Howl's Moving Castle

           

            On Sunday I continued reading Diana Wynne Jones’s “Howl’s Moving Castle”. This book is growing on me. It seems to correspond culturally to modern England while being technologically Medieval in a world where magic is the technology. Sophie, having been transformed into an old woman, has taken shelter in Howl’s Moving Castle. The spell she is under won’t allow her to tell anyone that she has been transformed unless they can see for themselves. So far the only one who knows is Calcifer, the fire demon that lives in Howl’s fireplace and controls not only the heat of the castle but also causes it to move through the countryside and exist in several places at one. Calcifer has agreed to help her break her spell if Sophie helps him break the contract with Howl that keeps him stuck in the hearth. To the frustration of both Howl and his apprentice, Michael, Sophie has imposed herself on the castle and made herself its cleaning lady and cook. They are starting to like her though. Meanwhile, Sophie has found out that Howl’s reputation for eating young girls’ hearts is really more a metaphorical and romantic one. He falls in love with young women and obsesses over them until they fall for him and then he loses interest. To Sophie’s dismay though, she learns that Howl’s current interest is in her sister Lettie, who is not actually Lettie but rather her sister Martha because they have used magic to trade appearances.

            I watched an episode of Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe entitled “Solar Sky Raiders”. The Universal Ruler has figured out a way to cause multiple suns to appear in the sky, thus scorching the Earth. He communicates that he will keep increasing the number of suns until the planet surrenders. Cody figures out cleverly that there can’t be extra suns because our gravity hasn’t been affected. It wouldn’t be practical to mount mirrors in space so he concludes that they are projecting several refractive force fields to reflect and multiply the sun’s light. Cody finds that each force field is projected by one of the ruler’s space ships so he destroys each one and saves the earth.

            Another flaw in Commando Cody is when he flies into space in his rocket suit without wearing anything over his hands. He could catch frostbite that way!

Voluptua

           

            I spent a lot of time on Saturday reading Diana Wynne Jones’s “Howl’s Moving Castle”. A young woman is transformed into a crone by an angry witch and so she leaves home. She encounters the “evil” Wizard Howl’s moving castle and takes shelter there. It turns out the castle exists in several places at once and is controlled by a fire demon that is controlled by the wizard, who doesn’t seem to be evil at all but just strives for survival to maintain the reputation that he is.

            That evening, since I’d been cooped up all day, I took a bike ride. There were nice smells of cooking floating around Korea Town. Personally I think that name was ill chosen. It doesn’t roll off the tongue or into the ear as nicely as “Chinatown” because it has one too many syllables. I think it would sound better to call it “Little Korea”. I rode to Yonge and then back down to Queen, along which there was a lot of annoying Saturday night sudden stops and parkings of the cars in front of me.

            I watched an episode of Commander Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe entitled “The Hydrogen Hurricane”, which again had nothing really to do with the story. The Universal Ruler’s henchmen were exploding the hydrogen pockets that are apparently in the core of the Moon, thus causing it to be propelled closer to the earth. Four such explosions would cause the Moon to hit the Earth. It’s an odd type of invasion and conquest if one just destroys the place that one wants to conquer. The overall plan of the ruler seems to change from episode to episode. A couple of the battle scenes were clearly taken from two episodes before. There are only two women that ever appear in this show. The main female character is Cody’s assistant, Joan, but the ruler has an unnamed gorgeous and voluptuous blonde assistant. She always wears the same long, form fitting white dress and has her hair up in a style reminiscent of the way old Hollywood movies portrayed elegant women’s coiffures of ancient Greece or Rome, though I think that in both of those cultures, elaborate braiding was the thing. She never spoke until this episode and it was only one line, but just enough to show that she couldn’t act. But even when a lot of these beauties are bad actresses, there’s something more to them than a pretty face. I saw that her name on the credits was Gloria Pall and I did a search. She was an aircraft mechanic during World War II. In 1945 she was working in a USO office on the 56^th floor of the Empire State Building when a US bomber crashed into the 79^th floor. In 1954 she stormed into producer’s office of a California television station called KABC and demanded to be made into a TV star. She developed a television show called “Voluptua” in which she would play a character of that name that was meant to be a Marilyn Monroesque love goddess. The idea was to cash in on the popularity of horror hostess, Vampira, by creating an opposite themed character known as “Voluptua”. She would enter the set by seductively descending a stairway to a round bed where she would sit and address the viewer as if she was on a date with them and had brought them home to her place. She would also undress and change clothes behind a screen so that her body could be seen in silhouette. That had Christian and PTA groups shouting “obscenity!” until the show was cancelled after seven weeks. She later became a successful Hollywood real estate agent and also wrote books about Hollywood. She died at the end of 2012.

Goodbye to Paul Valliere

           

            On Saturday morning I got the surprising and sad news that my friend Paul Valliere had died late Wednesday or early Thursday. I had just spoken to him on the phone on Tuesday because he’d called me about a week before but I'd been too busy writing an essay to get back to him. He said that he’d called me from a poetry slam that hadn’t started yet at the Drake Hotel and wanted to ask me what he should expect. He told me he’d really enjoyed the slam a lot and that there’d been an open stage portion as well, so he got to read something. We usually met once a month at the Plastiscene Reading Series but I’d missed the last two because of essay deadlines. He told me that he’d gone to the October instalment but had found it disappointing because they’d changed the open stage format to one poem, rather than whatever one can read in three minutes. He said to the hostess that he’d brought two short poems and she allowed it, but the way she’d said, “Make it quick!” didn’t make him feel that it was a very welcoming atmosphere. So after he’d heard Michael Fraser read, he didn’t stay. He told me that he hadn’t bothered to go in November. I said that I’d be going in December, so he said he’d probably go then. As he often did when we discussed open stages, he reminisced about the Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy, the reading series that I used to run and host. He said he would like to find something as open, relaxed and welcoming of poets as my event had been. He then asked if it had been twenty years yet since I’d started it. I told him it had been twenty-two. He reminded me then that there was still a chance to prepare a reunion for the twenty-fifth anniversary in 2018. I told him I’d give it some thought. I guess I’ll have to think even harder about it now.

            Paul started coming to the Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy I think around 1997 or 1998, and became a weekly member of the family. His daughter Rosalind started coming as well. Paul came to my poetry slam and even came to the yoga classes I started teaching in the west end.

