Comments (0) As many of the readers of this blog know, Bailey is incredibly shy. A few days ago he was lying on a pile of blankets in the hall when Fletch came right up to him and give him a little kiss. They then sat together for a few minutes, just long enough for me to grab the camera. Soon after, Bailey ran away, apparently in terror.
Most people who know me well enough to be reading my blog would know that I don’t celebrate Christmas. Neither do I celebrate Chanukah. I am an atheist. I also tend to dislike this time of year because of its hyper-commercialism and valueless materialism.
However, I did recently have an experience that harkens back to the supposed ‘true spirit of Christmas.’
At Val’s family Christmas dinner we were awaiting some kind of big surprise. Dinner came and went. No surprise. Val’s sister called prematurely from China to inquire about our reaction to the big surprise. Nothing. Until Val’s uncle Walter asked everyone to put on their coats to go outside.
Walter and his partner Sandra live north of St. Clair, west of Dufferin, where the houses are packed together and there are laneways running behind most streets. It was about eight o’clock on a crisp but not terribly cold night. Some of the guests were wearing only slippers on their feet.
We all shuffled out into the backyard where the lamb and chicken had just been barbecued by brothers Walter and Simon, who was in from Ottawa. Simon’s wife Glenda, who had recently moved back to Toronto for work, had been out there at the grill as well.
Once outside, we were all urged down the garden path and into the laneway. Walter took little Eli’s hand – he’s about four – because cars definitely use the laneway as a road as evinced by the speedbumps. We walked south a few houses, crossed a street, continuing on a house or two until we came upon an open gate. Walter asked Eli, “Why is this gate open? Let’s see.”
We all followed into a parking area where ahead of us there was a glass door with a curtain open just enough to see someone moving around in the well-lit room. Whoever it was, he was wearing red and white.
I now had enough pieces to fit together the puzzle of the surprise: Santa Claus is waiting for Eli and this must be Glenda’s new house. But there was more.
I’m pretty sure most of us were no longer thinking about the surprise. We watched the Santa scence through Eli’s eyes. We all entered a tiny, narrow room containing one chair and a stool. Santa sat with a bag of gifts and gave them out. Everyone had their eyes on Eli as he politely received a potato gun and a few other little boy toys. He definitely had a twinkle in his eyes but he was also clearly thinking about the plausibility of all of this.
After the bag was emptied Glenda ushered us forward through a backyard and into the main house. Santa must have slipped out the back.
In the next phase of the surprise Glenda revealed that she had bought this very special house – one she had always coveted – Toronto’s tiniest house. As we walked through the three rooms it clearly was tiny.
Simon entered through the front where he was questioned by inquiring Eli about Santa’s identity. Apparently Simon and Santa share the same face.
While everyone marvelled at the compactness of the neat little one-storey house and petted the 21-yer old cat Flapjack who lay curled up in a blanket on the one chair in the front room, Glenda and Simon prepared a little toast.
Simon, who had recently given the preacher-worthy fire and brimstone eulogy at his brother Geoff’s packed funeral, gave a brief toast to brother, uncle, father, husband Geoff. “To Geoff”, we all chimed in. We put our glasses down and exited the adorable little house through the front door this time.
From the front it is a perfect little gingerbread house. We scampered back to Walter and Sandra’s house for dessert, chatting away about the well kept surprise.
And so ended a lovely evening with family.
Val always mockingly winces when I say he is nice. He really does come from a smart yet very kind family. There’s nothing wrong with nice in this crazy and often cruel world.
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As I say to my students, just because it’s on the Internet, it doesn’t mean it’s reliable. It seems Netflix needs to learn this lesson. Just because a documentary is on Netflix that doesn’t make it good.
A few weeks ago Val and I watched “Fracknation”, one of Netflix’s many documentary offerings. It even recommended it to us because we had watched other seemingly similar docs; how kind. I am wary of this feature now because it turns out that it’s more of a propaganda piece than an even-handed documentary. The journalist involved says he is a freelancer. I say he is a cad. His (that is Phelim McAleer) whole premise is that he wants to challenge the assertions of another documentary, Gasland, winner of an Academy Award in 2011, that fracking is environmentally unfriendly and dangerous. According to McAleer Gasland is full of factual inaccuracies. Certainly he proves some of them in his interviews with some of the weird subjects that Fox relied on in Gasland. However, he goes overboard and makes assumptions such as if we in the west reject fracking as an energy supply we will be enabling Vladimir Putin of Russia to rule our lives. Hmm.
With just a little bit of research it is possible to discover that Phelim has a strong anti-environmentalism bias. It also feels like he’s being paid by the fracking industry, though he says he’s not. He says that over and over.
I’m not saying Gasland is all true and Fracknation is all false. I wouldn’t trust either one as my ONLY source of information. I wouldn’t trust anything as my only source of information. That’s the problem living in the digital age; it’s so easy to get just a little bit of information about everything. Gasland II is now being promoted by HBO. I’m not going to see it.
