Remembrance Day

This photo was taken on Remembrance Day at Queen's Park a couple years ago. It was slightly drizzly. When the guns fired, flame would shoot out from the end and the guns jerked back from the recoil of the shot. The area would be white with smoke afterwards. It was really cool. If only "looking cool" was the real function of those things.

NaNoWriMo

November is National Novel Writing Month. Your objective, should you choose to participate, is to infiltrate the enemy base write a full novel, at least 175-pages long (or 50,000 words) starting November 1 and ending at Midnight, Nov. 30. If you manage to do it, your name gets put on the list of "winners" at the website, you pat yourself on the back and treat yourself to a cookie. Yay.

It seems sort of fun to try, just to see if you can do it. Of course, you can do it any month, but will you ever really without signing up to some event to make you feel guilty whenever you remember it during your usual lazy-time?

Maybe I can manage a short story in November? Or maybe that's even harder than writing a novel, i.e. "I didn't have time to write a short story, so I wrote a long one instead"?

By the way, according to my google search, that 'short letter' quote, sometimes varying slightly in its wording, is most often attributed to Mark Twain, but also sometimes to Blaise Pascal. A similar quote ("I'm sorry to have written such a long letter, but I didn't have time for a short one.") is attributed to George Bernard Shaw, and to Rudyard Kipling. One site says that the quote "may go back as far as Cicero". So Mr. Sam Clemens, stop taking all the credit for being witty.

Another writing advice from Mark Twain (or is it?): "Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." Hmm. That's damn good advice.

Welcome

See how differently they treat the first years from the upper years! With kid gloves, I tell you!

Happy Hallowe'en, by the way.

Green Children

I read an article about the curious case of two green children, a boy and a girl, found in the 12th century, wearing strange clothing, speaking in an unknown tongue and would only eat beans at first. The boy sickened and died, but the girl thrived and soon lost her green colour. When later asked where she came from, she said "she and her brother had come from a country that was entirely green that was inhabited by green-skinned people. Even their sun, which was very feeble, glowed green". Interesting. Though the cause of her green-ness is probably not genetic, since she later lost the colour.

Anyway, what amused me particularly about this story was when, after offering an endocrine disorder as a scientific explanation of the green children, the writer states that "the chances of such diseases and disorders occurring in two youngsters simultaneously however, are highly unlikely. The only credible possibilities seem to be the extraterrestrial or parallel world hypotheses."

Hahahahaha. Yes. The disease being carried by siblings is highly unlikely, so obviously the only other explanation is that they're from another world.

Well, the account being from so long ago, I suspect there's a great deal of exaggeration, some fabrication and a few things not mentioned because they seem too mundane. Fun story, though.

News

A few days ago, I read in the newspaper that Rosa Parks had passed away on Monday. And I thought, she only recently passed away?

It came a bit of a shock to realize that racial segregation in the US is still recent history, only about 50 years or so, within living memory. I mean, I guess I knew it in my head, but still felt it was a thing long past; but actually, there are people living today who remember those days. Wow.

I know racism is far from gone - it disturbs me when I become aware of how not gone it is - but let's hope things will continue to get better. What will the world be like 50 years later?

Speaking of racism, I read an article about the 'head tax' on Chinese immigrants to Canada, between 1885 to 1923 in response to anti-Chinese sentiment. I hadn't known about this (perhaps it was mentioned in passing in grade 7/8 Canadian history class, when we learned about how Chinese immigrants worked on the Canadian Pacific railway). Anyway, I didn't really feel its nastiness until I read that this Chinese man had kept the head tax certificate in his wallet for 50 years until his death in 1970. Just imagine with what thoughts he must have kept it.

Another thing that struck me was my own reaction to the article. An organization is seeking redress for the family of the men who had to pay the head tax, and for a moment I thought, "What for?" Then I blinked, thinking, isn't this the attitude taken by the Japanese toward Koreans to whom wrongs have been done in the past (what an awkward sentence!), like the comfort women and so on. So I hung my head in shame.

On the other hand, if compensation was sought by a First Nations organization, I don't think I would have wondered why. Perhaps I just think that a country owes little to immigrants? Hrm.

Anyway, the moral of the story is 'apathy with ignorance, sympathy with identification' (silly, but tired of writing full sentences). Must try to be informed.

Making friends

Before my first class in the morning, I was sitting listening to music, the earbuds cutting me off from the world. Just started to put the MD player away when this girl sitting next to me says hi. Apparently, she's in three of the four courses I'm taking this term. And we were both in this one class last term also, which had something like 20 people in it. I had no idea.

No wonder I can't make friends. (And I think this is the first time in months that I socialized with a 'stranger'. Sigh.)

So I started a blog...

However, it seems doubtful even to me that I'll really keep it up (or that anyone will read it).
But here goes anyway.