Cosmonauts, Voyager, and Humans

Thursday, May 28, 2020

     Two documentaries show how small humanity and Earth are in the universe, but how big Earthlings' insights can be:  "Cosmonauts:  How Russia Won the Space Race," by the the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (2017), and "The Farthest/Voyager in Space" (2019) by the Public Broadcasting System, of the United States.  The British and USians inject the obligatory national chauvinism and anti-communist hysteria in each film, but especially the second film makes humans small and big at the same time.

     Russia, still the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the internal fifth column working for foreign interventionists not having sabotaged it and pillaged its public assets yet, was the first nation to send a rocket into orbit around the earth, an animal next, and a human, between 1957 and 1961.  Space suits the Soviets invented are the model for those used to this day by every nation that sends people outside Earth's atmosphere.  Rockets the Soviets invented remain the basis for rockets used to deliver cargo to space stations, another Soviet invention.  When the internal and external sabotage of socialism reduced the Soviet Union to several rump states in the 1990s, cosmonauts on the Russian space station were stranded and almost forgotten in a disintegrating vessel that almost didn't return to Earth.  The documentary lets various cosmonauts and engineers speak about the historic Soviet achievements.

     The second film, about Voyager 1 and 2, launched by the United States, that absurdly-named nation, shows humanity's smallness in the cosmos, but also great human insight.  By 1986, the two unmanned space vehicles had flown near Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and their moons and rings, some of them unknown by us until then.  In 2012, the crafts left the gravitational pull of the sun and thus the Solar System.  Aboard Voyager 1 is a record made of metal and gold, with recordings of Earth nature photos, human biology, language, and music, Earth's place in the Solar System, and other items about Earth and nature, which includes us.  Playback instructions and a stylus are there, too. 

     Long after humans are extinct, and the Sun is a red giant that consumed the Earth and much of the Solar System, this tiny proof of our once-existence will coast through interstellar space. The odds are vast against an intelligent being finding this object.  Pivotal space scientist Carl Sagan worked on the Voyager and other US space projects.  In the film, his son says that Voyager is about us more than about the cosmos.  Carl convinced his bosses to turn the Voyager cameras to photograph the Solar System as the craft left it.  The Earth is a speck in a faint sunbeam.  That's all we were and are, but this spaceship shows the heights we can conceive.

     The other day the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio One in British Columbia, Canada interviewed a Canadian astronaut during a call-in show.  One caller said that the $10/year/Canadian spent on the space program is a profoundly wise investment.  We struggle with poverty, injustice, racism, and other flaws born of our system based on private property and the profit system; but this $10 hints at what we can aspire to, if we choose.

    Look through a drinking straw at the sky, a woman scientist of the Voyager program said.  That tiny round view includes hundreds of galaxies, in a universe of billions of galaxies.  A century ago people thought there was only one galaxy, our Milky Way.  By caring to look and ponder, we humble and exalt ourselves at the same time. 

Stanley Cup Winning Games from 1976, 1984, and 1989

Victoria Monday, May 18, 2020

I just watched a condensed version of the fourth and last game, May 16, of the 1976 Montreal Canadiens- Philadelphia Flyers National Hockey League Stanley Cup Final series.  Montreal won the cup against the two-time defending champions in four straight games.  Fans in Philadelphia's Spectrum gave Montreal a standing ovation.  When the 1994 Vancouver Canucks lost the cup at home to the New York Rangers, the Rangers' first cup in decades, Vancouver fans not only gave no standing ovation, they rampaged destructively through downtown Vancouver after the loss.  I remember listening to the end of that game on the radio on the Alkali Lake school bus entering Vancouver on a field trip I helped lead during my not-brief-enough teaching career. 

