A Year of COVID-19: Missing friends, missing the Hub and Strand Theatre in Thompson, Manitoba

Last night, I was wistful for a very long moment for the pre-pandemic, pre-COVID-19 world, as I spotted the Hub restaurant and the Strand Theatre straight ahead of me downtown on Churchill Drive here in Thompson, Manitoba. After almost a year of takeout cuisine, which I am indeed grateful for, the Hub’s dining room, and perhaps a very rare steak sandwich to enjoy in the company of friends, and/or a movie next-door at the Strand Theatre, reminded me of life before Code Red.

For the last year, I have like many, many other people around the world, focused primarily on the present and putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward, one day at a time. It can be exhausting. Last March, the calendar may have said 31 days, but in truth it was the month without end.

One of the most chilling things, and there have been many, that I’ve heard to date during the COVID-19 pandemic, was this audio clip posted on Twitter last March 21. I heard this brief 30-second clip on Twitter March 24, 2020, the day after the “surge” hit New York City. Tim Mak is National Public Radio (NPR’s) Washington investigative correspondent – and an emergency medical technician (EMT), which is how he got the message. Aside from the subject matter, there is something eerie about that electronically-generated voice on the automated message that went out, with this message:

“This an emergency message. This is a priority request for D.C. MRC volunteers (District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC)…” (https://twitter.com/i/status/1241471610395267084)

The District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC) supports the DC Department of Health (DC Health) in its role as lead for public health and medical emergency preparedness, response and recovery by recruiting, training, and deploying medical and non-medical volunteers to assist with planned events and emergencies.

On March 30, I wrote on Facebook: “Consider this. Ordered earlier this month to “lean forward,” a military term familiar to those who serve in the United States Navy, meaning the willingness to be aggressive, to take risks, the U.S.Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH-20), homeported at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, sailed from port up the Atlantic seaboard Saturday and arrived in New York Harbor this morning.

“The Comfort will provide relief for New York hospitals by taking on non-COVID-19 cases and allowing the hospitals to focus on the most critical patients suffering from the virus.

“Picture this.

“What those sailors, military doctors and nurses, officers, enlisted personnel and civilians aboard the USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) must have been thinking as they answered the call of duty and sailed north into a Biological Armageddon.”

The following day, on March 31, 2020, I posted again on Facebook, “Waking up every morning in March 2020: ‘Red alert. All hands stand to battle stations'” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV30YwXaKJg).

I’ve read, thought and written a fair bit about pandemics and the like over the last 30 years. More than a decade ago on Dec. 4, 2010, when I was editing the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, I penned a story headlined, “Potential influenza pandemic on Garden Hill First Nation, MKO says: Surrounding Island Lake First Nations may also be under the flu gun.”

I wrote: “The novel H1N1 influenza pandemic, which started in Mexico in March 2009, albeit with relatively mild symptoms in most cases, was the first pandemic since the Hong Kong Flu of 1968. It originated in Guangdong Province in southeast China, but the first record of the outbreak was in Hong Kong on July 13, 1968.

“By the end of July, extensive outbreaks were reported in Vietnam and Singapore. By September 1968, Hong Kong Flu reached India, Philippines, northern Australia and Europe. That same month, the virus entered California via returning Vietnam War troops but did not become widespread in the North American until December 1968.

“A vaccine became available in 1969 one month after the Hong Kong flu pandemic peaked in North America. About a million people died worldwide in what are described as “excess” death beyond what be expected in a normal flu season, but still only half the mortality rate of the Asian flu a decade earlier. H1N1 swine flu is the first worldwide influenza pandemic since the Hong Flu of 1968-69.

“A decade earlier, the Asian Flu pandemic of 1957 was an outbreak of avian-origin H2N2 influenza that originated in China in early 1956 and lasted until 1958. It originated from mutation in wild ducks combining with a pre-existing human strain. The virus was first identified in Guizhou and spread to Singapore in February 1957, reaching Hong Kong by April and the United States and Canada by June 1957. Estimates of worldwide deaths caused by the Asian Flu pandemic vary, but the World Health Organization believes it is about two million.

“The Asian Flu strain later mutated through antigenic drift into H3N2, resulting in the milder Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968 and 1969.

