Setting an Example

The last few days I have been thinking about what sort of example have I been setting for the people around me?

If I had lots of kids, that's one way a person could expect to have a large influence on the younger generation.  But I have just one kid!  Unfortunately, on one hand—in terms of humor, and speech, and music—I think she does follow my example.  And also in less positive ways: e.g. she tends to be a hoarder, like I used to be :(

One way in which I would have been gratified to be followed, is to have as small carbon footprint as possible.  * We have very fuel-efficient cars.  * Our home is entirely electric; at the moment, that means that our home heating is only as energy-efficient as the electric company, so we've put our efficiency in one basket, so to speak.  We use as many LED lamps as we can, and so on.  * My child went to the public school.  It's a free country, so we have the right to send kids to any school.  But by sending our child to the public school, we were investing in a resource that was publicly available, rather than a private resource.  On the other hand, my kid revealed that she was relentlessly bullied while at school, (something that—one hopes—does not happen in a Catholic school, for instance; but who are we kidding?  It probably does happen in most schools.)

* I commuted to work using a bike, or a bus,  for a while.  But that takes planning; I was running late so often, I had to race to work in my car. 

I can't think of too many other things I could report to you without it sounding like bragging.  I don't think I'm cut out to be an influencer.  That seems to be a role at which women are more successful, anyway.  I don't know whether women are interested in influencing their followers to maintain any sort of smaller footprint; their success seems to be measured by the size of their footprint; the larger, the better!

Anyway, I urge any of my readers who are influencers even in a small way to keep an eye on positive influences they could model. 

Arch

I used to write diatribes against Donald Trump

Donald Trump was, and continues to be, a pain in the a$$.  Many trumpees claim to believe him (though sometimes they qualify their belief by saying "He tells the truth in a certain sense").

The main point is that they want Trump as president.  Possibly because they want someone who can lie to the enemies of the USA; they obviously forget that Trump's lies are like those of a school kid. 

Better writers than I have written entire books about the unreliability of President no. 45, many of them also indicting the GOP for providing a home for Trump (in a manner of speaking).

Anyhow, there are far more fun topics to write about!

Arch

Is School Attendance Optional?

That was the headline of a New Yorker article just this morning.  Apparently school attendance was bad during the COVID pandemic (and, I assume, even after adjustment for school closings), but has stayed low ever since. 

Parents decide to home-school their kids for various reasons, foremost among them cultural and religious reasons; I am not seeking to complain about that.  But it appears that parents are sometimes complicit in absenteeism.

OK, let's face it: why is education compulsory, wherever it is so?  In Pennsylvania, for instance, you have to attend school up to 8th grade.  Why?  Well, an educated electorate is important for democracy, because so much public information is dependent on an understanding of summary information, not to mention text (bills before various legislatures, etc.)  This is why Trump, being just marginally educated, is a poor citizen, let alone a good choice for president.  Do parents send their children to school simply for the convenience, or because they believe in the value of it?

Many parents who have reservations about the value of community schooling (kids learn bad habits; kids learn to swear; the teachers are no good; learning math is irrelevant,  we have calculators; there's bullying; teachers are all atheists; it's just an unnecessary expense), still could have a strong pro-education conviction or bias, but not be comfortable with the school environment or culture.

Talking about culture, it's more in keeping with the American cultural environment to negotiate a reward for attending school, than to assess a penalty for not.  We could award some sort of medal for diligent school attendance, that most students could win, which employers would want to see; potential employees with that medal would be considered preferable to those without.  At the moment, playing hooky is frowned upon, but not really penalized. (I don't know, maybe it is?)

I, of course, am a strong believer in school.  I learned great stuff in school, and my mother, who was a school teacher, would ask me: did they teach you such-and-such?  Just the fact that she was interested made a difference in how seriously I took my classes.  It really pains me to see grade school kids who look cross-eyed when asked about something they should be familiar with.  And worse, adults who defend them, saying, oh at her age, I couldn't have told you much more than her!  Hee hee!  (Trumpies are probably delighted to hear of incidents that upset educated people.  Piss off the Dems!  I love it!)