In the 1976 game, Guy Lapointe, Number 5, played defense;  I, Number 5, played defense in the Edson house league, my last year of minor hockey.  It was the first year that Yvan Cournoyer was captain; Henri Richard retired after the previous year.  Richard died a few weeks ago.  He won 11 Stanley Cups, the most of any NHL player.  Ken Dryden was goalie.  Guy Lafleur, Pete Mahovlich, Jacques Lemaire, and young Doug Risebrough, Steve Shutt, Doug Jarvis, and Bob Gainey were forwards.  Serge Savard, Larry Robinson, and Pierre Bouchard played defense.  Lafleur scored the cup-winning fourth goal with five minutes left in the 5-3 game.  I wore Number 10, like Lafleur, when I started playing minor hockey in 1970, on right wing.  Mahovlich scored the last goal.  The Canadiens' finesse overwhelmed the  "Broadstreet Bullies" of Dave Schulz, more elegant than I remember him, Bobby Clarke, Bill Barber, and Reggie Leach, the second person from a losing team, and the first Indigenous person, to win the Conn Smythe Trophy as most valuable player in the playoffs.

I was 14, growing like a weed, fit, fast, lean, and full of ice hockey, grass hockey, floor hockey, and any other hockey I could get my hands on.    Tennis balls were for grass hockey, not tennis.

The Habs won the next three Stanley Cups.  They lost only one of 13 games in the 1976 playoffs, and only 8 or 12 of 80 80 or so games in the 1977-78 season. 
The December 31, 1975 game in Montreal against the Soviet Red Army team was the best hockey game I saw until the mid-1980s Edmonton Oilers became the best team of all time, according to Gordie Howe, among others.  Pele called Maradona the best soccer player of all time.  Opinions are not always like assholes, although everyone has one.     

Cut to the last game of the 1984 cup final, in which the Oilers beat the New York Islanders, who had won the previous four cups, after the Canadiens' four cups.  I was glad the Oilers stopped the Islanders from winning their fifth cup and tying the all-time record of the 1956-60 Habs.  I watched that game between the two academic years of my University of Alberta Bachelor of Commerce After Degree.  I watched a condensed form of that game last week.  The Oilers became the first Western Canadian team to win the cup.  Watching them play was watching poetry on ice:  speed, passing, shooting, Andy Moog magical in net, Gretzky and Kurri in front, Anderson and Coffey faster than anyone, any year, any team.  To be fair, Cournoyer was still pretty fast in 1976.  Watching that game again was what made me write this blog post.

Go five years in the future to 1989, the last all-Canadian final, between the victorious Calgary Flames and the Montreal Canadiens.  Last week I watched a condensed version of the game in which the Flames won their only cup.  I was happy for moustachioed Lanny Macdonald, who had reached the 1977-78 semi-finals or quarter-finals with the Toronto Maple Leafs, only 11 years after the Leafs' last cup.  The Leafs last won in 1967, now 53 years ago.  I doubt any Canadian team will ever again win the cup.  The last team to do it was the 1993 Canadiens, who are now years into the longest cup drought of their history. 

I watched a game of the 1989 Flames-Habs series in a taxi office in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.  I was traveling across Canada by train, and Newfoundland by bus.  Nova Scotia bars were closed on Sundays.  The Saint Francis Xavier student residence where I stayed for $12 that night had a crowd of other young people watching something else on the common-area television.  Harrumph, as I say to those who giggle at folks such as I watching decades-old hockey games again. 

I watched another game of that series on the ferry from North Sydney, Nova Scotia to Port-aux-Basques, Newfoundland.  Played in Calgary, that game had a very late broadcast time in Newfoundland.  The ferry lounge, closed partway through the game but for its television, had three people in it:  me and two other young men bent on Christian evangelizing me.  I already had the religion of hockey.  I gave them enough attention for politeness but not enough to miss important parts of the game.

When a tv sports channel started broadcasting old games because the worldwide coronavirus crisis caused the closure of hockey and other sports leagues, from professional to toddler, this spring, I noticed few high-profile advertisers during the early broadcasts.  Who'd want to watch a mid-2010s  game between two of the many boring teams that populate the NHL now?  The three games above had advertisers such as usually advertise on tv pro hockey broadcasts, automakers, for example.  Perhaps these games are more popular than the drivel disguised as hockey that has been National Hockey League play since 1989, or not long after.

