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whew !!!

IN THIS ISSUE

• We conclude my story of depression days
• Dick Monaghan writes about a musical weekend
• Gerrit de Leeuw forwards a living will form
• We come to the end of the top physics experiments
• There is widespread concern about the future of CBC
• Keith Elliott thinks we lead our lives backward
• David Galway and Jean Sterling send us letters
• Jack Peaker tells the story of rapid response to a burglary
• Jay sends a poem about a record-breaking hot spell
• Jack suggests more websites to check out

This is the last of the reruns, unless I do not receive some personal stories from YOU:

THE GREAT DEPRESSION

We moved to Salmon Arm when I was in grade 7 so we would be able to go to high school. Mother had had to stop school to go to work when she was 14, on the death of her father, and she was determined that we would finish our education. Our earlier unorthodox schooling had not harmed us; the correspondence courses of those years and another I took in first year university were among the best lessons I ever had.

Still we were as poor as the proverbial church mice, but again it did not make any difference in our social life at school. Dad went back into the bush to work in other men´s camps and Mother maintained a home for us on the little amount of money he could send her. We paid $7 a month for an old house in the middle of the little town. Our allowance was 25c a week, and we spent it all on the weekly movie. When Dad joined the army in 1939, Mother got $50 a month - more than she had ever had before in her life.

In the summers Nell and I, along with most of our classmates, picked berries. Arriving at 5 o´clock in the morning, we often had to wait until the dew had burned off before we could begin. We would finish the raspberries around noon, and then if we were unlucky, would have to pick the sharp-thorned loganberries. At the end of the berry-picking season we would have made enough to buy our school books for the coming term. Once I had enough to buy a used bike with an oval rear wheel which produced a slight galloping motion, but it beat walking.

Our amusements were simple. We walked and biked every road around Salmon Arm; we climbed Mt. Ida and McGee´s Mountain; we skated on the big lake when there wasn´t too much snow and on the Little Lake where we could clear rinks; in the summer we walked or hitchhiked out to Canoe or Sandy Point to swim. (Salmon Arm´s water was too polluted even then to swim in: the sewer emptied out into the arm.) Every night every kid in town strolled down to the railway station to watch the passenger train come in. It was more of a place to gather than any fascination with the trains that drew us there.

By this time we had electricity, running water (cold), and phones. I never lived in a place with plumbing until I married at the age of 24. (No wonder roughing it holds few attractions for me now: I lived like that for too many years with no choice.)

We had an early-model radio on which we listened to Fibber McGee and Mollie, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny. Salmon Arm had a baseball team and a lacrosse team which played neighboring towns in the summer, and a hockey team for our winter amusement. When the indoor rink was not busy, we used to skate round and round to the sound of loud music. A great place for the young people to meet and flirt.

In my leisure time, I read everything that fell into my hands. I worked my way through the small local library and the high school library. I was especially fascinated by the myths and legends of gods and heroes, and the innumerable fairy tales. This taste has persisted to the present: one of my favourite genres is fantasy.

And all this time, we were working our way through the local high school, until finally we graduated into a world where there were few opportunities for young people - just like today. But then came the War; the boys all joined up, and because there were no boys left to fill the position, I was offered a chance to become a printing apprentice at the local newspaper office. I started at $7 a week for 40 hours; at the end of my five years I was receiving $25 a week.

But by now I was an adult; my childhood was ended, and so is my story of that childhood.

Dick Monaghan describes a recent visit to

ASTORIA

Herewith some pics from a weekend at Astoria, to hear two mostly-Mozart concerts. (To see Dick´s pictures, go to Jay´s website: http://members.shaw.ca/vjsansum/index.htm and follow the links in Dick´s story.)

Astoria, an old fur-trading post named after John Jacob Astor, is at the mouth of the Columbia in Oregon, with a five-mile bridge linking Oregon to Washington. Astoria was once claimed for Britain by an armed ship, but Kaiser Wilhelm´s famous line left it to us. The inhabitants didn´t care one way or the other. It was a cannery and fishing town, but now it seems to rely mostly on tourists.

The concerts featured world-class musicians (the guest conductor was from Russia). A pianist named Mark Wescott re-entered the concert world after twelve years of battling cancer and some two dozen operations. (His face looks like that of a burn victim.) He played Mozart´s Piano Concerto #25, with which I was unfamiliar. It seems to me (I am not a critic nor an expert) it is very difficult, technically. It didn´t engage my emotions much, but I think Mozart had a need, every once in a while, to show everybody what a hell of a pianist he was.

They also presented the first act of "Cosi Fan Tutti", with which I am familiar ("Ten-cent plot, million-dollar music" - anonymous commentator). The singers stood behind music stands. I thought them very good (as I did the pianist).

The one with the boats shows the view from our motel, early in the morning.

I think the one of Sass and the Modern Art Mobile Sculpture is self-explanatory. The one with Sass looking at the replica head of David I entitled "My God! A bust of Richard!"

