Back to opera

This evening I started rehearsing with the Toronto City Opera chorus. (I missed the first rehearsal the previous week, due to sheer carelessness.) This year we're doing Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, which I did with the choir, and Mozart's Don Giovanni.  The opening chorus of Ballo has some nice harmony.

At yesterday's choir practice, we learned "We Need a Little Christmas" from Mame.  What an ear worm:  it was going through my head all last night!

Last night I had a problem with my computer and couldn't load my Facebook games.  Part of me was hoping the problem would be permanent!  But I solved the problem today by putting the computer into shutdown instead of sleep mode.

I'm enjoying Paris 1919.  Clemenceau sounds like a pain in the neck!  By the way, even if Churchill and Foch were eventually proved right about the evil nature of Bolshevism, their tactics were still wrong:  intervention just made things worse in Russia. (And even if the White forces had won, that wouldn't have been a bed of roses either.)

I'm really annoyed by Margaret Wente's Globe and Mail article telling the climate change protesters to "grow up." The editors dump Rick Salutin and increase this columnist to twice a week?! There are people who try to do something to solve a problem, and then there are people who put down the aforementioned people for neglecting the problem's "complexity." (What they don't do is offer a more complex solution...)

This afternoon I finished the latest round of leafleting, along Old Forest Hill Road and Vesta Drive.  I don't know how much more I can do with so many other things going on.  Some very lavish houses there, like Stately Wayne Manor.

Ever been tempted to write graffiti?  When I see a poster in a school saying "Why do you think they call it dope?" I want to write under it, "Because it's dope, man!" And today,  while returning from leafleting, I notice a poster on a synagogue promoting Israel national bonds showing grapes, with the caption "How do you grow grapes in the desert?  IJF was there." (Or whatever the acronym is for the bond-selling drive.) I wanted to write under it: "By bulldozing the olive grove that a Palestinian family's been tending for a century.  IDF was there." (As in Israeli defence forces.) I've chickened out, of course.  But if someone reading this goes ahead and does it, I won't feel ashamed.