This probably comes across as though I hate all conservatives.  That's not quite true—yet, but I'm getting there. 

Arch

Pygmalion

Most everyone knows that the hit musical My Fair Lady (and the movie of the same name, from around 1964) was based on one of George Bernard Shaw's famous plays, Pygmalion.  I was thinking about the words of Higgins, commenting on Alfred P. Doolittle's remarks: "Listen to his native wood notes wild: 'I'm willing to tell you, I'm wanting to tell you, I'm waiting to tell you!' "

I was wondering how much of that was Shaw, and how much Lerner and Leowe.  I reasoned that, by this time Shaw's work must be in the public domain; I looked for the play in The Gutenberg Project, and there it was!  And much of the straight dialog was right in the original, including the 'Wanting ... willing, and waiting' bit!

The words—the libretto—of the musical are nothing short of hilarious, and well worth obtaining a print copy to follow along with, in my humble opinion.  I remember bringing the booklet home with me, when I was around 17, and laughing, all by myself!  Brilliant.  And they did trim some of the text down, to improve the rhythm of the words.

Well, what a pleasure and a blessing it has been, to have been alive at the time when movies such as My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, The Court Jester, Ben Hur, and The Ten Commandments were made (not to mention 2001, A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, and ... OK, I'll fill this gap pretty soon)!  Mel Brooks's movies alone deserve a mention.  Ẅhat a great life we have led, eh?

Arch

Stuff My Mother Taught Me

Last April, I  put up a long post about my mother, Kamala Philips, on our companion blog—Archie's Archives.  She was a musical powerhouse, and a lot of what I remember of her was her interest in music, and her interest in my interest in music!  But she was a multi- faceted person, who if she were alive today would certainly have been well-known in her community.  In her community, though, she was famous. 

She taught me a lot about music—mainly advanced harmony, and a lot of music history—but she taught me a lot more.  My siblings were difficult to wrangle, and couldn't easily be made to sit down and listen, whereas I would sit down and listen pretty well. 

Four of my female relatives taught me one interesting skill: ironing clothes.  It was partly the fact that I would iron their clothes without any bullying at all.  For those among my readers for whom the concept of ironing is outside their experience: in the early part of the last century, we had only natural fabrics—cotton, linen, silk and wool—with which to make clothing.  We would wash them by hand, hang them out to dry, especially in the tropics, and then we would have to smooth them out with gadgets called smoothing irons.  These were heavy metal things with a smooth bottom, with which you flattened out the wrinkles in your clothes.  We still have them, of course, but kids are generally kept away from them.  In fact, most of the ironing is handled by dry cleaners, as a sort of side- hustle. 

Being from the Indian Sub-Continent, and being a teacher, my mother and her sisters (and my grandmother) wore sarees, which are basically long rectangles of fabric, 45 inches by 6 yards.  Ironing one of those initially seems a daunting project, but actually you fold a saree in half, iron the folded saree, then fold it again, iron the four thicknesses, fold again, iron the eight thicknesses, and by the time you've finished, it's all done. 

Pants were the most interesting things that I learned to iron.  In addition to being made of cotton, they were often heavy material that took a lot of ironing, and lots of wetting down with a spray bottle.  A major principle of ironing, generally, is that small pieces of fabric, such as the cuffs at the bottom of the legs, could safely be ironed first, with no fear that they would be crushed by subsequent handling.  Same with shirt collars, or waistbands.  Or cuffs of long-sleeved shirts.  So there; even if you don't remember anything else I've said here, that's a major takeaway. 

My sequence for ironing pants, to this day, is

• The inside of each leg.  (Lay the leg with the two seams one on top of the other.)
• The outside of each leg.
• The waist band.  You're done. 

Shirts were the trickiest, and least useful:

• The cuffs of the sleeves.  The collar.  In either order. 
• The front placquet (or placket), where the buttonholes are. 
• The sleeves.  (They aren't as small as the collar and cuffs, but they're smaller than the rest of the shirt.)
• The back, and finally
• The front.
  

