Dale Wilson. More Tracks of the Black Bear (2013)

     Dale Wilson. More Tracks of the Black Bear (2013) Dale’s father was the engineer on site when the docks at Michipicoten Harbour were rebuilt, and became Chief Engineer. This connection may explain Wilson’s fascination with the Algoma Central and Hudson’s Bay Railway. But maybe not. The ACR has a lot of fans with no family connection. It’s a railway that survived against the odds, and still (as a part of CN) provides useful services.
     Fans will be pleased with this book, another collection of photographs, memoirs and miscellaneous documents. Wilson has arranged them in chronological order, with explanatory notes here and there. The result is a pleasant anecdotal history of the line. Readers interested in Algoma and Sault Ste Marie will also find this book a good read.
     I like these scrapbook-like histories. They contain a good deal of primary material, the kind that professional historians arrange into plausible narratives of cause, effect, and influence. The scrapbook leaves the task of interpretation to us, engaging us in the oddments of actual life. The photographs are well reproduced, but some documents have been damaged by time, so their reproduction is not as clear as we might wish. *** for the fan, **½ for the casual reader. Disclosure: Dale used one of my photos.

Fight the Mammals!

Occasionally, I check in to Boing Boing. I found this charming poster urging dinosaurs to defend themselves against the mammals. Logical, when you think about it in certain way.

POEM IN A COLD WINTER

POEM IN A COLD WINTER

A bird's song choked in my throat, I said.
And I saw a tin-whistling billy-goat
when the moon bloomed red as a rose.
And a grey church
with graves and black yews around
that's dead still, except for the sound
of the billy-goat's tune
dancing like laughter in empty rooms.
There was a blue sky, with chanting white clouds,
and a bottomless, sun-high sky that sowed shrouds
on a dead-still earth.
And the whistling shriek from the north-wind's throat
was the cornflower laugh of the billy-goat
dancing in the molten-gold pools of the ancient years
when the moon bloomed red as a rose.

[©1962; publ. in March 62, University of Alberta]

LARCHWOOD (POEM)

LARCHWOOD

I remember the nets of my childhood
heaving in the fluid air
they were mere play of light and shade
and did not seem strong enough to catch a fish.
They were hung on wooden racks to dry
those nets made white by water and the sun
by men that looked as delicate and tough
as the figures they carved in fragrant larchwood
that had a sheen in the winter lamplight
like shining nets that dried on larchwood sticks.
Marys they carved and Josephs
with robes that moved in the uncertain flame
and flowed like the nets.
And the Christchild was round with an old man's face
on a heaping crib
and the sheep wore woolly webs
from which wise faces peered.
Balthazar's crown was gold net on a braid
the box of myrrh had weaving incised lines.
And the gold coins jingled in a knotted bag.

But I did not see that, then, I saw
only the bright reds and blues, and the golden
halo on the Child, and the innocent white sheep,
and the green shutters on the windows.

My father still carves figures of larchwood,
but he does not paint them
and they have a sheen like white nets drying in the sun.

[copyright 1963; publ. in March 63, University of Alberta]

Money and Ayn Rand

      Ayn Rand and her followers worship money. But on money, she is so mistaken that she's not even wrong. From the Ayn Rand lexicon (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/money.html)::
     Money is the tool of men who have reached a high level of productivity and a long-range control over their lives. Money is not merely a tool of exchange: much more importantly, it is a tool of saving, which permits delayed consumption and buys time for future production. To fulfill this requirement, money has to be some material commodity which is imperishable, rare, homogeneous, easily stored, not subject to wide fluctuations of value, and always in demand among those you trade with. This leads you to the decision to use gold as money. Gold money is a tangible value in itself and a token of wealth actually produced. When you accept a gold coin in payment for your goods, you actually deliver the goods to the buyer; the transaction is as safe as simple barter. When you store your savings in the form of gold coins, they represent the goods which you have actually produced and which have gone to buy time for other producers, who will keep the productive process going, so that you’ll be able to trade your coins for goods any time you wish.
     This is of course nonsense. The only reason money can “buy time” is that there is surplus productive capacity. Money cannot create that surplus capacity, nor is it needed to ensure that it will be used. Humans have invented many ways of doing this without money. What you need is a technology that multiplies the effect of human work, and a system of customs (usually in the form of mutual obligations) that will ensure the surplus will be stored and traded. Fact is, even today much trade is done without money. The basic rule is "mutual obligation". Money is the abstraction of the IOU, which was is itself a record of a specific obligation.. It's a store of mutual obligation. not of wealth.
     And like practically everybody, Rand misquotes St. Paul’s comment on money:
So you think that money is the root of all evil? . . . Have you ever asked what is the root of money?
     In fact, St. Paul wrote, The love of money is the root of all evil. Look it up!
     Money is a way of making trade with strangers possible, and thereby making strangers mutually dependent. Very useful invention, IOW. E.g., just try to calculate how many people have been involved in producing a ball point pen and making it available to you. A stranger is someone to whom you owe nothing, and vice versa. This makes interaction between strangers dangerous. Hence, all societies have had to invent ways of making at least temporary mutual obligation possible. Think of "guest right", for example. So, why do all those strangers work to produce and deliver a cheap pen to you? Because money makes it not only possible to trade with people you will never meet, it makes it easy to do so.
     Nowadays, money trades are used to measure economic activity, which produces such incomplete, gappy data that it causes pernicious delusions. Even in our highly monetised economy, at least 1/3rd of economic exchange does not involve money. In pre-money times, that was 100%.
     Basic rule about money: money and wealth flow in opposite directions.
     I think everybody needs a good introductory survey course in anthropology. It might cure many people of the notion that our economic arrangements are somehow inevitable (or, gaak!, god given). For over 95% of our existence as a culture-creating species, we humans have had no money. Yet humans managed to produce the goods and provide the services they needed. It’s true that money, because it accelerated trade, and more importantly enabled trade with strangers, accelerated the creation of wealth. But trade, and its beneficial effects on wealth creation and cultural exchange, existed long before money.
     2013-03-11 & 2014-05-23