“Influenza A viruses are classified into subtypes on the basis of two surface proteins: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N).

“Three subtypes of hemagglutinin (H1, H2 and H3) and two subtypes of neuraminidase (N1 and N2) are recognized among influenza A viruses that have caused widespread human disease, says the Public Health Agency of Canada. “Since 1977 the human H3N2 and human H1N1 influenza A subtypes have contributed to influenza illness to varying degrees each year. It is not yet known if this pattern will be altered by the emergence of the 2009 pandemic virus [A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)]. Immunity to the H and N antigens reduces the likelihood of infection and lessens the severity of disease if infection occurs.”

“Influenza B viruses have evolved into two antigenically distinct lineages since the mid-1980s, represented by B/Yamagata/16/88-like and B/Victoria/2/87-like viruses. Viruses of the B/Yamagata lineage accounted for the majority of isolates in most countries between 1990 and 2001. Viruses belonging to the B/Victoria lineage were not identified outside of Asia between 1991 and 2001, but in March 2001 they re-emerged for the first time in a decade in North America. Since then, viruses from both the B/Yamagata and B/Victoria lineages have variously contributed to influenza illness each year.

“The antigenic characteristics of current and emerging influenza virus strains include A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)-like, A/Perth/16/2009 (H3N2)-like and B/Brisbane/60/2008 (Victoria lineage)-like antigens.”

On Nov. 1, 2019, just before a likely, but not yet conclusively proven, viral species jump to humans, in or around Wuhan, China, that likely sparked  the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, more commonly known as COVID-19, I posted on Facebook on time-lapse tracking of the transmission and evolution of Influenza A (H7N9), the most deadly flu on Earth, which has been circulating in China for the last five years or so. It has a mortality rate of 40 per cent, making it about 200 times more deadly than 2018’s Influenza A (H3N2) flu virus that circulated in Canada.

While influenza isn’t a coronavirus, some of the arguments I made on Oct. 16, 2013 in a editorial for the Thompson Citizen, might sound somewhat  familiar today, “Even if the influenza vaccine only prevents infection 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the time, in the best of cases – meaning that of every 10 people who would have gotten the flu without the shot, three or four still will – flu shots have proven to be effective in slowing the virus down and helping to limit the spread of pandemics,” I wrote. “On the balance of probabilities, you hopefully are helping yourself in getting a flu shot, but you’re almost certainly in any event being altruistic in helping the rest of us in the general population by slowing the spread the virus down.”

I’ve also blogged in soundingsjohnbarker on such esoteric topics as blog posts on “Black Death: Not so bad?” in 2014, “What if the 22nd century means staying at home with long-distance travel a thing of the past?” in 2015, “A still bigger picture: Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF), Samaritan’s Purse, ZMapp and the 2014 Ebola Crisis” in 2018 and, more recently, “The fire this time? Pandemic prose, and waiting and watching for the ‘big one’” in 2020

Thirty years ago, I wrote a third-year history essay at Trent way back in 1991 about ergot poisoning, from a fungus that commonly forms in wheat, rye, and other grains, and is now known to cause such symptoms as convulsions, vomiting, and hallucinations, possibly triggering the events leading to the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. In 2006. I read Laurie Garrett’s landmark 1994 book, “The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance.”

In 2011, Megan O’Brien was able to tell me she could bring in on inter-library loan to the Thompson Public Library for me a copy of “The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague Of All Time” by John Kelly, published in 2005.

Four years later, I borrowed an audio book version from University College of the North’s Wellington & Madeleine Spence Memorial Library on the Thompson Campus of “Station Eleven”, New York City writer Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel published in 2014, and centred around the fictional “Georgia Flu” pandemic, which is so lethal, and named after the former Soviet republic, that within weeks, most of the world’s population has been killed and “all countries and borders have vanished.”

In 2017, also from the UCN library here, I borrowed “The Plague”, a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story from the point of view of an unknown narrator of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran.

I spent Mondays between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. in a comfortable orange chair on the third floor of UCN during the fall of 2019 reading John M. Barry’s book “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History”, chronicling the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic. Barry is an adjunct member of faculty at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans.

