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. 

River skating

I went skating today on Winnipeg's River Trail. It was the first time I'd been skating in, umm, well, I'm not sure exactly. A long time. 10 years? Something like that.

It's the longest naturally frozen skating trail in the world. No, really. It is.

I went for about 5 miles maybe. I went from near my place to one end of it - the end on the Assiniboine River, not the Red River - and back and then a bit farther, as the river loops around my neighborhood, so going past where I started didn't put me any farther away from home than if I'd stopped where I started.

It was a good time. Interesting to see houses from the backside rather than the front side. There are some very nice homes along the river, and it was interesting to see how some of them have little (and some not so little) buildings along the river. Guest houses, perhaps. And at least one of those guest houses was bigger than some of my friend's places.

It was a pleasant skate, although much more so when I was going with the wind. That was the return leg of my journey, and I was happy about that. Skating with the wind - or without the wind in your face - was almost like skating downhill.

I'm not a great skater. One guy on fancy speed skates went speeding by me. Three times. But I didn't fall down, not even when I tried some cross overs. Didn't try an backwards skating, as there's not really the space for it. The trail's not really wide, so going backwards in my not so skilled manner might lead to some traffic problems.

But all in all, a good time.

This week

This week I went to Freud class, but didn't do well on the quiz, which was kind of frustrating as I'd done the reading (mostly) having felt guilty for not doing so in weeks past. Not a reinforcing experience that.

Nevertheless, I did pick up some other Freud books to help me out, so not giving up. Also, I'm simply sitting in on the course, so the quizes are really only for my amusement; the scores don't matter. Still it is a little disturbing to have done the work and not performed well on the test.

In my racquetball league match, in contrast, I did do well. I played Dave H, and as it was a 1 seed versus 2 seed match I was spotted 3 points in the first game, as I was the 2 and Dave is a 1. I took a 6-4 lead, but Dave came back to lead 9-6 in the first game.

Then I won 24 of the next 25 points, winning 15-9, 15-1. His point in game two was on a serve to the right side that I didn't move for (Dave's a left handed player, so serve to the right side are natural screens as the ball moves across his body, just as a right hander's serve to the left side are natural screens). When it happened, I thought "was that short? was that a screen? it was good? oh damn."

But at that point I was up 8 or 9 to nothing, so I wasn't concerned over 1 point. I just tried to keep the pressure on that had got me to that point, and I was able to get the result.

Very satisfying.

Then today I was over at a friend's baby shower. My gift was a bottle of wine that the parents can either drink now, or set aside for their child to have on her 18th birth anniversary. I'm suspecting the latter will happen.

Also, it was a pot luck dinner for the shower. My chickpea ragout - from Jacques Pepin - was a hit, and I also brought 3 bottles of sparkling wine from 3 different countries: Germany (Henkell Troken), Italy and Spain (Friexel sp?) with the idea that people could sample the different varieties of pseudo-champagne. It was good. I think I like all of them in general, and would need more time to distinguish exactly which I like best.

Quote of the day

Q: Well, what do you win?

A: Usually first.

- An ice sculptor from the Yukon being interviewed on Sounds Like Canada this morning. He was describing what people often ask him, and what he likes to respond, so he gave both the Q and the A that I've labelled here.

Master's champion

Was out in Regina this weekend playing racquetball. I played singles, and lost in the semi-finals of A, and I played 35+ doubles with Dave - although they had Bill written down on the draw by mistake - leading to "Bill" jokes all weekend long.

We won our first two matches in a four team round robin draw. One win was in a tie-breaker, and the other was in two straight games.

In our third and final game today, we start a bit slow, and the other guys are able to win the first game: 15-12, I think. In game two, I realize that the guy on my side is just killing us with his forehand shots when I try to kill the ball up the middle. So, I try keeping it to his backhand, hitting the ball down the left side wall. This works well, and we win game two going away, 15-7?.

In the tie-breaker, it's close early on, but then we put together a streak, and take a 8-2 lead. But after losing serve at 8-2, we never served again. They came back and won 11-8! Ugh!

Making it worse for me was that all their serves were to me. They got to 10-8 with the guy on my side serving lobs to my backhand, and somehow we just couldn't get a point for love nor money. Then after winning a rally to get them half down, the second guy comes in and also lobs to me. I hit an ok shot down the line, but it comes into the middle a bit and the guy serving kills it to win the game and match. Sigh.

I was really disappointed and felt I let Dave down. To have that large a lead and not win was deflating. The final record in our division had three teams at 2-1, including us, and one at 0-3. I wasn't concerned about where we finished after that loss.

