SAVING MR. BANKS

P.L. Travers on the Mary Poppins script: "Where is the gravitas?"--Saving Mr. Banks

Last night I saw Saving Mr. Banks at Canada Square.  That's the movie about P.L. Travers and Walt Disney collaborating (combatively) to make the movie Mary Poppins.  The psychology was pretty middlebrow, and Travers' dissatisfaction with the final movie gets glossed over.  But Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks are uncanny in the lead roles.  I also liked Colin Farrell as Travers' alcoholic father in the flashbacks.  Now I want to learn more about Travers' life.

I love the Mary Poppins movie--the Sherman Brothers became Hollywood's most prolific songwriting team, but they never surpassed their early work there--but I didn't care for the first of the books when I read it some years back.  Presumably, the books read better when you're one of the few people who haven't seen the movie.  (Maybe I should try them again.)

I've returned to translating those Portuguese booklets about the lives of the saints.  I've been working on the story of Sao Tomas de Aquino, but it took me a few days to realize that's the Portuguese name for St. Thomas Aquinas!

Father found a book of Pindar's odes, in both their original Greek and an English translation.  I'm likely to spend some time on that.

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

Record producer F. Murray Abraham (hearing Llewyn's audition): "I don't see any money here"--Inside Llewyn Davis

Last night I went to Jonah's Karaoke Meetup at BarPlus.  I sang quite a few songs, including the Alan Parsons Project's "Don't Answer Me," which I'd only sung once or twice before.

This afternoon I saw the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis at the Lightbox with a Movie Meetup group.  Pam was there too, and we always have interesting conversations. (She spent a year in New Guinea, which I'm now interested in after reading Guns, Germs and Steel.)

The movie was set in the New York folk music scene of the early 1960s, but was really about that scene's second-rate talents, sort of like the Christopher Guest spoof A Mighty Wind.  It was rather odd, part droll and part downbeat, with a far from likeable hero.

Because it's Christmas time, I've been playing Candy Crush Saga and Pet Rescue Saga again.  (I'm up to level 86 in Candy Crush Saga.) Now I have several Facebook friends who are also playing them.  After you play a level both games sometimes offer you a fun-o-meter to rate how much you liked it.  But the way I see it there's no point in rating each level, because what makes those games so fun is that all the levels are different!  If some levels are less fun than others, that's still better than if you only got to play the most fun levels.

Merry, merry

Roger Sterling: "You know Detroit [the auto business].  All fun and games, until they shoot you in the face"--Mad Men

Yesterday our internet connection got restored.  So I'm back to playing all those Facebook games.

Yesterday morning I noticed that I'd forgotten to move my outside window pane so there'd be two layers of glass during the winter (unlike in summer, when I can open it completely).  One of the panes was frozen shut and I used some boiling water to get it moving.  I had to take the panes out to rearrange them and put them on the corner of my bed, leaving a wet spot there that I could feel between the sheets.

Donald, John and his family came over for Christmas dinner.  We had both turkey and vegan food.

For lunch today I had a tuna sandwich for the first time in a while. I noticed that I bake good whole wheat bread!

This evening I had dinner at the Golden Thai restaurant with ten other people from the Asperger's Meetup.  I splurged and had both Golden Thai chicken and Golden Thai fried rice.

Ice palaces

We have a couple of trees in our front yard and yesterday they were covered in ice.  It would have been a good day for a Photography Meetup event.

Saturday night I saw the Alistair Sim version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL for the first time since I was a kid, with the Classical Movie Meetup at the Fairview screening room.  It's a great psychological movie.  When we get back online I'll be eager to learn more about it at the Internet Movie Database. (What else did Brian Desmond-Hurst direct?)

Yesterday I saw a broadcast of the Royal Ballet production of Tchaikovsky's NUTCRACKER at the Yonge & Eglinton.  My favorite costumes were the women in the Spanish Dance.  I would have seen it with Mary of the Classical Music Meetup, but she couldn't make it because of the ice storm. (What a shame:  I haven't seen her for a few months.)

The streetcars weren't running yesterday so I walked to St. Clair West station.  But I still had to take a shuttle bus north to Eglinton station because a tree fell near St. Clair station. (I arrived with little time to spare.)  On the way back I took the bus to Eglinton West station and hoped to take the Ossington bus south to St. Clair, but there turned out to be a detour so that bus was no longer coming all the way to Eglinton West!

I've finished ONE SUMMER, which I enjoyed greatly, and let's hope the Byzantine history arrives soon so I can start reading that one.  In the meanwhile, I've resumed reading the book with 50 things I need to know about architecture.

When I bought a drink yesterday at the Yonge & Eglinton they gave it to me in a reusable cup with a bendable straw, illustrated with a New Jersey Devil.  I guess I'll be reusing it.

It took quite a search this morning to find a library computer. (There have been some blackouts nearby, so more people must be depending on libraries for their net connection.) In the end I found one at the Gladstone library.

A week off line!

I'm posting this through the facilities of Wychwood library, since our modem conked out Thursday and can't be replaced till Christmas day. (I hope technicians get paid extra for working then.) To tell the truth, I needed a break from those Facebook games.

With the web unavailable, I've been reviewing my Greek.  If I get really bored, I might even watch TV!

Father and I have been watching the sixth season of MAD MEN on DVD.  The fifth and sixth seasons aren't quite as good as the first four:  Megan isn't as fascinating as Betty.  But I guess diminishing returns were inevitable. (Consider how diminished SIX FEET UNDER was in its last two seasons.)

Wednesday night the choir performed again, for the Earlscourt Rotary club.  Again, they treated us to dinner!

Another dream

I had a vivid dream last night.  It was about a non-existent Twin Peaks-type show about a group of people in a New England town.  They found themselves transported to a parallel universe that was exactly like theirs, except that they themselves were tiny and inconspicuous, like in the Irwin Allen series Land of the Giants.  

But then it gradually emerged that some scientist had found the mode that transported them, and they could transport back to their regular world.  And that there was a way for them to increase their size to one that was normal in this world, and become the same people as in their regular world, except that they could change things.  And that they were coming to this parallel universe to make Groundhog Day-like changes to avoid some big tragedy.  And that the group had originally just been the scientist, but had gradually grown to include more and more others.  And that the people in the group had developed a brotherhood among each other, with an initiation ritual for new people joining, involving dancing a mazurka in a circle around a circular table.  And that the storyline was gradually moving toward their making the changes that would fundamentally transform the outcome.

Maybe I could go to Hollywood and sell that concept.  But then I'd have to watch the show!

You might be an Aspie if...

I belong to some Facebook groups.  The main one is for the Autistic Spectrum Community.  I sometimes post news articles there on Asperger's Syndrome and autism that I've found on The Huffington Post and Salon and such.

Another of my Facebook groups is called "You might be an Aspie if..." Just lately that group's become pretty active.  One post was about how we often remember commercial jingles, and that got a whole lot of comments. (I get an email every time someone comments in a thread I've commented in, and I got quite a few from that one.)

Another one was about how we study foreign languages, and when we learn some way a foreign language is different from English, which for most people makes it a headache, sometimes causes us to think "If only English were like that!" We got talking about languages and I mentioned how German is full of tricks (like English). For example, "Lass singen" means "Sing on," while "Lass das Singen" means "Stop that singing."

Just today there was a post about how we often can't stand something like the noise from a vacuum cleaner. (My family used to have a really annoying Dirt Devil.) I mentioned that I can't bear to hear balloons burst, and get nervous when there are balloons around.

This evening I contributed a post myself mentioning how I recognize a musical chord in the game Candy Crush Saga as the opening chord in "Anitra's Dance" from Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite. (Since it's yuletide, I've relapsed into playing that game and Pet Rescue Saga, for a little while.) The tune that starts every CCS game also reminds me of "Getting to Know You" from The King and I.

THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO IDEOLOGY

Yesterday afternoon I went to Bev's Asperger's Meetup at an espresso place north of Eglinton station.  The snow interrupted the streetcars and I ended up walking all the way to St. Clair West station in the blizzard!  I was late, of course, but so was everyone else.  I had a scone and a pineapple-orange smoothie with Greek yogurt.  I also mentioned my new theory that Charles Lindbergh was an Aspie.

Last night I went to a party for the opera people at Frank Dejong's house near Lansdowne station.  About ten people made it despite the snow.

