Leonardo Re-thunk

So I watched another tv show about how Leonardo da Vinci was an isolated genius, a towering intellect whose creativity and inventions stump people. How did he do it?

Wrong, wrong and more wrong. Leonardo stood on the shoulders of others. People mention his flying machines. Well, people have always been interested in flight. About 300 years before Leonardo, there was Eilmer, also known as Oliver a monk at Malmesbury who strapped some wing-like gizmo onto his back and jumped off the tower.

He did fly for some yards before crashing and breaking both his legs. He could never walk again but he did fly. Leonardo most probably did know about him.

As for his other inventions and ideas. A good book has been written by Gavin Menzies which claimed that the Chinese treasure ships actually landed in Europe, too, and he notices in his book, that Leonardo's best work is done right after that.

Some of Leonardo's ideas are known to the Chinese who tried them before him. Did Leonardo da Vinci meet the Chinese travelers? Was he enthralled with their ideas, so radically different from what he was used to? Possibly.

I think that history needs to change it's opinion of Leonardo. Genius: yes. Lone inventor who invents all his own ideas: no.

Leonardo was a man of his time and was well read enough to know all about previous inventors and what they achieved. He improved on every idea he came across, found a better way to make it work, but he did not do it all in a vacuum.

He wasn't any more ahead of his time than any of the other 'crazy' inventors back in the Dark, Middle or Renaissance ages.

But go ahead, admire the guy. He was what he was and did a lot. Mostly mechanical toys and objects for his patrons parties. And he cast his giant horse in one go. It's still unknown how he did it.

These days I guess you'd call him the go-to guy and he's still the greatest genius the world has ever known.

Building A Toilet

Funny the things one does as a child. Before I started school,  my best friend was Randy Peterson. He lived almost at the top of the hill.

One day we went into a place called by kids, 'The Gulley'. It was a chasm running close to where I lived. It had a creek running through it and a clay falls, where a kid could take some clay right out from under a waterfall and make stuff with it.

Well, Randy and I went down there once and as happened from time to time, someone had dumped their garbage. A toilet seat. So Randy suggested making a toilet. We dug a hole and built something like a blind around it so noone could see in and put the toilet seat on the hole.

Then Randy said we should each use it. He went it and then I went in. I was worried Randy would peek at me but I don't think he did.

And so we left our toilet to anyone who wanted to use it. The next time I was down in the Gulley, there was no sign of it.

When we left The Gulley and went to Randy's house, he gave me a dead mouse because he liked me. I took it home and tried to entice my cat to play with it but my dad saw what I was doing and threw the mouse out. He said Kitty would get sick playing with it.

I thought I would be friends with Randy for a long time but as soon as we started school he stopped talking to girls completely. I was devastated. It was years before he would deign to talk to girls because back then boys were always saying how much they disliked girls and mock attacking them.

So much has changed. Now little boys will actually say they like girls and both sexes play quite nicely together, thank you. It's a good sign. No more girl's sandbox and boy's sandbox, they play in one sandbox, great strides.

Anyway, I never spoke to Randy again, except once, when I was with my friend Karen Burns at my neighbour's house and we wrestled with him. He much preferred Karen because she deliberately lost to him and we were older then and at the stage of boys being interested in girls so she was the big favorite. I was definately out.

But no worries. He got into drugs as so many other kids did back then in White Rock and became paranoid, I have no idea how he ended up.

But I still look back with fondness at our toilet making and have a giggle.

Dead Loss

I was never good at gym in school. When I was born, one of my feet was turned in and I had to wear shoes with a metal bar screwed on the bottom to correct it. Actually, I learned how to walk in them quite well and it never stopped me from doing anything.

Also, and I didn't find this out until I was in my forties, my feet, tested on a computer thingy used for foot health, are so unusual, that I'm the only one who has a gait like I do. This means, when you see one of those foot commercials which tell you your number so you can buy a insole, my number isn't there, it's totally unique.

There are a lot of people these days who want to be unique but in my case, my uniqueness has caused me quite a bit of trouble.

