Bradley Manning's conviction

Yesterday Bradley Manning was convicted on all but two of the charges against him.  I wasn't relying on a much better result, and I feared even worse. (If he'd been convicted on the "aiding the enemy" count, it would have been a disaster for the press.)

At such times I go to the Huffington Post forums and mouth off a lot.  When people say Manning betrayed his country, I'm quick to say, "He betrayed his government, not his country." Why does this issue mean so much to a Canadian like me.  I guess that with his one act of revelation he did more to make the world a better place than I've ever done.

I'm glad to see that people are already petitioning the White House to pardon Manning.  I know that Obama's launched a war on whistleblowers, in stark contrast to the rhetoric of his 2008 platform. (He's even been using the Espionage Act, which goes back to World War I and the accompanying assault on American civil liberties.) But I'm hoping that if the pressure for a pardon gets big enough he'll take the path of least resistance.  Some people say he'll wait till he's about to leave office, but I say demand it now!  Manning's American supporters should sign a petition promising not to vote for any federal candidate who doesn't publicly support the pardon.  And I don't care what the Nader-haters say.

THE PETRIFIED FOREST

"Why in heaven's name don't you die and do the world some good?"--The Petrified Forest

At today's memoir slam the two subjects were hoarding, and talking to yourself.  My pen gave out as I started to write and I had to borrow someone else's.  On the subject of hoarding I talked about my comics collection and our used books.  On talking to yourself, I mentioned how Mother used to sing to herself, which someone bugged me, and how I found the craziness that makes you talk to yourself less scary than the patriotic craziness that makes people say about the Bradley Manning case, "The American government didn't do one thing wrong!" (Someone actually said that in a Huffington Post forum.)

While waiting for the group to start, I've got into the habit of reading one of Miroslav Sasek's series of This Is... children's travel books. (Lilian Smith library has a whole lot of them.) In previous weeks I read This Is London and This Is Edinburgh; this week I read This Is Greece.  I only have time to read part of each book before things begin, and read the rest afterward.

This evening I went to the Classic Movie Meetup at the Central, where we watched the stagy 1935 movie of the Robert Sherwood play The Petrified Forest.  I find Sherwood's plays rather dated (this and Abe Lincoln in Illinois and Waterloo Bridge).

Back to THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP

I finished Guns, Germs and Steel last week.  Now I've started the second half of The Old Curiosity Shop.  I read about 40 pages yesterday on the way to York University and back.  I went there for an Aspergers Meetup at the York Lanes Second Cup, where I met Yevghenia and Tiffany for the first time in months.

Afterward I went to the Scott library and looked at the showbiz magazine Variety.  I like the "Crix' Pix" where they give a sample of a new movie's reviews.  (Unlike Rotten Tomatoes with its thumbs-up and thumbs-down, they include mixed reviews.) But it turns out they got rid of it this spring.  I did find a few issues from before the change, so I know that the reviews for the latest Die Hard movie were overwhelmingly negative.

We've been watching the Ken Burns documentary Prohibition on Netflix.  It's pretty depressing, of course.  More proof of H.L. Mencken's line: "For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong." Cool music by Wynton Marsalis. (Father finds expert Daniel Okrent annoying.)

Corn season has arrived.  We ate corn on the cob for the first time this year.

Earache

For the past week I've had an earache, which is why I stopped posting.  On Wednesday morning I went to Dr. Ang, who prescribed some ear drops.  It's finally lessening, but it's still hard to get to sleep.

I did manage to get to a Bereaved Families of Toronto support group on Wednesday afternoon.  I also got to the memoir slam on Monday afternoon, where we wrote about things that scared us; and clouds.  But I had to cancel on the Monday night Toronto Film Society double bill of THE FRONT PAGE and HIS GIRL FRIDAY.  And I couldn't make it to the documentary CASTING BY at the Bloor. (I hope they show it again.)

I managed to fiddle with the DNS preferences on Moira's computer and our HDTV, so we can now get the American version of Netflix on those machines as well as my computer. (I'm not completely useless around the house.)

We've finished assembling the new bookcases for the living room and now we're putting books in them, which means updating the locate file for our used books business.  This afternoon I helped enter data, and Moira said I was very good at it.

