclusion. In other words, make clear what it is
you are really talking about.

What Happened To The Paper Shortage?

I take in too many newspapers, in order not to be left behind on
something. The result is that I have difficulty getting them all
ready for garbage day. Very little is
real news,
and not much is
original opinion about what news there is; in fact, most
of the "opinions" are very predictable, correlated to whatever
newspaper is printing them. The majority of the paper surface
seems to be advertising, including numerous full-pages sprawls
that are so image-oriented one has to guess what is being sold.
One thing is sure:
it makes foolishness of all the fuss some years back about a
paper shortage, and the accompanying urgings to recycle, or just
to use less. Maybe you understand how this shortage became a surplus,
but I sure don't.



Paper is a commodity, and demand brings supply, which can, I
understand, lead to surplus (unless there's a shortage, right?).
Another commodity is oil, which seems
perpetually threatened with extinction, if you listen to the right
voices. The resulting price fluctuations have the potential to change our
way of life, and to determine whether the U.S. will be the
top dog,
or will it be Russia? Between these two, oil and paper, there
is a drastic difference in that no more oil is being
produced, as it requires many millions of years of geological
activity, while trees for paper are growing all the time, assuming
we don't cut them down all at once.



Surpluses and shortages bring us to the economics of the market
system. This is just as interesting as any topic of the day.
"Free" enterprise apparently includes the freedom to squash
competitors and create a monopoly -- which of course your
competitors were "free" to do as well -- paying off
politicians in the process, if that helps. Whatever it was
all about, the "paper shortage" was interesting, and, I must
say, had some lasting effects. My wife still makes sure all
the toilet paper rolls end up in the right bin.

The Law

Once I was told by an extremely good lawyer, who happened to be
Lieutenant Governor of
Nova Scotia
and senior member of a firm put together by a member of
my father's congregation, that I too should have been a lawyer,
but that the first judge I appeared before would have had me hanged
out of jealousy. In revisiting this remark, my defense is that
I have never pretended to undue modesty. In fact, what modesty
I do have, I am quite proud of. Anyway, back to "the law",
if you recall the title of this column.



The law is an institution, a very human institution, and, of course,
depends on the premises of those establishing it, which in turn
depend on the definitions of the words in those premises.
Rapidly we come full circle; to quote
Humpty Dumpty:
"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean --
neither more nor less." (To which Alice demurred, "The question is,
whether you can make words mean so many different things". And
Humpty replied, somewhat ominously, "The question is, which is
to be master —- that's all".) If we pursued this line of
reasoning, we would find that making law, administering it,
amending it, and understanding it are all impossible, in a certain
sense.



So definitions are impossible to get any absolute agreement on,
although there is no lack of trying -- witness the
Charter of Rights,
with its "notwithstanding" escape hatches.
I would recommend that we have a Common Law, like the U.K.,
where we have judges refer to past decisions and defend
departures from them. And the meanings of all the words in
that previous sentence are perfectly clear, of course.

Cannibals All (or: You Eat What You Are)

Most forms of life on earth, including humans, lack the ability to
manufacture internally all the chemicals needed to sustain themselves.
To obtain these substances, they eat other creatures that can
manufacture them. This happens all the way up the food chain. At
the top we have ourselves, who eat just about anything, including
vertebrates, crustaceans, plants, fruits, insects, the lot.
Put differently, we eat our fellows who eat their fellows. And if
that's not
cannibalism,
please explain what is, while I take time out to have some shrimp,
mushrooms, and a nice pork chop.



Seriously, the best food, or at least the best protein, is that
which is most like our own. Of course, eating others of our kind
gives rise to social problems, and is rare as a result, but it
happens. In times past, among some of the Pacific Islands peoples,
since a butchered human very much resembled a butchered pig, it
was referred to as
"long pig".
I presume these cannibals ate only their enemies, not their family members,
no matter how tasty they may have looked. Most of us have accepted
that humans are precious in the sight of God, while ordinary pig,
or "short pig", is OK nutrition.



