Laziness

For some reason September has made me lazy.  I haven't been going to Noah Richler's campaign office for volunteering, I've stopped baking bread and I can't think of things to write here.

Friday night I went to a fundraising event for Noah Richler at Dave's, just a few blocks from here.  I only went to make a token appearance, and left when the music started.  The next day I actually went into the office!

I finally finished A Short History of Progress.  And now I've started reading Edgar Allen Poe for the Classic Book Club.

Monday at choir practice Paolo asked me to yell like I wanted someone to come to me, so I said, "Come here, you sonuvabitch!" (That brought the house down.) And that's a word I've never used before!  All of a sudden, I'd been possessed by what Poe called "the imp of the perverse." At least I didn't say, "Get your stupid ass in here, you goddamm sonuvabitch!"

Opera rehearsal started Tuesday night.  We did the opening chorus of The Elixir of Love, which I'm pretty familiar with. (We're also doing Die Fledermaus.) Starting this year we're going to do eight performances instead of twelve, which means an extra week to rehearse.

Today I finally started moving those heavy patio stones to expand the garden. (Too lazy to get far, of course.) There's a whole layer of weeds that's spread over them.  I should dig up the potatoes sometime soon.

There's a girl in Waterloo called Nikki who asked me to order a plush Super Mario Brothers toy for her on Amazon. (She can't do it herself because she doesn't have a credit card.) But I couldn't open my Amazon account, having forgotten the password.

Last Night at the Proms

Saturday I went to the Last Night at the Proms telecast at the Yonge & Eglinton.  Once again, I just stayed for the first half. (The second half's kinda predictable anyhow.) I really went there to meet Mary and John D. from the Music Meetup, whom I haven't seen lately.  I'm impressed that pianists like Benjamin Grosvenor manage to memorize whole concerti!

You know you're getting old when you go to the cinema and see posters for sequels to movies you've already forgotten!

Sunday was the latest ROLT, and the topic was banned and challenged books, since September is Banned Books Month. (The event's title was "Think of the Children!") There were eleven people, about our best turnout ever!  I read the passage from Of Mice and Men where Lennie ends up killing the skanky woman, and the opening pages of W.O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind?  (One guy said it read the Steinbeck passage "beautifully"!) I would have read the opening pages of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich--it's not only been banned by the Soviets, but challenged in Canadian schools because of words like "shit-barrel"--but there were enough other people reading for a full event.

On Monday Paolo had the choir trying parts of "Joy to the World" and "Angels We Have Heard on High." He's moved us into the Villa Colombo hall where they have banquets, and introduced some new voice exercises like "tritrutritrutri," where you make an expression like the Phantom of the Opera when his mask's just been pulled off.

I thought tonight was going to be the first night of opera rehearsal, but when I went down there the place was empty!  First night is next week, of course.

New choir director

The Columbus Centre Community Choir has a new director, Paolo Busata.  We met him last Tuesday at a meet & greet, and had a full rehearsal last night.  We learned the first parts of "O Canada" and "Time to Say Goodbye." He's introduced some new voice exercises.

The Saturday before last I went to John Snow's book club.  The place at the Lillian Smith library somehow got double-booked, so they went to some coffee shop.  Unfortunately, I was late getting there and didn't know where they'd gone!  But I met up with Gabriella, who was also late, and we went to a Second Cup and had our own mini-meeting.  I wouldn't have been worth much at the main meeting anyhow since I hadn't read any of Stendhal's RED AND BLACK.

Sunday night I went to the Politics Meetup for the first time, at Scallywag's.  They had a political trivia quiz and I finished second. (We needed a tie-breaking bonus round.)

Last week I went to the Electric Caterpillar bookstore and bought a book of Italian folktales.  I'm now translating the Turinese story "The Canary Prince," about a princess locked up in a tower who sees a prince on the ground, but they're too far apart for talking and can only gaze at each other and wave their hankies. (Oh well, I like to think she had a voice like Fran Drescher while he had a voice like Robin Leach!) Then a fairy gives her a book where she can turn the pages one way to turn him into a bird who can fly up to her windowsill, then turn them the other way to change him back.  But her evil stepmother puts some pins in the cushion he lands on...

I also got a book about a hundred famous Italians.  But that book's language is less simple, better suited for Moira. (She's been reading a novel in Italian!)

HELL ON WHEELS

Have you ever watched a show that stretched credibility on occasion but you largely believed it anyway?  Then one episode there was a plot turn that just had zero credibility, and suddenly every plot turn seemed unbelievable? (Call it jumping the shark.) Something like that happens in the fourth season of Hell on Wheels.

The show is now set in the town of Cheyenne and a new territorial governor has arrived.  He's a carpetbagger out to take control of the rackets, but he also believes in law and order and is out to end the chaos in the streets. (He hangs a man for shooting a cheating gambler.) Then this gunfighter comes to town, along with his deadly enemy.  The result is a gunfight in which the first gunfighter shoots his enemy, and accidentally shoots a kid, then he shoots an innocent resident in cold blood to remove a witness.  He's about to kill a lady before he gets caught.

In the following episode the governor decides to make this gunfighter his marshal!  I could believe it if he'd just killed the other gunfighter, or even if he'd killed the kid too.  But the third killing puts him beyond the pale, and appointing him lawman is a slap in the face to the whole community.  Even a carpetbagging governor should have better sense than that!

This is the first in a long line of developments that aren't credible, but are required for the plot to reach a climactic event near the end of the season.  I won't spoil it if you haven't seen it, but I will say that attention-grabbing clearly trumped credibility.

In addition, the lesbian newspaper lady goes over to the other side and starts a sexual relationship with the governor, for reasons that weren't clear to me.  I think it's so they can go from lovers to enemies at the end of the season.