So, yes, I had some idea of what a pandemic might look like when it arrived a year ago and it did turn out indeed to be the fire this time.

Knowing might be good preparation. But you can only know so much. Nowhere had I read in advance to get ready for a pandemic where perhaps one out of every three carriers might be showing no symptoms and feeling just fine while shedding the virus and transmitting a disease, with multiple variants now, and that varies so much in its effects from person to person. The Chimera, according to Greek mythology, was a monstrous fire-breathing hybrid creature. COVID-19 is its progeny.

And no matter how much you know, it’s not the same as the lived experience of a pandemic where “mask up” is the imperative public health-ordered emergency non-pharmaceutical intervention that taken to brain and heart, along with six-foot physical so-called “social distancing” and restricted travel, might just some day mean dinner at the Hub and a movie at the Strand Theatre again.

That might seem like a distant hope at the moment, and I suppose it is, but I am mindful that individual actions can collectively matter, and instead of the “twindemic” of influenza and COVID-19 public health epidemiologists feared last spring for this winter, the start of the annual flu season in the Northern Hemisphere has been very quiet to date, much like it was in the Southern Hemisphere during their winter season last year during our summer. Since September, the CDC “FluView” – its weekly report on influenza surveillance – has shown all 50 states in shades of green and chartreuse, indicating “minimal” or “low” flu activity. Normally by December, at least some states are painted in oranges and reds for “moderate” and “high.”

In the Southern Hemisphere, where winter stretches from June through August, widespread mask-wearing, rigorous lockdowns and other precautions against Covid-19 transmission drove the flu down to record-low levels. Southern Hemisphere countries help “reseed” influenza viruses in the Northern Hemisphere each year, so a good flu season here year “Down Under” often, not always, means we can reasonably hope for one in the Northern Hemisphere.

And some of it is just seasonal variability. Some flu seasons are worse than others. Flu viruses mutate far more than coronaviruses through antigenic drift, hence the need for a different combination flu vaccine every year.

Since last February, COVID-19 has killed more than 430,000 people in the United States, more  than influenza has in the last five years, notes the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.in Baltimore. COVID-19 has a higher severe disease and mortality rate than influenza in all age groups, except perhaps children under the age of 12. “Influenza is a significant burden on the population, but COVID-19 has had a vastly larger effect,” Johns Hopkins says.

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Sci-Fi time travel: Where the popular imagination meets theoretical science and pseudoscience

Applied research often has the clarifying effect of disabusing one of preconceived notions. Except perhaps for debates about religion where all bets are off for everyone on all sides at all times. But that’s another story.

Every now and then I will post an article or a link to one on social media from some at least marginally reputable science site on some new wrinkle in theoretical time travel. I have three friends, in particular, located in British Columbia, Nunavut and Manitoba, who are sci-fi fans, but also science rationalists, who can be quickly counted on to let me know two things: what a fun idea the new theory is; how completely implausible it is on the science. Thanks, guys.

As a kid, while I enjoyed reading some science fiction – Ursula K. Le Guin‘s Lathe of Heaven from 1971, and Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 book Childhood’s End, come immediately to mind – I was also fond of other genres, including Greek mythology (I remember taking a mighty tome home on the subject from my school library and reading it from start to finish one Sunday in Oshawa, where I learned a bit about the Hippoi Athanatoi). Time travel was just one topic within one genre of my reading interests back then.

But aside from my reading interests, in terms of my later popular culture viewing, on both the big and small screens, as well as my own writing from time-to-time, time has never been too far from my remote view, if I think broadly about it.

Both The Time Tunnel on ABC and Star Trek on NBC television series originally debuted within a day of each other in September 1966. I was nine. The Time Tunnel (https://www.tvyesteryear.com/shows/the-time-tunnel/), largely forgotten today, was about Project Tic-Toc, a top-secret U.S. government effort to build an experimental time machine, known as “The Time Tunnel” due to its appearance as a cylindrical hallway. The base for Project Tic-Toc is a huge, hidden underground complex in Arizona, 800 floors deep and employing more than 12,000 specialized personnel. Star Trek made its debut on Sept. 8, 1966, one day earlier then The Time Tunnel, and is far from forgotten.

