Dr. Caligari's Cupboard

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Canada's national bird is the beaver.

Canada is the second-largest nation in the world. It is not part of the United States- (it's the U.S.' nicer sister, not dissing Mexico, the U.S.' feistier sister.)

A little jewel sitting at the top of the continent.

In the 147 years of their nationhood, Canadians have given the world paint rollers, snowmobiles, electric organs, green ink, toboggans, snow blowers, plexiglass, and the push-up bra.

Canada has about the same population as California, but fewer Scientologists.

According to the 2009 World Drug Report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Canada has the dubious honor of leading the industrialized world in marijuana use, at least when calculated as a percentage of population.

Today is the 34th anniversary of the Canadian national anthem, 'Like America, But Colder.'

Canada's leading export to the United States is Canadians. Dan Aykroyd, who happens to have been born exactly 62 years ago today, is one.

Pamela Anderson is another, and was also born today, although she's younger (most of her is 40ish, but some parts are significantly younger).

Other Canadian exports: Bryan Adams, Paul Anka, Alexander Graham Bell, Raymond Burr (of nipple rouge fame), John Candy, Jim Carrey, Celine Dion, Michael J. Fox, John Kenneth Galbraith, Lorne Greene, Peter Jennings, kd lang, Marshall McLuhan, Joni Mitchell, Alice Munro, Oscar Peterson, William Shatner,

Alex Trebek, Shania Twain, Neil Young and of course Leonard Cohen.

(... O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?)

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

Eric Arthur Blair was born on this day in 1903, in the Indian village of Motihari near the Nepalese border. His British father was an agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service (why is this job no longer available.) The family returned to England in 1907 so that young Eric could struggle and drop out of school. By 1921 he had returned to the subcontinent and joined the police in Burma (now known as Myanmar but for our purposes and to annoy the generals there, we'll continue to refer to it as Burma.) He spent five years with the Burmese police before returning to England to quit and struggle. He stayed in England for a year, then went to France to be poor.

Finally he returned to England and wrote a book about being poor in Paris but no one wanted to publish it. He told his mother to burn the book (she did not), then wrote a new one about being a policeman in Burma. It too was rejected by several publishers. Meanwhile, however, his mother had been sneaking around with the book she hadn't burned and had found a publisher for her son.

Upon submitting the final manuscript to the publisher, Blair decided that a book about being poor in Paris written by a middle-class servant of the British Empire might not look good, so he decided to write under a pen-name. The name he chose was George Orwell.

Later he wrote a book about the poor voting habits of farm animals and another one about a future involving apple computer that sucked (he later acknowledged that it would have been a cheerier book if he hadn't been dying of tuberculosis).

Finally he became a Famous Author and even a Great Writer, but by then he was dead, whatever his name was.