New comics

I just got some new Sunday funnies from Barry King, the first in quite a while.  One of the items I'd bought was a whole run of the 52 Terry and the Pirates Sundays in 1971.  This was from near the end of its run, long after George Wunder replaced Milton Caniff as artist.  It's clear they were running out of ideas:  they actually made Terry and congresswoman Dolores Deepsix into a couple!  The story about student radicals burning down a military museum was a little much.  At the end of the year there was the start of a story with the Dragon Lady, but that was mostly in 1972.

I also got some strips like The Lone Ranger, Rusty Riley, Tim Tyler's Luck, Smilin' Jack and Li'l Abner.  One thing I like about Barry is that he'll often throw in some extras:  Sundays that aren't saleable because of tears and such, but I still like to have them in my collection.

This evening I saw an episode of Night Gallery on Hulu.com .  That was the Rod Serling horror show from the early 1970s. (I'm amused by the "relevant" look of TV shows from that period.) Back at the time the credits alone scared me pretty thoroughly.  Today I find it pretty corny.

I also saw an American Experience documentary about the Greely expedition to the Arctic in the 1880s that gathered lots of weather data, but their relief ship failed to arrive and it ended in starvation and cannibalism.

Bad subway decision

Toronto's City Council made a bad, bad decision voting to build a subway line in Scarborough in place of the RT.  It looks to be a white elephant just like the Sheppard line, a money pit undermining overall TTC finances.  Rob Ford said enough to make it clear he lacks a basic understanding of the issue. (I sometimes feel sorry for the Mayor:  he doesn't seem to have any sense!)

I don't say this as an enemy of subways.  The Spadina Line extension they're building out to York University is long overdue, and will ultimately increase the number of suburban users from north of Steeles Avenue.  But this is just wrong.  What Scarborough needs is an LRT system going out all the way to the Zoo.  It'll provide big benefits at a much smaller price than the subway.

Today Moira and I saw the first episode of Top of the Lake on Netflix.  It's a series about a New Zealand detective (Mad Men's Elizabeth Moss) investigating a twelve-year-old's impregnation, produced by Jane Campion.  And it's very original:  I think I want to see that first episode again.

When I read my latest credit card bill from Visa, it turned out I'd paid my bill twice in June, and ended up over a hundred dollars in the black!  So today I went to the bank and took out $100, but instead of getting it from my usual account, I used my Visa and ended up about even.

CITY LIGHTS

On these hot summer days I've taken to drinking Coke before breakfast. (Yeah, I'm on the road to ruin!) I like to combine an uncooled can with ice so the end result is watered down.  Our refrigerator used to make its own ice, but something went wrong with it and now I get it at the store and crush it with a hammer before 

Today I mailed my snail-mail letter to John and Mary George. (They're at a cottage on the south coast of Lake Ontario northeast of Niagara Falls.) I found out it costs $1.25 to send a letter to the United States now!

This evening I saw Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece City Lights once again.  I saw it with the Classic Movies Meetup group, at an outdoor screening at Pecault Park next to Roy Thomson Hall.  (We got there early and took some of the metal chairs while they were available.) It's the one with the blind flower girl who thinks Chaplin's rich, and the blackout-drunk millionaire.  Classic ending! ("Yes, now I see.") There was a danger of rain, but we didn't get any.

This afternoon I saw the last episode of Freaks and Geeks (with disco dancing and Dungeons & Dragons); and an American Experience documentary about Jesse James.  Seems it was one opportunistic newspaper editor who made James look like a Robin Hood-type hero.

GUNS, GERMS & STEEL

Today was a hot, lazy day for me.  I stayed in and didn't do much.

I'm almost finished Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.  Normally I'd wait till I've finished before writing about it, but it's a slow day today!  It's a very enjoyable book, written in a clear style. ("The answer is unequivocal:  no!") I've been learning a lot about early civilizations and stuff like the Austronesian migrations that started in Taiwan and spread all the way from Madagascar to Easter Island.  I'd been wondering why the Bronze Age came before the Iron Age, and it turned out to be because smelting iron ore into steel requires bigger, more complex furnaces than just smelting copper and other ores into alloys like bronze.

