Classic Book Club

Saturday I went to the Met Tales of Hoffmann screening at the Yonge & Eglinton.  Afterward I wrote a Captain Snark piece about it. (I've learned to add an image attachment at the head of the piece.)

Yesterday the Classic Book Club met at the Victory Cafe and we discussed the first half of Our Mutual Friend and a lot of other things.  Jane has already finished the book, so she skipped the event lest she spoil the plot.  The meeting went on for two and a half hours, longer than usual.

The organizer of the new History Book & Movie Meetup stepped down with the first event scheduled for Wednesday (and no location).  So I took over and chose the Just Desserts near Wellesley Station for the location.  This is the same way I took over ROLT a few years ago.  I reached my limit of Meetups to organize, so I dropped the one connected to the memoir slam.  I have a lot of ideas about what me might read and view.

Today I wrote a pretty long Captain Snark piece about the movie Eyes Wide Shut.  I'm really getting into this new site!  I've only just started to tell people about it, since it's a work in progress.

The Wonderful World of Captain Snark

I've started a new blog!  (It's actually a blog-forum where people are encouraged to leave comments.) It's called The Wonderful World of Captain Snark, and I plan to write one snark piece every day for the indefinite future on subjects ranging from movies to TV to politics to writing to "the way we live now."

The concept owes a lot to Mr. Cranky of yesteryear, though he focused on movies.  If I can bring back even a tenth of the atmosphere that prevailed in those forums for a few years, it'll be well worth it.

I got free forum space (supported through ads) and my new URL is captainsnark.freeforums.net .  I started it on Tuesday and felt really excited!  It's fun imagining all the features and making an administrator's decisions.  And I've already written four pieces, ripping into The Sound of Music, the TV version of Little House on the Prairie, Ronald Reagan and The New York Times.  My next piece will be in the category of manners, and it'll be about aggressive rhetorical questions.

Yesterday I finally finished the first half of Our Mutual Friend.  Now I'm going to finish reading the winter issue of Lapham's Quarterly, which is about foreigners.  I've already received the spring issue, which is about con games.

Tonight I went to a Meetup for Maritimers in Toronto. (If you define us as an immigrant group, we're the third biggest in the city!) Only two people were there, but Rome wasn't built in a day.

BLAZING SADDLES

"The little expedition down the river was delightful, and the little room overlooking the river into which they were shown for dinner was delightful.  Everything was delightful.  The park was delightful, the punch was delightful, the dishes of fish were delightful, the wine was delightful"--Our Mutual Friend

"The time has come to act, and act fast!...  I'm leaving"--Blazing Saddles

Sunday I went to a Movie Meetup with buffet lunch at the Smiling Buddha.  The movie was Mel Brooks' western spoof Blazing Saddles, which I'd seen at least three times before.  This is a movie that's basically thrown together, that'll do anything for a laugh, like Animal House and Airplane!  We even get the knee-in-the-nuts gag not once but twice.  There are enough successful jokes to carry most people past the clunkers and the so-sos.  I noticed some off-colour jokes for the first time. ("Men coming and going, and going and coming, and always coming too soon!")

Last night was the choir's spring concert.  When Beatrice was introducing "That's Amore," I couldn't resist interjecting that it had been in the movie Moonstruck. (I hope that didn't bug her too much.) Afterward I suggested to her that we do a Scottish song like "Will Ye Nae Come Back Again?" and she'll look into it.

The book club is on Sunday, and I still haven't quite finished the first half of Our Mutual Friend!  It's time to focus.

Opera gala

Thursday night was the opera gala.  When we sang the Champagne Song, while the soloists were singing the chorus was supposed to dance, so I danced the twist and the limbo!  Jenny was drawing sketches backstage and I watched over her shoulder.  Someone sang Musetta's Waltz from La Boheme, which strikes me as a rather sad song.

Beatrice has set the complete program for the choir's upcoming concert, and it includes "To Dream the Impossible Dream" and "That's Amore!" and "Vilia" from The Merry Widow.

Wednesday night I saw The Wrecking Crew at the Bloor.  It's a documentary about a group of session musicians in 1960s Los Angeles who contributed to some of the period's most memorable records. (Glenn Campbell was the one who went on to solo stardom.) It's something like Standing in the Shadows of Motown.  After seeing it I had to go to Youtube and listen to "River Deep, Mountain High" again!

Last night John and his family came over.  Katherine made chilli for us and I ate too much!  That night I was really late getting to sleep, and didn't get up till after 14:00!

In that online game Forge of Empires you can collect coins from the houses every eight hours.  I used to collect from them twice a day, but the last few days I've been doing it three times, which makes a big difference in the coinage level.  The catch is that I have to get up and go online early in the morning. (Then I go back to bed.)

"Go fight city hall!"

This is a persistent cold I've got! (I actually suffered nausea Friday night, but maybe that means I'm in the last stages.) I'm ashamed that it's been over a week since my last post.

Monday night I played hooky from choir practice to see Renee Fleming in the Met production of Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow at the Yonge & Eglinton.  Kelli O'Hara is really pretty, and the Met can find some great dancers whenever they're needed.

I found a video on Youtube that plays Camille Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals while showing each page of the score as it gets played.  Nifty.

Today was the latest ROLT Meetup.  It was for political writing and social comment, and titled "Go fight city hall!" I was caught by the change to Daylight Savings Time and was almost an hour late. (Even if I'd remembered the change, I have a feeling I would have been late anyway what with my slow condition.) But the others had got their own discussions going and I was barely needed!  I read George Orwell's "A Hanging" and let someone else read the Hans Christian Andersen story "The Little Match Girl."  I also brought a Montaigne essay and James Thurber's story about being called for draft examination again and again in World War I, but I didn't want to tax my voice.

I've just been reading "Such, Such Were the Days," Orwell's memoir of going to a snobbish prep school around the time that World War I broke out.  He was there on a scholarship discount in the hope that he'd win a scholarship to Eton and help put the school on the map--which he did--and they never let him forget that he was a charity case!