            After the Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy died I fell out of touch with Paul and a lot of other people for about ten years, but tracked him down on the internet and we reconnected after I told him about the Plastiscene Reading Series. He had had a major loss during the time we hadn’t been seen each other. In the fall of 2009, Paul’s son, Alex, who had been living with him, caught some people that had broken into their house and Alex was murdered when he tried to stop them.

            Paul Valliere maintained his positive outlook on life despite the horrible loss of his son, but this was the way he had always lived his life. He was born Paul Valyear, but later adopted and became Bill Rundle. When he began sharing his poetry and writing, he adopted the pen name, Paul Valliere. Another example of his uncommon positivity can be found in his response after another man made his wife pregnant. Paul adopted and raised Daniel as his own child.

            Paul Valliere often asked me for advice on his writing and I was a harsh critic. He tended to accept the first draft of anything he wrote as the finished product. I advised him that trying to polish his work by rewriting pieces would help him to improve better than just writing one poem after another. I told him that he wrote poetry like Ed Wood made movies but he took that as a compliment. I thought his short stories were far more interesting than his poetry. Though they could have used fine-tuning as well, they were quirky, imaginative and had a natural flow to the dialogue.

            I only had one opportunity to see Paul in action in his secret identity as Bill Rundle, chimney expert. He and his son Daniel were going to be destroying the chimney of a building on Harbord, near Spadina, but it was next to an alley and they needed someone to direct traffic away from falling chunks.

            On my way there, along Harbord, I heard two beeps as a beat up old pick-up truck with a ladder tied to the back passed me. Although I’d never seen Paul/Bill’s truck before, I knew it was him behind the wheel.

            We met at about 8:45 behind the work site. Paul had brought his dog, Kira along. Luckily she was wearing a muzzle because when I went to pat her she tried to bite me. I’d patted her a couple of weeks before at Paul’s apartment, but I guess the context was different, plus I had been sitting down before, and threat perception probably changes according to how tall the animal we are encountering happens to be.

            Paul/Bill’s son arrived in a fairly new four-by-four, which when parked beside Bill/Paul’s old pick-up, illustrated the difference between their two personalities. Paul/Bill was a “let’s play it by ear” type of guy, whereas Daniel is a perfectionist and wants to have a plan for success. Paul/Bill had promised me fifty dollars cash for my help, but ended up giving me eighty. I don’t know what I did for it but it was nice to have it and kind of fun to hang out with Paul Valliere in his secret identity.

Bedrooms of the Nation

           

            On Friday I had to go to the Laundromat with my bedding because the day before that some idiot forgot to flip his mattress up on it’s side after getting up from a siesta. The result was that later on he walked into the bedroom and saw his idiot cat Jonquil, the one that stinks, lying on his top-sheet, which had made the sheet smell like her. So the idiot had to toss the sheet in the laundry basket and sleep without covers early on Friday.

            I thought that after doing the laundry I’d have time to take a nap before leaving for work, but I got a call from Statistics Canada about their “time use” survey and since I had told the woman she could call me back, I felt obliged to answer her questions for twenty minutes or more. The main body of the survey was for me to give her an account of twenty-four hours of my day, two days ago, so I told her about yoga, guitar practice and the foodbank. I also told her that about an hour was spent on something that she probably didn’t have a category for, and I think she understood.

            I worked that afternoon at OCADU for Diane Pugen, doing mostly one long pose. Coincidentally she was telling her students about the artist, William Kent Monkman, who is the co-author of one of the books on which I wrote my term paper. I told Diane that and she said she’d like to read my essay, so I told her that if I post it on my blog I’d send her a link.

            It was raining a bit when I rode home, but only enough to dampen my clothing slightly.

            I watched an episode of Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe called “Robot Monster from Mars”. These people are shameless with their titles. There was a robot, but it was from planet L-26, and Mars wasn’t even mentioned in the story. The aliens used a robot to break into Cody’s headquarters but it was neutralized. In a second attempt to get in the invaders used a stun ray that freezes people in whatever position they are in. Cody’s assistant, Dick is captured and they use a mind control device before releasing him, giving him instructions to get Cody’s spaceship designs from the safe. Then they fly to L-26 where Dick must work for the leader even after the mind control has worn off. Cody and Joan go looking for Dick, with Joan flying the ship. Dick, while talking to the leader, secretly turns on his two-way badge radio, which is similar to the com-badges that later used on Star Trek, and so Cody hears where they are and they fly to L-26. When the ship is approaching, the leader shoots a ray that stops them in the air, but Cody’s rocket suit is unaffected, so he flies down to disable the ray. He also gets hold of the controls to a guard robot and takes them back to Joan on the ship. The rescue of Dick involved Joan controlling the robot so as to run interference for Cody. The leader, of course, got away.

    

Detestable Drumsnabs

             
            While sitting in the lecture hall just before the start of class on Thursday, I turned around and did an approximate headcount. There had to have been just fewer than thirty-five students.

            When professor Baker started up the slide apparatus, a slide from the previous class was displayed: “Medieval Empires, Lecture 2: from the Ottonians to the Hohenstaufens” There was also the image of a very heavy looking golden and bejeweled crown with a cross on it that threw off its aesthetic balance. But it was hard not to associate it with some of the stories of fairy tale kingdoms we’ve been covering in Children’s Literature.

            The lecture, with a lot of audience feedback invited and received, was on Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s “The Jolly Postman or Other People’s Letters”. We returned again to the book as material object that invites physical engagement and interactivity. The child is invited to pretend to break the law and to read other people’s mail.

            The intertextuality of the book assumes that the reader is already familiar with many fairy tales and nursery rhymes that are referenced in casual ways. For example, a letter from Goldilocks to the Three Bears is postmarked Banbury Cross, thus referencing without quoting the nursery rhyme: “Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross, to see a fine lady upon a white horse; rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, and she shall have music wherever she goes.”

            The book places the world of fairy tales into the middle class English countryside of the 1980s and gives that world an efficient postal service to connect it. A lot of the magic referred to is made practical to the modern age, which is part of the same charm that made Harry Potter so popular.

            I thought it was particularly hilarious that the Wicked Witch’s garage was also made of gingerbread and had a car with the licence plate “Hag1”.