This afternoon I saw The Pervert's Guide to Ideology with the Sunday Afternoon Movie Meetup group at the Lightbox.  It's a documentary with radical intellectual Slavoj Zizek discussing ideological themes in movies. (Moira says his name is pronounced "zhizhek,"-- from the Cyrillic letter that looks like a spider--which you wouldn't know just from reading it.) They'd show a Taxi Driver scene with Travis Bickle sitting on his bed, then show Zizek discussing the movie sitting on a bed that looked just the same.  A lot of what he said was over my head, but I liked his setting Titanic next to a Soviet romantic propaganda movie called The Fall of Berlin, in which the hero gets romantic advice from Comrade Stalin!  Zizek pointed out that Rose tells Jack's corpse "I'll never let go of you," just as she pushes him off the raft!

Christmas dinner

"Sing it again, Mommy." "I don't want to torture the mice"--Boardwalk Empire

I've finished the third season of Boardwalk Empire.  Saw five episodes between Tuesday and Wednesday, so I managed to return the discs a day before they were due. (I noticed an anachronism: the song "Happy Birthday to You" only appeared in the 1930s!) Funny how I ended up liking Al Capone.

Last night the choir performed part of our Christmas concert at the Blythwood Baptist church.  They included us in their Christmas dinner too!

Tonight I went to a social gathering of the Non-Fiction Book Club Meetup at the Fox & Fiddle near St. George station.  Rose brought us together to discuss what directions to take the group in, but we're pretty satisfied.  We had an interesting discussion on a lot of different things.

I'm really enjoying One Summer.  Bill Bryson has an eye for telling, amusing details.

Christmas concert

Yesterday would have been the December ROLT Meetup, but after half an hour nobody else came so Moira and I went home.  It turned out that two people came later, so it bugged me that Moira had been pressuring me to leave.  Then again, maybe I would have left anyway.

At the memoir group today the two subjects were "Telling lies" and "A teacher or relative." One the former subject, I recalled this Mormon public service ad with singing and dancing kids telling real kids not to lie.  For the latter subject, everyone else  wrote about teachers they'd known, but I wrote about Aunt Alma.  Selia was away and the organizer who replaced her noticed a subject card that I'd submitted for the subject "Semi-maturity" that she wanted to throw out, but I insisted it was a good subject.

I was a bit late to the event because I'd seen an episode of Boardwalk Empire before leaving since I want to make sure of seeing all twelve episodes before the set gets due for return Friday.

This evening was the choir's Christmas concert. ("Mille Cherubini in Coro" has been going through my head.) There was such a big crowd that they had to find extra chairs and seat some people in the mezzanine.

BOARDWALK EMPIRE

Mob executioner: "Certain people you do not steal from!"--Boardwalk Empire

I rented the DVDs for the third season of Boardwalk Empire.  It's giving the feeling of diminishing returns. (They may run out of characters to kill.) The show still looks like a million dollars anyhow.

Yesterday afternoon I was under the weather and cancelled on the last Acting Meetup before the Christmas break. (It's the first one I've missed.) Instead I went to an Asperger's Meetup at the Starbucks north of Lawrence Station.  I met Bev for the first time in a while.  She says I'm amazing with my reading and activity.  There were also some young Aspies there.

In the evening I went to a party for the opera people at Frank Dejong's house.  I was afraid I'd be late, but I turned out to be a week early!

The other night I accidentally knocked a glass off my desk and it broke on the floor.  I picked up most of the broken glass, but there are still some tiny pieces to vacuum, once I get around to it.  Until then I'll have to be careful with bare feet!

Am I getting a cold?

Yesterday morning when I went to see Dr. Hassan, I had a huge headache.  It must have been due to the sudden mild weather:  big temperature changes seem to give me headaches.  But I found that when I started to talk to him, the headache eased somewhat.

Last night I went to Lillian's Karaoke Meetup at the Fox & Fiddle near Wellesley station.  But there was a long wait because of a fundraiser for the Philippines, and the noise got to me.  So just like when we went to Mayday Malone's, I quit after one song: "Every Breath You Take." (It seemed to be an audience favorite, and people were singing along with me.)

Today I woke up with a big sore throat.  Later I went to make a reservation for Sunday's ROLT Meetup, but it turned out that in the winter months the Central doesn't open till 4:00.  So I changed the location to Victory Cafe, like in October. (This December I'm doing children's stories, like I did last December.  And when I did it the first time, I was burdened with a cold.  I hope history doesn't repeat itself!)

In that Facebook Game The Tribez I finally made the breakthrough of building marble pits on the new Marble Fiord island.  First I had to upgrade Marble Fiord's main building, which meant constructing and upgrading a couple of mansions, all of which took a lot of cut stone, much of which I shipped from the Isle of the Ancients.  Now I can ship marble back for higher-level construction there.  But producing cut marble will require sand from Mystery Shore island, which I've now also entered.

ONE SUMMER

Bette Davis (noticing a hole in her sock): "Well, there's one piggy who'll be going to market in a shocking state of nudity!"--Dangerous

I finished One Summer yesterday and started reading One Summer, Bill Bryson's account of America in the summer of 1927. (Emerson said you shouldn't read a book that's less than a year old, but what the heck!) The first part is all about the race to be the first to fly nonstop from New York to Paris, which made Charles Lindbergh an instant celebrity, and the tabloid obsession with the case of the Window Sash Murder.  Bryson's writing is characteristically entertaining. (I've read a lot of his books.)

Last night I went to see Dangerous, Bette Davis' first Oscar-winning role, at the Lightbox.  I would have seen it with a Movie Meetup group, but I couldn't find them there.  It's about how successful architect Franchot Tone--a bargain basement Leslie Howard--falls for Davis, a broke stage actress with a "jinx" reputation, and commits all his money to putting her on Broadway, not knowing that she has a husband who won't divorce her. (If she told him it would be bad for the plot, of course.) It's conventional and boring, stuffed with the precious dialogue you often got in 1930s movies.  Frankly, it's the mannered performances that have tended to win Oscars.

Getting rid of those cookies

I brought some of my cookies to the memoir slam yesterday afternoon. (They were popular enough.) Our first subject was "What a way to die!" We put it back to choose another subject, but then we drew it a second time!  It was meant to be, and we had a lot to say about it.  I ended up musing about how I might like to die and what to do with my body.  The second subject was Walt Disney (a subject I'd submitted) and we had a lot to say about that too.  Among many other things, I mentioned that my house key is on a Goofy key ring, and that visiting California's Disneyland is on my bucket list.

I also brought cookies to the choir dress rehearsal.  Pablo from the opera came to sing solo in the concert.  Adolfo will be playing the Waltz of the Flowers from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker and Vince Guaraldi's "Lucy and Linus" from the Peanuts TV specials.  And Giovanni and some woman will be singing the duet "Baby, It's Cold Outside."

Next month the Non-Fiction Book Club will be discussing A Concise History of Byzantium.  It's in short supply in the libraries and on the Chapters and Indigo bookshelves, so I ordered a used copy online.

I had to quit that online game Anno because I ran out of money and couldn't figure out what to do next.

Cookie exchange

Sig Rumann:  "She looks like the healthiest woman in the world to me!" Groucho Marx: "And you look like you've never seen an unhealthy woman!"--A Day at the Races

Yesterday afternoon at the Acting Meetup the more experienced actors performed some scenes they'd been working on.  One guy did a standup comedy routine he's working on!  I didn't perform but I enjoyed it greatly.

Yesterday evening I saw the Marx Brothers' A Day at the Races yet again with the Classic Movies Meetup at the Fairview screening room.  Granted that it's pretty uneven:  Allan Jones, in the Zeppo role, has a couple of horrid songs, and the moment when the brothers disguise themselves in blackface will make you squirm.  But it's very entertaining overall, with Groucho in rare form.

This afternoon I went to a cookie exchange at the Bereaved Families of Toronto place.  I was reading the current death issue of Lapham's Quarterly--which has some fascinating texts on bereavement--and they were interested in it.  I ended up being back a huge pile of cookies, so many that I'll have to share them with the choir tomorrow night.