One thing Diamond might have talked a bit more about is the importance of trade in the evolution of early societies.  I couldn't help noticing that the leap to alphabetic writing systems was made by the Phoenicians, who were using it for far-reaching commerce, unlike earlier systems that just served bureaucracies within a single kingdom.

I found someone on Youtube who's posted whole episodes of The Carol Burnett Show!  I just saw an episode from 1975 with Sammy Davis Jr., with a musical number built around Harold Arlen songs and the famous sketch about the no-frills airline passenger. (I remember seeing it at the time, of course.) I'm going to be looking at more of those.

This afternoon I saw an American Experience documentary about building the Panama Canal.  It's a miracle that the project got completed:  they really had to learn by doing. (Today the American nation's idea of an accomplishment is getting Osama killed.)

Toronto Film Society

This afternoon at the memoir slam, our two subjects were children's books and the family car.  On books I talked about stuff like Dr. Seuss and Tom Swift and the Little House books, and mentioned that I thought Lord of the Rings was about circuses!  On cars I mentioned that I was born in a car--that was hard to top--and that we got our latest car on September 11, 2001.

There's a new South St. Burger and New York Fries that just opened in our neighborhood. We got our dinner there today.  The fries reminded Moira of those British chips that they served in newspaper.

This evening the Classic Movie Meetup had an event at the Carlton.  We saw a double bill presented by the Toronto Film Society, which I'd never attended before.  The first movie was a 1935 MGM adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's family comedy Ah, Wilderness!; the second was a 1946 musical remake called Summer Holiday. (I once saw a British musical called Summer Holiday, with Cliff Richard and his friends driving around Europe in a double-decker London bus.)

Ah, Wilderness! was pretty conventional, though Wallace Beery had some bright scenes as the soused "black sheep" uncle.  As for Summer Holiday, Mickey Rooney had got a bit too old for those adolescent hijinks. (The movie's release was delayed for over a year, possibly because Rooney criticizes capitalism.) I left the second movie pretty early, because I felt a bit sleepy.

Classical Music Meetup

The Salsa on St. Clair Festival went through its second day today.  The noise is inconvenient, but one noisy weekend a year is a price I'm willing to pay for living in an interesting place. (Now if it were this noisy every weekend, I'd give serious consideration to moving!) And it's fun to walk through once or twice.

This afternoon I went to a Classical Music Meetup at the Granite Brewery near Eglinton & Mount Pleasant.  Because they stopped the St. Clair streetcar during the festival, it was more convenient to go to St. Clair & Oakwood and take the Ossington bus north to Eglinton West station, then take the Eglinton bus east to the Granite Brewery. (Normally I'd take the streetcar east to the Yonge subway, then go east from the Eglinton station.)

This is the first Classical Music Meetup event I've been to in a little while. (They've had to make changes because their former location has been priced out of affordability.) Like my Meetup, they're now charging a $5 membership fee.  They held a raffle, and I won a CD of Rolando Villazon singing movie songs!

I also met John D., who like me is a fan of Herodotus.  He was pleased when I told him that they've made a sequel to 300, focusing on the Athenian experience.  I didn't care for the first 300 movie--it's the kind of film where the Spartan soldiers go without chest protectors to show off their pecs, and the Oracle of Delphi is young enough to dance naked--but reading the book got me interested enough to see the second movie too.

Salsa on St. Clair

This weekend they're having the annual Salsa on St. Clair weekend just north of our house. It gets pretty noisy and I like to find things to do elsewhere.  Fortunately, there were a couple of Meetup events today.

The first one, of course, was my ROLT Meetup.  Last fall's poetry event was so successful that I did another one this time.  I read Robert Browning's "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," A.E. Housman's "Hell Gate," W.H. Auden's "September 1 1939" and Robert Frost's "Mending Wall."

Moira didn't come because she was helping to paint the living room. (Maybe I should have been doing that too.) We now have the new living room windows installed.  Our next project will be installing the new toilet with two flush levels in the main bathroom.  For the past week it's been pretty inconvenient having to use the downstairs toilet all the time.

A total of eight people came!  A new member called Heather was particularly laudatory about the group. I got the others to contribute five dollars each toward my Meetup organizing fees. (It's about $150/year, but I'll be happy if they absorb half the cost.) Next month our topic will be humorous writing.