            I really don’t need to own “The Jolly Postman”, so after class I went up to the OISE library to get their copy of the book. I went up to the juvenile section, on the third floor, which is really the fourth or fifth floor by my count while climbing the stairs. I found the book fairly quickly, but discovered that it was sealed in a transparent plastic string and button envelope. It seemed so extremely protected that I wondered if I’d be allowed to take it out, but the friendly young librarian in that section told me that the container meant there were things in the book that could fall out in transport. When I brought it downstairs, the front desk librarian, who always looks both a little bored and a little reserved, looked puzzled. She said, “I wonder why they have it in that container!” Her curiosity then brought her to life and she said to me, “I’m sorry! I HAVE to see what’s inside to find out why they put it in this envelope!” Then she unravelled the string and saw that some the book’s pages had open envelopes with letters inside that could be pulled out and read. Then she understood. Her curiosity had an interesting coincidence with the nature of the book.

            I rode along Bloor to Castlefrank and then north. There’s only one street running east off of Castlefrank and it’s a dead end with some big fancy houses called “Drumsnab”. It sounds like an insult that musicians would bestow on a particularly despicable fellow musician, as in, “You fucking drumsnab!” Apparently it’s the name of the estate that the street is named after and the estate was named after a word in a northern English dialect that means “sugar-loaf”. Sugar was stored in phallus shaped loaves in old post-colonial England.

            I watched an episode of Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe called “Destroyers of the Sun”. The Universal Ruler was shooting a ray that blocked out the sun and plunged the world in darkness. It only seemed dark in some areas though and other places like dusk. I guess they needed to show us what was going on. They found out the signal was coming from Planet M-27, which is apparently in the solar system “just west of ours”, whatever that means. They went there and bombed their base, causing the signal to be shut off and our sun to shine again.

Too Many Lawyers in the Guacamole and Other Recipes

           

            On Wednesday I went down to the foodbank at around 11:00. Again, so many people in line were smoking that I just stepped back, and since I was the last person in line when it started moving, there was no danger of conflicts over who was where. The red faced woman who sits there every Wednesday on the fire escape, jabbering amicably, had just gotten her ticket and then stood at the door as if it were a line-up to get food. She was told it wouldn’t open for more than two hours, which she, of course should have known because she’s there every week. It never occurred to me before then that she might have dementia.

            I got number 28 and went home. Two hours later, as I was getting ready to go back down, my next-door neighbour popped his head out of his door and told me that a guy had already moved into the superintendent’s old room. I sighed and commented that we never get any women in this building. In the eighteen years that I’ve lived here there have been only two female tenants. One of them stayed for a month or two and the other, a friendly former prostitute and perhaps occasionally relapsing crackhead, was there for about a year.

            Our building stands in direct gender contrast, it seems to the building that houses the A-plus Sushi and Bibim place that sits exactly across the street. I have hardly every seen anyone but women living in the apartments above. I wonder if a building of men and a building of women exactly across from one another keeps some sort of balance in Parkdale that would go askew if it changed.

            At the foodbank, I went over to stand in the only patch of sunlight against the wall of the building across the driveway. It’s also the only part of the wall where dead vines still cling even without a connection to the ground below.

            A very talkative woman in her sixties was holding court and waxing philosophical at the broken hexagonal picnic table. She was telling a small group that the brain is the root of addiction and that drugs, gambling and other things are merely triggers. A guy with a backpack to chat with her. He was drinking beer out of a can and he told her that he borrows ten dollars every day from his buddy at the computer store so he can buy beer. She advised him of a deal at the Beer Store of “Two tall boys for four dollars and you can’t go wrong with that.” She helped him get another beer out of his backpack.

            A nervous young man asked her what’s so special about Justin Trudeau. She answered that he’s Pierre Eliot Trudeau’s son. He said that he hadn’t known that and had thought that them having the same last name was a coincidence. She told him that Pierre Trudeau had been a Socialist who crossed over to the Liberals from the NDP.

            At one point she quoted Gloria Steinem’s famous statement that “a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”. The thing is, that can pretty much be said about anything. Houses don’t need basements or even windows, people don’t need haircuts, cars don’t need radios, dining rooms don’t need tables, buses don’t need seats and the world doesn’t even really need music, so the same comparison can be drawn with all of those things and more. It’s actually more of a Buddhistic statement than it is Feminist.

            She said, “I’ve had three husbands and two wives!”

            She said she still gets dressed at 4:00 just to go out and find a cigarette but she used to stay out all night to find drugs. The young nervous guy said that, from the point of view of an athlete, since pot interferes with performance. She argued that anything that grows on the earth is natural to the human body. That’s an odd statement, considering all the natural poisons from both plants and animals that can kill people within minutes.

            It seemed to take a long time for them to call the numbers. Once I was inside though, I didn’t have long to wait. My friend with the wool cap was my volunteer for the first shelves. They had some jars of gourmet condiments from Stonewall Kitchens, so I took the fig and walnut spread. I took a small bag of flour, a bag of vanilla flavoured coffee beans, some granola bars and several little packages of instant oatmeal. I finally asked the volunteer for his name, and he told me it was Bruce. I shook his hand and told him mine. In Sue’s section, there was only a bag of pre-cooked, frozen egg whites and a PC Blue Menu frozen dinner of “Quinoa Southwest Chicken”. I asked in the bread section if they had raisin bread but the lady said they didn’t, so I didn’t take any bread. My daughter had bought me some fresh bread when she visited from Montreal a few days before. There wasn’t much in the vegetable section. Just three potatoes, two apples and a package of white corn tortillas.

            I watched the fifth episode of Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe. It was explained in the first episode how Cody got his name. He had been a commando during the war. The United States does not have commandoes. That’s a British army unit. The U.S. loves to imitate the U.K. military. This episode was called “Battle of the Space Giants” but there were no giants of any sort in the story. It’s reprehensible to give a title that has nothing to do with the content. In this episode the aliens were shooting germ bombs at the Earth’s cities. Cody stopped them and captured the enemy ship to find that the weapons on board were far in advance of Earth’s. Their power source was an element known as Saturnium that can only be found on one of Saturn’s moons. So they flew there to shoot a missile that would explode the saturnium and set off a chain reaction to destroy all of the Saturnium. They never explain just how fast Cody’s ship can go with it’s atomic fuel, but it seems that getting Saturn is like going out for a short drive across town.

