What I’m Blogging

Today is Halloween, one of the oldest holidays in the Western European tradition.

…Celts believed it was the night that spirits, ghosts, fairies and goblins freely walked the earth…

Today, 70 percent of American households will open their doors and offer candy to strangers, most of them children; 50 percent of Americans will take photographs of family or friends in costume; and the nation as a whole will spend more than six billion dollars. In terms of dollars spent, it is the second most popular holiday of the year in this country, after Christmas.

For the Celtic people of Northeastern Europe, November 1st was New Year’s Day, and October 31 was the last night of the year. Celts believed it was the night that spirits, ghosts, fairies and goblins freely walked the earth. Archaeologists aren’t entirely sure what all the traditions were, but they believe the holiday involved bonfires, dressing up in costumes to scare away evil spirits, and offering food and drink to the spirits of family members who had come back to visit the home.

It was Pope Gregory III in the eighth century A.D. who tried to turn Halloween into a Christian holiday to divert Northern Europeans from celebrating an old pagan ritual. He made November 1st All Saints Day, and October 31 became All Hallows Eve. Instead of providing food and drink to the spirits, Christians were encouraged to provide food and drink to the poor. And instead of dressing up like animals and ghosts, Christians were encouraged to dress up like their favorite saints.

In the United States, Puritans tried to outlaw Halloween, in part because of its association with Catholicism. So it was the Irish Catholics who brought Halloween to this country, when they immigrated here in great numbers after the potato famine in the 1840’s. Since the Irish were largely poor and oppressed, Halloween became a holiday for them to let off steam by pulling pranks, hoisting wagons onto barn roofs, releasing cows from their pastures, and committing all kinds of mischief involving outhouses. Treats evolved as a way to bribe the vandals and protect homes.

But by the late 1800’s, Victorian women’s magazines began to offer suggestions for celebrating Halloween in wholesome ways, with barn dancing and apple bobbing. And by the early 20th Century, it became a holiday for children more than adults. In 1920, the Ladies’ Home Journal made the first known reference to children going door to door for candy, and by the 1950’s it was a universal practice in this country. By 1999, 92 percent of America’s children were trick-or-treating.

What’s interesting about Halloween is that it has no real connection to the majority religion of this country, it does not celebrate an event in our nation’s past, it does not involve traveling to visit family, and it doesn’t even give us a day off work. But it gives us the chance to try out other identities. For one day, people can feel free to dress as the opposite gender, as criminals, as superheroes, celebrities, animals, or even inanimate objects. But Halloween retailers report that the most popular costumes remain some variation on witches, ghosts, and devils.

From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.

Further spooky reading available at Amazon Canada, US and UK

So what are you going to be on Halloween. According to this innocuous blog quiz, I should be out hunting for Dorthy and her little dog. Alright, I’m getting on with it… I’m flying, and I’m not your pretty OK?

Your Halloween Costume Should Be

A Flying Monkey

What Should You Be For Halloween?

Sunday morning. Presumably a morning of rest and relaxation. As usual, presumptions are wrong. This Sunday morning is the dreaded time of change, or more accurately, it is time to change time itself.

…what have the Romans ever done for us?…

In my house we are in the midst of an anomaly in time. I am trapped between time zones. In years gone past it was the job of the first to wake to change the clocks to the arbitrarily assigned time. Now with the advent of Network Time Protocol, computers, and clever algorithms, some clocks, change themselves. All my laptops changed. One old PC which I keep for sentimental reasons did not, but it sill thinks the date is 1985 so it’s not much of a bother. The TV, VCR, and DVD all made the transition. The microwave and the wall clocks were left behind. I’m on temporal clean up detail to gather the stray time pieces and return them to the flock.

It’s bad enough that there are different timezones and I have to calculate what time it is in London when I want to call the Queen. We could have just stopped with that nonsense, but no! Ben Franklin has to throw daylight savings time into the mix, and twice a year we have to go through this mess. My wife has a better solution - one time to rule them all. That’s it. It would be the same time everywhere. No zones. No daylight savings. It’s off the wall, people would have to get rid of their attachment to the old Roman division of the day into 2 halves of 12 hours. But honestly, what have the Romans ever done for us?

It’s the birthday of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, born near Dublin, Ireland (1751). He’s best known for his play The Rivals (1775), about a couple, Lydia Languish and Captain Jack Absolute, who want to get married against the wishes of their elders, Mrs. Malaprop and Sir Anthony Absolute. The first performance was an hour too long and much too bawdy for the audience. Sheridan rewrote it, and the play was re-produced 11 days later to an enthusiastic reception. The play became so successful that Sheridan was able to buy the theater it played in.

Richard Sheridan said, “The question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is: Don’t we all anyway? Might as well get paid for it.”

From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.

Further bawdy theatrical reading available at Amazon Canada, US and UK

…It’s like the Japanese Archery version of writing, hitting the target by not aiming at it…

So here I am on the first day of my vacation, waiting for the NaNoWriMo to kick off. I’m gathering thoughts about what to do, what to write, and at elevenish on a Saturday morning, the most important thing of all, what to eat with my coffee. Can I have kippers for breakfast? Apart from the Supertramp flashbacks, I have been reading what other NaNoWriMonauts^™ are planing and taking heart. Some are just as messed up about it as I am, Some have a plan. In the spirit of panicked authors everywhere a little planning plagiarism is in order.

An Odious Woman (no, not my ex wife) has a rather good plan with an outline and some snappy pointers. This is definitely a plan I will take note of.