12 YEARS A SLAVE

Slave mistress: "Your children will soon be forgotten"--12 Years a Slave

Last night I finally saw Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave at the Market Square. (I haven't been there for quite a while.) It was pretty spellbinding, and disturbing.  When the overseer told the slaves to start clapping their hands, I found myself clapping too.  Now I want to see McQueen's Hunger, which also had Michael Fassbender, this time as Bobby Sands starving himself to death.

I have a pretty busy weekend coming up.  I saw two episodes of Treme this evening, so I won't fall behind Moira when she sees one tomorrow night.  I also baked gingerbread for Sunday's cookie exchange.

Father and I are going to start on the book business accounts one of these days. (We'd talked about doing it this afternoon, but he didn't feel up to it.)

I've run short again.

Anno

I started a new online game called Anno a few days ago.  It involves building a colony in the New World.  Unfortunately, I expanded the production facilities too quickly, leading to a predictable money squeeze.

In Sunshine Bay I spent quite a bit of real money, something I'd resisted doing, to acquire a water-bottling plant that expanded the range of voyages available to my ships. (If I'd waited a few days I could have got it a lot cheaper, but oh well...) I also saved enough coin to acquire a second business yacht, and the available passengers are getting moved more quickly.

In The Tribez I finally figured out how to visit the Marble Fiord island. (You have to go the map.) The new settlement has had big shortages of food and cut stone, requiring much subsidy through zeppelin shipments.  But I'll soon have marble pits there to send marble back to the original island and allow higher-level construction.  To do that, first I'll have to upgrade my three mansions there to their top level, then make one more upgrade in the local town hall.

We've been having trouble with our internet connection several times in recent days.  Maybe the cold weather and all the electric heaters operating at once have slightly lowered the local power's voltage level. (When I can't get online early in the evening, I go to bed early, for a few hours.)

TREME

"Did he hit on you?" "Kinda not really"--Treme

We've started watching the third season of Treme on DVD.  That show's all over the place, but I like it anyway.  Great theme song!

Yesterday afternoon at the memoir group there were just five of us, so we had time for three subjects again:  impromptu public speaking, landmark buildings and hair coloring.  On the first subject, I wrote about the big meeting at Goodenough College where I spoke briefly about the recycling program I'd been helping out with. (People were impressed that I did it in one minute flat.) On the second, I wrote about the Robarts Library which I frequented as a Ph.D. student.  On the third, I wrote about orange-haired Johnny Rotten, a hero of my adolescence.

Selia made it for the first time in three weeks.  She's still low on energy and got me to go to the library kitchen and find the canister containing the subject cards that we draw from.  It turns out that we'll be able to continue meeting through the holiday season. (It's only on Christmas and New Year's days that the library's closed.)

Last night the choir started rehearsing the Christmas program in order of performance.  Predictably, "Feliz Navidad" needs a lot of work.

This evening was the last opera rehearsal before the new year.  We went over Cosi Fan Tutte and the second half of Carmen again, then staged the last part of the latter's first act.

Cold weather

Thursday night I saw the comedy documentary When Jews Were Funny at the Bloor.  It had some pretty funny jokes.

Friday night I went to Lillian's Karaoke Meetup at Mayday Malone's near Bathurst & Dupont.  It was close enough that I would have walked except that it was freezing cold! (I ordered a bowl of chili.) It was rather noisy and I only stayed for one song.

At the Acting Meetup yesterday afternoon we each pretended to do  a commercial audition. (I did a BMW ad.) I also did a scene where someone pretended to be a cop arresting me, and I gave him a Bronx cheer!)

Last night I saw Edward Burtynsky's Watermark at the Revue with a Movie Meetup group.  It was as eerie as his Manufactured Landscapes.  I was hoping to meet Pam there--she's one of the most interesting people I've ever met--but she couldn't make it.

This afternoon I was in the opera fundraising concert.  This year it was at the Hart House music room on the University of Toronto campus.  Tetyana, who's playing Carmen, wore a ballroom dancing dress.  I met Barbara Thompson afterward. (Giuseppe Macina didn't come:  he told Yvette, "That book is closed!")

A dream

Yesterday morning I had to leave pretty quickly to meet Puitak and Gordon for lunch, so I didn't get to take my Cipralex.  As a result, last night's dreaming was more intense than usual.

I dreamed I was joining some friends (none of them actual people) near Camp Tidnish, a Rotary Club camp near our cottage.  We went underwater to do some fishing under a magical spell that allowed us to see and breathe the same as above the surface.  I grabbed a piece of wood which magically contained evidence of WWII war crimes--I'd been reading about Japanese war crimes on Wikipedia--and brought them to the actor James Whitmore, who was playing General Patton.  I told Whitmore how much I liked the actual scene in Asphalt Jungle where he was being taken to his cell and in a rage lashed out at the gang's squealer, who was safe in another cell.

We walked around underwater in the area near the eastern end of the New Brunswick-Nova Scotia border, here a much wider and deeper area than in real life, and approached a non-existent area where the underwater geology was radically different.  I met a girl and it turned into a story about how dangerous it is for people to have their wishes magically granted.  I imagined turning the story into a Hollywood movie and wondered what would be a good location for scenes taking place under a bridge.

I also dreamed about seeing four different versions of a Warren Beatty comedy, in the area around my old high school.

Facebook games

I've been playing Sunshine Bay for a while.  I finally saved up enough coin to buy a business class yacht, but I can only sail it to a few ports.  A wider range will require a big expenditure on a water treatment facility.  And I got a fourth sports yacht, completing a mission, but then I sold off my first one in order to replace its dock with a new one at a higher level, to put a business yacht in it someday.

I'm also playing The Tribez.  In that game sometimes a caveman or two will invade the space and you have to land six hits on them to make them disappear, before they start burning your buildings down. (Putting out the fires requires more hits.) But what's frustrating is a caveman invasion happening when you have a slow connection and the signals you send the game take several seconds to process, too long for hitting moving targets.  On such occasions, even leaving the game takes a while.

At least they've finished the Halloween business with the Pumpkinheads.  Though these invaders could be removed with only five hits, sometimes they'd cross paths with villagers and leave them tangled up in vines.  And they only got released from the vines when you hit on them eight times, except sometimes they'd be hard to spot. (If I were tied up in vines, I know I'd want to be freed quickly.)

And they're almost finished this new business of supernatural invaders (fairies, vampires, witches etc.). What bugs me with this one is that the villagers scream whenever they run into them.  The sound effects in this game can be tiresome.

Puitak and Gordon took us to lunch at a dim sum place today.  The food was so oily that I had to take a nap in the afternoon.  But they don't take us out too often.

Rob Ford

I haven't had much to say about the Mayor.  I've been against him since he promised to kill TransitCity--one time when the planners had actually got it right!--yet I can't help feeling sorry for him.  He doesn't seem to have the sense God gave a goose, as the saying goes.

Father and Moira are interested in the whole affair.  They've been watching the city council debates live on the computer. (Who watches the TV set any more?) Yesterday they even left it on during the big vote so they could listen to it over dinner, something I don't care for.

The other day someone I knew on Facebook posted on his wall, "You aren't a total loser unless you watch reality TV." I added the comment, "Or read magazines like Maxim." Before long I wrote another comment, "Or vote for Rob Ford a second time."

At tonight's opera rehearsal we prepared for Sunday's fundraiser concert, then staged some more of the first act.  There's a bit where the factory girls enter screaming, and we had a hard time getting it right.  The first time Carmen threw the flower into Don Jose's lap, it wouldn't come off her blouse.

This is about the time when I start to imagine the mini-character I'm playing in the chorus.  I think I'll be a veteran soldier who joined the guerrilla army fighting Napoleon while still a kid, and is now middle-aged and starting to feel indifferent about everything except watching and flirting with women.

ALL IS LOST

Yesterday afternoon I saw All Is Lost at the Varsity with the Sunday Afternoon Movie Meetup.  It was a pretty good sea story, with Robert Redford uncharacteristically showing his age.  I like the genre of marine tragedies, including The Perfect Storm and Open Water.  This reminded me of some of the stories I read in the sea issue of Lapham's Quarterly a few months ago.

As I came there I passed some Santa Claus Parade clouds.  It was unusually warm weather, good for a parade.  It was also warm the day before, but I wore my long johns when I didn't have to; I didn't make that mistake the next day.