Exploding Hymens of the Metalstream and Other Breaking News

On Tuesday, after yoga, I started putting the finishing touches on my essay. Mostly I worked on the in text citations, but one of the books, “A Coyote Columbus Story”, does not have page numbers and so there was nothing to put in parentheses. I thought about just counting the pages, but I first checked out the MLA website and, as far as I could tell, it seemed to be saying that one shouldn’t make up page numbers but should rather simply refer to what the author has said, each time. I sent an email to my TA two hours before I had to leave, to ask her what I should do, but she didn’t get back to me at all before I left or even later that day. I finished the essay and wrote a new end paragraph. I’m fairly happy with the essay, but the end was a little rushed. Mind you though, an essay that I got an A-plus on last year had an ending that I just threw in at the last minute.

            I got to the lecture hall just as the previous class was finishing. I think the Medieval History professor was making eyes at me before she left.

            Christine, one of the TAs, was our guest lecturer for the discussion about C.S. Lewis’s “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”. I haven’t read it because writing my essay put me behind on the reading.

            C.S Lewis was called Jack by his friends and family. By a strange coincidence, he died on the same day as Jack Kennedy, as did Aldous Huxley.

            Lewis was also known for his writing on Christian theology and some people think there’s a little too much Christian symbolism in his “Chronicles of Narnia” series. He had been drawn to spirituality because of the experiences of overwhelming joy he would experience, starting from childhood. His attitude was reminiscent of the Romantic poets. I’ve experienced that same joy and I say it’s meaningless.

            Lewis wrote “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” first, though some of his subsequent books are set in a time preceding the original story.

Lewis: “Sometimes fairy stories may say best what’s to be said.” They defamiliarize the imagination and can also be a training ground for learning how to interpret facts. He said of Narnia that he had not set out consciously to write a Christian story, but since he was Christian, that was the imagery that came to him.

            Lewis was heavily influenced by both George MacDonald’s fantasy writing and his moral teachings. When Lewis became well known, MacDonald’s books had already slipped into obscurity but Lewis promoted them and brought them back into the public spotlight.

            In his paper, “The Fantastic Imagination”, George MacDonald wrote, “ The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them; but they themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own, with its own laws … When such forms are new embodiments of old truths, we call them products of the Imagination; when they are mere inventions, however lovely, I should call them the work of the Fancy: in either case, Law has been diligently at work.

            His world once invented, the highest law that comes next into play is, that there shall be harmony between the laws by which the new world has begun to exist; and in the process of his creation, the inventor must hold by those laws. The moment he forgets one of them, he makes the story, by its own postulates, incredible. To be able to live a moment in an imagined world, we must see the laws of its existence obeyed. Those broken, we fall out of it. The imagination in us, whose exercise is essential to the most temporary submission to the imagination of another, immediately, with the disappearance of Law, ceases to act.”

            I found this interesting because it mirrored a quote from Ursula K. LeGuin that I read in Science Fiction class last year, “In fantasy you get to make it all up, even the rules of how things work, and then follow your rules absolutely. In science fiction you get to make it up, but you have to follow most of the rules of science, or at least not ignore them.”

This idea of the laws one must follow is interesting because Lewis seems to find a way of breaking those laws by coming up with the idea of deeper magic that existed before time and which has different laws than the current magic.

            The Narnia stories also draw from a lot of previously established tropes of fantasy, such as Alice’s finding an unexpected passage to another world; timelessness, as in Peter Pan’s Neverland; there are creatures from mythology; there is an evil queen; there is a sleeping figure, as in Sleeping Beauty, but the sleeping figure is the place of Narnia.

            The idea that it is perpetually winter but never Christmas in Narnia is interesting because Christmas itself is barely in winter. That would mean that Narnia is frozen somewhere within the four day period between the winter solstice and Christmas.

            The narrator of the story is biased and slightly manipulative.

            The lion character, Aslan, has been compared to Jesus Christ but Lewis has insisted he is not an allegorical representation of Christ but a parallel of Christ for that particular world. When one of the children asks if the lion is safe, they are told that he is of course not safe but he is also good.

            The question, “What are you?” is often asked in Narnia, as opposed to “Who are you?”

            The children change Narnia but it doesn’t change all of them.

            After class I rode up to OISE to renew a book and then down to Bay and Dundas to Top Cuts. Now that my essay was handed in I felt free to take the time for my bi-annual haircut. Amy wasn’t busy, so she took me right away with her magic fingers.

            On the way home, since it seemed to be a day of getting things done that had been put off for a while, I stopped at The Australian Boot Company to see if someone had time to treat my Blundies. Again, there was someone who wasn’t busy at all. It took about ten minutes and it’s cool how the treatment makes them darker.

            That night I watched the fourth episode of Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe. The story was entitled, “Nightmare Typhoon”. The aliens were dropping bombs into the atmosphere that, when exploded caused cataclysmic weather in the area below. The Universal Leader threatened to wipe out New York City but some of the storm footage showed palm trees in a hurricane. Cody developed a dispersal gas to counter the effect of the bombs and also destroyed the alien spaceship that was dropping them, with the crew inside. It was the first time he’d actually killed anyone.

Cigarette People of the Smokerings of Earth and Other Stories

            
            On Monday I put my essay aside for a few hours to go and meet my daughter and her fiancé at Timothy’s across from the Eaton’s Centre while they waited to catch their bus. I think I waited with Astrid and Lauren for at least three hours and they had been there even longer. They were using the Timothy’s network. I tried to go on too and then my phone started screwing up in a way that it never had before. It seemed to be freezing like a computer using Windows 98. Astrid and I reminisced pleasantly for quite a while.

            At around 15:45 I walked with them to the bus station. Astrid ate a couple of soggy microwaved beef patties while Lauren ate a burger from the Plastiverse. Then I walked them to their platform and hugged them goodbye when the Megabus arrived.

            I rode home and spent about five hours on my essay, almost finishing a second draft by bedtime. My editing process is that I will read a paragraph out loud. If I notice anything that needs to be adjusted, even if it’s the adding of a one comma, I will make the change and then start the paragraph again. I spent an hour on one of the paragraphs.

            I ate dinner while working and so didn’t view any downloaded shows, but the night before that I watched the third episode of “Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe”. This one was called “Cosmic Vengeance” and it featured Cody, Joy and Tim rocketing to Venus in Cody’s spaceship to take on the Universal Ruler who had set up a mining base and weapons lab there. Joy and Tim stayed in the ship while Cody walked directly into the leader’s cave. He was invited in with the intercom, and then the leader gave him a tour, showing off his ray gun that could melt a building on Earth from Venus. He showed Cody the chair he planned on putting him in which would extract his knowledge about spaceships. That’s when the fistfight began. For some reason the leader only had two assistants. The aliens always seem to want to fistfight with Cody even though the knockout spray they use on everyone else would probably work better. Anyway, Cody knocked them all out and stole the ray gun, which he set up outside the cave and began melting the mountain down around the ruler. Then he flew with Joy and Tim back to Earth.

