Like A Teapot

Having not heard from my mother for a while, I decided to give her a call tonight. I had suspected that she had gone to visit her father this past weekend and I was right. Apart from seeing her father, she also attended a dinner event celebrating the birth of one of her sisters' first grandchild.

She also informed me that she was in the middle of watching the final episode of the American television series Prison Break. Now that was interesting. First I did not expect the show put on Chinese television. Second, I never thought she would ever be interested in such material. I asked if she was watching the English version or a dubbed Chinese version, she said it was the latter. She also mentioned that the main actor of the show, whom she thought was quite good, had visited China and gone on a popular talk show earlier, which I did remember reading about here.

Though I knew about the tv series, I have never watched it myself and could not immediately recall its English title. So I typed in the Chinese title to google it. And guess what, "Reality Prison Break Show in Belgium" emerged as one of the top search results. I clicked on it and found it a breaking news item. An English BBC version is here.

This is amazing material. Not the least because a similar incident took place in Belgium a few years ago and things of Belgium seem to have made quite a bit of headlines lately. Yesterday I was going to comment on this remarkable Belgian on the right. He was a painter of the 19th century. He may not be a great artist, but he truly had guts. And I admire him for that despite what The Economist says.

This morning I went to the post office and was delighted to discover that Canada Post had issued a set of new stamps for the Christmas season on the very same day (November 3, 2008). Instead of the all too common Jesus Christ and Modonna and Child variety, Canadians can now send the simple childhood joys of the holiday season to their loved ones around the world with three charming stamps showcasing popular winter activities of Canada.

The stamps are sold separately in packs. One for domestic mails (top right), one for mails destined to the USA (top left), and one for other overseas locations. I bought a six pack of international rate (left). I considered getting the other packs too but eventually decided to wait a bit. I have too many unused stamps at home.

Sometimes critics have rebuked me for making the theme of Canada's intellectual poverty the theme of several of my plays. But if I may speak in my own defence, critics normally live in big cities and mix with sophisticated people, whereas I have lived in places that were small and culturally undernourished, and I know what that does to the people who live in such circumstances and have nothing upon which to hone the mind. The things of the spirit are fully as necessary as the things of the flesh, and where they do not exist, a serious disease appears which I have called Cultural Rickets. And of course it must be remembered that these plays were written many years ago and that things in Canada are changing, and intellectual isolation is not as severe as once it was. But I will not be moved from my conviction that what I have shown in my plays are certain aspects of truth, and the task of the playgoer, and the reader, is to find the truth wrapped in the theatricality.

Robertson Davies

The two big Chinese characters in the picture below mean "Unidirectional".