But today was cooler. (The night before the wind was so fierce it kept me awake.) I actually saw a bit of snow on the way to choir practice, where we learned a French folk song "Les Cloches du Hameau." Beatrice wanted to do a couple more songs but it's getting close to performance time and now we'll have to concentrate on reviewing what we've done before.

At today's memoir session our subjects were "Classroom fights" (my suggestion); and "The perfect therapy" (as in marijuana, which I have no experience). The subject of August also got chosen, but we weren't interested in that one.  Selia wasn't feeling well and couldn't make it.  I hope she's in better shape next week.

OF HUMAN BONDAGE

Last night I saw Bette Davis and Leslie Howard in Of Human Bondage (for the second time) at the Lightbox as part of a Bette Davis series.  The part I remember from that is the scene where Howard's struggling through a medical school exam, and he looks at the medical-school skeleton and imagines those bones with Davis' flesh on them.  I saw it with a Movie Meetup group, including someome who gave me a big share of her popcorn.

At the Acting Meetup today I did a Second City sketch where I was a doctor's patient being prescribed pills, who wanted more "natural" treatment, leading to a quarrel.

In the evening I went to an Aspergers Meetup combined with a British Culture Meetup, so I met some new girls in the latter group.  It was at the Duke of Somerset, which I had a devil of a time finding!

I've decided to have the next ROLT Meetup at the Central in Mirvish Village. (Moira finds the Butler's Pantry noisy, and the food at the Victory Cafe upset my stomach.) We'll try different places until we know the best one.

Last night I dreamed of Mother.  In this dream I remembered she was dead and told her, "We miss you!"

LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY

After finishing Ivanhoe, I started the death issue of Lapham's Quarterly.  It has articles on subjects like animal grief and last meals, and Jessica Mitford's book The American Way of Death. (I should read that someday.)

Last night I dined at the Mengrai Thai restaurant downtown with the Life Begins at 40 Meetup group. (There were about 25 people there.) I think I prefer the Golden Thai restaurant, or at least for my taste that place is almost as good for a bit less money.

We finished The World at War this evening.  In the larger sense, it's hard to imagine how they could have done it significantly better.  But there are a lot of minor shortcomings.  One example is that they say very little about China's eight-year war, except to mention that they lost 15 million people, mostly to starvation. (I suppose they had a hard time finding eyewitnesses in the communist bloc, which would also explain why there's rather little about Poland.) There's also little about India, and the Japanese veteran who speaks admiringly of the Korean "comfort women" seems unaware that they were often coerced.

Another shortcoming is that there isn't that much about the Commonwealth:  the episode about the Battle of Britain omits the Dominions' all-important support, though they do mention the Canadian navy's role in the Battle of the Atlantic.  They do mention the Commonwealth in the last episode, where Imperial War Museum director Noble Frankland (who had a big influence on the series) mentions in the last episode that the Bomber Command he served in was multinational.

Finished IVANHOE

The cold weather has arrived! (I noticed it today when I went to the Maria Shchuka library to return "The Lottery" and "The Tell-Tale Heart.") I've brought my winter jacket out of the closet and moved it downstairs.  Looks like it's time to start wearing my long johns.

At last night's choir practice, we did a jazzy version of "Go Tell It on the Mountain." (Giovanni brought Timbits!) I lent John George my book of Hemingway short stories, since he's interested in that author just now.

At opera rehearsal this evening we started preparing the numbers we'll be doing at the fundraiser in a couple of weeks.  Then we went onstage to start preparing the blocking! (Under Giuseppe we didn't start doing that till January.) We staged the first act up to the end of the Habanera.

I've finally finished Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.  Bringing Athelstane back from the dead was pretty jaw-dropping.  The next books I'll be reading in my project of Classics Illustrated comics sources will be two of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking novels:  The Pioneers and Last of the Mohicans. (I'm doing The Pioneers first because Cooper wrote it first, and I've read it in comic-book form.)

BOO! said the monster

This afternoon was the latest ROLT event.  Titled "Boo! said the monster," it was devoted to scary stories.  Nine people came, though one left early.  Moira and I walked to Butler's Pantry and back.  (She considered reading a passage from The Woman in Black, but the noise got to her.)

I read the George Orwell essay "Decline of the English Murder"; Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"; and Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." (The others thought I read the last story quite well.)

Next month's event will be about children's writing.  December seems like the right month for that, what with Christmas being close at hand.

Afterward I felt unwell.  John and Kathrine brought dinner over but I only ate a little and went to bed quickly.

I don't usually run short, but my mind is going blank just now.

ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK

At this afternoon's Meetup I did a scene from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, as the experienced cop about to show her the corpse from the 40 years-cold case.

Finally finished the first season of Jenji Kohan's Netflix series Orange Is the New Black.  I could have watched all at once like on DVD, but I ended up watching it once a week or even less often.  It was a bit of a chore, to tell the truth.  It's a very, very uneven show (not unlike Boardwalk Empire). 

An uneven show can be more frustrating than one that's consistently poor.  The subplots are often compelling, and some of the supporting actors are very good--I especially admire the transsexual hairdresser.  But I find the central character Piper annoying, especially her tendency to whine. (One comment in The Huffington Post suggested that she's intentionally annoying!) The sexual politics in the main storyline doesn't really interest me:  Piper used to be the lesbian lover of drug smuggler Alex, illegally moving cash for her, but now she's engaged to Larry, then she's serving a year in the same prison as Alex, and Larry finds out that Alex ratted her out, but lies to her about it to avoid worsening her situation, then Piper becomes Alex' lover again...

The "bourgeois bohemian" background of Piper and her fiance is a pretty easy satirical target, and a lot of the humor feels sour.  (Kohan's earlier series Weeds was quite uneven too.) Also, I should mention that the opening-credit sequence is unusually obtuse and unimaginative:  we see one closeup after another of the convicts' mouth, then they switch to repeated closeups of their eyes!  I guess they wanted an "in your face" effect.

MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG

"What do you do?" "I drink." "What do you really do?" "I really drink!"--Merrily We Roll Along

Last night I saw Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa for the third time, at the Event Screen.  Beautifully made and intelligent, thought the central romance feels rather weary. (Robert Redford is the weak link as Meryl Streep's love interest.) I planned to see it with the Movie Meetup group, but didn't realize they were seeing it at the Yonge & Eglinton!  I also ordered popcorn with butter just for variety, which I won't be doing again for a while:  it made me a bit unwell.  Two mistakes in one night!

This evening I saw a special Digital Theatre broadcast of a West End revival of Stephen Sondheim's 1981 musical Merrily We Roll Along.  This was another Event Screen presentation, but was so popular that they showed it one of the bigger rooms.  It tells the story of a threesome working together in musical theatre--a commercially ambitious man writing melodies, a more artistic man writing lyrics, and a woman writing scripts--with lots of showbiz cynicism.  Curiously, it tells the story in reverse chronological order, starting at the end and moving back and back to their beginnings in the age of Sputnik.

I can see why the show's first production failed:  this kind of story is hard to get into.  But I got more and more into it as the show went on, and by the time it was over I wanted to see it again.  It's a lively, faultless London production.

COSI FAN TUTTE

Yesterday I arrived late at the memoir slam, where our subjects were "Betrayal" and "February." On the former I talked about my experience taking Grade 10 correspondence courses from the New Brunswick Community College, which left me with an ulcer; on the latter I mentioned that my birthday is that month.  I wish the subjects had been in the reverse order, because I had more to write about the first one and wasn't finished writing when they started reading their stories, so I missed some interesting stuff.

Last night at choir practice we did a couple of new songs for soloist as well as chorus, though there weren't yet any soloists singing with us.  One was Adeste Fideles, the other Schubert's lullaby "Mille Cherubini in Coro." The latter's a nice piece, and today I was listening to it on Youtube, both the original German solo and Andrea Boccelli and choir in a resonant cathedral. (Moira doesn't care for Boccelli's singing.)

This afternoon I was putting away some of my new comics and took some out of the closet.  The mice took a big bite out of some of my early Prince Valiant Sundays!  They'd been safe earlier when I stored them flat against the floor.  But somehow (Moira's doing or mine?) they got pushed against the closet wall, enabling the critters to get in.

This evening at opera rehearsal we finally worked on Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte.  The chorus is just three or four numbers in it, but of course it's nice music.