Manu Saadia, a contributor for The New Yorker, wrote back in 2016 in “The Enduring Lessons of ‘Star Trek,”‘ a 50th anniversary piece to mark the debut of the franchise, that “the original series was at its best when its cast engaged in good, old-fashioned time travel. ‘The City on the Edge of Forever,’ penned by Harlan Ellison, threw the dynamic trio of Kirk, Bones, and Spock into nineteen-thirties New York. They were familiar characters dropped into a familiar setting, tasked with a familiar, if daunting, mission: save the world. (By a series of unlucky coincidences, their arrival in New York had altered the future, leading to Nazi Germany winning the Second World War. This had to be corrected.)” Joseph Walter of Screen Rant in his piece today, “Star Trek: The 10 All Time Best (And 10 Worst) Episodes, Officially Ranked” rates “The City on the Edge of Forever” as the sixth-best Star Trek episode from the entire franchise, which includes all the series that followed the original, which aired on NBC from September 1966 to June 1969.

Star Trek, and its many successors, both television series and movies, not surprisingly have continued to explore the idea of time travel and alternate timelines in all kinds of manifestations. I like many of them, but have a particular fondness for Dr. Beverly Picard, who in a briefly existing alternate timeline in “All Good Things,” the aptly-named May 23, 1994 final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, is the captain of the U.S.S. Pasteur (NCC-58925), as her ex-husband, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, inexplicably finds his mind jumping between the present stardate 47988 and the past just prior to the U.S.S. Enterprise-D‘s first mission seven years earlier at Farpoint Station and then flash-forward 25 years into the future, where he has retired to the Picard family vineyard in Labarre, France.

In The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, published and set in 1962, events takes place 15 years after a different end to the Second World War, and depict intrigues between the victorious Axis Powers – primarily, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany – as they rule over the former United States, as well as daily life under totalitarian rule. A television series was loosely adapted from the book and ran for four seasons from January 2015 until last November.

In a similar vein, The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternate history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. Adapted for television as a six-part miniseries that aired in March and April, The Plot Against America imagined an alternate American history told through the eyes of a working-class Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, as they watch the political rise of Lindbergh, an aviator-hero and xenophobic populist.

Wormholes and parallel universes are pretty much de rigueur for this genre, and Sliders, a television series which aired between 1995 and 2000, understood that, as it was premised on a group of travelers, led by Quinn Mallory, using a wormhole to “slide” between different parallel universes. Alternate timelines are altered versions of our timeline. Unlike parallel universes, alternate timelines do not seem to diverge from the universe, but instead rewrite history to the point of wiping out the original timeline.

For its first two seasons, Sliders was produced in Vancouver. It was filmed primarily in Los Angeles in the last three seasons.

In Quantum Leap, which aired on NBC for five seasons from March 1989 through May 1993, Scott Bakula stars as Dr. Sam Beckett, a physicist who leaps through spacetime during an experiment in time travel, by temporarily taking the place of other people to correct historical mistakes. Dean Stockwell co-stars as Admiral Al Calavicci, Sam’s womanizing, cigar-smoking companion and best friend, who appears to him as a hologram.

Time Changer is an independent science fiction Christian seriocomic film written and directed by Rich Christiano, and released by Five & Two Pictures in 2002. The screenplay concerns Dr. Norris Anderson (Gavin MacLeod), who uses his late father’s time machine to send his colleague, Bible professor Russell Carlisle (D. David Morin), from 1890 into the early 21st century.

The fascination with alternate timelines is not limited to science fiction writers. Historians have been known to wonder if the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in ending Camelot, changed the course of history for the worse? It’s a popular, if not almost universal view, that it did. But historian David Hackett Fischer, in his 1970 book, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, warns of the dangers of counterfactual historiography, which extrapolates a timeline in which a key historical event did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur. Had Kennedy lived would the United States have exited Vietnam closer to 1964 than 1975? Would Lyndon Johnson’s landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 have passed so soon under JFK? We can only wonder.