Now I sound like one of those old timers such as my dad, who venerate Charlie Connacher, Howie Morenz and Maurice Richard, who played before I was born.

As I age, many notable events recede into the past, but they're worth remembering.  People still watch Hamlet, although I don't remember any Danes playing in the NHL.          

A and N Boutique No More

May 11, 2020

Army and Navy, "Western Canada's Department Store," one slogan says, went out of business this week.  This family-owned business started in 1919 in Vancouver.  The first location I knew was the Edmonton one at 82 Avenue and 104 Street, when I started attending the nearby University of Alberta in 1979.  My brother called it "A and N Boutique."  I bought many bargain clothes there, notably fleece pants for running in winter.  I also knew the 105 Avenue and 97 Street location, which closed more than 20 years ago, years after I left Edmonton.  In 2019 the original, downtown Vancouver location decreased from two buildings to one, and had various centenary decorations after the reopening of the diminished space.  I was in the New Westminster location many times, and in the Langley one once or twice.  The remaining five locations closed this week.  Army and Navy joins Kresge, Metropolitan, Eaton's, Sears, Woodwards, Zellers, SAAN, W.W. Arcade, Stedman's, Marshall Wells, Macleods, and various other retailers on the ash heap of capitalist consolidation.  What would Rosa Luxemburg say?

HBC 350 Memories

April 19, 2020

I hired on with the Hudson's Bay Company Northern Stores Department in

Edmonton in July, 1986.  Two plane rides later, I was in Fort Simpson, Northwest

Territories, 1 200 km to the north.   One relative I left behind called it

"Fort Nowhere."

I began 13 months of raw fur buying, running in-store post offices and banks, and

selling a range of items that included food, clothes, housewares, televisions, snowmobiles,

motors for boats, and guns and bullets. I literally sold guns to Indians.  The

four communities I spent that year in were from 60-95% Indigenous, with

300-1100 people in each one.

Every account ledger page I used in 1986 had the preface "316."  The 1987 ones

had the preface "317."  That stood for the number of years since the first ship

of supplies came from England to Rupert's Land.  King Charles II gave that Indigenous

land, not his to give, to the new Hudson's Bay Company on May 2, 1670. 

That date is inscribed on more than one Hudson's Bay Company

department store building in Western Canada, including Winnipeg (national

headquarters), Edmonton, Vancouver, and Victoria.

I worked in Forts Simpson, Providence, Resolution, and Liard.  I read newspapers

under the midnight summer sun.  I swam in the Mackenzie River.  I cross-country

skied in the wilderness beside the Mackenzie and Slave Rivers.  I haggled

for the fresh pelts of beavers, muskrats, mink, martens, foxes, wolves,

weasels, squirrels, lynxes, and one otter, which somehow got hundreds of kilometres

up the Mackenzie River from the river's Arctic Ocean delta.  I still have a lynx

foot that I found in my fur bin, a wooden box about the size of a coffin, when

I emptied the bin's furs into burlap bags, a weekly duty, for shipping south to the

Edmonton fur auction. A leg-hold trap, standard then and illegal now, loosened the

lynx's foot enough for it to fall off in my bin. 

The greasy pile of a couple hundred muskrat pelts I found upstairs when I ran the Fort

Resolution Bay, during its manager's week long trip to Edmonton meetings, had a

heavy, oily stink that made me feel as if I was inside a muskrat in the nearby

Slave River Delta at Great Slave Lake.  "Send those on the next truck to Edmonton,

would ya?"  Kevin asked before he left.  With relief I did.  I don't think there are

many fur auctions nowadays, although I met a trapper at a Christmas, 2019 market

in Williams Lake.  I can't find the photos I took of him or his furs, but below is a link to his trapping school and a book I bought from him.

