Long John Silver

"'I can't do without you,' he said.  Oh yes you can, I wanted to protest.  It will be inconvenient, but you can.  You changed your newspaper once and you can get used to it"--The End of the Affair

Felix: "Tsk, tsk, tsk!" Oscar: "You'll wear out the roof of your mouth doing that!"--The Odd Couple

"These boys are mature--they're seniors!"--One Day at a Time

Long John Silver: "There be fifty good years left in me!... Well, thirty."

There's always something interesting on YouTube.  The other day Paul on Language Focus posted a video about kanji--that's the words in Japanese writing that are taken directly from the Chinese script. And then I found old episodes of The Adventures of Long John Silver.

Long John Silver was a '50s syndicated TV series filmed in Australia (before Australians had TV!), with Robert Newton doing his classic Treasure Island anti-hero.  I'd seen a bit of it when I was young and recognized the opening credits with Newton waving his sword and going "Yaar!" Moira remembers being terrified by it.

Yesterday I went to Staples and bought a new attachment to play DVDs on my computer. (The old one went bust.)

Dawna, Debi and I saw some sitcoms this afternoon.  First we saw two episodes of The Odd Couple, then three of One Day at a Time, which Mother used to like.  Remarkably, both shows had a bit where a character denied feeling jealousy but his/her body language told a different story! (Some sitcom devices are especially basic.)

YOUTH

"That scar was part of his character as much as his jealousy.  And so I thought, do I want that body to be vapour (mine, yes, but his?), and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity.  But could my vapour love that scar?  Than I began to want my body that I hated, but only because it could love that scar"--The End of the Affair

"The pigs are in the street!  The party officials were promising to clean the sky, but they forgot to close the gate"--Youth

For Christmas dinner we didn't bother with anything fancy. Just omelette, cauliflower and apple pie.

Yesterday afternoon I saw the Chinese movie Youth with Moira, Puitak and Gordon.  It's about a Chinese revolutionary ballet troupe in the Cultural Revolution era, with two members who become heroes in the 1979 border war with Vietnam.  I got confused because all those Chinese girls look the same to me! (It didn't help that their clothes and hair were pretty identical.)

We've been watching Errol Morris' docudrama Wormwood on Netflix.  It's about a CIA man who got dosed with LSD in the '50s and jumped out a window to his death, and his son investigating the matter in the '70s.  Pretty unsettling.

I started a little firestorm on Twitter.  Some Tweeter mentioned the "dysfunctional" U.S. general election last year, and I commented, "So when to the Democrats admit their primary was 'dysfunctional'?" Clintonites are still insisting that the only dysfunctional thing about the primary was allowing Bernie to run in it! They look at the 2016 disaster and that's the only lesson they learn?  I still wish that you could remove from your notifications feed likes and retweets of replies to you!

I've been translating the John Metcalf story "Early Morning Rabbits." Its title in French, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese is "Les Lapins du Petit Matin," "Os Coelhos da Madrugada," "Qingchende Tuzi" and "Souchou no Usagi."

Feliz Natal

"I thought, I shall not be breaking my promise if accidentally on the Common I run into Maurice, and so I went out after breakfast and again after lunch and again in the early evening, walking about and never seeing him"--The End of the Affair

Frank (entering the hospital tent): "I'm here to relieve you." Hawkeye: "You do resemble an enema"--M*A*S*H

Earthling: "Ciao." Mork: "Pekinese!"

Saturday afternoon Dawna and I saw some Christmas-themed videos.  Magoo's Christmas Carol had predictably cheap animation but some nice songs, unlike the Albert Finney musical. (Which I haven't seen, but I heard that "Thank you very very very much!" was actually the best song in it!) There was also a Mork & Mindy episode with an appearance by Morgan Fairchild, and an episode of The Red Skelton Show where George Appleby got hypnotized at a Christmas party to think he was drunk when he got patted on the shoulder, and sober up when he heard the word "wife." I loved Red Skelton when I was young!

And we also saw a Christmas episode of M*A*S*H, built around Hawkeye writing a letter to his father.  If I were a M*A*S*H character, I think I'd be Henry the hapless commander.  In one scene Hawkeye grabbed Hot Lips and kissed her for about thirty seconds, and she was turned on! (That's the sort of thing male writers come up with.) I've always found Alan Alda a bit annoying.