Disturbingly, the fact remains that protein is best when nearest
our own, but religious leaders, politicians, and relatives are
against what this implies. Long pig is nutritionally ideal, however
stick to the shorter variety. Next time you're stranded
on a desert island with a small group of people, and you're tempted to change
your ethical stance, ask your priest or lawyer first.
Fish is good.

Many A Mickle ...

It is a drowsy, cloudy, rainy Sunday, and I have turned on the TV
to get the weather. Listening to the forecast reminds me of the
heavy storms
that have battered our continent in the recent past.
Houses and people were washed away, with many deaths.
This is one more reminder that
"many a mickle makes a muckle",
but of a different type than I had in mind. Raindrops add up.



Lately, I have been hearing from relatives who have been influenced
by my advice to them, my advice from
The Richest Man in Babylon,
to put away at least 10% of income, never to be spent
but to be invested very carefully. As time goes by, taking few or
no chances, you will become better off, maybe very much so.
Begin young, and your "mickle" will indeed become a "muckle".



Populations are like this, including human populations; the effects
of a few more being born than dying, or vice versa, can be profound.
Tip the balance
slightly in one direction, and the population
can alter drastically. If it grows, we have pressure
on land, transportation systems, food supply, and health services.
If it shrinks, we may choose to increase immigration to compensate,
with accompanying changes in religious mix, labour relations, crime,
sports, and more.
In a similar way, gradual geological changes, like grains of sand
deposited as a river curves and slows, result in vast volumes
of material being spread over great sedimentary plains.



To say it again, "many a mickle makes a muckle". And to back up
a couple of paragraphs, put some money away, now and often.

The Red Queen

When Alice complained that they were not getting anywhere with
their constant running, the Queen said that in Wonderland it always
takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same place.



Most of us do struggle to keep up, and in my case it has to do with
paper. I get too many newspapers and magazines, including the
New York Sunday Times.
I spend as much time at the kitchen table throwing away papers
into a box as I do eating.



The solution is simple. I must stop getting some things, but which
ones? Also, I must conquer the backlog of many hundreds of pages
torn out for later. Well, this is later. If I don't
conquer this mountain, Mrs. Red Queen, I'll never get to the
quietly waiting pile of requests from all the charities. I've given
to over 100 of them, and mail from new ones keeps arriving, thanks
to the efficient computers that spread my information around, and
systematically churn out bulk mail. Between papers and charities,
I am cornered.



My spare time is gone, and I wonder how I ever held down a steady
job, or indeed paid any attention to my own family, who appeared
from somewhere, somehow. Is it fear of something, or instinct,
or just habit that makes me like this? And what do I mean by
just habit?



Maybe I should read
Alice
and
Through the Looking Glass
again, or consult the Red Queen myself. If I weren't so busy,
I'd get around to that.



Right now I'm off to bed, because I have so much to attend to
tomorrow.

A Lovely Late October Day

Warm golden sunshine beams through the tall glass doors that lead to
my balcony, reminding me they need to be cleaned. A large tree
branch adds pattern, and nothing could be more beautiful, I tell
myself, as I gaze out on the woodland beyond. Truly, what is more
lovely than this late October day in the mid-latitudes?



My world -- alright, our world -- is tilted to the sun so that its
hot rays must pass through quite a slice of atmosphere, with its
pollution and dust, favouring the golden rays of my October day.
Of course, the intense colours fade as the sun rises, but this
means the day will warm up. And as for colour, frosty nights
are not far away, and the trees over there are aglow with beautiful
dying hues as the leaves prepare to fall off. This seeming decay
protects the trees from sucking up too much water to service leaves
which could not do their job in the cold weather in any case.
Nature knows what she is doing.



Events in the fall do seem to be intelligent, and what is
intelligence if it is not survival in changing circumstances?
As I bask in this lovely morning, I know it will not last; it will
be followed by snow on ground and trees, and by ice that will
glitter in the branches on bright, cold mornings. I know winter
can be stunning in its own way, to be followed by spring with its
return of bursting life.



Eventually, outside my kitchen glass doors, I know too that
lovely late October days will come again, and again.

"In The Bowels Of Christ"

The quotation is, of course, from the well-known remark of
Oliver Cromwell,
urging the mule-headed General Assembly of the
Church of Scotland
to repudiate their allegiance to the crown, i.e., to
Charles II.
Cromwell, mule-headed himself, made his famous plea:
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken".