            This was the last episode in which William Schallert played Tim Richards. That guy has been working steady in film and television from then pretty much till now, though he’s slowed down a touch in his old age.

Unitards of the Plastiverse and Other Stories

The ancient Egyptians had a religion that was transportation based. That’s why one of the gods they worshiped was “A New Bus”.

I spent most of Sunday working on my essay. Because of that I wasn’t able to go out to the Plastiscene Reading Series for the second month in a row. I assume that the next Plastiscene will be on December 20 and I plan on going to that, even though my exam will be on December 22. It’s very hard to prepare for English essays other than to just write practice essays on questions one makes up about the material. Sometimes it’s possible to anticipate an exam essay topic and have most of the response in one’s head before the exam, but mostly one just has to have read the books. I’ll have almost three weeks between my last class and the essay, so I should be okay for a night out on December 20.

I finished a first draft of my essay at around an hour before midnight. Hopefully I’ll have time to fine-tune the thing on Monday.

I went to bed after midnight, but couldn’t sleep and so I got up again to write this. I wasn’t sure why I couldn’t sleep though. Perhaps I was excited because I was relieved about finishing the first draft of the essay. I slept so well the night before. I was feeling kind of prickly but it didn’t seem to be bedbugs because I couldn’t smell them and when bedbugs are around the odour is obvious. Maybe it’s from the cats shedding on the couch and me having been sitting against it. I’d better vacuum the couch again.

When I finally started feeling tired, I went back to bed, and just before drifting off to sleep I could smell bedbugs.

A Family Dinner at Om

           

            On Saturday I got up at 4:00 because I had gone to bed earlier than usual. I decided to take advantage of the extra hour to satisfy my curiosity as to whether the bedbugs were finally gone. In the doorframe all I found was the greasy corpse of a bedbug that strangely didn’t even give off a bedbug odour. I moved my mattress to check the baseboards, and in the corner that corresponds to the top left of my bed I found a live bedbug that was black inside. A little further along the baseboard though I killed one that had fresh blood inside of it. A little further down there was another sick one, but about halfway I crushed a large one that was red inside. I searched the whole room and that’s all I found but if there were healthy ones there might also be eggs. I vacuumed the area before I started my yoga. I felt a little discouraged about there still being bedbugs but I guess I should feel encouraged that I haven’t seen any crawling out in the open for two weeks. Hopefully they won’t repopulate drastically before the next treatment on December 4.

            At around 9:00 about six fire trucks wailed their way frantically along Queen, turning in front of my place as they so often do to park in front of 245 Dunn Avenue. It seems to me that they should just set up a fire station on the main floor of building to save time, traffic and noise.

            I went down to the foodbank at 10:00 to stand in line in the cold rain, and after locking my bike, I walked back to the end of the line just as a big middle aged bleached blond woman and a slightly less large bushy haired middle aged man of Indian descent took the place in front of me. They were both smokers who lit up almost immediately. They didn’t look like they’d be that receptive to being asked politely to step out of line while they were smoking, so I just stepped back, almost out of range of the smoke, hugging myself in the cold. They swayed from side to side as they talked as they smoked, with her doing most of the talking. I wondered how many tobacco company executives are millionaires just from sales to poor people alone. I went back behind them when they had finished their cigarettes and then away when they lit up again. They were each on their third cigarette when the line started moving, but I stayed to the side and waited until they were done. When I took my place again, the woman mumbled something about me butting in ahead of the frail old guy with the walker and the fedora, even though he knew I was ahead of him. I guess one can’t step out of line to avoid jeopardizing one’s health without getting accused of butting ahead of someone.

I got number twenty-four and went home. I came back at 11:00 only to find that they don’t open until 11:30. I guess I knew and had forgotten that fact. I went home again for a few minutes and on the way out I met Sundar, the building superintendent. He’s moved out but he said he’d still be managing the building. I had been told that he’d moved into the cockroach heaven of the West Lodge Apartments at the top of O’Hara, but he said he’d gotten into a seniors residence. “You’re a senior?” I asked with surprise. He nodded and confirmed, “I’m sixty.” I said, “I’m sixty too!” and then wondered if he’d though I’d said, “I’m 62!” but I didn’t clarify. He said that the hospital helped him get in because of his health problems. He said he’s happy with the new place and I believed him.

When I got back to the foodbank I noticed that the guy who’d been behind me in line with the walker was already coming out with some bags of food. It turns out that the foodbank decided to open early, perhaps because of the rain. I went right in. There wasn’t really much this time around. They had some packages of green pea crisps, which I’d never seen there before. In addition to the usual pasta there was something that I thought was rice and picked it up but the volunteer said that it wasn’t rice, though no one there knew what it was. She suggested it might be tapioca. There was no rice other than packaged rice dish products. I was disappointed that there was no cereal. In the cold section there was sour cream, some frozen beef patties, and some slices of pizza in plastic bags, probably left over from all the pizza they’ve been giving out over the last two weeks. The bread was of a better quality this time around and I took a couple of whole grain loaves that looked relatively fresh.

I spent the rest of the day chipping away at my essay until the evening.

My daughter, Astrid and her fiancé, Lauren arrived in town the day before and she invited me out to dinner Saturday night. I thought it might be nice to give Lauren another Toronto food experience that might not be as readily available in Montreal, so we decided to go to a Tibetan restaurant in my neighbourhood. Astrid called me from Lansdowne and Queen and said they’d meet me at my front door. It turned out they had walked from Lansdowne subway station and stopped at the No Frills along the way. When I came out she handed me two grocery bags full of food. I don’t know if she did this consciously but most of Astrid’s food selections for me were the same kinds of groceries I used to buy when she was living with me. There was also a case of lemon soda. I took the bags back up stairs and then the three of us walked to the Om Restaurant just past Lansdowne. I remember the location back when it was a West Indian bar back in the late 80s. Om has a pleasant atmosphere and the walls are done in warm orange earth tones, with nice, mostly traditional Tibetan art on the walls. This atmosphere is interrupted though by the television hanging down from the ceiling and which looks about as appropriate as a mobile made of electrified razor blades hanging down into a crib. I had the chilli chicken and a Moosehead. They ordered a platter, which featured a selection of Asian appetizers such as spring rolls and samosas, and I think for an entrée they had the shaptak, which is sautéed beef with green chillies. Lauren couldn’t finish hers because she’s not used to that much meat, so I took it home. Mine was very spicy, but I liked it. It was wonderful to catch up with my daughter on her life in Montreal over a pleasant meal in a pleasant place. We’re planning on getting together again before they leave on Monday.