Under the weather

Being sick can give you a different perspective on things.  On Friday I came to feel unwell all at once.  In the afternoon I felt fine, and Father and I managed the heavy job of prying this big file cabinet out of its cubby hole under the stairs so I can start storing my Sunday comics collection in it.  Of course, we'll still have to get it up the stairs, which won't be a pushover.

Friday night I was in bed just about around the clock.  But I didn't sleep solidly as usual, but in continuous fits and starts. (No dreaming either.) Last night I slept more normally, but I'm still a bit slow.

One consequence was that I had to cancel on yesterday's Acting Meetup. (Oh well, it isn't like I'm the organizer as with ROLT.) Then this afternoon I was going to see 12 Years a Slave with the Movie Meetup, but thought it better to cancel.  At least I wasn't the only one.

I haven't been out of the house for almost two days.  I finally brought up the electric heater from the basement, so my room is warmer now.

So Obama says he's good at killing people! (According to the new book Double Down.) And just the other night I saw Blow, with the drug-smuggling son saying "I'm great at this!" and his father saying "You'd be great at anything."

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN and BLOW

"I suppose you're right." "Of course I am!  I always am"--Young Frankenstein

"Danbury wasn't a prison, it was a crime school.  I went in with a Bachelor of marijuana, came out with a Doctorate of cocaine"--Blow

Thursday night I saw Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein at the Fairview screening room with the Classic Movie Meetup.  It holds up well in repeat viewings.  The organizer handed out printouts of trivia about the movie from the Internet Movie Database, and I was surprised to learn that Brooks resisted including the "Puttin' on the Ritz" number until Gene Wilder prevailed on him. (It's hard to imagine a Mel Brooks movie without a musical number.)

I met Cecilia there for the first time since the spring.  She was visiting her daughter in Brazil, and wouldn't let her participate in the Vinegar Revolt demonstrations.  I warned her that Ivanhoe was not suitable reading for people whose second language is English.  Even I have trouble understanding some of it. (Walter Scott uses words like "an" in place of "if.")

Last night I rented the video of Ted Demme's Blow and watched it for the second time.  It's the somewhat self-serving yet largely believable story of a drug dealer who reached the heights but ended up in prison for 60 years.  Johnny Depp has a good scene near the end when he realizes that his partners are ratting him out.  Ray Liotta has a good role as his working-stiff father, especially the scene where Depp tells him "I'm great at what I do!" and he responds "You could have been great at anything!" It's a very sad story, which doesn't reduce my anger about the wasteful War on Drugs.

The Sunshine Bay saga continues

Remember the other week when I was writing about the Facebook game Sunshine Bay?  I said that I wasn't going to buy new land for buildings but save my game bucks to finish the enlargement of the port terminal.  Well, a few days ago they had a special where land was being sold for half price, so I spent all five of my bucks on land that would usually have cost ten.  I've used it to build a second villa, and a second hotel that produces 56 passengers every four hours. (The catch is that it requires nine squares of land instead of four.) I could use some of the space for the solar plant, but I still don't need extra electricity.

This expansion came at the right time, because I finally saved enough coin to buy a third sports yacht! (I got room for it by selling off my small yacht.) My next step will be raising the funds to upgrade my lighthouse, so I can carry a fifth boat.  I'll get the small yacht back till I can afford a fourth sports yacht, or perhaps I'll save a whole yacht and buy a business yacht first.

Meanwhile, by plugging away I finally got all the parts to complete the port terminal expansion, which I was afraid would require purchasing with bucks.  Changing the plan was a good decision.

If only I could find a career that involves me the way these games sometimes do!

Another coincidence

At the memoir slam yesterday, the subjects were "Potluck dinners" and "The biggest mistake." I didn't feel like writing about the biggest mistake I'd made, so I ended up writing about a mistake I actually didn't mind, just because it was MY mistake!  On the subject of potluck dinners, I ended up digressing into times when John and Kathrine brought vegan dinner over and I ended up sneaking out to McDonald's or KFC.

Not for the first time, there was a coincidence between the memoir pieces I was writing about and what I did that day.  For yes, John and Kathrine did bring over dinner that day.  But I actually had a good excuse for sneaking out:  they were late arriving and I was pressed for time because of choir practice. (But before I left I did get the chance to have some of their nice garlic bread.)

At choir practice that night we started doing the Carol of the Bells, but we're doing it in its original Ukrainian!  That language has sounds like "shch" and "hh."

At opera rehearsal this evening we started the last act of Carmen.  We're actually doing an onstage number from that part that was edited out the last time we did it. (Opera productions aren't an exact science.)

RUSH

"Are you ever not an asshole?"--Rush

Today I went out food shopping.  All I could think of to get was milk and eggs, but I felt the need to get out of the house.  It was pretty cool, but I decided against wearing my furry winter cap. (My breath isn't visible yet.)

I also felt like seeing a movie, and didn't care which so much.  I'd hoped to see that documentary about the woman in charge of the Beatles' fan club, but it was on earlier than I thought.  In the evening I went to see Ron Howard's Rush at the Varsity.

Rush is an enjoyable, sometimes thrilling biopic about the world of 1970s Formula One auto racing and the famous rivalry between Jim Hunt and Niki Lauda. (I remember reading about--spoiler alert!--Lauda's recovery from a near-fatal crash, leaving his face with permanent burn marks that seemed not uncool when I was fifteen.) Howard's middlebrow craftmanship can build real excitement--both here and in his Apollo 13--though his use of not one but two flashback montages is more than a little cheesy.

The other night as I was going home from karaoke I noticed a long queue in front of a nightclub.  I hope Toronto isn't turning into New York!

Demophobia

Am I afraid of crowds?  I don't mind being in a crowd watching a parade, but last year when I visited London there was one point when I left the theatre after seeing The Jersey Boys and there was a crowd of hundreds so huge that they filled the whole street. (I don't recall what event they were there for.) And that really did frighten me.

I thought of this because I went to karaoke last night at the Office and there was quite a crowd getting together for some party.  And they rather unnerved me:  they crowded the bar so that I was a long time ordering a Coca-Cola there.

I was there with Lillian's Karaoke Meetup group, singing "Always Something There to Remind Me" and "If You Could Read My Mind." She gave me a candle holder decorated with Christmas reindeer.

This afternoon Nancy filled in for Ivan at the Acting Meetup.  She had one exercise where two people were given an Alice Munro book, someone gave a page number and they had to start a conversation from a line of dialogue on that page.  When I did it I suggested using my copy of Ivanhoe, and the result was a scene where I was a guy who thought he was a mediaeval knight.  My last line was "Do you know where there are some windmills?" Later we did these scenes in pair with the dialogue "You came," "I had to," and "You shouldn't have," only as part of different genres.  My pair got to do it as horror, which was pretty fun.

David Kiang

This afternoon my father's friend David Kiang came to visit.  Father taught him at Mt. Allison over fifty years ago. (Mother recalled that he did every problem in the textbook!) He was later a mathematics professor at Dalhousie University, and now he's retired.  You know Father is old when even his students have been retiring.

When David was a student he did some babysitting for us.  On one occasion he left a Chinese-language book at our house.  Later on, as I started learning Chinese, I got an ambition to translate the book, and I cracked the first part a few years ago.  It's a cold war romantic thriller about a beautiful Chinese student who gets exploited by the communists and ends up with a Prince Charming in Hong Kong.  I'll have to translate some more of it sometime.

We also talked about another Dalhousie math professor called Edelstein, who briefly taught me in a year at Mt. A. (When I saw the classic Italian movie Umberto D., something about the title character reminded me of Edelstein.) He supervised David's wife's Ph.D. thesis and spoke well of David.

This evening I went to see Night of the Living Dead at the Event Screen. (I've never seen it, though I know the whole plot from reading Roger Ebert's Reader's Digest article "Just Another Scary Movie?" which didn't fail to reveal the ending.) But it turned out the schedule had been changed.  Oh well, maybe I'm better off not seeing it...

Sunshine Bay

A Facebook game I recently started playing is Sunshine Bay.  That's a game where you send out cruise boats to different destinations, requiring passengers and fuel.  (You get the passengers by building houses on your land.) It's a game that requires long-term strategic thinking.