One thing, I couldn't run in gym. And I couldn't breath either because I had allergies which caused me pain. The one reason I couldn't stand gym was because exercise people always push you beyond what you can do. It was torture. I was in pain every minute of running with the gym teacher yelling, "get your second wind." It never happened.

Another thing. I didn't like games too much. In soccer, someone would kick a ball to you. Suddenly, all the attention was on you. I wasn't one for liking attention so I would kick the ball in the ditch.

You've heard of musicians and artists complaining that they were always picked last for a team. So was I, but I understood the reason. No one wants a team member who deliberately throws the game in order to stop the ball from coming at them. So I've never complained about it, in my case.

The one time I did like gym was when they decided to teach us a couple of folk dances. I'd never danced until then and found that I actually like it. We learned the Hora? I don't know the spelling. I think it's a Jewish dance but I'm not sure.

Then there was the Dance Of The Seven Veils. Really? No breasts, no hips children? The strangest part was that the boys used to sneak into the gym to watch us dance this. As if we were anything to see with our bulky gym shorts and sweaty t-shirts along with our sneakers. Boys will be boys, I guess.

My favorite day in school was the day I was able to quit gym. I think I had to take it until grade ten and then it was an elective, so I have never again gone to gym.

I still don't like exercise, it's the same old thing, the yelling coach pushing you, plus, for me, the pain in my feet, but I do like to walk and swim so I'm not a complete loss, but I do wish, for other kids like me, that they could change how physical education.

If they could teach them how their body works when it's exercising or have other things like yoga, so that they could find for themselves what is good for them, I think it would benefit society.

Kitty

It's funny what you don't notice as a child. I never knew my father didn't like Kitty or that Kitty didn't like him back. After I was grown and long after Kitty was no more, my father told me of how Kitty liked to dig his claws into my Dad's hand, just for fun, it seems.

Well, I loved Kitty. To this day, my heart has a special place for Orange tabbies. I liked when I was a child to come home and see Kitty sleeping under his favorite rose bush. It had about an inch worth of cat hair as a nest because he'd been using it forever.

I always considered him a clever cat because he knew how to get inside, his method was to leap up and hook his claws into the bottom of the window pane on the door. Whenever I heard a bang, I knew Kitty wanted to come in and I would see his face in the glass. Then I'd open the door and unhook him and bring him in.

We had him neutered because our previous cat had died from fighting, we think. He came in one day, all torn up and bleeding, then curled up and before we knew it, had bleed to death of an internal hemorrhage. Looking back, I don't think it could have been caused by another cat, maybe he was kicked, but it must have been for his propensity to look for fights. So we un-maled Kitty.

He never held it against us, (except Dad, maybe) and was a loving cat and loved to play with butterflies by batting at them with his paws.

It was sad at the end, though, when he couldn't hold his bathroom and kept defecating in our downstairs shower. And he needed lots of love then. He would come up to me and want to be held and stroked. He wanted our company.

His only downside was that now the dog could 'get' him, meaning he wasn't fast enough to run away. When we first brought our puppy dog home, she wanted to play with Kitty but he scratched her and from then on, it was war.

So the dog, who was getting old, too, and had kidney problems caught him a couple of times. That's when my mom decided to have them put down. She thought that they wouldn't really enjoy life anymore and also thought that since they'd always been fighting, they should be put down together. It would be strange to have one and not the other.

So one day in 1978, they were taken to the vets and helped into the afterlife.
R.I.P. Kitty.  R.I.P. Cindy. I hope they rest easy now and are waiting for me when I die. I don't mean to be morbid here but I would like to see them again. Someday.

Cold Days

It's brrrrry outside, so cold that my room mate won't let me walk anywhere but drives me. I don't mind, there is a lot of ice on the sidewalk and I don't like the idea of falling. About ten years ago, I fell and fractured my leg so I'm not an enthusiastic walker in winter ice conditions.

On the other hand, in about two weeks, on Groundhog's Day, I'm having my fifty-fifth birthday. I can hardly believe that I'm the same person who lived by the Pacific Ocean and spent my free time turning over rocks to find the baby crabs.

Because of my diet, I'm not going to have a cake or pie but I might buy one single blackberry tart that they sell in the grocery store we shop at. David, my room mate, will buy a big cupcake as he doesn't like fruit. So we will have a celebration, we just have to something other than our birthday Chinese meal.