Later, I was at home and I heard a woman screaming angry words. I looked out my window and saw she was screaming at a young man. Then she suddenly slapped him and walked away while he walked off in the other direction seemingly unaffected by the assault.  A few minutes later I heard screaming again. They both must have walked back from the directions they had gone, because they were standing on the same corner as before. This time I could make out some of what she was screaming in the rain: “Your wife! Your wife! Your wife! That’s all you ever think about! What about me?” Later things had calmed down and she was merely talking loud as they walked, I assume to her place, since it’s the direction she had stormed previously after slapping him.

I did some writing for a while, but felt very tired about two hours before I would normally go to bed and without exercising good oral hygiene, I flopped into bed and went to sleep right away.

Arguing with the Traffic Light

           

            I spent some time on Friday working on my essay. It’s starting to pull together, but it seems there’s never a day when I have three hours to pour into it. I went to teach my yoga class and I was surprised when an actual student showed up. It was a woman who I think came once to my Sunday class about three years ago.

            On my way home, I was standing across the street from my place waiting for the walk signal. A late middle-aged guy who I see almost every day was standing at the other side. He always wears bright coloured tracksuits with matching hats, either in yellow, red or a combination of the two. He started shouting at the light as he was waiting, “Come on light! Change! Why don’t you change? I want a little change in the afternoon!”

            That night my landlord came to my door to tell me he couldn’t get an appointment with the exterminator until December 4. When I had told him last week that I was only available on Monday or Friday this week, he misunderstood that I meant that Mondays and Fridays were my only options any week. It may not be a panic. Eight days ago, the last time I searched for bedbugs, I was only able to find two live ones by digging them out of crevices in the doorframe, and neither of those were very healthy. I haven’t seen any crawling but I’d better do another search soon to add more evidence to my theory that they are gone.

            I watched the second episode of Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe. The aliens steal Cody’s spaceship and try to use it to take uranium from Earth to their home planet so they could build a fleet of ships like Cody’s. He uses his rocket suit to intercept them. They capture him and tie his hands but he manages to sabotage his ship so they needed him to fix it. He tricks them into surrendering. They try one more time to physically overwhelm him while the ship is spinning out of control, though for some reason they aren’t being tossed around inside the ship. Cody knocks them out and lands the ship just in time.

Sky Marshal of the Universe

           

            In Children’s Literature class on Thursday, we spent the whole hour discussing Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “A Little Princess”, whose publication history spanned the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of the Edwardian. It began as a magazine serial in one period and finally emerged as a novel in the next. Professor Baker didn’t really lecture this time, but rather engaged us to give our impressions of the story. We compared it to Cinderella. The mean headmistress of the school takes the place of the wicked stepmother and her two favourite students represent Cinderella’s evil stepsisters. The magical transformations of “A Little Princess” are not supernatural, but are nonetheless fantastic. Both are stories of unjust oppression featuring an undervalued heroine with high beginnings to which she returns. Both girls have no mothers at the beginning and lose their fathers early on. Both girls are forced into a life of drudgery. In both stories a man of great wealth seeks the girls out, though they differ in that Sara, of “A Little Princess” is younger and still in need of parental protection so when she is found she is adopted. Both Sara and Cinderella are exceptionally good girls, though Sara shows some slightly more realistic flashes of ego. She is also shown to be unusually intelligent and creative. The moral of both stories is that graciousness is priceless, and without it, nothing is possible; but one must also have intelligence, courage, good breeding, and common sense. In both cases though there is also help from some higher source. Sara’s equivalent to the fairy godmother is Ram Dass, the Indian servant of the wealthy man who is trying to find her. I doubt if it would be considered appropriate in the modern era to have a man watching a young girl constantly in her bedroom through a skylight and claiming that he’s looking out for her best interests.

            Cinderella, in some versions had to live in a basement but in “A Little Princess” the attic is ironically the place in the house where lowest servants were forced to live.

            In some ways the story has more in common with Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre”.

            After class I went to Canada Computers to buy another flashdrive, as my old one has mysteriously disappeared. Maybe it will turn up though when I start putting my place back in order, if indeed the bedbugs are proven to be gone as seems to be the case.

            I watched the first episode of the 1955 series, “Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe”. Humanoid aliens have begun to attack the Earth, but to avoid mass hysteria; the government is keeping it a secret while they mount a defence. Commando Cody, a master scientist and a two fisted warrior, has been made the leader of the Earth’s defensive forces. He hires two scientists to assist him, and I was surprised to see that one of them was played by William Schallert, who went on to play the fathers of the two cousins on the Patty Duke Show. In the first episode, “Enemies of the Universe” the aliens, who basically look like regular gangsters and fight with fists, bullets and the odd hand grenade, first try to uncover Cody’s plans to fight them. He has already shielded the planet with a layer of radioactive cosmic dust, which somehow prevents the alien rockets from breaking through. They find the map to an abandoned mining town called Graphite, which is where Cody and his crew plan to set up operations for an undisclosed project. Somehow the aliens manage to set up a secret base inside the walls of Cody’s lab in Graphite and they spy on him through the cut out eyes of the photograph on the wall of a cowboy. When they learn that Cody is building an interplanetary spaceship they send a message to their leader on the home world. Their leader, wearing a comical costume of robes and headgear with earflaps and who of course has a Russian accent, tells them they must destroy the spaceship at all costs.  They first try to set it on fire, but Cody stops them. Then they plant a bomb that is supposed to go off as soon as the ship reaches a certain altitude. Then Cody and Schallert as Tim take the ship for a test run. Meanwhile though they capture the female scientist who activates the badge that Cody gave her, which is a two-way communication device. She is able to let Cody overhear the alien plans before he reaches the height that would cause the bomb to go off. Cody puts on his rocket suit and flies to rescue his assistant and defeat her captors. It was entertaining. I had actually thought I’d only downloaded an episode but it turns out I have the whole season.