History is full of those who were wrongly sure of themselves,
to the point where we suspect that anyone who is completely sure
is never quite right. Many religious groups have been "sure"
that "others" were wrong, and have used force to convert them.
Within Christianity, Roman Catholics have burned heretical
Protestants at the stake, and vice versa, and so on.



Not only in religion do we find this, but in political life as well.
Communists
have forced their ways on society, as did the
Nazis.
None of all this made many true converts, or proved who was right.
Sports and styles offer more examples, without the violence, mostly.



If we search for reasons for all this, we find ourselves considering,
again, the biological need to belong, preferably to those whose
appearance, language or geographical origins are similar to ours.
We are uneasy being alone. It all seems as simple as that.
So much for freedom.

What's Your Herd?

As I was going over the newspapers, very fat on the weekend, I
couldn't help marvelling at the fashion sections. Spots are "in",
as in those of the
leopard,
a creature becoming scarcer as hunters pursue its skin. Coats, bags,
skirts, boots are to have spots, but also stripes and swirls in spots.
These patterns will indeed be everywhere, from $20 to $1000 or so,
depending on what store you patronize, which is an odd word when you
reflect on how very much they patronize you. You are,
of course, being herded once again, depending on your age, wealth,
where you live, and so on and on. You belong to many herds.



At the centre of this issue is the need to belong. First at home,
then in the schoolyard, in
Tim Hortons or
McDonald's,
in your church of choice, we must belong, and belong to the right
grouping. On a larger level, wars are fought and "enemy" identities
exterminated. And still, we believe in free will and intelligent
choice. We look with scorn or pity on flocks of sheep or herds
of cattle, following anything but freedom or any choice of their
own, either as individuals or groups. Really, what is the difference
between us and them?



This is not all bad, of course. We have the comfort, the security,
of not being exposed. We have our philanthropists, our hospitals,
our jails for our support and protection. It is natural to identify
(and to identify with) your herd. As for myself,
God Save the Queen, I say!

Salt Shaker And Casket

My title indicates that table
salt kills people.
Of course it does --there is no mystery about it.
In the past, traditional
African
people living in the wild did not get
heart attacks,
at least not at any significant rate, but if the same people
took jobs among the white people and ate a "good" Western diet,
they experienced heart disease at the same rate as in the West.



You see, in the bush their diet was mostly plants, along with
whatever animals, large and small, they could catch or kill.
Plant juice is high in
potassium
and animal blood is high in
sodium,
minerals that we need in the right quantities.
But in the Western world, a bit more salt for cooking and a bit
more at eating time makes things tastier. The purveyors of dried,
preserved and pickled foods know this, and so with "progress" comes
tasty, salty food.



You can draw logarithmic lines for amounts of salt and potassium
intake versus time in years, and you pretty well get a diagram of
incidence of heart attacks over the same period. All this
is well known, and the medical people and the "health nuts" agree
in urging us to eat our veggies and to avoid dousing everything
with salt.



As more of us eat out, and as
fast foods
increase, so do heart problems. This can't be ignorance, so it must be
stupidity, or is it perhaps a modern form of
death wish?
Certainly, the old saloon motto in German-American bars is "dead" on:
"Too soon we get oldt, too late we get schmardt".

Half? Or Half?

There is something fascinating in what we reveal about ourselves when
we give an opinion. Two people can see the same thing as quite
different, opposite in fact. One sees that the glass is half full,
while to the other it is clearly half empty. Both are right. It is
simply that they are different people, probably seeing every situation
as either reassuring or as very much to be watched.



Unsettled weather is threatening to one and hopeful to the other.
To one, a thousand dollars is very much alright, to the other far
from being security. A healing broken leg is great to one,
crippling to the other. A hamburger is junk food to one,
but very satisfying to the other. I could go on and on, but we
all know this. Why this difference?