In 1983, Ohio State University historian Stephen Kern wrote The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, a book which talked about the sweeping changes in technology and culture that reshaped life, including the theory of relativity and introduction of Sir Sandford Fleming’s worldwide Standard Time – and an onrush of technics, including telephone, electric lighting, steamships, skyscrapers, bicycles, cinema, airplanes, X-rays, machine guns, as well as cultural innovations that shattered older forms of art and thought, such as the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, simultaneous poetry. All of these things created new ways of understanding and experiencing time and space during that almost 40-year period ending with the end of the First World War. Kern’s argument is that in the modern preoccupation with speed, especially with the fast and impersonal telegraph, international diplomacy broke down in July 1914, leading to the outbreak of the First World War the following month.

In physics, according to Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity (SR), motion in space alters the flow of time, creating a time dilation, speeding up or slowing down time, because as you move through space, time itself is measured differently for the moving object than the unmoving object. This, in theory, would allow time travel within the known laws of physics into the future, not into the past (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/03/12/time-dilation-daylight-saving-time-and-other-mysteries-of-time/).

Standard Time, of course, with its standardized times zones, is a Canadian invention, courtesy of Sir Sandford Fleming, who conveniently divided time into hourly segments, dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead.

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, the principal research officer, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Fleming’s genius was to create 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/just-remember-you-are-about-to-pass-briefly-through-the-twilight-zone-nothing-can-happen-tomorrow-between-201-a-m-and-259-a-m-because-those-59-minutes-do-not-exist-on-march-8/). Like many things, there are, of course, exceptions. Samoa uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC+13:00) as standard time and UTC+14:00 as daylight saving time, which it observes during summer in the southern hemisphere. The U.S. territory of American Samoa, as well as the Midway Islands and the uninhabited islands of Jarvis, Palmyra, and Kingman Reef, use the Samoa Time Zone, which observes standard time by subtracting eleven hours from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-11). The zone is one hour behind the Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zone, one hour ahead of Howland and Baker islands, and 23 hours behind Wake Island Time Zone.

Samoa happens to sit in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just 32 kilometres, or 20 miles, east of the International Date Line, an imaginary line at the 180º line of longitude that runs from the South Pole to the North Pole separating two consecutive calendar days. Immediately to the left of the International Date Line the date in the Eastern Hemisphere is always one day ahead of the date (or day) immediately to the right of the International Date Line in the Western Hemisphere (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/29/skip-a-day-why-not-samoa-did/).

It is not a perfectly straight line, however, and has been moved slightly over the years to accommodate needs of varied countries in the Pacific Ocean. Kiribati, north of Samoa and near the equator, south of Hawaii, previously straddled the dateline. The eastern part of Kiribati was a whole day and two hours behind the western part of the country where its capital is located and a time difference of 23 hours between neighbouring islands. There were nine islands on the eastern side of the international date line, and 20 per cent of the population. On Jan. 1, 1995 it added an eastward extension to its section of the dateline so all 33 of its islands would have the same date and all of Kiribati would be in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Since 1892, when Samoa had two Monday, July 4ths, it had been east of the International Date Line until Dec. 29, 2011, after switching sides to coincide its days better with trading partners in the United States and Europe. Now, Samoa does a lot more business with New Zealand, Australia, China and Pacific Rim countries such as Singapore, so it switched back to the western side of the International Date Line.

China, which has just one time zone – Beijing Standard Time – making the time zone uncommonly wide. In Kashgar, in the extreme western part of China, the sun is at its highest point at 3 p.m. and in the extreme eastern part at 11 a.m.  In 1912, the year after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China had created five time zones in the country, ranging from five and a half to eight and a half hours past Greenwich Mean Time. But in 1949, as the Communist Party consolidated control of the country, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered that all of China use Beijing time.

Historians aren’t the only academics to ponder these sort of things.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)  professor of philosophy Bradford Skow suggests a “box” universe theory, as describes “now” as an arbitrary place in time and states that the past, the future and the present all exist simultaneously, suggesting that if we “look down” on the universe, as if we were looking at a piece of paper, we would see time spanning all directions, exactly the same way that we see space at some point. I believe my three friends unanimously concluded this was rather bunk, but good fun.