This evening I went to a Karaoke Meetup at BarPlus.  Besides Jonah and me, there was a newlywed couple.  Jonah left a bit early, and so did I.  Didn't dare to sing anything new.

Mysteriously Yours

Last night I went to the show Mysteriously Yours with the AFACT group.  That's a dinner theatre place that puts on mystery shows. (We only came for the show, skipping the dinner.) Their mystery took a spoofy approach, set in Upton Mansion (like Downton Abbey, geddit?), with the detective parodying Columbo.

The show had six actors, with one actor playing a daughter in drag until she got killed and he came back as the detective.  Instead of being on a stage, they came out among the audience.  Some people who were their for their birthday or wedding anniversary got introduced as cameo characters!  At the end audience members got to guess who'd done it and why, but I didn't try.

I paid thirty-five dollars to see the show, and at that price it seemed thin. (Don heard the food was overpriced too:  it's basically for tourists.) But it got us thinking about the approach we want to take with our show.

The night before I sent a message to the group's other members with a link to a Youtube clip of a Carol Burnett Show episode with an Ed & Eunice skit where Eunice was rehearsing a play with Madeline Kahn. (Mama: "I used to like Ingrid Bergman till she ran off with that foreigner!")

Art walk

"It's called 'disclosure,' you dickhead!"--My Cousin Vinny

The night before last I thought of going on another ROMwalk, but they don't interest me so much.  Instead I stayed home and saw the DVD of Jonathan Lynn's courtroom comedy My Cousin Vinny (for the second time). It's a pretty good Joe Pesci vehicle.

Last night I went on Betty-Anne's Queen Street art walk again.  Monday's flooding wreaked havoc on her itinerary, and she had to make a lot of last-minute changes.  But for one gallery it was an opportunity:  they made an impromptu exhibit of art they'd salvaged from their flooded basement.

The walk started at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, with an exhibit of Louise Bourgeois' modern art.  One of her abstract sculptures reminded me of African art. (It's a paradox that 20th-century modern art sometimes found inspiration in the "primitive.") We also went next door to the Edward Day Gallery's exhibit of Rebecca Last's paintings.  They were mostly clouds on lakes, but they really "move": I felt like there was something happening.  The artist appeared and answered questions!

We also went inside a shoe boutique called Gravity Pope(?).

Afterward I had a big headache, so this blog had to wait till the morning.

How to write like Pauline Kael

The other day in The Globe and Mail, TV critic John Doyle said that some of the people in his trade have ambitions to become the Pauline Kael of television.  That got me thinking about offering them tips on how to emulate the famous New Yorker movie critic:

Be nasty.  In reviewing the movie of the musical A Little Night Music, she said, "Hal Prince directs as if he had never seen a movie!"

Use the second person in the present tense.  Don't say "I didn't like it"; say "You don't like it."

Appeal to artistic snobbery.  She said that Bugsy Malone is "only for people who like putting ribbons on dogs." What if I like putting ribbons on dogs?

Use attention-grabbing overstatements.  She famously compared the Last Tango in Paris premiere to the premiere of the Stravinsky ballet The Rite of Spring.  A bit premature, wasn't she?

Invent new words.  Grease is a "klutzburger."

Don't be afraid of spoilers.  In her review of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining she spoiled what she admitted was the movie's scariest scene, which involves the sentence "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." (If you've seen the movie, you know what I'm talking about.") All this so she could reach the clever conclusion, "All work and no play makes Stanley a dull boy too." That's a sore point for me because back in 1980 I read the review before seeing the movie.

Generalize aggressively.  Write about "why movies today are so bad."

Be vulgar.  She called the True Grit sequel Rooster Cogburn and the Lady "a belch from the Nixon era"; her review of the movie version of Annie said, "The other group that might like this movie is the fetishists:  it has big-girl and little-girl panties."

Make cultural references that half your readers won't get.  Shelley Duvall in The Shining "looks more like a Modigliani than ever."

Be alert to "confidence" in actors and even directors.  In reviewing the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, she said that "the director, Phil Kaufman, provides such confident professionalism that you sit back in the assurance that every spooky nuance you're catching is just what was intended." Well, she did anyway.

Use overelaborate expressions.  Don't say "one of the most"; say "one of the two or three most."