 

The 1920s-era Fort Providence staff house I spent the 1986-87 winter in had an oil

barrel for a heater stove, lit by turning on the spigot from the adjacent oil tank and

throwing a burning piece of paper into the stove.  Every couple months, the Fort

Providence village authorities sent a truck to fill that tank.  Every week they

sent a truck to fill the fibreglass tank inside the house for water.

I filled my wringer washer by bucket from the kitchen sink, and drained it into a

metal garbage can I dragged outside to dump in the years of tangled grass that

surrounded the house, 100 metres from the Mackenzie River.  I strung a clothesline

from one corner of the outside of the house to the adjacent, protruding corner of the

glassed-in porch.  This house had been the store from the 1920s-60s.  When I

visited Fort Providence in August, 2005, another "Bay Boy" lived in that house,

by then renovated, including its heating and plumbing.  I have a CBC Radio Yellowknife

cassette of interviews with Bay oldtimers, many from Scotland.  My Edmonton boss

was from Scotland.

The Bay deducted about $130/month from my $800-$1 200 salary for housing and

food.  I could eat what I liked from the store, whose wholesale prices I entered in

a store journal kept for staff; there was no monetary limit to staff food, but even

though I stocked the store, it was too small to have much diversity of food.  I

had to stock the "Core List" of Bay items, including Pilot Biscuits, which I like to

this day.  I have a package in my cupboard now.  They're made in St. John's,

Newfoundland, for the seafaring crowd.  See the pilot biscuit photo below. 

The above introduces the following news from the Canadian National Historical

Society, whose emails I get a couple times per month.  The theme of this news

is the 350th anniversary of The Bay, one of the world's oldest firms.

 

The website for this is canadahistory.ca.  April 6, 2020 is the date of the stories

that came in my email.  I couldn't attach that story of others to this email.

Native Trapper's School – Canadian Winter Wilderness and Wildlife Experience

Beverage Container Deposit Dialectics

Wednesday, March 11, 2020

     We called them pop bottles in the early-1970s.  One summer morning, my friend and I bicycled two kilometres north to the local dump and scrounged about 200 10-ounce pop bottles.  We laboriously hauled them back to my family's acreage a couple kilomtres north of town.  We washed them at the tap on the outside of our house.  My dad agreed to drive us and them to the local bottle return depot in nearby Edson, Alberta.  We got two cents for each bottle, about four dollars in all.  That was big money when ten cents bought a chocolate bar or fudgesicle and twelve bought a bottle of pop.

     Less than a month later, the bottle deposit refund rose from two to five cents.

     The deposit remained at five cents for decades.  In the 1990s, bottles and cans my spouse and I collected cans and bottles in the Indigenous community of Alkali Lake.  We lived there for two years and I taught school there for three, commuting 50 kilometres from Williams Lake the last year.  We took turns pushing our infant daughter in her baby buggy as we walked around collecting containers, which filled plastic shopping bags hung on the back of the buggy.  We added more than a thousand dollars to her savings account this way, in two years.

     By then I knew that collecting cans and bottles was something that poor and/or Indigenous people did in Williams Lake.  I joked that Williams Lake had Indigenous "troopers" and Alkali Lake had me, a white "trooper." My Vancouver professor friend who grew up in Edson when I did calls them "binners" for scrounging in garbage bins.  I've also heard them called "dumpster divers."

     Today's Williams Lake paper's front-page photo is of a homeless "white" man scrounging for bottles in the dumpster behind the local Indigenous hall while people inside discuss homelessness.

     That brings me to the point of this story:  "appearances deceive," as I told a man and woman surveying the homeless who crossed my path between home and the bottle depot yesterday morning.  The cans were from my spouse's Anaham house.  We brought them to Williams Lake a couple days ago to sell.  We got too busy to sell them before the bottle depot closed.  I took them from the trunk that evening, before she drove back to Anaham.