Staying with our either/or hypothesis, the answer could be in-born
or acquired. I suppose it could be both, and I think it is. We
are conditioned by our surroundings as soon as, or perhaps before,
we are born, so our behaviours, including our attitudes and opinions,
are indeed both from heredity (DNA if you like) and from environment
(of all sorts). I don't think we can fully pin this down, but in
any case there are these two sorts of people we must deal with, the
optimists and the pessimists, and I proclaim myself to be the
half-full type. "I know and know full well" that I am right, and yet
I know that "they" are right too. Collectively, we are all on the edge
of being sane, with all the problems that accompany this state of
being. And musing on these things doesn't do much to change the world
around me, but it sure is fun.

I Wish I Loved The Human Race

Long, long ago I learned a mean little rhyme, and there are days
when it comes back. I have a head full of these gems, some
of which are handy bits of wisdom that make up for my lack. Others,
like this one, are reactions to times when people seem to cooperate
to make my time irritating, frustrating, or simply boring.
The full version
(by Sir Walter Raleigh) is:



     I wish I loved the Human Race;

     I wish I loved its silly face;

     I wish I liked the way it walks;

     I wish I liked the way it talks;

     And when I’m introduced to one,

     I wish I thought "What Jolly Fun!"




This is the flip side of the
herd instinct,
which keeps us together, collectively and individually. I suppose
we have to have crowds to make us value being alone sometimes, and
certainly when we have been alone too long, we value company.



Occasionally, I believe, we agree with the sentiment behind this
rhyme. We do not always need company, at least not necessarily
human company. Certainly, cats, budgies, puppies, big dogs or
little ones for hiking or hunting, are company. The don't argue;
indeed, they seem to agree. My oldest daughter has snakes longer
than herself which almost seem to purr when she wraps them around
her neck. If they could talk to you, I'm sure they would say
they love her.



I suppose if you exercised requited love with some other friendly
species, you might believe you did not like our own species, and
there is plenty to dislike. For myself, I'm frequently partial to
certain humans, but I am very choosy about it.

My Experience With Lung Cancer And TB

Once upon a time, over 50 years ago, I was a member of the Council of the
American Association of Museums,
and was to be away for three weeks at their Annual Meeting in the U.S.
I was working evenings to get ahead of my responsibilities in
Halifax, Nova Scotia. So I was tired, and had a lame feeling in my
side, and foolishly consulted a medical doctor. He took X-rays
and put me in hospital, where he and a very good surgeon
(whom I had taught to cut up cats in Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy),
took out two-thirds of my left lung in a nine-hour operation that
left a 25-inch scar. The lung was supposed to be cancerous,
but in fact had a lump of healed
tuberculosis,
and should, of course, have been left alone.



Following that, I told them to put it back, but they said it had
been thrown away. As I had had tuberculosis, I was put into the
TB sanitarium, where I stayed for six months.



Afterwards, I was short of breath for a couple of years, and
of course avoided doctors like grim death, and pondered what
I had learned. High on the list is "If it ain't broke, don't
fix it", and "Doctors have to get experience". Also, "Don't
ask so many questions", and "Well, we don't have to do that
again". Or, as Thomas Edison must have so often remarked:
"We know that doesn't work". I must say, it cured me of smoking,
a habit that consisted of one cigarette around a campfire or
a pipe of tobacco at university reunions. So all is not lost, yet.
I've cheered up, and so should you.

Time To Get Rich!

Given enough time, and doing some very simple things, you can hardly
avoid becoming rich, maybe very rich. For example, if the
$24 paid by the Dutch for
Manhattan Island to the natives had
been put out at 10%
compound interest, it would be worth over
12,000 trillion dollars by now, more than North and
South America are worth by any accounting.
So what are you waiting for?



We do not have that sort of time, of course, and there are taxes to
contend with,
but the principle is the same, if you will pardon the pun. Do not
put off until tomorrow what you can do today. As our wants will
always exceed our earned income, this means you do not wait until
you have some left over, but put your 10% away first and
live on the rest. Time is, indeed, of the essence. The future
never arrives, and the present is always sliding into the past.
So do it now, quickly, before it too becomes the past.



I have talked one family member into putting money away daily,
never to be spent, but instead to be put to earning. It seems
as if that were just last week, but already this person is
wondering how to do better than a savings account at the bank,
which pays 2% for money that it then lends out at 14% or so.