On the other hand, I watched many good documentaries this summer on Netflix, most of them by American film maker Ken Burns whose works often premiere on PBS. Countless hours were spent in front of my tv viewing his offerings from The Dust Bowl and Prohibition to Jazz, a mega-million hour series about the social history of jazz and its players and promoters. By good I mean well researched, even-handedly produced, and having a viewpoint supported by evidence, including interviews and documents. I sometimes have problems with Ken Burns’ documentaries in that they can be a bit maudlin, such as The Civil War, or a bit one-sided. These ones were not, generally.
In the near future I assume Burns’s latest, The Roosevelts – Teddy, Franklin and Eleanor – will come to Netflix. It is his best work yet, primarily because it is not afraid to criticize all three of the larger-than-life figures it portrays and mostly celebrates. Yes, Teddy Roosevelt was a big character, but he was also incredibly bombastic and oddly hypocritical. Franklin was the longest serving president ever and ably led the country into and through World War Two, however, he was, in some respects, a selfish person who was repeatedly unfaithful to his wife. Eleanor, my favourite character in the series, was an incredibly devoted servant of the state, particularly toward those most dispossessed by the state, yet she was a highly needy individual who couldn’t be alone and put up with her husband’s misbehaviours.
Honesty is a complicated thing. Sometimes it can’t be conveyed in a neat little package one hour long. Sometimes it needs eight hours. Those of us who have the patience for it are rewarded.
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We had one day in San Francisco and decided to go to Telegraph Hill. We didn’t have time to go inside Coit Tower but we certainly did enjoy the views from nearby.
Finally, some pictures of the mysterious and aloof Bailey. It only took one year.
We spent about a week at the cottage in August. We didn’t do much, but here is the evidence.
Here are some pictures from Bells on Danforth, a bike-advocacy event that my husband, Val, helped organize. It is a group ride from Danforth and Woodbine to city hall, and it joins up with Bells on Bloor and Bells on Yonge. This year it culminated in Bikestock, musical performances at city hall. Photos courtesy of Val Dodge.
It is odd that I picked up a book called Tobacco (2001). I hate tobacco in all its forms. It is a vile substance in my estimation.
So, oddly, I just finished Iain Gately’s Tobacco which had been sitting on my pile of cheap books for a while, at least two years. I like books about single subjects – acorns, salt, cochineal beetles – because they reveal so much about social history. Tobacco is no different. Covering a very wide time span, from the Spanish conquest of the “New World” to the heyday of anti-tobacco law suits in the 1990s, the book tells the stories of fads, motivations, restrictions, gender roles, class differences, cultural preferences, advertising motifs and pure old dependence.
Gately has a very English style of understatement that made me laugh out loud quite a few times. He says this of the early Spanish conquest: “Relations between the Spaniards and Americans were limited to exploitation and sex.” I probably would have put the book away for another two years if I hadn’t stopped to read that line over a few times, now aware that Gately is capable of succinct mockery. As one who teaches this horrible period in human history I do appreciate the reference.
Hitler hated tobacco. Duke University was so-named after a gift of millions of dollars to Little Trinity College by Buck Duke, founder of the American Tobacco Company. Smoking jackets were designed so that weak women wouldn’t have to smell tobacco on their aristocratic husbands. Prohibition was a great boon to smoking. The book is full of interesting little nuggets like this. It is a quick trip through American and British popular culture.
What I didn’t like about the book was the ending. Gately seems to have succumbed to his own sub-title: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization. In the end he is seduced by the allure of tobacco, good and bad: “Many great men and women have left elegant testimonies to their tobacco habits, which will be joined, I believe, with others made in centuries to come.” I don’t know if he’s a smoker or not, cigar or cigarette, but as a vehement anti-smoker I don’t have any sympathy for smokers whatsoever and I certainly don’t think their stories are elegant. More recently it seems Gately has taken up the subject of alcohol (2008’s Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol). As a non-drinker I will not be imbibing.
Thunderstruck, by Erik Larson, is another in his historical murder series. Having previously read The Devil in the White City I knew to expect two intertwining stories set in a beautifully described city; this one involves Marconi and his development of wireless telegraphy plus American doctor Hawley Harvey Crippen who gruesomely murders his annoying wife. The city is London in the Edwardian period. Certainly this book is not as exciting or gripping as The Devil in the White City but it does have the same easy to read yet not trite writing style. I enjoyed the descriptions of London’s neighbourhoods so much that I have determined to go there next summer. The two plots come together when the wireless telegraph is used to capture Crippen and his disguised lover on their way to Canada aboard a a Canadian Pacific steamer.
One of the difficult aspects of this book is the character of Marconi. He is awful: socially obtuse, ego-maniacal. Yet he is not the murderer in the book. Larson makes no bones about Marconi’s dislikeable character. Perhaps he is so accurate in his description that he leaves the reader disinterested and morally disgusted. I couldn’t wait for the Marconi chapters to be over. I knew that mild-mannered Dr. Crippen was going to turn out to be a murderer yet I enjoyed the descriptions of him so much more. Seemingly patient in putting up with his demanding wife, Dr. Crippen turned out to be driven to the wall, poisoning and dismembering his wife. His turned out to be one of the most famous murder cases in British history. I knew nothing of it.
Oddly, it turns out that Marconi’s chief rival, Tesla, who does not figure in this book, was severely lacking in social skills as well. He ended up befriending pigeons. Marconi did marry, twice.
I will read another Erik Larson book. The man is a sincerely talented writer.
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