So I go and have a shower, and sit in the great whirlpool that club has. Really enjoyable. Then I go to their little bar and try to order some food. The person working says they are short of food but someone's gone to get groceries. So, I'm not sure whether to order or wait or what Bob, the guy I drove out with, wants to do.

Now twice disappointed - by our loss and by the lack of food at the club - I figure I'll go look at the final doubles standings to see where we finished with the thought that we'll be 2nd or 3rd.

BUT NO! We finished first! Ha!

I had a good laugh at that.

More photos from home

My friend Lynn and her pal Will dropped by earlier this month. Lynn was in town to visit her folks, and Will had tagged along. They live in London now. Will was fascinated by some of the bits of my house, and he took some pictures.

Will was particularly taken with the steam radiators. Such as this one:

My vintage microwave oven also caught Will's eye.

It was a Christmas present from my dad to my mom back in 1975. The sticker on the back says it was manufactured in "November 1975." Yes, Nineteen Hundred and Seventy Five. "I know!" said in that Craig Ferguson sort of way. "I know some people that aren't as old my microwave!"

Picture of Paris

I went looking for Freud books (again!) yesterday, and came home with a little picture.


It's an image of Paris, and I think it's looking from the left bank to the right; that is, the view is to the northwest. The bridge would be Pont de l'Archevêché at the eastern end of the Ile de la Cité.

I liked it, because (a) it's Paris, and (b) it's done in a comic book kind of style. I'm not sure if it's a print or a watercolour. It could be taken out of a book, although it is signed. "Guy" d'something, perhaps. I can't make out the two noms autre than Guy.

The picture measures 9" by 12" for picture itself and 16" by 20.5" for the frame. It was $60, and I figure it'd be hard get something framed for that, so it was a good deal.

The person at the bookstore couldn't tell me anything about it, except that they probably bought it at an auction or from an estate that they'd purchased books at. The back of the picture is covered in brown paper with a local framer's name tag on it. I'm thinking this is the kind of style of framing that was done several years ago, so it's probably at least 25 years old.

In general, I'm happy with it. It's the kind of image that I'd wanted to have of Paris, but never found to my liking before.

What I did NYD

Slept in. Watched some football, sadly seeing the Illini lose and those nasty Wolverines win. Cleaned out the fireplace, seeing the bottom of it for the first time in ages. Had a fire: "fire, fire, heh, heh."

Reading Stephen Brunt's Searching for Bobby Orr, which is quite good. Very interesting about how Orr got involved in hockey, and ended up with the Bruins; that's how far I've got in the story. Orr's 14. Definitely worth picking up if you've any interest in hockey, or sport in general.

No country for old men

OK, so I've seen the film that made all those best of '07 lists: No country for old men.

It was good, although I'm not completely happy with the ending. That is, it seems there's a loose end or two that could have been tied up. I'm just asking for a little more resolution, Mr. Coen & Coen.

Interesting to see Tommy Lee Jones not playing the bad/kickass character. But, boy, there sure is a badass character in this film. Whoo-eee. The guy who was putting that other guy through the wood chipper at the end of Fargo don't got nuthin' on the badass in this flick. Nuthin', I say, nuthin'.

Not a flick for the feint of heart.

The best films of the year

Well, it's almost the end of the calendar year, so people are putting out lists trying to tell you what the best of 2007 was for films, books, political protests, toy recalls, or whatever. I've looked at four lists of films, and it's interesting how little overlap there is between them.

The lists are: Alison Gilmour's in the Winnipeg Free Press, The Globe and Mail's, The National Post's (which tries to make it a best 11, rather than 10, but 11 is just a bunch of runners up of what isn't in the top 10), and the JAM list from Canoe's website (i.e., the Sun chain of newspapers).

Only one film is on all of them: No country for old men. There are two films that appear on three of the lists: Juno and Away from Her (Gilmour didn't include either of those; perhaps Juno was excluded from her list as it's only now opening in Winnipeg).

Only five others are on two of these lists: Ratatouille, Knocked Up, Once, Zodiac, and Eastern Promises.

Thus, of the 40 films on these lists (41 really as Gilmour puts Knocked Up and Superbad as one item on her list), only 8 are duplicates. That's quite a divergence of opinion. But then how many films come out in a year?

There's, say, at least 3 major releases each week, and more than that if all films are included. Thus, if we take it to be 5 films a week, then we're talking over 250 films a year, of which 10 are being selected for the "best of" list. So maybe it's not so surprising to see little convergence in the lists, especially when one considers that there's likely a desire to be at least a little different from others/standard opinion when creating the list. Thus, in a situation where there's a choice between two films, the more idiosyncratic choice may be chosen more often than not.