Be sarcastic.  In her pan of Four Friends, she said: "There's a wholesome, beefy moralness in Steve Tesich's script, and Arthur Penn does his best to bring out its hearty bouquet." And all smart moviegoers hate that, of course.

Speculate about the filmmakers' intentions.  When she panned the Funny Girl sequel Funny Lady, she said: "They weren't just going to make a musical sequel--they were going to knock us out! (And they were going to outdo Cabaret, besides.)"

In using adjectival description, be spontaneous, stylish, "and"-less. Tex "is oddly quiet, tepid, soft." Robert De Niro in True Confessions "seems flaccid, pre-occupied." George Cukor's direction of Adam's Rib "is too arch, too consciously, commercially clever, but it's also spirited, confident."

Write overlong sentences.  Her review of Dressed to Kill alone has two sentences each over sixty words long!

Don't get me started on how to write like John Simon!

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

Frank Sinatra: "I've been having this dream--and it's a swinger of a dream, too"--The Manchurian Candidate

We were lucky last night when our blackout lasted only two hours. (In some places it went on past midnight!) But this afternoon it returned and lasted about five hours!  But when that happens I can still have a bath or a nap like before.

This evening I saw John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (for the third time, I think), at the Event Screen, presented by Murray Pomerance.  It's pretty chilling, and its box-office success must have surprised the industry. (The last line is "Hell, hell!") 

Frank Sinatra is at his best:  I liked his scene telling Laurence Harvey that all the links had been cut.  The Janet Leigh character seemed a bit superfluous.  The Harvey character of course brings to mind Damien Lewis on Homeland, though the latter is more of a conscious defector.  Pomerance told us that Sinatra initially wanted Lucille Ball cast in Angela Lansbury's sinister mother role! (She might have pulled it off.)  I'll have to check the Internet Movie Database, because there were several actors I think I recognized.

Memoir slam

"He's a New Yorker.  Nothing really impresses him"--Company

Yesterday I went on another Prof Walk.  We met at the Dundas West station and walked down Roncesvalles to Parkdale and the shore.  Afterward I had lunch at a restaurant called Eggsmart.  Once in a while I am capable of doing something new!

This afternoon I went to an Out of Your Shell Meetup event at the Lillian Smith library:  a dozen people met for a sort of memoir slam, where they randomly choose a memoir subject to write about, people write for half an hour than read their writing aloud, then they do it again. (They meet most Mondays.) The first subject was the countryside near our childhood home; the second was bodybuilding.

I was half an hour late because I'd been off seeing Dr. Hassan to get my Cipralex prescription renewed, then getting it refilled at Shoppers Drug Mart.  So I didn't get to write in the first round, but just listened to the other people.  But I couldn't think of anything to write about bodybuilding, so in the second round I actually wrote about the first-round subject!  I told them about how we'd take ice cream to our cottage and it would be half-melted, and I still have a soft spot for half-melted ice cream today; and also about our year in Brighton, of which I remembered several smells and seeing Rolf Harris play his wobble board on TV.

In preparation for Saturday's ROLT event, I picked up a book of A.E. Housman's poems at Lillian Smith, and one of Robert Browning's poems at Gladstone.  It's at times like this that I miss Mother:  she liked Housman and I wish I could talk to her about his poetry.  

I made it home just before a big downpour that presumably caused the two-hour blackout this evening.  Blackouts are something the goblins cause from time to time to remind us how dependent us modern city slickers are on electricity.

Has liberalism failed?

Moira reads the left-of-center magazine The Nation.  I used to read it too, but lost interest in recent years.  The other day, however, I read a Nation article that asked the question, "Has liberalism failed?"

That got me to thinking, and I'd suggest that American liberalism failed back in the 2004 election campaign, when it succumbed to risk-averse "pragmatism." Pragmatic liberals are quick to accuse Ralph Nader and his few supporters of enabling Bush Jr.'s "election" and his 2003 invasion of Iraq.  But look at their own behavior in 2004!  When they chose prowar candidate John Kerry over antiwar candidate Howard Dean in the primaries, then Kerry over antiwar candidate Nader in November--all while hoping Kerry didn't mean it, of course--they provided the warmongers with some enabling of their own. (In truth, the left had largely surrendered to pragmatism back in the 2000 election, but not unanimously enough to please the Nader-haters.)