I've outgrown pleasure boats, which only go on local cruises.  But I still have a single small yacht, which goes to the Bahamas or Cuba. (Who cares about Washington's embargo?) It's no longer needed for the specific challenges, but it's nice to have one boat that needs only twenty passengers.  I also have one high-speed catamaran, an intermediate-sized boat that goes to Bermuda, Haiti, New York, Cancun or Venice.  I still need it for one challenge, but I imagine there won't be much more of that.  But I have two sports yachts that go to Buenos Aires, Vancouver, San Francisco, Reikjavik, Dublin or Barcelona, and I'll be getting more soon when I've accumulated enough coin, as well as a business yacht.  First I've had to replace a couple of docks so they'll accommodate boats at that level.  All that costs coin, and I've planned the order of purchases carefully.  I'll also upgrade the lighthouse to allow for a fifth dock, in addition to replacing the smaller boats.

Some players spend a lot of real money--something I only do as a last resort--and get a lot of land for buildings.  But I prefer to use the land I do have more intensively. (Beachfront expansion is a higher priority.) First, I largely got rid of my business buildings, whose income isn't so important, to focus on residential buildings.  Now I'm going to replace several of the buildings with villas that produce passengers every hour, which I consider the best frequency.  Things will be easier when I've expanded the port terminal to allow a bigger reserve of collected passengers, but it can wait.  So can other improvements like expanding the city hall for greater residential population--which I don't need--and creating a solar plant.  So far fuel supply hasn't been a problem.

A new Meetup group

Two weeks ago at the memoir slam, only six people showed up and Selia was worried about its future.  So I've started a new Meetup group to attract people from that milieu. (Since I'm already organizing the ROLT Meetup, I can start a new one with no extra fees.)

It's working well.  The Meetup group already has about ten members.  At yesterday's session three of the nine people came from Meetup. (A couple others may be coming next week.) Our two subjects were "Things that aren't as they appear" and "Being chosen last." On the first subject I couldn't think of much to write about, but mentioned how I'd belied my appearance.  The latter was a subject that I'd just submitted:  ironically, it got chosen first!  I talked about being chosen last for teams in gym class, including the time when both teams insist the other one take me.

At this evening's opera rehearsal things were reversed and Adolfo went downstairs with the boys, like in previous years, while Beatrice stayed upstairs with the girls.  We did the number from the third act of Carmen where the smugglers sing about sending pretty women like Carmen on ahead to distract the customs officer. ("Like all men, he's eager to please/He loves to play the gentleman..") Just at the end of the number there's a triple-dotted note!  That very rare sign means that the note's value is increased by seven-eighths, and it goes from two beats to three and three-quarters.  In other words, it fills the four-beat bar all except for one quarter-beat note at the end.  I noticed a note like that in the finale of Macbeth too.

The social whirl

Friday night I attend another trivia contest put on by Sash's Toronto Social Friends group, which took place at Fran's Restaurant near Carlton station.  Once again I was one of the top finishers.  In each round we formed new teams and had to choose a team name, so I chose the movies titles "The Wild Bunch" and "The Meanest Men in the West." (I was surprised how hard much of the second round was.) For my dessert prize I chose rice pudding.

I was late getting to the Actor's Meetup yesterday, so I didn't do much:  just a generic scene where I'm openly worrying and the other guy is resisting worry.

Last night I went to an Asperger's Meetup for the first time in a while.  We had an Indian dinner at the Banjara restaurant near Eglinton Station. (I ordered chicken biryani and butter naan bread.) There were five of us, all boys, but I was unfamiliar with most of them.

This afternoon I was going to go on a Professor's Walk up Dufferin, all the way from Bloor to Yorkdale Mall!  But I lost interest and stayed home.  I finished harvesting the potatoes, and they fill both of our big bowls.  Some of them are reasonably big.

Last week I tried a new Facebook game called Trainstation, but I couldn't get into it. (Joining locomotives and wagons isn't my thing.) But I have become interested in another one called Tribez [sic], which involves building a prehistoric village.

Funny Girl

"I'm a bagel in the middle of onion rolls!"--Funny Girl

Moira went off to Kingston for a while, so we'll resume watching The World at War when she comes back. (Before she left, she made us a turkey pie!)

I've started digging up the potatoes in the garden.  It's somewhat better than last year anyway.

Last night at opera rehearsal we started bringing the props upstairs from the basement.  We're now getting into the third act. (Beatrice is hoping to start the staging part before the Christmas break!) It turns out that David Roche won't be doing the acting class this year.

Today I finally saw William Wyler's movie of the musical Funny Girl at the Event Screen. (It was for the second or third time:  the first time was in French on a black & white TV, so I'm not sure how much that counts.) It's a pretty good Barbra Streisand vehicle, on the conventional side.  With Streisand, what you see is what you get:  either you adore her or you don't.  I checked out Fanny Brice on Wikipedia and it turned out that Nicky Arnstein didn't become noble in the end as the movie depicted. I think the projector didn't have trouble last week; this print starts with an imageless overture so they thought there was something wrong.

Afterward I had dinner at the Eaton Centre food court. (They now have "collection centers" for empty trays.) I used to eat roast beef sandwiches at Arby's there, but that place has now closed.  Instead I ate Indian food from Amaya Express:  butter chicken with fresh naan bread and mango juice. (They also threw in chickpeas.)

Oh to be in England...

Yesterday was the October ROLT event.  At the last minute I found out that Butler's Pantry was closed on Thanksgiving weekend, and had to change the location to Victory Cafe, also in Mirvish Village to the south.  Fortunately, we still got a full six people.

I read part of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre where she returned to her old home and met two cousins, who were messed up in opposite ways.  I also read a beautiful chapter of the third book in T.H. White's The Once and Future King explaining how Guenevere ended up in love with Lancelot. (All the library copies were out--some book club must be reading it--so I had to buy it, but I was hoping to read The Sword in the Stone again anyway.) And I read the first page of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English, and Jane considered this a highlight.  I considered reading Orwell's essay "Shooting an Elephant" as well, but skipped it.

Among the other readers, a new guy called Darren read an entry from his blog "Personal Travel Stories," about visiting Cheshire. (Like me, he's a big fan of Bill Bryson.) Moira came and read part of Samuel Pepys' diary with his vivid depiction of the Great Fire of 1666.

Too bad that the lunch I ordered there made me unwell for much of the day. (Beware those home fries!) Donald came over for dinner but I had to skip dessert.

Viewership of this blog has been sluggish for a while, but I just had a big uptick.  My "Busy evenings" post has already had seven pageviews!

HEADACHE!

At today's Acting Meetup, I did a commercial for a financial planning group, pretending to be a rich heir confiding in his psychiatrist.  I also did a scene from The Replacements where coach Gene Hackman recruited has-been quarterback Keanu Reeves for his team. (It was the kind of cliched writing where Hackman waits on Reeves' boat then makes him jump when the latter returns there exhausted.) I played the Reeves role, but in hindsight I really should have been doing Hackman.

This evening I was going to try to see Funny Girl again at the Event Screen, planning on an early dinner since the movie started at 6:45.  It turned out, however that John and Kathrine were coming for dinner and they'd be a while arriving.  Do I stay for dinner with them and miss the movie, or go to the movie and miss dinner with them?  In the end I did neither, because I had such a big headache I ended up in bed.

Lately I've been doing o'ekaki puzzles by this Japanese expert.  The way it works is that you have a grid of tiny squares where some are filled and others are empty.  With each row and column, they tell you the length of the segments of filled squares, but you have to figure out the length of the empty segments yourself, and when you're finished you get a picture! (Left-brain process, right-brain result.) 

I really love that kind of puzzle.  Figuring out which squares are filled requires a special kind of logical thinking.  For example, if a segment is more than half of its row/column's length, you can determine that some squares in the middle have to be filled.  Or when you have a long segment on the top of the grid while the adjacent row only has some very short segments, you can figure out its location by seeing which columns begin with a single-square segment.  Or if a row/column equals the combined length of its segments plus the number of segments minus one, that means its unfilled segments are all just one square in length and you can determine the whole row! (Or if it's that number plus n, you can determine part of the segments that are n+1 in length.)

Busy evenings

Tuesday night I went to opera rehearsal.  Just as I approached the bus stop I realized I'd left my Metropass at home!  I had to go back and get it, so I was twenty minutes late. (Oh well, I'm usually early.)

