Thank you Adolf Hitler

You are reading this because of Adolf Hitler. Not directly, of course. The mustachioed one isn't back to haunt us again (I wonder if Adolf would have participated in Movember?). No, you're reading this because Hitler's actions led to the Second World War, or WW II as the cool kids say.

Doris Erfle, my mother, was born in 1922. She was a farm girl, although the farms changed with regularity. Various locations in Saskatchewan then in California then back to Saskatchewan. She lived through the 30s, and if you think times are bad of late, you have no idea how bad it can really get.

Then in 1939, Adolf invaded Poland and WW II kicked off (America, as per usual, was late to the party; strange that such a militaristic nation would shy away from a fight, but there it is). Doris signed up. I'm not sure exactly when. You had to be 18 to enlist, though I think my dad got in near the end in 1945 but might have had to lie about his age; he was born in 1928.

Regardless, Doris did some of her training in Kingston, and then served in Montreal, so she didn't go overseas. She wouldn't go abroad until 1973 with her friend Kay Cottington; dad and I stayed home.

Then the war ended. First in Europe, then in Asia. Doris told the story that when peace was declared in Europe, women she worked with in Montreal cried, because they didn't want the war to end. They feared the end of the war would mean a return to the hard times they'd lived through in the 30s, and no one wanted to go through that again.

The Canadian Government sponsored veterans to go to university, if they wished. That's how Doris was able to attend the University of British Colombia in Vancouver, where she saw Billie Holiday perform then shock the audience by turning around after the performance and revealing that her dress was backless.

Doris graduated from UBC in 1950 and then went to the University of Toronto to do a library science degree. Doris wanted a career and career options for women were limited. She'd taught Normal School (yes, they called it Normal School) for a year in Saskatchewan when she was young. it was a situation where someone - usually just an older kid as Doris was then - would be the teacher in a one room school house.

She hated that teaching experience, though perhaps it was the situation she was in rather than the actual teaching that was so bad. Regardless, that career option was off the list. What was left? A nurse? A secretary? I don't think she had any inclination to the medical field and I'm certain Doris wouldn't have wanted to be some guy's - and you know the boss would have been some guy - secretary.

So Doris chose another, less common, path and became a librarian.

After getting her BLS - yes, the library science degree was only a bachelors in 1951, not a masters as it is now - Doris again moved around a bunch. She was in Winnipeg working with Elizabeth Defoe, who was such an important library figure on the Fort Garry campus that they later named the main library after her, and back in Vancouver and in Moose Jaw (no, I'm not making that place up), where she was the children's librarian and her niece Donna Lee would come and visit her.

Then in the late 1950s, the University of Manitoba created a Dental School and with it a dental library. They needed someone to be their librarian, and Doris was chosen, ending her vagabond life as she stayed there until retiring 1988.

In 1962, E. Thackeray Pritchard showed up, an Ottawa guy who came from the University of Alberta via a fellowship at Harvard (there's much more to Thack's story than that, but this is about Doris). They were married in 1964. Thack was late to the service, which should have been Doris's first clue that their marriage wasn't going to go smoothly.

Then two years later, I appeared. Quelle surprise, vraiment.

But if WW II hadn't happened, then Doris would not have gone to university and gotten that BLS. Without the BLS, she doesn't show up in Winnipeg, meet Thack, and have me. (yes, there should be another step between meeting Thack and having me, but one never likes to think of one's parents in that kind of way, does one?)

Hence, thank you Adolf Hitler for being such a bastard that whole nations wanted you and your German compatriots dead so much so that they were willing to start a whole war to get that done.

Of course, Hitler was a bastard, and maybe the biggest bastard the world's ever seen. Hard to know of sure, of course, as I'm working with incomplete information on all the other bastards in history. But I'm willing to say he's in the top three for the 20th century; Pol Pot and Stalin weren't nice guys either.

It's easy to imagine that the world would have been better if the mustachioed one would never have existed. Or died early and not implemented the horrific ideas he came up with later. I have to say that I would have willingly foregone my life in exchange for stopping all that.

But, of course, that's the not the sort of choice one gets to make. Steven King's latest tome is about a fellow going back in time to prevent JKF's assassination on the assumption that will make the world a better place. But would it? If JFK didn't die in Dallas that day in November, would it have prevented the Viet Nam war? Saved Martin Luther King? Prevented Watergate? Stopped the NBA lockout?

Or would other bad events simply have occurred instead? You see everything occurs in a context, and that context matters (don't tell any research psychologists that), so changing one thing can change a whole lot of things that we weren't anticipating, because well, we just aren't that smart. We don't know how things are connected. Not completely anyway.

And actions always have consequences. Sometimes the consequences are positive, and sometimes they are negative. But most often they are not seen or understood.

Refreshingly,

Evan

XXXX 52 Times is a periodical by Evan Pritchard (c) 2011 XXXX

Evan Pritchard still ain't named any child Adolf.

Mardy : Fish :: Tuesday : Poisson

So, there's this American tennis player named Mardy Fish. 

This causes me to wonder if there's a French tennis player named Tuesday Poisson. 

Hey, check it out!

The Racquetball Blog is now up and running. 

You should definitely check it out. 

A mediocre game with a good finish

Sunday's Brier final was one of the poorest games I saw this week at the Brier. Joel and I had tickets from Thursday morning on - and also went to the Monday morning draw, and I watched some on tv too.