Of all the films on the lists, I've only seen one of them: Michael Clayton, which I quite liked (it was on the JAM/Canoe list). It was suspenseful; you always had the feeling that something was just about to happen, and sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn't. And it ended well.

I did see some films this year - like The Bourne Ultimatum, but apparently few - well, one - of the Best of 2007. C'est la vie.

Holidays

Stuck close to home the last couple of days. Was over next door for drinks on Xmas eve, and then went across the street for Xmas dinner last night.

It was all good, but maybe the highlight was playing pool last night across the street. I played really well. Had a run of seven balls in the middle of one snooker game, and sunk 4 or 5 in a row to end off another snooker game.

During that latter run, there was a shot that I had to reach way down the table for. One of the other players asked if I needed the reach, and I said "no," making the shot right afterwards.

Being able to reach way down the table and make a shot is one of the interesting by-product skills of pool that I've noticed get better over time. You see people who haven't played a lot of pool try those kinda shots, and they're so shaky on them that they can barely hit the ball, let alone sink it.

Yet, as you continue to try those shots, you find that you progressively get better. Becoming a bit calmer despite being all stretched out. Able to hold it all together, if only for the couple of seconds needed to make the shot.

It's those little improvements that make games/sports so fun.

Oww! - Update

Just in from shoveling a bit of snow, a couple of cms fell overnight. And my shoulder/back feels fine. There's almost no pain in any movement.

I'm happy, but could someone explain this to me?

Oww!

My right shoulder is killing me. Well, it's not the shoulder, really. It's in my back on the right. The stupid cause of it - I think - is reading in bed.

It began on Tuesday morning, and Monday night I'd read in bed for about an hour, during which I mostly supported my weight on my right arm. I think that led to the knot that's in my back right/neck area. And does it produce some sharp pains! Ouch!

Now, I've had this sort of thing before, and normally it goes away in a day or so. But not this time. It did seem to be getting better on Wednesday and Thursday, but then seemed worse on Friday.

Friday morning, I go to my chiropractor for my normal appointment, and he does a few things. And it seems worse in the afternoon. So, I book a massage, and that helps. For a while. But in the evening it comes back about as bad.

On Saturday, I'm still hurting. But I know I need to get out and get a few things before Christmas comes. And it's snowed a few inches, so I need to shovel before getting out.

The shoveling doesn't hurt, actually, so I get that all done and go out to get a few things. When I get home I'm feeling better than I'd felt in days, which is strange - but good. I don't know if it was getting the muscles warm from the exercise of shoveling that did it, or what.

It's now Sunday morning, and again it's painful. Not as painful as previously, but the same pains are there. It hurts when I'm getting up, turning my head to the right and moving it forward/down.

Hopefully, this too will pass.

Appropriation Art

I heard the bit on appropriation art today on Q, and I'm confused. This bit focussed on a current exhibit at the Guggenheim on Richard Prince's work, which Jim Krantz claims is too much like his work. Jian Ghomeshi talked to Krantz and as well as an art professor about this issue.

Ghomeshi asked the art professor if he were to go into a gallery today photograph a few things and present them as his own - as appropriation artists have done through the years, would that be art. She replied no, it wouldn't, and seemed to offer a "been there, done that" rationale for why not.

But isn't art supposed to about creating something that's timeless? If it could be art 100 years ago (or 30 or so to go back to the beginning of Richard Prince's career), it should still be art now. That is, a "been there, done that" argument should not be relevant to the evaluation of something as art.

Following this reasoning, either going out and photographing art in a gallery (i.e., engaging in the rephotographing process) this weekend is art now just as Richard Prince's work has been over the last 30 years, or it's not. I don't think there's a defensible middle ground here. And on that basis, it seems that appropriation artists are more akin to copycats than they are to creators.

It's not that we can't look on objects/images produced with non-artistic intentions (or at least not entirely artistic intentions) as art. We can, and certainly there are objects/images that have great artistic value. I can think of some recent exhibits at the Winnipeg Art Gallery that fall into this category, where in one case images from old Eaton's catalogues and the related (non-catalogue) work of those who produced the catalogues were displayed and another case where commercial glassware was displayed.

In both instances - the catalogue images and the glassware - items were produced for non-artistic reasons. Yet I'm willing to call the products art.

I also think I have to disagree that truth isn't an issue here. If I see one of the images that Mr. Krantz originally photographed and Mr. Prince has rephotographed, how am I to know whose work it is? And given that the image seems to have been created twice, is there a definitive answer to that question? Isn't that an important question? I think it is, but that the rephotographing makes any answer ambiguous.

And that's not good.