Badgers and Coyotes

           

            Wednesday was the first day in nine months that I’ve had to work at OCADU for an 8:30 class. I got up 5:00 though and had time to play guitar for half an hour and even make coffee.

I worked for Terry Shofner’s class. He’s one of the few instructors who actually engages me in conversation whenever I work for him and is interested in hearing about my university classes.

I was scheduled to work that afternoon from 15:10 to 18:10, and I would have normally had time to ride home and sleep for a while, but my professor has her office hours from 14:00 to 16:00 and I wanted to get some feedback on my essay, so I wanted to be there half an hour early to guarantee I’d be the first one to see her so I could get to work on time afterward. I decided to go to the models lounge to try to sleep there. I rested for a while with my feet on a chair and the chair’s cushion against the wall behind my head, but I couldn’t really sleep. I plugged in my laptop and read some more of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “A Little Princess”. She really was a pretty good writer, especially in some of her descriptive writing. I’m about two-thirds of the way through. In the movie, Sara’s father returns after being incapacitated for all the years his daughter lived in poverty. In the real story, it looks like her father is really dead and it’s her father’s partner, who had been thought to have run off with his money, was the one who had been incapacitated. He’s made it his life’s goal to track down his partner’s daughter and to give her her father’s share of the fortune he made. He still doesn’t realize though that he is living next door to the school where Sara is trapped in the life of a drudge.

As I’d planned, I was by far the first student there for Professor Baker’s office hours. She spent fourty minutes looking at and talking about my essay. She likes a lot of my ideas about the use of talking animals in literature; even the one about “otherness”, which I wasn’t sure wasn’t a little bit tacky. I was telling her that otherness inspires sympathy more than sameness and that it can be seen not only with animals, but also in aliens and androids as presented in science fictions stories. She didn’t agree with me at first but in the middle of reading my essay she told me that I was right about robots. She reminded me that I have to steer clear of absolute statements and just stick with the material at hand. There was also the obvious fact that the essay needs to be organized, but I didn’t even really consider what I showed her to be a first draft yet.

While researching coyotes, to try to see how many natural characteristics fit with Thomas King’s character of Coyote, I came across some interesting information that I shared with Professor Baker. Apparently, Coyotes form amicable relationships with badgers in the wild because they help each other dig for rodents. Coyotes have been seen snuggling up to badgers and even licking their faces. I would imagine that if they can get the badgers to like them the coyotes wouldn’t have to do as much of the digging. Sort of like, “You’re a wonderful little badger and I like you very much! Thanks for the rat!”

I asked her to reassess my first essay and she told me my TA had already let her know that I would probably make that request. She said she would read my electronic submission.

I also asked her if she would sometime offer me a critique of the only children’s story I think I’ve ever written. She said she would if I was sure I could handle it, so it was arranged that I would email it to her in January.

It was lucky that I was her first visitor because when I walked out of her office I had just half an hour to get to work. There were at least five or six people waiting in the hall to see her when I left. None of them looked all that happy to have been waiting for so long. I don’t know if she spent so much time with me because my essay was particularly interesting or if it’s just that she kind of lives in a dream world where time doesn’t exist like a lot of people from the west coast. Even though her office hours are only for two hours, I’m sure she stayed until everyone had had a chance to consult with her.

I worked for Sara Sniderhan from mid-afternoon to evening. Her hello at the beginning and her thank you at the end were stiff and businesslike but she seemed a bit warmer in the midst of the class. She’s probably just shy, and covers it up with a cold veneer.

When I left work it was dark and raining. I passed the sax player who I see busking a lot at the corner of Spadina, but he was about a block east of the corner where the sidewalk is very wide. He has longish hair, swept back from a well-receded hairline and he looked and sounded good playing the sax intro from Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” in the rain. He was playing it way too quickly though.

That night I watched the fourth episode of “Cheyenne”. It was a lame, formulaic story about going to a town across the Mexican border to bring back a bandit. The bad guy and his men run the town and have robbed it of its spirit. Cheyenne and Smitty take on the badguys by themselves, inspiring the men of the town to rise up to help them. Again, it was stiffly written and poorly acted. This show blew its chance with me and so I deleted the whole file.

Spoon Face

           

            On Tuesday as I was leaving for class, a couple of older women were smoking and talking in front of the Coffeetime near the “O’Hara Garden” at the corner. She said hello to me and I recognized her. She asked if I knew who she was. I said I did. She challenged me to tell her though. I recognized her as the vegetable lady from the foodbank. She declared, “Your good! Most people don’t recognize me without my bandana!”

We spent the entire two hours of Children’s Literature class talking about George MacDonald’s “The Princess and the Goblin”. MacDonald’s life as a writer corresponded to Victoria’s reign as queen of Britain. He was a Congregationalist minister but the church let him go because he preached that all faiths eventually unite with god. His books fell under the old definition of the romance novel. He had eleven children and was a deeply engaged father. An annual event in the family was a staged drama, such as a Shakespeare play, in which all of the children would perform. He believed that children were an important part of any adult’s self understanding and this was tied with his approach to theology in that he saw god as a nurturing father as opposed to a ruling king. He felt the same about both the appreciation of and the making of art and that art was a lens that brought us closer to god. He thought that there was no difference between the waking world and the world of dreams, except that dreams are just a more powerfully charged reality, a glimpse of spiritual reality, which is too intense to experience except in diluted form. His thinking was influenced by German romantics such as Goethe, who strove to combine philosophical thinking with the aesthetic experience of art. MacDonald strove with his writing not to convey meaning but rather to wake it in a personal way for the reader. He tried to convey moral teaching without a particular lesson. He was the mentor of Lewis Carroll, who was a friend of the family and took many photographs of MacDonald’s children, in particular, his young daughters. It was because his readings of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” were such a hit with MacDonald’s children that he was encouraged to publish it.

            “The Princess and the Goblin” contains many elements of popular fairy tales. Every aspect of the story, every colour and object described and everything that is done has spiritual symbolism behind it. The magical grandmother alludes to the femininity of the human soul. There are three tiers to the story: the upper regions of light, the lower realms of darkness and the middle ground where the Peterson family live, their house perhaps representing the Christian church. Unlike traditional fairy tales, feminine curiosity is valued and rewarded, rather than punished.

            Aristocracy is presented as being more about behaviour rather than genetics.