Last night I went to see Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl at the Event Screen with the Classic Movie Meetup group.  But the projector broke down (it was delivering sound without picture) and they gave all of us rainchecks.  Actually, it was probably for the best because I wasn't feeling well.

This evening I went on the Queen Street art walk.  One of the places we went to was a boutique selling Japanese art prints that just moved there from Yorkville.  In the back they were having an exhibition of Hiroshige's landscape prints.  Hiroshige's one of my favorites! (I especially like his winter images.)

What with my schedule, I've been watching The World at War in the afternoons while Moira watches it in the evenings.  Just today I saw the episode about the incredible Battle of Stalingrad.  The budget standoff in the American government reminds me of Stalingrad, with the Republican extremists ruling out compromise like Hitler ruling out retreat, and the Democrats forced to take a stand like the Russians.

IVANHOE

I've developed an odd ambition to read every novel that was made into a Classics Illustrated comic book.  Issue #1 of Classics Illustrated is Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, which I  read about a decade ago. (It's amazing how villainess Milady takes over the story in the second half.) The second issue is Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, and I picked it up yesterday at Lillian Smith library.

It's a bit slow so far, with lots and lots of visual description:  I'm glad I've read the comic.  It occurred to me to read into the novel's Norman-Saxon conflict a subtext of the emerging class tensions in Regency Britain.  Cedric the Franklin seems to represent the upper-middle class, the backbone of the modern British social order.  Of course, the squirearchy of the antebellum American South took Ivanhoe to heart and made the Normans their role model, which is odd because Scott's Normans are basically jerks.

At yesterday's memoir slam there were just six people, so we had time to do three subjects:  breakfast, bad grades and Saturday rituals.  (The latter two had been my suggestion.) On bad grades I wrote about being in Grade 7 the year we were in Mississauga, and the art teacher giving my blue squares 1 out of 5 because the edges were messy; on Saturday rituals I talked about the color comics in the weekend newspapers and swimming at the university pool.  But I couldn't think of much to say about breakfast.

I got the idea of starting a Meetup group to attend the memoir slam, to see if we can attract Meetup people, since I can organize a second group with no extra fees. (I had to quit trying to start the Ph.D. Students Meetup because of the Acting Meetup on Saturdays, but I was getting nowhere anyhow.) I've set it up and we already have one new member!

Last night's choir practice was the last for three weeks.  We started "Tu Scendi Delle Stelle" (we'd done this under Giuseppe, but this was a simpler arrangement) and Jose Feliciano's "Feliz Navidad." I forgot to bring the book of Hemingway stories for John George, so I'll just have to remember it next time.

This evening I got an email from Blanche Klein.  I attended the first meeting of her book club, then didn't get to any of the later ones.  But I think she liked my book suggestions, and I'm impressed that she remembered me. (They'd just been reading The Leopard, which I'd suggested.)

What I think about sometimes

During yesterday's walk in the park, I got to thinking about how I'd remake Ingmar Bergman's sexy comedy Smiles of a Summer Night in an American setting.  I imagined it being set in Arlington, Virginia, in 1899.  I imagined Fredrik going to see the opera Carmen at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C., with Desiree shown singing the Habanera.  And there'd be some dialogue afterward.

Younger woman (cooing, holding up her fan): That was so immoral!

Older woman (livid): You could see he was having intimate relations with that... that...  If he hadn't stabbed her, I would have!

Mother (with boy in tow): He should have married the nice girl.

Fredrik:  It's all French to me.

Boy: If they were Spanish, why were they singing in French?

Mother (grabbing the boy's ear): Don't ask questions all the time!

And I imagined a scene where Fredrik sneaks up behind Anne and puts his hands over her eyes.  Anne smiles at first, but when Fredrik speaks and she realizes it's him and not Henrik her smile fades, but it returns when she turns around and faces him.

I think the original movie had a scene where the Countess fires a pistol at a shooting range, so I imagined a soldier saying to her, "Bullseye!  We could have used you in Cuba!"

That's what I think about sometimes. (While I remember these characters well, I had to check the Internet Movie Database to remember their names.)

Autumn damp

Yesterday's Acting Meetup still attracted a good twenty people.  Someone did a commercial pitch for Captain Morgan's rum, and that character appealed to me.  So when I did a pitch for this fish vitamin that improves your skin I performed it as Captain Morgan! (I started by swooping off my imaginary hat.) I also did a scene from Elysium, where my only three lines were "Where are the guns?" "What is this?  Family Heirloom?" and "Hmm--yeah, it'll do."  I had a bit of a headache, so I didn't mind.  I entered the scene at a slow, steady pace to suggest a gangster.

I've finished Larry McMurtry's Roads.  I haven't read any of the "50 ideas you really need to know" series for a while, so now I've started reading the entry on architecture.  I knew a bit about gothic architecture because I recently saw J. Bronowski discussing it in The Ascent of Man, and I also knew about Doric, Ionian and Corinthian columns (which Vitruvius compared to a man, a woman and a maiden respectively).

This afternoon I went on a Walking Meetup with some Culturelink people.  We met at Victoria Park station and walked through Dentonia Park.  The weather was damp with autumn gloom:  you could see fog around the tall buildings.  But that weather appeals to me.  I considered seeing Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal again at the event screen, but the day was gloomy enough.

I've been getting into Facebook's Sunshine Bay game.  Just now I'm saving money to upgrade my port to allow a greater capacity for passengers.  After that I'll replace some of my businesses, which I don't really need, with residences to increase the passenger flow. (I won't be able to buy more land till I get a fourth neighbor.) Only then will I save to buy more sport yachts.  And I still won't need to upgrade the town hall to increase the resident capacity for a while, because I'm not yet close to full.  Fuel upgrades aren't needed either.

Plantar fasciitis

Wednesday I finally went to see Dr. Ang, and it turned out I have plantar fasciitis.  Moira has had that too, but she runs a lot more than I do.  She recommended some foot exercises (which Moira knows all about) and suggested insoles for my shoes.  Moira also mentioned that her hairdresser recommends a change of shoes.

I've been wearing my previous pair of shoes, whose soles are a bit worn, but my condition is already easing.  This evening I finally got out to the drugstore and bought the cheapest pair of insoles I could find. (Tell me I'm not my father's son!) That meant I had to cut them to my foot size of 8 1/2; unfortunately, I cut them to a woman's 8 1/2, which is more like a man's 6 1/2.

Wednesday I went to rent the Danish version of The Killing at Suspect Video in Mirvish Village. (I used to go there a lot a decade ago, before we started our zip.ca subscription.) Unfortunately, they had no copies of the first half which we wanted, though they had three copies of the second half!  I've been hoping to rent the third season of Treme, but that still isn't out.  

Instead, Moira and I went out to 2Q Video where she decided to rent The World at War, the 1973 British documentary series about World War II.  What a powerful show it is! (I'm seeing it for the fourth time.)  It's very clear and well-structured, with a lot of interesting people being interviewed.  But it's also rather depressing.

Group photo

Larry McMurtry on Edmund Wilson: "He was a great describer--after all, he even described Finnegans Wake"--Roads

At the memoir slam we did life on a farm (I wrote about our family garden) and vacations.  Selia wrote about a vacation where she found out some girls she'd admired had stolen something, and that's all she could remember about it.

At choir practice we posed for our group photo so we were dressed fancy, largely in black. (I wore my black suit and black tie, but with a grey shirt.) They had us stand on a staircase so we could all get in the shot.  We also did a new song combining "O, Holy Night" and "Silent Night."

I was pleased that John George showed up. (He'd missed the earlier rehearsals, and Giovanni was giving me a lift afterward instead.) He told me that he was taking up reading Ernest Hemingway, so I promised to lend him a volume of Hemingway's short stories that I have in my room.

My right foot got sore around the heel instep and has me limping.  The odd thing is that I have no idea why:  it just got sore. (Someone in the choir said that when you get older soreness often comes out of nowhere.) I'll have to see my doctor about it.

A busy weekend

Friday night I went to a Karaoke Meetup at Jingle's.  The place was small and a bit noisy, and I only stayed for one song ("Ring of Fire.")