 You might not believe this, but my mother also taught me bookbinding!  I had been given a subscription to a boy's magazine (Eagle), and I collected the issues.  We put them together in two volumes—it involved a straight- backed chair, and special waxed binding thread—which were then taken to a printing press, who machine-trimmed the edges; then we made cover boards, glued them on (yes, we had binding tape and everything), hammered the spine into shape, and when it dried, it looked fabulous!

These days, Staples or Alpha Graphics, or Kinko's have the ability to bind your magazines into a volume, if you think the magazines are worth the effort to preserve them.  Most of them will use spiral-binding, which is a lot less trouble and less expensive. In my opinion, comics are probably worth binding, but then you can't sell them, if that's what you want to do (unless someone wants to buy the whole volume.)

Well, happy New Year, all my readers!  I have a feeling things are going to get better, but I have been wrong before!!

Arch

Tea, Anyone?

The tea I'm most familiar with is cut black tea.  This is often put into tea bags, and you can make either hot tea with it, or iced tea.  Hot tea is lightened with a little milk, or just drunk plain, sometimes with sugar (or sweetener); it's the same with ice tea.

When I was in high school, I was introduced to tea.  I drank gallons of the stuff--- not all at one sitting, but over the years.  I gave up tea in favor of coffee while at university, and even while I taught, because that's what was available.  But every once in a while, I get a hankering for tea. Not just any tea, but good tea. 

Tea has four aspects: fragrance, taste, tartness, and color.  Fragrance and taste are self explanatory.  Tartness is, too; but I think it might be different than the tartness of an apple, for instance, which is related to sourness as well.

Color is the least important, but for those who drink tea with milk, it becomes important as a means for judging the milk/ tea balance.  (I'm sure there are those who will ascribe a mystical flavor element to color as well, and I'm not going to argue with that.)

Teas that are grown in the highlands of Sri Lanka, India, Nepal and Kenya, at higher than two thousand feet (I'm not sure of the exact altitude) is fragrant, but lacking in color, taste and tartness.  Tea grown at lower altitudes are considered to have a more robust fragrance, and more color and tartness.  Connoisseurs don't like the robust fragrance.  Tea grown at a few hundred feet has an even coarser fragrance and color and tartness, but they are (only) favored in places where the tea is spiced with coriander and cardamom.

Most tea drinkers, especially in Britain, like consistent cups of tea, which have a fair fragrance, tartness, taste and color, consistently cup after cup.  This is achieved by blending tea; high- grown and mid-grown, and with teas from different plantations together.  Tea from Lipton's and other old firms, are made this way.  The bulk of tea sold in the US is blended tea.

Recently, I'm having difficulty finding a variety of tea that tastes right to me.  In one sense, being a (mostly) natural product, we can't expect it to be absolutely consistent from one cup of tea to the next.  Further, I'm getting older, and my taste-buds don't seem to know what they're doing!

While I was living with my parents, I seldom drank tea; then at my ɓoarding school, we drank tea every day in the morning (if we wanted to), and it was sort of unremarkable stuff.  Then, once I got taken out of that school and made to attend a school in the hills, in 11th grade, we were allowed to leave the school compound during free periods.  My friends, as part of my cultural education, took me to Hotel Silverdale, a restaurant on Brownrigg Street. As a law-abiding citizen, I was extremely anxious.  We went upstairs, and they ordered a pot of tea.  (This seemed quite harmless, and my heartbeat slowed down.)

A pot of tea, and a small pitcher of warmed fresh milk was brought out; everyone served themselves, and–with some help–I began sipping my very first cup of tea that I was drinking voluntarily.  I needed six spoonfuls of sugar (I know, I know; my health deteriorated as you would expect), but the tea was heavenly.  I frequented Hotel Silverdale so much that I was in fear of being sold shares in the ownership!  Jk.

To explain to an expert what kind of tea I would like, I will have to get into the subject of tea in greater depth.  But I'm retired, and unwilling to exert myself so much.  I have three types of tea I drink in rotation, and the one that satisfies me most is PG Tips (the fine print says Unilever.)

