To thine own self be true

The only thing worse than self-destruction is group self-destruction. Large numbers of individuals self-destructing in a situation.

The Oilers have a deep psychological problem. We’ve seen it rear its head previously in other games and series. The bottom-line is that the only team, ironically, who can beat the Oilers is the Oilers themselves. They are lemming-like at the core. There is a strange defect which simply doesn’t want to win or be consistent.

So, no, no change from previous editions of this group. No improvement on the key aspects of will, attitude, desire, and spirit.

There have been many desperate women characters in literature including Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Hardy’s Eustacia Vye, Perkins-Gilman’s protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, and Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Usually, they are driven to desperate choices given restrictive contexts they are in with no apparent means of escape short of madness and/or suicide. Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is memorably desperate, similarly because of her character, her choices, and the flawed men in her life.

Hedda Gabler was written in 1890, 11 years after A Doll’s House about Nora Helmer (the first real liberated modern woman character in literature who abandons her husband and kids to start a new life, happily independent from her limited, repressive husband Torvald). Hedda is an attractive, free-spirited, impulsive, ruthless, untrustworthy, neurotic coquette who smokes and shoots twin pistols that she inherited from her father. Though she has married at the beginning of the play, she is unhappy, bored, restless, and looking to control men in her life. This goes totally against what 19th century expectations were for women of her day.

George Tesman, her simplistic, naive, but moral writer-husband, has no clue about the inner life of the woman he has married. A friend of the couple, Judge Brack, is a witty, clever, vain man who secretly desires to be “the cock of the walk” in their trio; he later uses blackmail to threaten the illicit favors he lusts after in Hedda. Eilert Lovberg, a friend of the trio, is a dissolute writer-friend who was once seriously involved with Hedda. Meeting years later, he fancies they can resume their liaison, but Hedda controls him finally to the point of destruction to quench her own crazy power trip.

A minor character is Hedda’s old schoolmate Thea Elvstad who leaves her husband (much like Nora Helmer) in order to commit to Eilert as an editor-companion. For the two, his manuscript (about to be published) is their ‘baby’. She is tormented by the jealous Hedda who wants Eilert all for herself and her selfish, nefarious purposes. Hedda was nasty to Thea in her youth and still cruelly torments and ‘plays her’.

Things go awry after a men’s club party with the three men. Eilert gets drunk and loses his manuscript which weirdly ends up in Hedda’s possession. When he shows up at her house in complete despair, she gives him a pistol to kill himself, in order to please her whimsical control fixation. “Let it be beautiful” she morbidly tells him.

Of course, this all goes wrong and he dies a pathetic, unglamorous suicide. An investigation is initiated to find the gun’s source and the walls start closing in for Hedda cornering her on several fronts. As she says “Everything I touch becomes ludicrous and despicable.” Suffice to say, that, after that, two characters find resolution, Major Brack’s plans are foiled, and Hedda realizes a tragic poetic-justice end.

Like Ibsen’s other works, this short, fast-moving play revolves around conflicts between reality and illusion, conflicts between men and women in particular, psychological choices, manipulation and control, mental illness, and the dream lives of characters. In some ways, Hedda is a modern woman, who wants to escape and be free of the male-imposed and society-imposed conventions of her day. She tries to be her own person (unsuccessfully) and defiantly goes against the grain. This is ‘her play’ and one of the first significant modern psychological studies in modern literature.

I watched the 1962 BBC tv production, directed by Alex Segal, with veteran Ingrid Bergman as Hedda and a cast of distinguished English actors including Michael Redgrave (George), Ralph Richardson (as the wicked judge), and Trevor Howard (as the dissolute Eilert). Bergman’s natural Swedish accent gave a nice Scandinavian underpinning to the production and she was perfectly cast. She had played neurotic roles before in several movies and she convincingly brings out Hedda’s boredom, restlessness, and treachery.

If you are an Ibsen fan, this is a tragic must-see/read. If you are interested in the evolution of women characters in modern literature or psychological studies, this is, likewise, a must see/read.

Several thousand in a few hours passing by. What each skein looked like, higher than this:

Last year producer Giles Martin was thought to be doing a redo of Rubber Soul after completing the Revolver boxset, but, instead, he ended up revisiting The Beatles red and blue albums of greatest hits. The 2023 blue album has several surprises including their latest/last single “Now and Then”, but the real surprise is in the red album set. Martin added songs to the original sets bringing the total to 38 songs on the 2 CDs.

Martin had already redone 8 Revolver tracks which appear on this album. But he also demixed the remaining 30 tracks and then remixed them much as he has been doing with the previous redos. The result is that original 4 track stuff which previously had been impossible to separate and untangle was broken down and reassembled with Martin’s machine-learning technology, and the results are spectacular with greater clarity, a wider field of separated vocals and instruments, and, therefore, more impact.

Now when you listen to these 30 brand new tracks, you hear new and more things that you never heard before. In short, listening is like being there in the studio with The Beatles. It is also like hearing these 30 tracks for the first time anew. No more muddy mono mix.

If you are a serious Beatles fan and collector, you will buy the blue album, but the red album is the gem of this 4 CD release. It is distinctly different from the original versions of the revised 30 songs and will enhance and extend your aural appreciation of these hits and album tracks.

to understand and appreciate the nuances and figurative meanings of irony, satire, paradox, ambiguity, complexity, and subtlety.

are pretty much bringing the world to a standstill. And there just isn’t enough education, critical thinking, and crap detecting out there to save us from the disastrous results.

it’ll be because the majority of people are just plain stupid/uneducated and turned their backs on masks, vaccines, facts, truth, and science.

I shut/tune out all this modern madness, focusing on my personal daily world and family while remaining true to myself. Saves a lot of time, stress, hassle, and unnecessary conflicts.

Jean Paul Sartre in his play No Exit wrote that “Hell is other people” and that pretty much puts much of the current world into perspective.

As T.S. Eliot predicted Western civilization show signs of ending with people killing each other in the streets. That’s what happens when civility, compassion, and the rule of law disappear and a society has innumerable dangerous and mad persons running around on the loose.

In the words of the immortal Sophie Tucker, “Cheer up. It can only get worse.”

prejudice, and violence toward others out there in the world, I go back to my position for some time now of acceptance and letting go (particularly of the above all based on ego, selfishness, greed, and possessiveness), in order to set ourselves and others free to live and let live in peace.

1/5 of Canadians use the services of food banks.

And the food banks can’t keep up with the rising demand.

What will the food bank clients do when the food banks have nothing left?

Will Amarjeet Sohi, Danielle Smith or Justin Trudeau ride to the rescue?