We finished the second season of The Crown.  The episode where bloody-minded Prince Philip insisted on sending Prince Charles to Gordonstoun was a little much.

I'm still trying to reduce my email backlog.  I got it below 2000 the other day!

And I'm still having unusual dreams. One night I dreamed of being in an airport about to take a flight, and shopping for a camera in a downstairs shopping concourse.  Then the other night I dreamed of a thriller movie in the M. Night Shyamalan style involving machines rising up to kill people!

Pre-Xmas dinner

"He was too powerful for the room:  he didn't go with the cretonne"--The End of the Affair

Monday was the last meeting of my memoir groups for three weeks.  For something different, we're going to try writing a piece or two at home over the break:  the topics will be "people I've admired" and/or "hide & seek."

Last night we had a lot of the family over for a pre-Christmas dinner of Indian food.  For dessert, we had a fresh pineapple. (Unlike most people, I like to eat the tough part in the middle!) I was showing my nieces a photo I found of Mother when she was young.

The second season of The Crown isn't as great as the first, but it's still pretty good.  My other sister is still on the first season and didn't want to hear any spoilers, though I would have thought people know the story already!

I'm now rereading Laura Ingalls Wilder's These Happy Golden Years, the last finished book in the Little House series, which tells of her teaching school and marrying Almanzo.  I'm going to read some more of Oscar Wilde's children's stories too!

The Children's Hour

On coming to after a Blitz explosion: "My mind for a few moments was clear of everything except a sense of tiredness as though I had been on a long journey.  I had no memory at all of Sarah and I was completely free from anxiety, jealousy, insecurity, hate:  my mind was a blank sheet on which somebody had just been on the point of writing a message of happiness.  I felt sure that when my memory came back, the writing would continue and that I should be happy"--The End of the Affair

Saturday afternoon I saw two episodes of the '70s scifi series Space:  1999 with Dawna.  Or rather, I saw one and a half--I had to leave because I was getting sleepy. (Doctor Who it isn't.)

Yesterday afternoon was the Reading Out Loud Meetup. December is our month for children's writing, and I titled the event "The Children's Hour." I read a chapter from Laura Ingalls Wilder's On the Banks of Plum Creek, a Hillaire Belloc poem about a kid whose balloon blew up his house, the poem "To a Monkey" written by a girl of seven, and Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince." In "The Happy Prince" you can see the influence of Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen!

Martha read a story she created with her Grade Two class, of trolls looking for a house to buy, with illustrations of troll dolls, Lego and stuff against green-screen backdrops.  Other reading was the part of A Little Princess where she found a coin in the gutter and bought buns but ended up giving most of them to a beggar girl; a Little Red Riding Hood spoof in Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes; and Wilde's "The Selfish Giant." (Wilde wrote those stories in his twenties, when he was flirting with Catholicism.)

I was just reading in The End of the Affair the part where Sarah tells Maurice, just before breaking up with him, "Everything must be all right. If we love enough." At first glance that seems sentimental, but there's something profound about it.  It reminded me of W.H. Auden's line in "September 1st, 1939": "We must love one another or die." (My interpretation is that if we don't love each other we'll die inside, like Mohammed Atta.) It's a very adult novel, not because of the sex, but because of the themes.

TOM JONES

"It is widely believed that too much wine dulls the spirit.  And so it will, in a dull man"--Tom Jones

On meeting in 1939: "We saw each other for the first time, drinking bad South African sherry because of the war in Spain.  I noticed Sarah, I think, because she was happy; in those years the sense of happiness had been a long while dying under the coming storm"--End of the Affair

Wednesday night we saw a documentary about the Gallipoli campaign.  It was so grim that Moira couldn't finish it! (It's easy to forget that the Turks lost almost as many men as the British and their allies.) I just found out that the Royal Newfoundland Regiment was sent to Gallipoli before their annihilation at the Somme.