In the USA, unfortunately, the common drink—in these parts, anyway; in the south it might be different—is coffee.  By the time I had left university, and was becoming curious about what sort of tea I could get, it was 1983, and I was fearsome about returning to the motherland, especially since no post was waiting for me, and many of my friends who had returned to Ceylon were re-returning here.  When I finally visited Sri Lanka, it was 1997.  Nobody there could steer me towards a reliably good brand of tea, while I was in Colombo.  When I returned, I brought with me some Lipton's yellow-label tea.  The next visit to Sri Lanka, I discovered Bogawantalawa tea, which I really like, and brought back several bags of the stuff to distribute among my tea-deprived ex-pats.  I drank tea from that bag until it was over, and asked my daughter to return the bag I had given her (which she hadn't used, but she's an American, despite her parentage) and drank that until it was gone.  A friend, a Trinitian, brought me Loolecondera tea, which was excellent.  This time, when I was flying back, the young lady at the duty-free tea store listened to my story, and insisted that that Loolecondera tea (what an outlandish name!  Certainly not Sinhala) was too strong.  "Too strong, sir!"  So I bought the type she recommended, but, to cover my bases, also bought a tiny tin of Lool… that thing.  It is too strong, though I had been enjoying it for a year. 

I feel a lot better now, having complained to you chaps.  Any advice will be cheerfully read and appreciated, but bear in mind that Sri Lankan tea is about $5 an ounce in the USA, I think, which does not encourage experimentation.

Anyway, there's always PG Tips to fall back on, though some importer is probably making a killing at the cost of some Sri Lankan exporter.

Arch

John Lennon's Eternal Christmas Anthem

I have been a staunch Beatles fan for close to 57 years!  (I initially wrote '67 years,' but I was off by a decade.) I have been an ardent fan of each of the Beatles for most of these years, but most definitely a John Lennon fan since he was denied immigration into the USA.

Most Beatles fans, early on, took a strong dislike to Yoko Ono; no doubt they felt that she was at least partly responsible for the breakup of the group.  I'll say what I think about that another time, but, you know, people can't go on being the same as they always were (ask David Byrne!) ... sooner or later you have to accept that, if you had to choose between what you want, and what the fans want, you can't choose the fans every time.

Yoko certainly had a huge influence on John Lennon.  She was probably instrumental in urging him to stand up for himself, and not to succumb to the group---thing.  In addition to that, she made John Lennon aware of what was happening in Vietnam---things that many of us have come to accept as being wrong-headed.  The US military and the US congress was determined to stop the spread of communism.  It wasn't our job to halt this spread, just as much as it isn't the job of the Christian Church to stop the spread of alternate lifestyles.  Thoughts and prayers will have to do.  It was the military might of the USA that prevented the Vietnamese nation from prosecuting the illegality of the war in an international court.  On a personal basis, many Americans have made their peace with Vietnamese citizens whom they have come to know as individuals, but as a nation, we have taken the principle of "Never say sorry!" too far.

Given the confluence of Christmas, the (imminent) end of the Vietnam War, and John Lennon's immigration status, I feel that the song (two songs, really: So this is Christmas, and Give Peace a Chance!) is an amazingly gentle piece of persuasion.  You can see the influence of Yoko, in the strong rhetorical points, and the gentleness, which comes from nowhere: whose is it?---that moderates the severity of the tone of the lyrics:

[John Lennon, Yoko Ono]
So this is Christmas!
And what have you done?
Another year over,
A new one just begun.

Most of my readers very likely know these words.  They're essentially an introduction to the rest of the song.  ('And what have you done?' probably comes across as a bit sanctimonious.)

And so this is Christmas,
I hope you have fun;
The near and the dear ones
The old and the young.

This verse captures an important characteristic of the feast, namely the gathering of the tribe, the old and the young!  During Covid, of course, we couldn't do the traditional thing, but in the mid seventies, we did, and Lennon / Ono embrace the full spirits of the festival.

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

And so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong

...

[chanting]
War is over over
If you want it
War is over