For years every birthday for both of us we've gotten Chinese food for our birthday meals. I need something different this time, something healthy and weight efficient, so I'm doing a lot of thinking about what to have. I don't know if anybody else has had this problem of needing to find a special diet-friendly celebration supper but I guess it's probably common.

The problem with dieting for people in the city is that their isn't anything to do that's beautiful. There's no walk to the waterfall, something that would interest a person. For me, gyms are boring, so there is virtually nothing to do for exercise.

When I was young and went to Algonquin Park, I found walking half-a-kilometer to a designated toilet and washing my laundry in the lake or just walking up and down to get water to cook, great exercise. Exercise without thinking about it.

I'll just get it done with the food thing and then, after that, I'll be happy to wait for spring and look forward to the melt and all the fun things that come with sunshine.

Strange Canadian Prime Ministers

It's funny, but I find young Canadians don't know anything about their own Prime Ministers. They may know that John A. McDonald was the founder of Canada but they don't know much about the man.

He had a drinking problem and would sometimes sleep off his drunks when Parliament was in full session but all of his party and even of the opposition party considered him a great guy. He was really concerned about them and would ask after their health.

Strange as it may seem, many in this country don't know but I've met some Americans who do. I don't think that's typical but it does show that he's interesting to others, too.

My all time favorite Canadian Prime Minister is William Lyon McKenzie King. He was a very unusual man who never cut the apron strings and always asked his mother's advice on everything, even after she was dead.

Yes, he had seances to call his beloved mother back to talk to him. His dog attended the seances, too. He was quite attached to Pat, the dog, and also prayed with his dog every night, holding his little paw in his hand.

It is thought that William Lyon McKenzie King never had sex at all. Odd.

I'm sure that other countries have had their fair share of unusual characters in their highest office. I just wanted to write a bit about these two, who never cease to fascinate me. Leave a comment if you like and tell me about your favorite public leader who is a bit odd.

I've written a short story called Nealla's Dream. You can read it at Front Row Lit
http://frontrowlit.com/?p=4267

Dionne Quntuplets

I wonder how it is that so much that appears to be happy is anything but. So easy to mistake what people do to survive as a positive.

This brings me to a photo, any photo, that I've seen of the Dionne Quintuplets. They were born in Callander, Ontario sometime in the nineteen thirties. There was no fertility drugs back then, they were natural quints.

In fact, there were six of them, three sets of twins, but the mother passed one of the babies while it was still a fetus. So she 'only' had five baby girls. They were a French-Canadian Catholic family at a time when most Canadians viewed them with suspicion.

Once it hit the newspapers that quints had been born, people started demanding that the 'special' babies be taken away from their disgusting parents. After all, they already had six children and what kind of animal was Mr. Dionne to keep getting his wife with child?

The Ontario government bent to the pressure and removed them. Built a whole hospital for them where they were cared for to the exact specifications of 'experts' who said they must be kept thin and never let outside. Very contrary to the Dionne parents who wanted chubby, active kids. But never mind, they didn't have any control over their girls.

And they were put on view. Every day hundreds of people came to Callander to see the babies. They filed by and interest never abated. As toddlers they were finally let outside to play. People watched from behind a screen, thinking the girls couldn't know they were there.

Later, when the girls grew, they wrote a book and said, they did know people were there.

But the girls grew out of cuddly toddler stage and the Dionne parents became the focus of French-Canadian interest to help them fight the prejudice against them. The parents finally got their girls back.

But by then, the quints had nothing in common with the rest of the family and as they grew up, found that because they'd been so isolated, they had no idea how to cope with simple things like money.

Then one died and it came out that all of them were epileptic but it had been kept quiet due to shame of the condition then. Another died...alone. They didn't know how to make friends, only had each other.

The last three won a four million dollar settlement but soon another one died. And then another. There's only one left now. And thank goodness it's the one who has children so she has someone for her.

It's a tragic story but what is the real tragedy? Is it that I feel joy whenever I see the photos of those sweet, magic little girls? I just don't know