The picture of the dog and birds I just couldn´t resist. I took it at Seaside. The dog seems to be saying "Aw, c´mon: would I eat little birds?"

Gerrit de Leeuw forwards this handy

LIVING WILL FORM

I, _______________, being of sound mind and body, do not wish to be kept alive indefinitely by artificial means.

Under no circumstances should my fate be put in the hands of pinhead politicians who couldn´t pass ninth-grade biology if their lives depended on it. Nor in the hands of lawyers/doctors who are interested simply in running up the bills.

If a reasonable amount of time passes and I fail to ask for at least one of the following: Beer, margarita, scotch and soda, martini, vodka and OJ, steak, shrimp or crab legs, a lottery ticket, bowl of ice cream, waffles, chocolate, or sex,

... it should be presumed that I won´t ever get better.

When such a determination is reached, I hereby instruct my appointed person and attending physicians to pull the plug, reel in the tubes, and call it a day.

At this point, it is time to call a New Orleans Jazz Funeral Band to come do their thing at my funeral, and ask all of my friends to raise their glasses to toast the good times we have had.

Signature: ____________

Date: ________

Here are the remaining top physics experiments forwarded by Bruce Galway:

BEST OF THE BEAUTIFUL MINDS

Foucault´s Pendulum

Last year when scientists mounted a pendulum above the South Pole and watched it swing, they were replicating a celebrated demonstration performed in Paris in 1851. Using a steel wire 220-foot long (67m), the French scientist Jean Bernard Leon Foucault suspended a 62-pound (28kg) iron ball from the dome of the Pantheon and set it in motion, rocking back and forth. To mark its progress he attached a stylus to the ball and placed a ring of damp sand on the floor.

The audience watched in awe as the pendulum inexplicably appeared to rotate, leaving a slightly different trace with each swing. It was the floor of the Pantheon that was slowly moving, and Foucault had shown, more convincingly than ever, that the earth revolves on its axis. At the latitude of Paris, the pendulum´s path would complete a full clockwise rotation every 30 hours; on the southern hemisphere it would rotate counterclockwise, and on the Equator it wouldn´t revolve at all. At the South Pole, as the modern-day scientists confirmed, the period of rotation is 24 hours. (Ranking: 10)

Millikan´s Oil-drop Experiment

Since ancient times, scientists had studied electricity - an intangible essence that came from the sky as lightning or could be produced simply by running a brush through hair.

In 1897 (in an experiment that could easily have been included in this list) the British physicist J. J. Thomson had established that electricity consisted of negatively charged particles - electrons. It was left to the American scientist Robert Millikan, in 1909, to measure their charge.

Using a perfume atomiser, he sprayed tiny drops of oil into a transparent chamber. At the top and bottom were metal plates hooked to a battery, making one positive and the other negative. Since each droplet picked up a slight charge of static electricity as it travelled through the air, the speed of its descent could be controlled by altering the voltage on the plates. (When this electrical force matched the force of gravity, a droplet - "like a brilliant star on a black background" - would hover in midair.)

Millikan observed one drop after another, varying the voltage and noting the effect. After many repetitions, he concluded that electrical charge could only assume certain fixed values. The smallest of these portions was none other than the charge of a single electron. (Ranking: 3)

Rutherford´s Discovery of the Nucleus

When Ernest Rutherford was experimenting with radioactivity at the University of Manchester in 1911, atoms were generally believed to consist of large mushy blobs of positive electrical charge with electrons embedded inside - the "plum pudding" model. But when he and his assistants fired tiny, positively charged projectiles, called alpha particles, at a thin foil of gold, they were surprised that a tiny percentage of them came bouncing back. It was as though bullets had ricocheted off Jell-O.

Rutherford calculated that atoms were not so mushy after all. Most of the mass must be concentrated in a tiny core, now called the nucleus, with the electrons hovering around it. With amendments from quantum theory, this image of the atom persists . (Ranking: 9)

Young´s Double-slit Experiment Applied to the Interference of Single Electrons

Neither Newton nor Young was quite right about the nature of light. Though it is not simply made of particles, neither can it be described purely as a wave.

In the first five years of the 20th century, Max Planck and then Albert Einstein showed, respectively, that light is emitted and absorbed in packets - called photons.

But other experiments continued to verify that light is also wavelike. It took quantum theory, developed over the next few decades, to reconcile how both ideas could be true: Photons and other subatomic particles - electrons, protons, and so forth - exhibit two complementary qualities; they are, as one physicist put it, "wavicles."

To explain the idea, to others and themselves, physicists often used a thought experiment, in which Young´s double-slit demonstration is repeated with a beam of electrons instead of light.

Obeying the laws of quantum mechanics, the stream of particles would split in two, and the smaller streams would interfere with each other, leaving the same kind of light- and dark-striped pattern as was cast by light. Particles would act like waves.

