To thine own self be true

look out your Edmonton window and watch a magpie struggling to dig in the fresh-fallen snow to get something to eat as you do your morning Tai Chi exercises to music from a Chopin for Lovers CD.

A headliner:

http://edmontonpoetryfestival.com/headliners/richard-davies-2018

What we’re seeing happening now in Syria and England is a throwback to the mustard gas and chlorine attacks of WWI or napalm use in Viet Nam in the ’60s.
Much like those diseases that were once brought under control and believed to be eradicated, chemical warfare has made a comeback and a nasty business it is. All you have to see of it to know it is to view a Syrian baby or infant damaged by it.
Human beings are specialists at all kinds of evil ways to make war on humankind without concern for the consequences. Ignorant, evil men and countries at work on the loose. Some things never change. Even a hundred years later. ‘The old ways’ still have their followers and adherents.

whether it be at the dentist’s or doctor’s, is to distract oneself, to look away before the needle is inches away from the injection site. What you don’t see is much less likely to bother, frighten, or traumatize you.

Don’t even bother with this one. Go directly to Sidney Lumet’s excellent adaptation of Christie’s classic starring Albert Finney (unrecognizable as himself playing Poirot), Lauren Bacall, Martin Balsam, Ingrid Bergman, Jacqueline Bisset, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Rachel Roberts, Richard Widmark, and Michael York. Branagh’s version is mediocre on all key counts: script, performances, direction. Only atmosphere is somewhat comparable.

For a more realistic take on this one, check out David Suchet’s Poirot from the Poirot tv series boxset. Branagh tries to copy the Suchet moralistic dilemma, but comes up short, incidentally.

*Worth hoping and waiting for, still, is Branagh’s Macbeth , shot in an English church live a few years back, which has yet to come to DVD.

I would concur with her husband Leonard; it is her greatest novel.

It contains her most passionate views on life, human nature, human experience, the effects of time passing, and death.

And the book is very metaphorical right through to the end; she uses poetry to plumb each of the above. The book cannot be read like a conventional plotted novel. It is all atmosphere, sensation, and epiphany. And yet, read on it own terms (six connected characters are ‘the waves’), it has much truth to impart on all of the above.

The inhibiting verb “must”. As in “I must go” or “I must adhere to what others might think of me or this”, or “I must do what I think is right”.

So much for following the heart, one’s feelings, one’s bliss, or what one desires.

the world, I want to get off”, I can recommend three options:

1. Take 6 months off from work. (You’ll still get a pension.)
2. Switch to half-time. (You’ll still get a pension.)
3. Quit if it’s bad enough. (Nothing is worth sacrificing your sanity or health for.)

political censorship. (A sanctimonious, one-way, ego-centered imposition of these limited/limiting values on others.)

Egg-painting by daughter

Easter bunny in search of much better weather

Easter at Butchart Garden–a good time to go