Facing deadlines

Next Sunday my book club is discussing Robert Frost's collection, and next Wednesday the history group is discussing Ten Lost Years.  So I'm anxious to finish my complete Frost collection by Sunday, and Ten Lost Years in the next week.  To tell the truth, I work pretty well under pressure.  Reading Frost's poetry gives me a desire to write my own poems. (Please don't laugh!)

Saturday I went to a late-season barbecue Margo from Russia was hosting. (She warned us to wear jackets against the cold.) She lives a bit north of Bathurst & Steeles, and getting there was an adventure!  There were a dozen people there.  She got a game going where everyone had to name a fruit or vegetable with the same initial as his first name.  All I could think of was "juniper berry," though I don't know if that fruit is used for anything but flavouring gin.

Sunday afternoon I went to a "town hall" discussing electoral reform, hosted by MP Adam Vaughan in City Hall council chambers.  I left a printout of the post I uploaded here last October with my proposal for a mixed proportional representation scheme.  Here's a pet peeve:  When people sit in those plush benches for the spectators, you might think they'd go to the middle, but half of them just sit down next to the edges, so I have to step past them to get a seat!

At opera rehearsal, Beatrice added some makeshift taijiquan to our warmups!

Duolingo can be odd.  I was recently learning some romantic pickup lines in Portuguese, and one of them translates as "If I could see you nude, I'd die happy!" (Is that what Brazilian girls want to hear?) Another is, "I'm not a pirate, but I've found a treasure!" I also learned an expression that translates as "helpless as a blind man in a shootout," except that they translated it as "helpless as a nun on honeymoon"!  Just today I learned Portuguese sentences that translate as "She sleeps in an empty room," and "You don't exist!" I'm now officially 27% "fluent." To tell the truth, there seem to be a lot of Portuguese words that are easy to learn:  guess what "companhia" means?

Another thing that bugs me:  the Duolingo logo for the section teaching about the verb "to be" is a skull.  Sure, Hamlet does say "To be or not to be..." and hold a skull, but he does it in different scenes! (Very persnickety of me, I know...)

Back to the opera

Sunday was Read Out Loud.  It's September, so I did banned and challenged books again.  Someone was reading from Bulgakov's Master and Margarita (I should read that again someday!) and someone else was reading a rant by journalist Oriana Fallaci.  I read the chapter in Salinger's Catcher in the Rye where he's travelling on a train and bullshitting the mother of a classmate, a section from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale that was reprinted in the Lapham's Quarterly spying issue, and the chapter in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn where the judge tries to reform Huck's father.

Tuesday was the first Toronto City Opera rehearsal.  We started on Bizet's Carmen, and did pretty well with it. (We did it three years ago, so I guess it's still fresh in our memories.) This year I'm singing tenor for the first time, and Beatrice is grateful:  the chorus has three members this year, as opposed to none last year!

Andriy is now charging $50 per lesson, which is reasonable since we go on for an hour and a half! (He'd go on even longer if I didn't get tired.) We've mostly been doing Gluck's "O del Mio Dolce Ardor," and he suggested the exercise of singing the song in vowels alone, without consonants, which seems pretty useful.  The other day we started on Pergolesi's "Nina" too.  It's actually just a guess that Pergolesi wrote it:  if they had no idea it would be a folk song!

Last night I went to a new Book Club Meetup at the Bedford Academy.  It turned out that I was the only boy there! (I quipped, "Book clubs are a good place to meet girls!") This was just a meeting to discuss what to read next, and I suggested Maria Chapdelaine since I just finished it.  Denise is the organizer, and I invited her to join my Toronto Bookshelf group on Facebook.

On Facebook today someone mentioned a report that a public school employee quit because she was forced to deny a school meal to a kid who couldn't pay.  I pointed out that that's the sort of thing I've been reading about in the Great Depression history Ten Lost Years!

The other night I dreamed about being in Glasgow (where I spent a year almost thirty years ago) and remembered an actual toy store called The Jolly Giant!  I also dreamed about travelling around in a London Routemaster bus with double deckers, like Cliff Richard did in the movie musical Summer Holiday, but in this dream it was painted blue.