My first permanently linked bloggernaut pal Rachel not only introduced me to the Odious Woman (again, no relation to my ex), but also passed on a link about the snowflake method of writing a novel. All good reading, all good advice

For the counter point, however, credit must be given to Pep for his Nike-esque “Just Do It” approach of sitting in front of the keyboard and typing for 30 days. It’s like the Japanese Archery version of writing, hitting the target by not aiming at it.

Today is the anniversary of Black Tuesday, the stock market crash in 1929 that signaled the beginning of the worst economic collapse in the history of the modern industrial world. Three million shares were sold in the first half-hour. Stock prices fell so fast that by the end of the day there were shares in many companies that no one would buy at any price. The stocks had lost their entire value.

…the most disastrous trading day in the stock market’s history…

The front page story in the New York Times on this day read, “Wall Street was a street of vanished hopes, of curiously silent apprehension and of a sort of paralyzed hypnosis… Men and women crowded the brokerage offices, even those who have been long since wiped out, and followed the figures on the tape. Little groups gathered here and there to discuss the fall in prices in hushed and awed tones.”

It was the most disastrous trading day in the stock market’s history. The stock market lost $30 billion, more than a third of its value, in the next two weeks.

From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.

Further economically depressing reading available at Amazon Canada, US and UK

It was on this day in 1919 that Congress overrode President Woodrow Wilson’s veto and passed the Volstead Act, which provided for enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors in the United States. Ours isn’t the only nation to attempt a ban. Various forms of alcohol prohibition have been attempted since ancient times by the Aztecs, ancient China, feudal Japan, the Polynesian Islands, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Canada, and India.

…a long fight against women getting the right to vote…

The movement to ban alcohol in this country began as a religious movement, and it was also a movement dominated by women. At the time, it was still difficult for women to make a living on their own, and many women had seen their lives ruined when their husbands squandered the family income on booze. It was the liquor industry that put up such a long fight against women getting the right to vote, because they were terrified that women voters would usher in restrictions on the sale of alcohol.

It’s commonly believed that Prohibition was a huge failure; that no one stopped drinking and the law’s only effect was to give a boost to organized crime. That was true in big cities, but in rural America, prohibition was quite effective. Both cirrhosis death rates and admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholism fell by more than fifty percent. Arrests for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct also went way down. And while organized crime may have gotten a boost, homicide rates were the same during the 1920s as they were in the previous two decades.

From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.

I first read this book during the 2004 Presidential Election in the United States. At the time there was a lot of talk about Democrats fleeing to the the Dominion where it would be a “nicer” version of America. It opened my eyes, and any American thinking about life in the snowy north might give it a read too and discover the differences.

Adams, Michael. 2003. Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values. Penguin Books. ISBN 0143014234.

What I liked about this book: I think the things that I liked most about this book were the humour (it’s pretty funny) and the hope for the future that it inspired. Too often we are bombarded by the media about how Canada is becoming more and more like the United States. This book shows, rather sharply, that this is not the case. It also has good background information on the historical differences between our two nations; “Life, Liberty and Happiness” as opposed to “Peace, Order and Good Government”. Very entertaining.

What I disliked about this book: While it was informative, and funny, there were times when it read like a sociology textbook. I suppose that is to be expected when covering a topic like sociology, but there were sections in it where I found myself mumbling “blah blah blah” and then fell promptly asleep. But I struggled through and it was worth the read.

Available at Amazon Canada and US

My blog is worth $7,248.23.
How much is your blog worth?

There are those who claim that blogging is just a waste of time , effort and of no value. “Take my wife…” as Henny Youngman used to say. Well over at Business Opportunities Weblog an effort has been made to quantify just how much filthy lucre money a blog is worth. They should know, they are in the making money from a blog kind of space. Now don’t get me wrong, I like filthy lucre money as much as the next guy. Heck, I even bought a lottery ticket in the Ontario 649 mad dash for forty million of the little darlings [incidentally I did not win]. For the most part I like to think of blogging for blogging sake. Sure I put up links for Google Ads and I have links to Amazon for books and stuff, but to date I think I’ve made a grand total of $10 in the last 3 years. Don’t worry, I won’t be spending it all in one place.

Nope blogging for me is definitely not a exercise in money making. It’s more of an exercise in hearing myself type. But now I have an arbitrary number of value to assign to what I’m doing.

“I’ll be up to bed soon honey, I’m just increasing my virtual net blog worth….”

It’s the birthday of Dylan Thomas born in Swansea, Wales (1914). The name Dylan was an extremely rare name at the time of his birth. His father found the name in a collection of old Welsh folk tales. Today, Dylan is one of the top 20 most popular names for boys in the United States.

…he had an extraordinarily deep, sonorous reading voice…

Thomas kept a notebook for his poems as a teenager, and he continued to borrow lines and even whole poems from that notebook for his entire career. Almost every poem he wrote as an adult had an early version in that original notebook, written when he was 18 years old.

He made his name among general readers with the poems he wrote about the bombing raids on London During World War II, including “Ceremony After a Fire Raid,” “Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid Was a Man Aged a Hundred” and “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.”

Once he’d become famous, he spent most of his time going on reading tours, especially in the United States, where he could make the money he needed to support his family. He had an extraordinarily deep, sonorous reading voice, and people came in droves to listen to him read his own poetry as well as the poetry of others. In the last eight years of his life, Thomas wrote only eight poems. He died on his last reading tour of the United States in 1953.

From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.

Further poetic reading available at Amazon Canada, US and UK