When I worked in Buffalo, there was a sign in a tavern which said
"Too soon we get oldt, too late we get schmardt". There is a principle
that if you force yourself to do something every day at the same
time, you will find it difficult not to do it in two to
three weeks.



Habits can help us or hurt us, so right away, put the same amount
aside every day, so its earnings can sooner look after you.
Time to act!

On Packaged Dinners, Etc.

The game is to find out what to do with the stuff ... in very fine
print. Now a good many of the purchasers of these one-person
packages are actually one person. They are one person because
their companion has left once again, or they never had anyone, or
everyone else has died off, and with the passage of time their
eyes are not good, even if both of them are operational.



If the maker of the product "believes" in it, he/she should surely
want the message of what to do with it to be clear. So, to get at
the mystery. While "Nutrition Facts" are in quite large print, and
"Ingredients" are in capital letters, the finest print is reserved
for what the hell to do with it to make it edible. By the time you
scrutinize this minutiae, if your time is worth anything, you are
better off to take a taxi to the nearest fast food outlet, because
this cute package is sure as hell not fast food.



Skipping "For firmer rice, decrease water; for softer rice,
increase water", you come to microwave instructions. By this time,
you have had two drinks more than you should, and a couple of
chocolate bars are starting to look good to you.



It seems that food purveyors spend zillions on experts to design
everything, from recipes to more efficient packaging. Hell, I
could do that, much better. Could you tell me where I apply?
I'm tired of just working for a living.

That Y Chromosome

Princess Kiko
has had her baby and it is a boy. This will end Japan's facing
the possibility of one day having an Empress instead of an Emperor.
For 2000 years there has been an Emperor, held to be divine until
Hirohito
resigned the idea of divinity after the atomic bomb led to surrender
in World War II, and an American general ran the country.



All this is against the background of advances in knowledge of
DNA
and of the nature and mechanisms of life. Eggs have X chromosomes,
while sperm have either X or Y, meaning that sex is determined by
which brand of sperm gets to join the X egg -- XX gives a female
individual and XY a male, so chance determines whether the ruler
is divine or not. In many other cultures the same has been true,
where only a male could be the boss. It is a flip-of-the-coin matter.



Always, there has been a method of selecting sex of infants, age-old
in India and very current in China. This is usually by drowning or
suffocating unwanted female babies, although smashing the head end against
a wall was often the method when, in the southern American colonies,
a white mother had a "tarred" baby.



It is interesting to note that eggs are few, like one a month, while
sperm come in the millions, and also interesting that more males
are born than females, who make up by living longer -- there
are more old women than men.



We are talking sex, and as we consider other species, that becomes
very interesting indeed. Some invertebrates, I think among the
molluscs, have adults which are male some years and female other
years. I'm sure we will get back to discussions of sex again.

A Few Good Men Books

One of our more recent philosophers said, "The trouble with reading
books is that there is so much in them that isn't so." So I am
suspicious of all books, including the few that I am so
fond of that I re-read them, some frequently.



On the matter of wealth, the top of the list is
The Richest Man in Babylon;
what he said was that to be rich, we should put away the first ten
percent of income at least, before we use or spend anything. Soon,
we should consider how these "slaves" can work for us, in complete
safety. In time, we become very wealthy, of course.



If I have a favourite book, it must be
Instincts
of the Herd in Peace and War, by
Wilfred Trotter,
pointing out that enlargement of the group affords protection within
the group; this is true from single cells to great societies.



Of Stars and Men
takes up the story and emphasizes again that families, villages,
cities, nations and leagues of nations all attain strength and
variation by the smaller units becoming dependent and giving up
some functions. Today we see world becoming more and more of a unit,
with resulting internal pressures and clashes
by formerly independent states, cultures and religions.



My list is not very long before I hasten to add
Alice in Wonderland,
by a mathematician, for a favourite young friend.
It is full of sly, worldly wisdom. Really good books are worth
re-reading, again and again. So they do tend to be few.

What's Wrong With The Morning?