Ever see the 1980s high-school comedy Pretty in Pink?  That's the one where rich kid Andrew McCarthy fell for "back of the tracks" girl Molly Ringwald and was going to invite her to the prom, but his rich friends gave him grief and he chickened out.  He later explained to her, "I believed in you.  I just didn't believe in me." Dean was rejected because American liberalism stopped believing in itself.  And that's the heart of the matter.

I recall Democrats portentously saying back in 2004, "This is the most important presidential election of our time," and I fear they were right.  Liberals hoped that Obama would be another Dean, but he's ended up looking more like Kerry, his latest Secretary of State.  To live again, liberalism needs to make a clean break with the slippery slope of pragmatism and its ever-diminishing returns.

A Heritage Toronto walk

Last night I had some vivid dreams, as I predicted.  I was cast in an acting role in this Batman-like gothic TV series; and I was walking around Sackville in a snowstorm and realized I had no place to go to. (After I woke up I went onto Youtube--the new twelfth link on my homepage--and listened to Woody Guthrie's "I Ain't Got No Home in This World Any More." A real classic!)

This afternoon I went on a Heritage Toronto walk around the Guild Park in Scarborough. Getting there via the TTC was a real adventure:  I took the Bloor-Danforth subway to its eastern end at the Kennedy station, then took the Morningside bus east on Eglinton, beyond Kingston Road to the Guild Inn.  I got there an hour early and had time for lunch at a nearby strip mall, where I chose Pizza Nova over Subway.  It's been years since I visited a strip mall!  There's a new cafe there whose opening has been delayed, with a sign saying, "For sure we'll open in June July!" (I got to use my strikethrough!)

I was going to join some people from the Over 50 Meetup for the walk, but the weather was too hot for most of them. (Ruthie did come before the walk so I was able to lend her our copy of Wild Animals I Have Known as I'd promised.) The walk went on for almost three hours and I got a bit of a sunburn on my arms.  Tim Hudak turned up in the huge crowd. I'll have to look up future Heritage Toronto walks online.

This evening I went to 2Q Video and rented a DVD of a recent production of the Stephen Sondheim's famous 1971 musical revue Company--the one about a single man and his married friends--with actors like Neil Patrick Harris, Jon Cryer and Christina Hendricks backed up by the New York Philharmonic. (I saw it on the London stage seventeen years ago, at the cutting-edge Donmar Warehouse theatre.)

AFACT

John George was reading my blog and sent me a snail-mail letter of condolence from his summer home in New York State.  John, I'm going to write back to you in snail mail. (I haven't done that for years!)

In the afternoon I went to replenish my Cipralex but it turned out I have to see Dr. Hassan next week and get my prescription renewed.  When I run out of Cipralex I sometimes get vivid dreams.

This evening I went to an AFACT rehearsal.  They gave me some new lines, involving me talking with Maude the diva and Jenkins the butler.

Corinne resigned as organizer of the Ph.D. Students Meetup--she couldn't afford the fees--so I took over. (Since I'm already organizing ROLT, I can organize this without paying extra fees.) I'm going to have meetings at the Victory Cafe in Mirvish Village.

I've finally quit that Empire game after someone raided my castle twice and left me with one soldier!  That means I have a vacancy among the twelve links on my homepage.

WEST SIDE STORY

"Go walk the streets like your sister!"--West Side Story

Today I had lunch with Bev of the Aspies group.  We met at Yonge Sushi.  I played it safe and had the chicken curry.  Next time I should be more adventurous and get an actual sushi order.

This evening I saw West Side Story (for the fourth time) at the Event Screen.  Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins were a team of genius.  The movie was pretty close to the stage show, I'd imagine, and my favorite number is "America." But the movie version has pretty weak romantic leads:  Natalie Wood was pretty, but Hispanic as my grandmother.

Of course, for JFK-era moviegoers white vs. Hispanic gang warfare bore a subtext about white vs. black racial tensions. (Just like when the 1956 movie Giant dramatized discrimination against Chicanos, the audience sensed it was really about discrimination against Afro-Americans.) Frankly, the middlebrow 1950s concern about juvenile delinquency and violent youth strikes me as hypocritical.   At least teenagers who played "chicken" were only endangering themselves.  John Foster Dulles' "brinksmanship" was chicken with nuclear weapons, and the world was lucky to survive the Cuban Missile Crisis.