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Bajrangi Bhaijaan plays to packed house at Strand Theatre July 18: Eid al-Fitr holiday marks the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan for Muslims and is celebrated by Hindi Bollywood cinema’s Salman Khan

Several thousand Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs from India and Pakistan call Thompson, Manitoba home, with hundreds more arriving each year, yet the scale of their collective and growing presence is perhaps best appreciated through the lens of their religious and festive holidays, such as Eid al-Fitr, which began for the world’s almost 1.57 billion Muslims July 17, with the arrival of the  astronomical new moon on the Islamic Hijri lunar calendar, with the crescent first visible over Chile July 16.

The Eid al-Fitr holiday that marks the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan for Muslims is also traditionally celebrated by Hindi Bollywood cinema from Salman Khan and Thompson loves Bollywood and Salman Khan. Surprised? Well, mull on this for a minute. Statistics Canada’s  voluntary National Household Survey (NHS) from the May 2011 census, the first results from which were released May 8, 2013, enumerated by way of example, that adherents of Hinduism outnumbered Pentecostals by 300 to 290 in Thompson, but they also outnumbered many other Christian denominations as well. Their growth in numbers has been and continues to be explosive.

There were 50 self-identified Hindus here as recently as 12 years ago. There were also more Hindus in Thompson in 2011 than there were self-identified Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians and Christian Orthodox. That, of course, may not be so much of a surprise to anyone who has been to Hindu Prathna Samaj of Thompson’s Navratri festivities in the fall.

There were also 130 Muslims and 80 Sikhs in Thompson enumerated, during that last voluntary Statistics Canada National Household Survey (NHS) four years ago, and their numbers, too, have surely increased since the 2011 census.

So, yes, Bollywood, a word used since the early 1970s to describe the Hindi-language film industry, based in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, in India, is a big deal in Thompson. The Strand Theatre, they city’s only movie theatre, and one of Thompson’s oldest entertainment spots, having opened at 111 Churchill Dr. in 1960, was packed Saturday night for the highly-emotive Bajrangi Bhaijaan, released worldwide only a day earlier for Eid al-Fitr, and starring Salman Khan, one of Bollywood’s biggest stars.

The narrative has the Indian character Pawan, played by 49-year-old Khan, portraying a devotee of the monkey deity Bajrang Bali, guiding home to her Himalayan village in Pakistan, Shahida, a lost and mute six-year-old Kashmiri girl, played by Harshaali Malhotra, who in real life just turned seven last month, and who becomes separated in the movie near the border frontier in India from her mother during a Lahore-Delhi train crossing  from Pakistan to India.  Given that Shahida doesn’t speak, Pawan must interpret the clues she inadvertently provides, such as feeling more comfortable around mosques than temples, and her elation when she sees Pakistan defeat its arch-rival India (both republics joined the Commonwealth in 1947) in cricket on television, to discover where exactly he is supposed to be returning her. The North American analogy would be looking for a needle in a haystack. And the perilous journey, of course, also plays out in an area fraught with international geo-political tensions and potential worldwide nuclear ramifications in any dispute on the sub-continent between India and Pakistan should it involve the Kashmir Valley, under Indian control behind the Line of Control, the de facto border established as the military control line between India and Pakistan in 1971.

While some of Bajrangi Bhaijaan was shot in New Delhi, Mandawa in the Jhunjhunu district and Shekhawati region of Rajasthan State in northern India, with its grand havelis, or private mansions, and maze-like bylanes, stood in for Pakistan, and much of the movie was shot in the Kashmir Valley, which has no cinemas of its own, in places like Pahalgam and nearby Aru, noted for its scenic meadows and located in the Anantnag district of Jammu and Kashmir State; atop the 11,700-foot Zoji La mountain pass at Srinagar, where it was a below freezing -2°C in mid-May during near final shooting; and the climax shot at the 10,000-foot level at the base of the Thajiwas glacier outside Sonamarg.

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Mouthwatering American Thanksgiving recipes correction in the New York Times and other pardonable acts

I’ve read a good number of corrections and clarifications over the years in newspapers as a journalist. I daresay I’ve had to write a few myself. That’s the nature of the beast. But the correction appended Nov. 26 by New York Times editors to a Nov. 18 story headlined “The United States of Thanksgiving,” which overreached it turns out in scouring “the nation for recipes that evoke each of the 50 states (and D.C. and Puerto Rico)” takes the cake for both its length, reflecting the rather larger number of errors, and something unique in my experience as a reader. It was so mouthwatering it made me hungry just reading it.