Yesterday afternoon I went to a new Acting Meetup connected to the Fringe Theatre.  An actor called Ivan started this group so actors of different skill and experience levels can get together and play scenes.  I enjoy that sort of thing, and he intends for us to meet every Saturday!  For the first meeting he gave us brief scenes to do from recent TV shows.  I did one from Nikita where I'm talking to a techie while looking at a computer scene. (I held my sheet in front of me to stand for the screen, which made glancing at my lines less awkward.) For the other scene I was one of two tough ex-cons meeting in a bar: one of my lines was "Shitty day, whiskey neat."

This morning I went out to Chudleigh's in Milton and picked apples as part of the Born in the '60s Meetup.  Heather gave me a lift from Islington station at 9:00 so we could get there at the 10:00 opening, so I had to get up early and take the Bloor bus before the subway started.

Chudleigh's has long lines, but they know how to keep them moving pretty quick.  I bought Cortlands, Honeycrisps and some pre-picked Empires. (I'd visited Chudleigh's once before, when I was 12 and we were in Mississauga for the year.  I think we picked Red Delicious apples then.) Unfortunately, nobody else could make it.  I guess we would have done better to find a less crowded orchard where we wouldn't have had to get there early.

Non-fiction book club

"Now I'd rather be almost anyplace on the planet--always excepting Rock Springs, Wyoming--than on the Long Island Expressway at rush hour"--Roads

Yesterday afternoon I met with Heather of the ROLT Meetup at the Butler's Pantry.  She and Jane were in a quarrel, and since I listened to Jane last week it was important to talk with Heather too so she wouldn't think we were uniting against her.  I think I made a good impression.

After finishing The Ascent of Money I decided to start reading Roads.  It's a book by Larry McMurtry--one of my favorite writers--about driving along some of the less famous American highways. I enjoy his discursive style:  in the first chapter he starts out recalling dining in a revolving restaurant in Duluth, and on his way to Wichita expounds on Nelson Algren, MTM sitcoms, the "adopt a highway" program, the "women in chains" genre of '70s B-movies, serial killers on the Great Plains, and Oklahoma City's obsession with oil production.

Last night I went to the Non-fiction book club at the Rosedale library where we talked about The Ascent of Money.  Niall Ferguson's best when talking about how the financial system came to be the way it is today; on what it'll be in the future, his writing tends to beg the bigger questions.

Choir and opera

At choir Monday night we started doing "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music, a musical for the fallout shelter era.  It's all about joy in the face of dread, most clearly in that song.  I had a big headache.

Last night at the opera we got to the Habanera. (I still don't know the date when David Roche is doing our acting class.) I mentioned to Beatrice the six styles of love and how they correspond to the leading characters in Carmen:  ludus (love as a game) is Carmen; mania (love as obsession) is Don Jose; eros (love as conventional romantic passion) is Don Escamillo; and storge (affection developing gradually out of friendship), pragma (practical considerations) and agape (self-sacrificing empathy) are all Michaela.

I recently found an interest cheque they sent me a few months ago. (I thought it was a statement.) That puts me ahead of the game financially!)

This afternoon I went to an open house at Culturelink, an institute for established Canadians to meet immigrants. (I've been considering volunteering for that.)

I just finished Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money.  I wonder what I should read next?

CHINATOWN

Sunday afternoon I saw Roman Polanski's Chinatown yet again, at the Event Screen with the Sunday Afternoon Movie Meetup.  It was another in the "Film 101" series introduced by Murray Pomerance. (I usually go to them, though I missed his presentation of Spielberg's Empire of the Sun last month.) What great dialogue!  When a girl on the phone asks "Are you alone?" Jack Nicholson says "Aren't we all?" That's the kind of line Nicholson worked wonders with.

Pomerance talked about the movie afterward, but I didn't stay for that part.  I actually left before the tragic ending, because I didn't want to be late getting home for dinner, and I was just in time.  Dinner was Chinese food, fittingly enough.  My fortune cookie said that I'm good-natured, practical and attached to my beliefs, which I suppose is true.

Yesterday at the memoir group the two subjects were "The best compliment I ever received" and "September." (The latter was a subject that I'd submitted.) On the former subject I mentioned how ten years ago Cynthia, my dance teacher at the Arthur Murray studio, called me a gentleman.  Selia liked the September pieces so much that she submitted the other twelve months of the year, so we'll probably be doing a lot of that.

At The Huffington Post I wrote a post about an Elizabeth Drew piece saying "Don't scapegoat people who don't vote.  If they don't care, they don't care." But the moderators wouldn't publish it, and Moira realized it was because they were automatically blocking posts with the expression "don't care." (So abusive!) So I rewrote it as "If they're not caring, they're not caring," and it got published.

Managing the ROLT situation

Friday I met Jane at the Butler's Pantry and we discussed the disagreements that followed the previous weekend's ROLT event. (Joel has left the group, and he was one of our most regular attendees.) We may put out a statement to try to prevent future disputes.  Heather was publicly disagreeing with Jane, and I'm going to see her on Thursday to hear her side of it.

The meeting was also an occasion for me to suggest changing the day from Saturdays to Sundays.  That's because of a new member--Betty-Anne, who organizes the Queen Street art walk--who can't make it on Saturday.  I don't know of anyone who can't make it on Sundays, and I'm sure Betty-Anne would be a valuable addition:  she used to tape audio recordings for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. (We used to have a CNIB broom.) Fortunately, Jane had no problem with changing the day; on the contrary, she likes Betty-Anne too.  So I went to the Meetup website and changed future events to Sundays.  The only problem is that I can't change the thing on the homepage that says "This group meets every second Saturday"! People will just have to ignore it.

On Saturday night I went to Jonah's Karaoke Meetup at BarPlus.  There was a new Korean guy who sang a Korean song.  I sang "Every Breath You Take," which I've hardly ever done before.

O multigrain flour, where art thou?

Since Father stopped driving last month, it's been a while since we shopped at the No-Frills in Dufferin Mall.  But today I went there for one reason:  to find multigrain flour.  The Robin Hood people make it by combining regular flour with cracked wheat and cracked rye and flax. (How exactly do you crack wheat?) We just ran out and I couldn't find it at the huge Loblaw's near the Bathurst station.  I'd hate to have to stop baking it, because I have such a neat 12-loaf rotation system where whole wheat and multigrain (one loaf in four) alternate with white bread, cheese bread (both one in six), raisin bread and rye bread (one in three).

But I didn't need to worry.  It turned out that they were still selling multigrain flour at the No-Frills place.  Too bad you can only get it in five-kilo packages. (You can get white flour in packages of twenty kilos!) Oh well, back in Sackville, New Brunswick, you probably can't get it at all.  But there's a health food store there called Jacob's Larder where you can buy loaves of protein bread...

Moira and I have are still working together to straighten out the location files for our huge book collection.  We finally finished the living room and started working on the attic.  Monday night the computer screen fell over and the screen got cracked.  But the Apple people managed to fix it and we were back in business today.  This evening we did it differently:  I told Moira the titles and she entered the information.  I have to admit that saying the titles is the easier part of the job, but doing it once in a while is enough for me.

Toronto City Opera

Yesterday at the memoir slam our subjects were "Change of residence" and "Unusual meals." (The subject "Hemorrhoids" also got chosen, but we decided to skip it.) When I mentioned about having lived in London somebody expressed interest in hearing more from me about it.  On the subject of unusual eating, I mentioned that when I was thirteen I ate a whole can of cherry pie filling on a dare from John.

Last night at choir practice we started "The Little Drummer Boy." We're no longer doing the version with the men singing "Prum, prum..." but the one Bing Crosby and David Bowie did as a duet.  I liked prum-prumming but the new version does have nice harmony.  It's also in favor of peace on earth, like anyone admits to being against it.

This evening was the first rehearsal for the Toronto City Opera (formerly the Toronto Opera Repertoire), where we're doing Bizet's Carmen and Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte.  Beatrice has succeeded Giuseppe as artistic director, while Adolfo is still musical director.  We started learning Carmen, and this time Beatrice directed the men downstairs while Adolfo stayed upstairs with the women.  We did that opera five years ago, and the music is still familiar to me.

Last night I dreamed of a much longer version of the movie Citizen Kane, as screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz might have imagined it before director Orson Welles scaled it back to normal dimensions.  This version included a subplot about a woman involved with a pirate on the Panama Canal. (The movie has a line about the Spanish-American War: "But do you think if it hadn't been for that war of Mr. Kane's, we'd have the Panama Canal?")