Both finalists - Kevin Martin's team from Alberta and Glenn Howard's Ontario team - had played much better in earlier games. Martin's rink had been unstoppable all week, going undefeated, although they did look human in their playoff game against Saskatchewan (a game the Sask boys should have won). But on Sunday they were far from their best.

The story was the same with Howard, who was the defending champion. Some of the players on the teams had been playing at 90% accuracy or more during the week, and it's hard to play at that high a level for a whole week. Sadly, they hadn't saved their best for last.

But they were equal in being off their game, so the game was close, but also a low scoring affair with only 9 points in total put up on the board. Each team only got a deuce - 2 points in an end - once. Howard's two point end came in the 9th to tie the game.

But that gave Martin the hammer - last rock - in the last end, and he made good use of it by drawing the four foot to score a tie-breaking point and win the 2008 Canadian Curling Championship, a.k.a. the Tim Horton's Brier.

It was a good shot, and classic finish to what was an otherwise less than classic game.

I'm happy I went to some of the games. One of the remarkable things about them was how fast the ice is. It's as if the ice was like glass. If I was throwing the weight that these players used for some of their take out shots on my draws at the Grain Exchange (where I curl mixed), I'd be hogging my shots (not even getting them in play). And their draw weight is even lower than the take out weight. Unbelievable.

They can throw the rock but do they know the game?

I've been at the Brier the last few days. The top teams are really good, but yesterday and today Pat Simmons's rink from Saskatchewan showed some strategic shortcomings that led to their downfall.

Yesterday in the 1-2 playoff game - the winner to advance to the finals, with the loser to today's semi-final - they called the wrong strategy in each of the last three ends. First, in the 8th, they tried to draw with their last stone rather than take out the Alberta rocks that were sitting pretty close together in the back of the house. If those rocks are removed - or even pushed back so that the Sask rocks in the top of the house out count them, then Alberta can't get more than one point (Alberta had last rock then, and when the other team has last rock, your strategy is to limit them to one point).

Sask makes an error on the draw, and Alberta manages to gets two points that they had no business getting.

In the 9th, there are two Alberta rocks in the house (as well as two Sask rocks), and an Alberta guard rock in front of the house. Strategically, the most dangerous rock is the guard, as it can protect a rock later in the end, limiting what the opposing team can do. Instead of removing the guard, Sask eliminates the rocks in the house with a nice double take out.

However, later in the end Alberta gets a rock behind the cover of that guard, and it leads to back and forth draws, and then a steal of 1 by Alberta to tie the game.

Then in the 10th end, rather than keeping a clean sheet, which would be a good strategy if you only need 1 point and have last rock, they leave a number of rocks in play. Nevertheless, they have the opportunity to hit and stick for a single point and the win. However, their last rock picks on something on the ice and sails past Alberta's shot rock, failing to remove it, so Alberta counts 1 and wins the game.

The Saskatchewan rink was up 6-3 after 5 ends of a 10 end game, and should have come out on top. But they were outscored 5-1 the rest of the way, and lost 8-7, despite having last rock for most of the second half of the game.

Then today Sask is playing Ontario in the semi-final game. Again in the 10th end down one point, when they need to score 1 to tie and 2 to win, Sask allow a number of rocks to be in play and it's only with a great shot on their last throw that they get the necessary point to force an extra end.

In that end, Ontario plays a more conventional, lower risk strategy, by keeping the house pretty clean of rocks (e.g., hitting guards rocks in front of the house), and with their last rock they make an easy draw into the house for a point and the win.

And Saskatchewan goes home. Hopefully, they'll realize what they did wrong, and get it right next time. But they've been here before, more than once in fact, and usually there's only so many opportunities to get a break through victory.

Sadly, Saskatchewan didn't get one this year.

Sexy Beast

Watched the film Sexy Beast last night. Very interesting. It's a robbery flick, where a guy who's retired to sunny Spain is asked come back to London to do one more job. Maybe it's inaccurate to call it a robbery flick, because the focus of it is more on getting the guy to do the job than the job itself.

Ray Winstone plays the guy who's asked to come out of retirement by Ben Kingsley, who's playing a character with the moral opposite of the Gandhi role that made him famous. Even before Kingsley arrives in Spain, the knowledge that he's coming is enough to ramp up the tension between Winstone, his wife and the couple they pal around with in Spain, who are all familiar with how brutal Kingsley's character is.

But Kingsley isn't the head bad guy - his character's too much of aloose canon for that. No the head bad guy is Ian McShane, who I first enjoyed in the Lovejoy tv series and has more recently found notoriety in Deadwood.

The robbery itself actually stretches the limit of plausibility to me, but it's not really the point of the film. It's more about interplay between the three characters played by Winstone, Kingsley and to lesser extent McShane (because he has less screen time), and how the past can haunt you and how in particular Winstone is going to deal with these characters from his criminal past that he'd really rather just say no to.

But sometimes saying no is a very difficult thing to do.

Things done in ire

I was on the Air Canada site trying to book a flight to go overseas for a wedding in June, when it comes along to me signing in with my Aeroplan number and password. I'm not sure when I'd last signed in, so there's no way I can come up with my password. Thus, I click the old "Forgot/Need New Password?" button. 

In going through the process of getting a new password it asks me the prompt question that I'd put in when I set up my last password. The question I put in was: "What is the most fucking annoying website for travel miles?" 

That's what comes up as the prompt for me to login. I'm not kidding. 

Clearly, no one edits the prompt questions people put into the website. I must have been really angry when I'd set the password up the last time, and trying to navigate around the Aeroplan website this evening I got the sense of why that might have been.