As a former resident of North Carolina, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, all I can say is yum. Happy Thanksgiving to all north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. You can read the original New York Times story here at: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/11/18/dining/thanksgiving-recipes-across-the-united-states.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

The correction appended the bottom of the story online reads:

“Correction: November 26, 2014

“An article last Wednesday recommending a Thanksgiving dish from each state, with a recipe, contained numerous errors.

“The recipe from Connecticut, for quince with cipollini onions and bacon, omitted directions for preparing the quince. It should be peeled, cored and cut into 1-inch chunks. An illustration with the West Virginia recipe, for pawpaw pudding, depicted a papaya — not a pawpaw, which is correctly depicted above. The introduction to the recipe from Arizona, for cranberry sauce and chiles, misstated the origin of Hatch chiles. They are grown in New Mexico, not in Arizona.

“The introduction to the Delaware recipe, for du Pont turkey with truffled zucchini stuffing, referred incorrectly to several historical points about the Winterthur estate. It was an ancestral home of the du Pont family, not the sole one; it was established in 1837, not in 1810; the house was completed in 1839, not in 1837. The introduction also misstated the relationship of Pauline Foster du Pont to Eleuthère Irénée du Pont. Pauline was the wife of Mr. du Pont’s grandson, not his daughter-in-law.

“And, finally, the label for the illustration for the nation’s capital misspelled the District of Columbia as Colombia.”

Much like Canadian Thanksgiving, which I wrote about last month (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/canadian-thanksgiving-eh-february-april-may-june-october-november-a-very-moveable-feast-historically/) our American cousins have an older and equally interesting Thanksgiving history of this very moveable feast in both countries.

In the United States, Thanksgiving is a more complex feast. Originally, the Pilgrim Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony celebrated their first Thanksgiving Day on July 8, 1629. The following year, John Winthrop gave his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” where he rightly predicted the colony would be metaphorically, as from salt and light in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, known as the “city on a hill, ” watched by the world.

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” Winthrop said. “The eyes of all people are upon us … we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.”

Almost four centuries later, their purposes perhaps not quite as lofty, Americans now celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. It is the single-biggest domestic travel weekend of the year for Americans going home, wherever that might be, to visit family.

Canadian Thanksgiving, or Jour de l’Action de grâce, by contrast is a somewhat more low-key affair.

While we do travel to visit family and many of us will sit down to eat turkey with family and friends, it’s nothing on the scale of the American experience.

Perhaps that’s because we have our Thanksgiving on a Monday at the end of a weekend, not on a Thursday at the beginning of a long weekend (officially the Wednesday and Friday are not holidays in the United States, just the Thursday, but virtually no one – aside from unfortunate retail store clerks – works the Friday, as those of us who have lived there know.) Just try and get a government official on the telephone after mid-afternoon Wednesday, or all day Friday of American Thanksgiving week if you wish to test this hypothesis.

While the fourth Thursday in November is also often the last Thursday as well (as it is this year), even a cursory glance through the years of our Gregorian calendar reveal some years, of course, have five Thursdays. Such was the case in 1939, the last year of the Great Depression, when Thanksgiving was scheduled to fall on Nov. 30, not only on the fifth Thursday of November but the very last day of November as well in fact, and less than a month before Christmas, causing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, to use the moral authority of his office by proclamation to move Thanksgiving up a week to Nov. 23 at the initiative of Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, who had warned U.S. Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins as early as August that the late calendar date of Thanksgiving that year could have an adverse effect on retail sales, and that an earlier Thanksgiving could perhaps boost the bottom line.

To understand the rationale more fully, harken back to that bygone era where it was quaintly considered bad form for retailers to display Christmas decorations or have Christmas sales before the celebration of Thanksgiving, as opposed to the current day-after Halloween kick-off. Or is it the day after Labor Day now Christmas sales start? One of the two methinks.

Roosevelt, however, had waited until Oct. 31 to announce his thinking on the matter of moving up Thanksgiving by a week 23 days later. The short-notice change in dates affected the holiday plans of millions of Americans; while there was plenty of confusion and many were inconvenienced, others hit pay dirt.