There are people I know who are adverse to getting up before noon.
Since I fade at about 9 p.m., I do not know what time they put their
heads down, but I suspect 2 or 3 a.m. My going off so early and
their going off so late can't be accidental, but why? It must
have to do with diurnal rhythms, acquired or built-in or the result
of outside agencies.

In the wild realms of nature, we have extreme examples of such rhythms.




The most extreme I can think of is the breeding of the
palolo worms
in the South Pacific. With precise timing each fall,
the adults ready for it simply rise to the surface layers and burst,
releasing tons of eggs and sperm, the whole mess a feast for sea
predators and marine birds (and humans).
Fertilizations take place, of course, nearly all wasted.
The successful ones are the survivors, the ancestors of the next
go-around.



Another is the return of the swallows to
San Juan Capistrano
in the spring. Accurate to within a day or so, something moves them
to migrate. There are many more examples. So, what about us?



Just as babies become slowly enculturated, necessarily embedded in
human groups, we adults are the effects of just such continued

multiplied habits and groups of habits.

For myself, coming from
farm people who had to get up early to accommodate the animals,
I was never surrounded by people who were late starters. Also,
at one stage I had to get up early to write radio items I was to
record later that day.



So, these habits are habits, but how acquired, how transmitted?
As I usually do, I'll give it some more thought.

The Fat Of The Land Is Sinking The Land

One third of the world's population goes to bed hungry. Drugs are
saving the disease-prone, and many who have not considered the
consequences are having large families, often without attending
males and with increasing statistics on
AIDS.
Natural resources are exported or used for products that are
exported, with the benefits going to non-residents, mostly
corporations, mostly foreign. However, in the rest of the world,
people are getting fat, disastrously fat.



Everywhere, we are urged to eat carbohydrates which turn to
fat, or fried foods, or meat whose production involves great
use of land, water and food. In short, we are all, worldwide,
either starving or getting fat.



Even in rich countries, "health" services, meaning services for
the sick and unhealthy, are stretched to limits and face
impossible demands in the all-too-near future. It is clear
that young fat kids are almost certain to become obese adults;
fat adults represent increasing percentages of
diabetic and
coronary
cases; and as the
"baby boomers"
become older, and ultimately old, numbers will soar. All this
is for sure, and may be a lot worse than we think.



So, food industries with very efficient promotion through
the media are, although maybe unintentionally, but hardly in
ignorance, producing sickness and early death.



Yesterday, we killed off
passenger pigeons
and most species of
bison.
Today we are fattening ourselves for the kill, while starvation and
AIDS
stalk the less "fortunate". Individually, we may be
intelligent, but collectively, this seems stupid.

My Wonderful World

I understand that not everyone's world is good, and some are very bad,
as for the one-third of humanity which lives and dies without ever
not being hungry. But my world has been just better than I could have
hoped or managed. My original geography, my family DNA, my early
childhood crossing with world events, were all so unusual, even
startling, that it was as if someone was orchestrating my
introduction into this life of collisions of cultures we witness now.
We may experience it next door, or by media, or airline, but in any
case it is inescapable. To encapsulate it, for my sins I live in
Toronto,
by far the most cosmopolitan city in the world, if you count
the 150+ languages, cultures and religions which flourish and, of
course, clash here. I'm not saying all is good, whatever that might
mean, but boring it is not. Now, back to me.



I was born at an early age, I understand, and according to all reports,
with fairly firm opinions in advance of any direct fresh air evidence
of the things about which I held these opinions. We are all born
somewhere, among people, and so our first views come with the words
and grammar of our parents, relatives, friends, and enemies, and
the views of these people we soak up as geese adopt whatever they see
as they hatch, whether that is a farmer, a hen, a rock, or a PhD.
And so, like yourself, I was pushed out physically, and punched out
mentally and physiologically into whatever I was when I began to
experience this world, which, I insist, is wonderful.

With Respect To Age

I have been moved to write one on how I am regarded, treated,
looked at, and all that. I thought of "My Age is Showing",
"People Are Getting Nicer", "A Grin in Time Wipes Whines",
but maybe I can write this again, later of course, with a
different tag like one of these, or maybe "It's the Way I Walk".



