The world of Ebooks

The other night I weakened and bought an Ebook online.  I feel a certain loyalty to paper books, but there are some books you can only get in this format!  The book I bought was Short-Lived TV Series 1948-1979. (Why yes, I am interested in reading about shows like Cool Million and Anna and the King.) But when I tried to read it on the Safari browser, I got nothing but blank pages!  So I downloaded the Chrome browser and tried to read it on that.  But now I got a message that I couldn't open it and had to go into the browser's settings and specifically enable cookies on the website play.googleusercontent.com .  So I did exactly what I was supposed to, but I still had the same problem!  I had to phone brother Donald and ask him to come over once more and fix the problem.

Today I started digging up the russet potatoes in the garden.  The first row was a whole bowlful, including one big enough for baking.  I also brought in a really big head of cauliflower.  The carrots are looking good.

On Duolingo I've been learning the past tense and the imperative mood in Portuguese.  I've been doing about a dozen lessons a day. (There's a tongue-in-cheek clip on Youtube suggesting that Duolingo is a tool of the Devil, and Moira got a big laugh from it.)

My history discussion group met on Wednesday night and we discussed Ten Lost Years.  We got half a dozen people. (Our discussions tend to go off on tangents, but we have a good time.) I suggested some new year subjects to Jane, and she said that she's always skeptical about my ideas but gets won over when I explain them!  A few days ago I posted Cabaret, Anne of the Thousand Days and Tom Jones as movie events for the rest of the year, and I just posted the subjects for the first three months of 2017:  the 1950s, the United States and Ireland.  The background books will be John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, Don't Know Much About History and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.  For movie events the same months, I'm thinking of Peyton Place, The Crucible (the version with Daniel Day-Lewis) and David Lean's Ryan's Daughter.  I guess maybe I'm getting ahead of the game, but I do enjoy planning this stuff!

Now that I've finished Ten Lost Years and the Frost poems, I'm back to reading the Lapham's Quarterly about disasters.