On the downside, many college football teams traditionally ended their seasons with games against their main rivals on Thanksgiving, and had scheduled them in 1939 for Nov. 30. Some athletic conferences had rules permitting games only through the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Changing the date could mean many teams would play their season finale in empty stadiums or not at all. The change also reportedly caused problems for college registrars, schedulers and calendar makers.

The Thanksgiving winners in 1939 lived in Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. Those three states observed two Thanksgiving holidays that year; the just-proposed Thursday, Nov. 23, and then they did it all over again a week later on the originally scheduled holiday on Thursday, Nov. 30.

Now, that’s something to express gratitude for, unless your were a turkey taking a double-hit on your numbers possibly in  Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. All told, 23 states and the District of Columbia, of the 48 states in those pre-statehood days for Alaska and Hawaii (both joined the union 20 years later in 1959), recognized Nov. 23 as Thanksgiving in 1939, while 22 states stuck with the original Nov. 30 date as planned.

Gradually, the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving, with some see-sawing back-and-forth and general waffling, took a more permanent hold throughout the United States. Texas was the last state to change its holiday law, observing the last Thursday in November as  Thanksgiving when there are five Thursdays in the month for the final time on Thursday, Nov. 29, 1956.

The considerable, and for a time in the early 1940s, still ongoing confusion surrounding when Thanksgiving should be celebrated was not surprisingly diffused in the popular culture as ripe material for laughs through cinema, as well as radio. “In the 1940 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon Holiday Highlights, directed by Tex Avery,” Wikipedia notes, “the introduction to a segment about Thanksgiving shows the holiday falling on two different dates, one ‘for Democrats’ and one a week later ‘for Republicans.'”

In the 1942 musical Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, a classic black-and-white film, which I borrowed in DVD format from the Thompson Public Library a few years ago (and which was on the shelf today I noticed) there is a delightful parody where a November calendar appears on which an animated turkey jumps back and forth between the two weeks, until he gives up and shrugs his shoulders at the audience.

And speaking of turkeys getting the last laugh, no discussion of American Thanksgiving is complete, of course, without addressing the issue of the Presidential turkey pardon. In a piece called “Why presidents pardon turkeys — a history” by Domenico Montanaro, PBS Newshour yesterday offered the comprehensive history of the practice, which you can read at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/presidents-pardon-turkeys-history/#.VHbAtv1lVLA.facebook

Cheese, a 49-pound big boy born on July 4, with a height of 36 inches and a wingspan of 4½ feet, and a “strut style” described as “grand champion,” was this year’s recipient yesterday of a presidential pardon from U.S. President Barack Obama during the annual ceremony in the Grand Foyer of the White House. It was Obama’s sixth turkey pardoning as commander-in-chief Wednesday at the White House. Cheese’s gobble was characterized as “loud, romantic, with a country ring to it.”

The annual tradition now sees two turkeys spared from the dinner table, but only one is selected to take part in the White House pardon ceremony.

This year’s duo was Mac and Cheese, but only Cheese got to ham it up before the cameras.

“I am here to announce what I’m sure will be the most talked about executive action this month,” President Obama said, his two daughters Sasha and Malia by his side. “Today, I’m taking an action fully within my legal authority, same taken by Democratic and Republican presidents before me, to spare lives of two turkeys — “Mac” and “Cheese” from a terrible and delicious fate.”

He added, “If you’re a turkey, and you’re named after a side dish, your chances of escaping today dinner are pretty low, so these guys beat the odds. … They’ll get to live out the rest of their days respectably at a Virginia estate. Some would call this amnesty, but there’s plenty of turkey to go around.”

Mac, also a male born on the Fourth of July this year, came in two pounds lighter than Cheese, tipping the scales at only 47 pounds. He also had a half-foot smaller wingspan of only four feet. His strut style was described as “feather-shaker.”  Mac’s gobble was characterized as “rhythmic, melodious, with a touch of bluegrass.”

Mac and Cheese will be sent to a park in Leesburg, Virginia, a Washington suburb. The property has been used to grow turkeys in the past. The estate was owned by former Virginia Governor Westmoreland Davis, who raised hundreds of his own turkeys there in the 1930s and 1940s.

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