People have begun to hold doors, to wait for me in various
circumstances. Is it pity, is it admiration, or just respect
to old age? True, I am older than I have ever been, in fact
older than any related male I know of. My maternal grandfather
mowed by hand all day, and that evening ran over a mile to help
the bucket brigade up the lake to put out the fire at the local
creamery, owned by them all, and got "cold in his kidneys" and
died at 87. My paternal grandfather died with a knife in his
back when he was throwing a troublesome drunk from his saloon
restaurant in a mining camp in Colorado. But I am the oldest
male living past 90. So perhaps my age is beginning to show.



Maybe I should lie about my age and say I am only 85 or so,
or perhaps I should lie the other way and say I am 99. Depends
on how much respect I want, or do I want pity? Not that, please,
as it might be catching and I might begin to pity myself, and
that would interfere with my plans to go see my grandchildren
in Wales, and come back by going the rest of the way around the
world.



People do form opinions about age, and their attitudes
are affected, sometimes for the better. Altogether, getting older,
and even old, does have its advantages in some respects, sometimes
including more respect, I think.

The World Is Getting Smaller

If you were able to control a large area which had many kinds of
plants and animals that lived on the land and on each other, and
which had roughly the same critters and climate as one hundred
years ago, and you put a fence -- an impenetrable
barrier -- around it, and each year made it smaller, do you
imagine that the "balances of nature" within your enclosure
would not be affected? Not so. Species dependent on the same
resource would, of course, be in conflict with each other. As
your fence hemmed in less territory, the conflict would become
more deadly, and some things would decline or perhaps disappear.
Fear, anger, slaughter would increase. So should we wonder that
as populations grow, our world with its finite resources would
be fought for and endangered? Add wild growth in communications
and you have the world we live in.



The world, in effect, is getting smaller. Something has to give.
The earth is for all life, and we humans are not the owners and free
exploiters we have thought we are. We imagined God to be made
in our image -- or was it the other way around? -- and we paid
no mind to the evidence of the past -- the fossils, the
disappeared species such as passenger pigeons and bison, victims
of our "free" enterprise.



Mostly, we think that we humans, or at least our particular colour
in our generous open spaces, will be alright. Whatever is wrong
we will fix, somehow.



However, our world is getting smaller, more crowded, its
irreplaceable resources exhausted. God has watched many experiments
fail. It seems we are determined to join the list.

Habits CAN Be Changed

I have just come from Sunday brunch with my wife, youngest daughter
and her husband at my Country Club, and during lunch I kept thinking
about how habits hold us all. We were on time at twenty after ten
as agreed, which is my own life-long habit, partly from my years
in radio and television but also following the ways of life of
my maternal grandfather, who was always ready twenty minutes early.
I favour him because he was short among tall people, as I am. My
paternal grandfather was six foot ten, or rather a brother of his
was. About my father's father I never knew, as he was knifed in
the back by a drunk whom he was throwing from his dining room saloon
out in Colorado during one of the gold rushes. I'll get back to
that later, but this column is about habit.



Actually, my daughter and her husband were right on time, on their
own time, because they are knowingly and even consciously twenty
minutes late for everything. I know that they could change that
if they wanted to enough. Now I'll go back to a time when a surgeon,
whom I had taught to cut up cats in pre-medical school, took
two-thirds of my left lung for
cancer
in a nine-hour operation.
When the pathology report came back the first of the following week,
the suspicious lump had been calcified tuberculosis. So I was sent
to the TB hospital for some months for a disease I hadn't had for
years. There we were on bed rest for the first couple of
months, except once a day to the toilet. We were supposed to sleep
from noon till one o'clock, although in bed 24 hours a day, and
I thought this was hilarious. However, after about three weeks
I could tell when noon approached because I was falling asleep.




That's when I really learned about habit, and have used it to my
benefit many times since. It works especially well if you use it
to replace a bad habit. After two weeks, you feel guilty if you
don't do whatever it is now your habit to do.



Change of habit can be done, and you can almost make yourself over,
habit by habit, to a new, better designed you.



I have been writing these pages or columns or whatever long enough
that I feel vaguely badly if I were not to do it. Since it is a
habit for me to tell other people what to do, now you can go do it.