Square dancing

My new interest is square dancing.  They started a Square Dance Meetup group, and I went to the first event on Thursday night at the community centre near Church & Wellesley.  Then I went to a second event last night at Dovercourt House, with live country music!

To someone who's taken ballroom dancing lessons, square dancing isn't so complicated.  The main thing is to keep in step with the music, left-right like in marching.  I've been learning stuff like promenade and allemand left and peekaboo, and of course do-si-do.  The Thursday night group had enough people for three rings (at eight dancers each), but back twenty years ago when there was less competition, they got over a hundred people!

I've been learning Portuguese on duolingo.com .  I learned that in this language cobra means any snake, not just one breed.   The word "banana" must come from Portuguese because it's the same in that language.  Xicara means cup, while copo means glass, which can be confusing.  They say I'm now 17% fluent, whatever that means. (Did you know that there was a period in the 16th and 17th century when Portuguese was a lingua franca in a lot of Asian commerce, like English today?)

This afternoon the Play Read-Through Meetup did Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None.  That was pretty fun, and we got almost ten people!  Next month we're doing Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

I've started re-reading Ten Lost Years, Barry Broadfoot's oral history of Canada in the Great Depression.  This is what reading history should be, full of compelling stories about people trying to survive unusually hard times. (Maybe we should do Six War Years too.)

I finally got around to buying a new set of pajamas.  I'd tried to buy one at Walmart, but they only had them in extra-large size!  This evening I went to Yorkdale Mall--had to take a shuttle bus because the subway's being serviced--and found a pair at the Bay.  They're a bit tight, but cost only twenty bucks!  I'm wearing them right now.

Two TV shows

I've been looking at two new series on Crave TV.

Deutschland 83 is a German miniseries about a 1983 East German who gets manipulated into spying in a West German general's office under a stolen identity, so the East German government will give his mother priority for a kidney transplant operation.  It's a terrific show, intelligent and exciting. (We rarely appreciate how lucky we were to survive the irresponsibly hawkish Reagan presidency.) Those little East German cars looked curious.

I've also started the remake of Roots.  It isn't as cheesy as the 1977 original, but it still lacks subtlety.   Alex Haley's book is way better than either version.  Forrest Whittaker has a good role as Fiddler. (It was a good role for Louis Gossett.) At least it lacks the bad acting of white stars like Edward Asner!

Last night I found a puzzle at brilliant.com where you have to figure out x where (x+1)^1/2 - (x-1)^1/2 = (4x-1)^1/2.  I think their answer is that there's no x that fits the equation, but that assumes that these are all positive square roots.  x=5/4 works, when the second term is a negative root while the others are positive, or when the second one's positive while the others are negative!

Odds & ends

Monday night we saw the movie of August:  Osage County, which Moira borrowed from the library.  The cast included Dermot Mulroney, whom she calls "my favourite goon." Unfortunately, the video skipped several times in the second half. (She says library DVDs are notorious for that.) The soundtrack included the Eric Clapton song "Lay Down, Sally," which I always thought went, "Way down south"!

Tuesday night we saw Rene Clair's And Then There Were None, from the Agatha Christie play, also from the library.  It's pretty scary, with a tasty cast. (Moira said, "The cat did it!") It turns out that the play has a different ending from the book!

Wednesday I had lunch with Pam at Butler's Pantry.

Yesterday I finally got my eyes tested at a clinic near St. Clair & Dufferin. (I tried to wait until after my OSDP interview, in hopes that a new health care plan would pay for it, but it's been taking forever!) My long-distance sight is still improving, so I got a new prescription.  The eye doctor expects that my headaches will be reduced, but they never seem to go away.

Today I got my hair cut.  When she was finished, the Hungarian barber said, "Now you look ten years younger!" My gray hairs are a bit more visible near the temple, but I find that look dignified!

I saw a video on Youtube by someone talking about the best and worst national flags.

Last night I dreamed about meeting an American fundamentalist and pointing out that Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson was a deist.  I said, "Deists think that God is like that rich uncle who never takes you out to dinner!"