Living with bengals part 237

It gets pretty weird around here much of the time but the bedroom floor is not usually scattered with finger puppets of assorted Hindu deities.

Thanks guys!

I'm very touched by all the expressions of concern about crazy stalker woman and I'm going to talk to the police about my options. But please don't worry. I really do not think she is a threat. Mad, delusional probably, but about half my size and, this being Toronto, unlikely to be packing serious firepower. So, while I find the whole episode irritating, I'm not particularly concerned.

Morris off

There is much to recommend Toronto but not, alas, its Morris dancers. The standard of Morris dancing in this fair metropolis is downright appalling. Now, I have no pretensions to being a Morris dancer myself (I'm not a great dancer - period - and I don't have the Nijinsky like vertical leap that marks a good Morris man) but I used to hang out with some pretty good ones and I do know how it's supposed to be done. If you were at the Distillery this afternoon, trust me, it's not supposed to be like that.

Alien on your own planet

I've been thinking a lot about cultural differences recently. It's mostly been fairly light hearted stuff about Australian cricket, Scots teeth, New Zealand accents and the like but it has its serious side too. I'm a fairly well travelled person. I've seen a pretty good chunk of North America, Western and Northern Europe, Australia, New Zealand, French Polynesia, Thailand and a few other bits and pieces. Most of that has been for work too which definitely provides a different perspective from being a tourist. My experience of the third world though is limited to Thailand, Mexico and parts of the Southern USA.

So I wanted to ask my esteemed flist where was the most culturally alien place they had been and why they felt that way.

For me, it's a place called Jena, Louisiana where I worked one long, hot, summer in the mid '80s (date not temperature - it was hotter than that). I suspect Jena is fairly typical of towns of that type. I've spent shorter periods of time in not dissimilar places. It has a motel, a couple of diners, a high school, a couple of automotive parts plants where most people work and a metric shitload of churches. Racism is never far below the surface but it's not as bad as the nearby town of Nebo where there are no black people. The Jena little league team leaves its black players at home when it plays there. It's just not safe to take them.

All the people in the plant, except for the plant manager, were local. Most of them had never been outside the state and the most travelling they ever did was to the occasional football game in Baton Rouge. A handful had been overseas but that invariably meant a military base in Germany. They weren't bad people, just stuck in a very limited world with almost no comprehension at all of the world outside. I, for instance, was a total enigma. I wasn't a "good ol' boy", I didn't really fit the spec for a "damn Yankee" and I "sure as hell weren't no nigger" ('scuse my French).

Just one small example, I was having lunch one day with the production manager (no. 2 guy in the plant), Ernie, and I was telling him about the running battles my (then) wife was having with squirrels in our back yard in downtown Ottawa. Ernie wanted to know why I didn't just shoot them. I decided it would be too complicated to explain the potential implications of discharging a fire arm midway between the parliament buildings and the Governor General's residence so I told, him, perfectly truthfully, that i didn't own a gun. He was flabbergasted and it was probably a full minute before he recovered enough to offer to lend me a pistol for my next trip home. At this point I had to explain that hand guns were illegal in Canada etc, etc.

Now, it has to be said that I saw things that summer that made Jena look like a demi-paradise. If you ever want to see the US that doesn't feature in the tourist brochures just take Highway 98 east from Natchez, MS to Interstate 55. You know those early photographs of black sharecroppers outside their shacks in the post-bellum south? It hasn't changed much. It's certainly at least as bad as anything I saw in Thailand, even going through the slummy outskirts of Bangkok on the train.

Almost forgot

September 3rd may be the single most important date in history. Besides being pigsnout000's birthday, in itself the 50th anniversary of the British declaration of war on Germany it is also the day of the two great deliverances, Worcester and Dunbar, and the anniversary of the great Oliver's death. Let's not forget the greatest of Englishmen.