     The next morning, the annual day that local anti-poverty activists seek, question, and count the local homeless, the surveyors politely stopped me as I walked with the bag toward the bottle depot about a kilometre away.

     "We're doing a homeless survey," they said, or less ambivalent words to that effect.  I'm sure the survey had a home, as did the surveyors.

     I also had a home.  "I live in that building there," I pointed for them.  "Appearances deceive."  I held up the bag of cans. 
 
     I wished them well and we parted.

     As I walked toward the bottle depot, I regretted that I hadn't talked longer to them.  I wondered about their survey and much else, but I was happy I didn't delay them more, and happy I chipped a bit off a stereotype in their minds:  not all men, Indigenous or otherwise, carrying bags of bottles, are homeless, or even poor.  I'm thrifty, a nice word for cheap. 

     My coat has my spouse's band's logo, and I'm a prominent walker around here.  Recently I got my photo in the local paper's online edition for joining a demonstration of solidarity with the Wet'sowet'en blocking a gas pipeline planned for their traditional territory a few hundred kilometres northwest of Williams Lake.
   
     In recent months, the bottle deposit refund rose from five to ten cents.

    My bag of containers earned me exactly ten dollars.  That's about how much my friend and I would have earned for our 200 or so pop bottles had we waited a month or so for the refund rate to rise from two to five cents.

     The bottle and can deposit thus rose five fold, from two to ten cents, in my lifetime.   The price of a chocolate bar rose about twice that, ten fold, from ten cents to a dollar.

     I eventually attended university, whose tuition is now about ten times higher than I paid; but summer job wages aren't ten times higher now than then.  United States Marxist economist Michael Parenti wrote and spoke of the "Third Worldization" of people overseas and at home.

     Would Karl Marx or Michael Parenti collect and sell beverage containers?

Back in Time for Winter Reflections

Saturday, February 22, 2020

     "Back in Time for Winter, Reflections" is the seventh, summary episode of the CBC series that has a Sudbury family spend one episode in each of the 1940s-1990s, in their house refurnished for the decade.  Their clothes, food, housework, and recreation vary according to stereotypes of each decade.  The tv mom does all or most of the housework until the 1990s episode.  The power goes off in the 1990s, a implicit criticism of privatized power systems that replaced the dependable public power systems of earlier decades.  During the rare times our rural neighborhood's power went off during my 1960s-70s childhood, our lifestyle didn't change much because many of our appliances used natural gas, not electricity:  the stove, dryer, furnace, and hot water heater.  I remember a neighboring family eating with us during those times because they had an electric stove.
     Today is March 8, many days after something interrupted this draft before I could post it on this blog.  I forgot about this draft until I put that International Women's Day post on my blog tonight.  I don't remember all that I wanted to mention about this tv series.  I do remember the tv children saying that the episodes before digital electronics included family activities that were more social and less individual than they were accustomed to in this digital era.  They liked those antique activities.  I grew up with them, but I like email, word processors, and the internet.  I don't miss typewriter correction tape and whiteout.  I like but rarely write or receive letters, but I'm glad I have many from past years.  The internet doesn't reduce our recall, which Socrates said that writing would do; it makes us think differently.  People still know lots; the wise don't pretend they know all. 
     I'll end here and return to real life, which is genuinely social, unlike social media, which is misnamed.

International Women's Day

Sunday, March 8, 2020

     Today is International Women's Day, first proposed  at the 1910 International Socialist Women's Conference by German delegates Clara Zetkin and Kate Duncker.  The February 1917, Russian Revolution began on February 23 on the Gregorian Calendar, the equivalent of March 8 on the Julian Calendar Russia soon adopted.  Revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky said that women's day was a fitting day to start a revolution.
     The sexism that soaks society implies that men get the rest of the year's days, but there has been an International Men's Day, on November 19, for a few decades.  The United Nations recognizes women's day but not men's day.  Men's day promotes good role models and the prevention of family violence, among other things.  Is Leon Trotsky a good role model?