Processed Food

      A few years ago, the CBC ran a program on school lunches. It pointed out that "healthy" choices are difficult because standards were set in the 1940s when the US Army found that it had to reject a large percentage of recruits for being underweight or otherwise malnourished. Modern processed food is too good, it seems, and is making our children obese. That reminded me of the days when a large part of a family's time was spent "putting up" the preserves for the winter. Fruit was dried, or made into compotes, jams, and jellies. Vegetables were pickled or boiled nearly to death and and put into sealers. As these cooled, the air inside contracted and pulled the lids down into an airtight seal.
     One of the major events at Rutzenmoos was the making of sugar syrup and molasses. Mum, Tante Maria, and Frau Schomburg (the pastor’s wife) chopped and sliced sugar beets, then cooked them in the big washing kettle, a copper bowl inset into a purpose built stove, which was normally used to boil the washing in a soap and lye solution as part of the weekly washday rituals. It was of course perfectly sterile. The syrup was a golden colour, the molasses were a nice sticky dark brown. I don’t know whether the syrup was further processed to make sugar, I paid little attention to it. I  concentrated on the molasses, whose taste I can still sense in my oral memory. Wonderful stuff!
     Without processed food, we would have starved.  People nowadays have no idea how important processed food is for survival, and even less how much time was spent in processing it. The food industry made processed food cheap and plentiful. And government made it wholesome: as recently as the 1940s and 50s, governments had to pass regulations to prevent food adulteration, or to enforce safer (and more expensive) processing methods.
     In fact, it was our ancestors' discovery of how to store and process food that led to our eventual dominance of the ecosystem. Until people knew how to grow grains and process other food, they could not live in temperate climates where fresh food is seasonal. True, some people learned how to use technology to live in very inhospitable climate, the Inuit for example; but they survive because, as luck would have it, their prey contains vitamins without which they would die. That, not technology, is what enables the Inuit to live in the Arctic.
     The present day reaction against processed food comes largely from people who have no personal memories of how important processed food is for us. The fact that we can get fresh fruits and vegetables year-round has also helped distract people from this insight.
     There’s another fact, which perhaps should be better known: Human digestive systems do not do a very good job of digesting fresh foods. Cooking is a kind of pre-digestion. It breaks down cell walls in fruits and vegetables, and degrades the proteins in meats, making both more nutritious for us. Without cooking, we would get a good deal less value from the food we eat. True, cooking also destroys some vitamins, but usually there’s more left over than we would get from the uncooked food. The same is true of calories in some cases. Many starchy foods are essentially indigestible until they are cooked.
     Processed food has achieved a bad rep. I think it’s undeserved. In fact, it’s because our food is generally so wholesome and nourishing that the fearful among us fasten on any evidence that suggests food is not as good as it might be,  however trivial the failure is in the larger scheme of things.

Columbo: Publish or Perish (1974)

     Columbo: Publish or Perish (1974) [D: Robert Quine. Peter Falk, Jack Cassidy et al.] Publisher Riley Greenleaf arranges the murder of Allan Mallory, his best selling author, in order to prevent his defection to a rival house, staging an alibi of obnoxious drunkenness for the time of the murder, so that he will appear to be framed. Columbo must break the alibi and discover the link between Greenleaf and hit man Eddie Kane. A split screen is used to show the murder and the alibi at the same time. The acting is barely a cut above wooden, and even Falk seems to sleepwalk through his part. Mickey Spillane (in real life a hard-boiled pulp fiction writer) plays Mallory, and demonstrates that he can’t act. A below average entry in the series, barely complicated enough to fill the 73 minute screen time. *½