After that amazing spike early in the week, my pageview level has subsided to what it was before.  I wonder what exactly raised it so high?

Ph.D. Students Meetup

Yesterday I went to a Ph.D. Students Meetup.  Sure, I'm long finished with that part of my life, but I like to have a chance to talk about it with people still going through it.  We met at the Art Gallery of Ontario cafeteria. (Corinne was doing research at the AGO library.)

Corinne is in a Ph.D. program at the University of Edinburgh.  Her thesis has something to do with art and music and vagueness, but I can't really describe it.  I do know that her research has something to do with the painter Eugene Delacroix, because that's why she was at the AGO library.

Dianayah was also there.  She's working in psychology and her thesis will be about abused children.  She's a native of Benin in Africa, and she was really impressed that I remember her native country used to be called Dahomey.

In the evening I went to another trivia contest with Sash's Toronto Social Group.  This one was about 1970s movies and I did very, very well.  But the noise level of the crowd got to me.

Last night, no doubt because of the earlier Meetup, I dreamed of being back at Goodenough College trying to finish my Ph.D. thesis research.

MYSTERY MEN

Yesterday we finished Coriolanus.  It's one of those movies that leave all the credits to the end, so only then did I learn that Ralph Fiennes directed it himself!  It was filmed in Serbia (very appropriately).

Last night I saw the superhero spoof Mystery Men at the Event Screen.  It had some pretty good dialogue. ("Dad, I'm going to my room with three strange men.") And I also liked the cast:  Ben Stiller (his superpower is throwing tantrums), William H. Macy(he bonks people with his shovel), Janeane Garofalo, Peewee Herman.

Unfortunately, I felt a bit sick as I was watching it.  I guess I ate too many peanuts for lunch.

In that online game Empire I finally got to level 30 where I could add another castle extension.  I had to build quite a few buildings and decorations to get there.

For the last three days I've been getting about 200 pageviews a day!  My most popular post is the one where I talk about Twenty Feet From Stardom.  I suspect all my Polish readers are interested in the part where I write about getting a VPN and HDTV.

Coriolanus & Help!

"There is a world elsewhere"--an exiled Coriolanus

For lunch today, I made a peanut butter sandwich from the white bread I baked a few days ago. (I do that about every three months.)

This afternoon Moira and I saw the first part of the Shakespeare movie Coriolanus.  It was a pretty cool adaptation, set in the 21st century amid urban unrest and hand-to-hand combat.  Ralph Fiennes in the title role and Vanessa Redgrave as his divaish mother Volumnia were well cast.  The political story was a bit complicated, and the play's no doubt worth reading in detail.  Kathrine arrived (with her and John's dog Caillou), so we'll have to finish it tomorrow.

This evening I saw Help!, Richard Lester's second Beatles vehicle, at the Event Screen with the Classic Movies Meetup.  It was frantic and a bit thin:  A Hard Day's Night definitely did more with less.  But some of its zaniness must have inspired the later school of British comedy exemplified by Monty Python.  Afterward we  hung out at the Imperial.

I read another chapter of Guns, Germs and Steel.  This one was about how prehistoric societies made the leap from hunter-gatherers living off local wild plants and animals to farmers raising domesticated strains descending from the same.

Canada Day

"He says my drums were interfering with my school work.  The way I see it, school work is interfering with my drumming"--Freaks and Geeks

Today is Canada's national holiday.  They've had a couple of posts on that subject at the Canadian page of THE HUFFINGTON POST. (I mostly read the US page, but I sometimes read the Canadian and British pages too.) One writer asked about the meaning of Canada, and one comment said that Canada meant nothing.  I couldn't resist adding, "Canada:  the 'It's about nothing' country!"

Yesterday I went on another ROMwalk.  This one started at the first Toronto post office and went through the St. Lawrence market neighborhood.  I hadn't noticed what fancy architecture the St. Lawrence Hall was.

Last night I saw an American Experience documentary about Robert E. Lee.  I couldn't help feeling that his genius was tragically wasted on a cause that couldn't win and didn't deserve to.

Yesterday this blog got over 200 pageviews!  And the main source is Poland.