According to an accompanying article in Physics World, by the magazine´s editor, Peter Rodgers, it wasn´t until 1961 that someone (Claus Jonsson of Tubingen) carried out the experiment in the real world. By that time no-one was really surprised by the outcome, and the report, like most, was absorbed anonymously into science. (Ranking: 1)

There is widespread concern about

RECENT DECISIONS BY THE CBC MANAGEMENT

One of our readers wrote to me, lamenting the proposed dropping of her favourite program, and asking if other readers feel the same way. She writes: "My husband, myself, my family, friends and casual acquaintances are upset and outraged by the decision of the powers that be at TVO (TELE VISION ONTARIO) to cancel STUDIO 2. This is our one pleasure on TV, providing information and just sheer enjoyment for people who wish to be informed and who do not want to be exposed to so many idiotic programs. I wonder if polling your listeners among other protests would help bring Paula Todd and Steve Paikin back in the format we loved so much."

Then I got a letter from the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting urging supporters to send a message to the government, calling on Parliament to return CBC to its public broadcasting origin.

The current CBC management has decided to pre-empt The National for an American reality TV program starting on July 8. It may be too late by the time this issue comes out to affect this decision, but there is a website on which you can express your opinion on the direction in which the CBC is heading. It may also be an appropriate place to voice your opinion of the cancellation of Studio 2:

http://friends.ca/returncbcroots/

Keith Elliott thinks we´ve got it all backward:

LIFE CYCLE

The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A death. What´s that, a bonus?!?

I think the life cycle is all backwards.

You should die first, get it out of the way.

Then you go live in an old age home. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, then, when you start work, you get a gold watch on your first day.

You work forty years until you´re young enough to enjoy your retirement.

You drink alcohol, you party, and you get ready for high school.

You go to primary school, you become a kid, you play - you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby.

You go back, you spend your last nine months floating with luxuries like central heating, spa, room service on tap, and then you finish off in a flash of passion!

Yes!

LEGAL OBSERVATION

³We can imagine no reason why, with ordinary care, human toes could not be left out of chewing tobacco, and if toes are found in chewing tobacco, it seems to us that somebody has been very careless.²

- Pillars v. R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., 117 Miss. 490, 500, 78 So. 365, 366 (1918).

CORRESPONDENCE

David Galway, Jill´s and Bruce´s son, writes:

Thank you very much for your support and donation. We had a great day rollerblading and bicycling, and apparently we raised quite a bit of money (for the Heart and Stroke Foundation).

~~~~~

Jean Sterling writes: I enjoyed your story very much and look forward to the sequel. I think it was a friendlier time back then I can remember waving at train engineers and getting a wave back. My father-in-law¹s farm was below a railroad track, and he can remember men coming down from the railroad and asking to do odd jobs for a bit of food and a sleeping place in the barn.

Did you have any problems adjusting to attendance in a school with other kids? And one does marvel at how a teacher managed all those grade levels in a single room. The fact that discipline was better in those days was probably an enormous help.

Jack Peaker sends this story about

BURGLARS

George Phillips of Meridian, Mississippi, was going up to bed when his wife told him that he´d left the light on in the garden shed, which she could see from the bedroom window.

George opened the back door to go turn off the light, but saw that there were people in the shed stealing things. He phoned the police, who asked, "Is someone in your house?" and he said "No." Then they said that all patrols were busy, and that he should simply lock his door and an officer would be along when available.

George said, "Okay," hung up, counted to 30, and phoned the police again.

"Hello, I just called you a few seconds ago because there were people in my shed. Well, you don´t have to worry about them now ´cause I´ve just shot them all." Then he hung up.

Within five minutes three police cars, an Armed Response unit, and an ambulance showed up at the Phillips residence and caught the burglars red-handed.

One of the policemen said to George: "I thought you said that you´d shot them!"

George said, "I thought you said there was nobody available!"

I was complaining about the record-breaking heat we had been experiencing, when Jay found the following information on google:

LONGEST HOT SPELL IN THE WORLD

"Longest hot spell (world): Marble Bar, W. Australia, 100 °F (38 °C) (or above) for 162 consecutive days, October 30, 1923, to April 7, 1924."

"The town has been immortalised in the very funny, but sadly, little-known poem ´The Man from Marble Bar´ by Victor Courtney.

"Satan sat by the fires of Hell
As from endless time he´s sat,
And he sniffed great draughts of the brimstone´s smell
That came as the tongue-flames spat;

"Then all at once the devil looked stern
For there in the depths of Hell
Was a fellow whom never a flame could burn
Or goad to an anguished yell.

"So Satan stalked to the lonely scene
And growled with a stormy brow,
´Now, stranger, tell me what does this mean?
You should be well scorched by now.´

"But the chappie replied with a laugh quite new,
´This place is too cold by far.
Just chuck on an extra log or two;
I´VE COME IN FROM MARBLE BAR!´"

Ed. Note: Does this poem remind anyone else of Robert Service´s "Cremation of Sam Magee"?

THIS WEEK´S SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Jack Peaker sends more sites to check out:

Art: http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/yourcollection/

Health: http://airnow.gov/index.cfm?action=airnow.outlook

Photo Journalism: http://snipurl.com/saxu

"Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can read."