            The grandmother challenges the conventions of age, and Professor Baker compared her to Lady Philosophy in Boethius’s “Consolation of Philosophy” who “drives away the Muses of poetry”. Another comparison was made with Lady Wisdom from the book of Proverbs.

            C.S. Lewis said of George MacDonald’s “Phantastes” that it baptized his imagination.

            On my way home I stopped at Freshco. The young woman who often works the express check-out these days looks the way an ordinary pretty girl would look if her face was reflected on the back of a spoon.

            As I approached my place there was a guy walking and talking amicably on his hands free phone: “Just stop! Stop! Stop it! Just stop! Just stop! Just stop!”

            In front of my place, Sue, from the foodbank was talking loudly with someone. She said hi to me, and when a guy who she also must have known came by with a walker, she shouted, “Give me that!”

            I watched the third episode of Cheyenne. This one had a much better story. Two guys on their way to meet their partner to prospect a gold mine discover the guy with the map dead. Cheyenne shows up and guides them to the mine after being promised a cut. All the gold is in dust but they find a lot of it. One of the men starts going crazy with greed and keeps thinking the others are after his gold while he’s at the same time thinking about taking theirs. They get attacked by renegades but some soldiers chase them off. They know the Natives will be back and that winter will be coming soon so they decide to leave and cash in, with about $30,000 each. One night some Natives approach their campfire to ask for help with the sick wife of a chief. Cheyenne goes to help them and asks his partners to take care of his gold. The next night the crazy partner goes crazier, thinking that if he doesn’t kill his partner his partner will kill him. He guns him down and leaves him but he’s still alive. The Natives find him take him to Cheyenne, then they both go after the crazy guy. The guy with the gold is at a watering hole when the renegades come, looking for bullets. They think the bags of gold dust are full of bullets. The guy tries to stop them and gets killed. As a wind storm picks up, the natives cut open every bag looking for bullets. The gold means nothing to them and so it all blows away in the wind. I liked this episode enough to give the show one more chance.

Are the Higher Prices of Medical batteries a Scam?

           

            I had to work on Monday afternoon at OCADU, so I had a little sleep first. I posed for Nick Aoki’s class. He’s a fast talking, cool sounding young guy who’s been teaching at OCADU for about ten years. He’s actually the only art instructor that I’ve seen in a bar outside the context of the school, at least since the Beverly Tavern closed down back in the 80s. He came with some friends to the Tranzac during the Monday night open stage a couple of years ago.

            After work I went to Shoppers Drug Mart to buy batteries for my bike’s red flasher and my guitar tuner, which both take CR2032 3V batteries. When I finally found the battery shelf, the CR2032s had a space but they didn’t seem to be in stock. I inquired at the drug counter and the pharmacist paged someone for me. He led me to another shelf that also had batteries and the kind I wanted were there. On the shelf near the drug counter the price for the batteries would have been $8.99 but these were $6.99. The employee explained that the more expensive ones were medical, but that didn’t explain what there was about them that made them worth more. Someone on an online forum suggested that medical batteries might be more stringently tested to guarantee longer life, but I wonder if they’re exactly the same.

            I stood on the sidewalk in front of my bike under the streetlight, fumbling to change the batteries on my flasher. I had to use my jackknife to pry the old batteries out and to cut open the battery packages. Then when I put the batteries in the flasher, they didn’t work. I pried the batteries back out and peeled off the stickers that tell you not to swallow the batteries and that have the image of a diapered baby with a red line through it, which I guess means that babies could be harmful to the batteries so keep them away. Once the stickers were off, the flasher worked.

            I watched the second episode of Cheyenne and it was just as bad as the first. Clint Walker is as stiff as everyone’s dialogue and all of the action choreography. Even seasoned guest actor Ray Teal who played Sheriff Roy Coffee for years on Bonanza, couldn’t save it. It’s interesting how when a good actor is surrounded by bad actors and bad production values he or she just phones it in as well. I’ll give this show one more chance before deleting it.

Unfriending

           

            When I logged onto Facebook late Sunday morning I noticed that I’d lost a friend overnight. I suspected right away that it was Heather Babcock that had unfriended me because I had written a comment the night before in response to a post she had made on November eleventh that Remembrance Day is not a glorification of war but rather a way of honouring those who had fought in the wars that the leaders had made. I argued that as long as there is no equal day to commemorate the civilian victims of war then Remembrance Day is indeed a glorification of war. Deciding to no longer be friends with me was an interesting response to a philosophical difference. It’s not a choice I would have made but it made me think that I wish I could wake up and find that my apartment had cleaned itself of things I don’t need in the same way that Facebook does.

            On Sunday I had a choice between doing laundry and buying underwear because if I didn’t do one or the other I wouldn’t have briefs to wear on Monday. Since I didn’t want to take up a lot of essay writing time, I rode up Brock Avenue to the back of Walmart. I always go in that way because there’s a place to lock my bike near the door and it’s a less busy entrance. The first thing I saw when I walked into the mall was a fake snow covered Christmas tree that had been put up way too early. I guess it’s supposed to remind shoppers to do their Christmas shopping early but I would rather not see Yule decorations for another month.

            I noticed on the outside of Walmart there is a lawyer’s ad offering personal wills for $99.99. I have no idea how much wills usually cost, but that sounds cheap. I spent $18.05 on six pairs of Hanes. I timed my trip to and from the mall. It would have taken at least ninety minutes to do my laundry and so I saved fourty minutes and got some underwear.

            I continued to work on my essay. I think I’m making progress. I’ve got six pages of the required seven and I’m hoping that I’ll have a first draft to take to my professor on Wednesday to get some feedback. I still have just over a week before it needs to be handed in.

            I watched the first episode of the first season of Cheyenne. To see a bad premier like this really does show just how good Bonanza was. Clint Walker played a scout raised by Natives. He travels with a mapmaker from Texas named Johnny as they ride around making geographic sense of the west. The Shoshone are on the warpath and attack a stagecoach. Cheyenne and Johnny help some white guys fight the Natives off but the white guys turn out to have been planning on robbing the stage themselves. Cheyenne has to help the bandits, as they are holed up on some rocks while the Shoshone attack. It wasn’t much of a plot, and Clint Walker, though a good-looking giant, showed no emotion through the whole story. I’ve downloaded the whole first season, but if the next two episodes are as bad as this one I’ll delete the file and move on to something else.