Last night I saw Tony Richardson's Tom Jones yet again, with Debi of the History Meetup.  It's a real scream! Richardson and screenwriter John Osborn's showing the dirt and ugliness of the 18th century--they'd previously made the "kitchen sink" classics Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer--makes the audience appreciate its beauty more! (Didn't Joan Greenwood have fine eyebrows?  When I saw her in The Importance of Being Earnest those were the main thing I remembered about the movie...)

Another vivid dream last night.  It was a story sort of like the Godfather movies, but even more violent.  The main thing I remember is a pack of attack dogs advancing in slow motion, and the gangsters furiously pedalling electric generators to produce a huge surge and explosion!

END OF THE AFFAIR

"'When you are miserable, you envy other people's happiness'...  And there--in the phrase--the bitterness leaks again out of my pen.  What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is.  If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love, I would be another man:  I would never have lost love"--End of the Affair

Sunday afternoon the Classic Book Club discussed A Little Princess.  We liked the book, but couldn't think of much to say about it, and dispersed rather early. (I hope John S. returns to the group!  He'd surely have a lot to say.)

I finished the book about Russia and started reading Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, for the next Classic Book Club event.

Yesterday was Tuesday, so I went to Ali Baba's near Ossington station to get the Tuesday special of falafel wraps.  It's turning into a weekly ritual!

We've started watching the second season of The Crown.  It looks like Her Majesty will be using her dirty look a lot this season.  One of the background events is the Suez Crisis. (Orwell said that Neville Chamberlain wasn't a monster or a traitor, but a stupid old man doing what he thought was right at Munich; you could say the same about Anthony Eden!) I can't help feeling that Prince Philip was a jerk, but that revelation will surprise few people...

The other day I left my library card at the library again! (It's those self-serve checkouts...) But I got it back the next day.

The last of DAMAGES

Tonight we saw the last episode of the last season of Damages.  It's a pretty good show, though the cryptic foreshadowing and nightmare scenes eventually got a bit tiresome.

Thursday night was my History Meetup, in which we discussed the Civil War.

This afternoon Dawna and I saw An American Christmas Carol, with Henry Winkler as a 1930s version of Scrooge.  It must have been a Canadian production, because there were quite a few Canadian actors, including R.H. Thomson as the Bob Cratchit equivalent.

Dreams

My shrink prescribed me 30 Cipralex pills instead of the usual 60, so as an experiment I'm taking them every other day instead of daily.  One side effect is that my dreams get more vivid.

Just last night I had a dream of moving into a new house in York Region much like our Sackville house, but outside the northeast corner there was a tent-like enclosure accessible through a glass passageway.  There were some kids watching a Kurosawa movie.  I also dreamed of being stuck watching a movie that wouldn't end!

Today Moira and I went grocery shopping and bought almost $100 of stuff!

I've finished translating "Streetcar, Streetcar, Wait for Me" into Chinese ("Dianche, Dianche, Ni Deng Woba") and started translating it into Japanese ("Densha-San wa Boku-o Matte-yo"). In French and Portuguese it's titled "Tram, Tram, Attendez-Moi" and "Electrico, Electrico, Espere-Me."

LIVE AND LET DIE

James Bond: "My name is--" Mr. Big: "Names are for tombstones, baby! [to his henchmen] Take him out and ice him!"--Live and Let Die

Saturday afternoon Dawna and I saw Live and Let Die.  It's the first of Roger Moore's James Bond movies, with a big motorboat chase, Jane Seymour reading tarot cards (Dawna's done that, and says it can get scary!) and Geoffrey Holder doing a voodoo dance.  It's all pretty goofy, of course.  Moore never had Sean Connery's style--though in all fairness, who does?

Friday I had lunch with John S. and went to see the train-set screwball comedy 20th Century again at a Robarts Library screening. Unfortunately, I ended up leaving early because I was sleepy.  Something about the sound of a moving train lulls me, like Arctic scenery. (When I saw the Inuit movie The Journal of Knud Rasmussen that made me sleepy too.)

I renewed my library card and borrowed the book Russian History:  A Very Short Introduction.  Oxford University Press has a whole series of those Very Short Introduction books!

On the latest season of Damages, Ryan Philippe is playing a Julian Assange type.  He's actually a pretty interesting actor, who's come a way since Cruel Intentions, which opened with him driving a car on the freeway. (That's one of the tritest movie-opening cliches!)

THE MAN WHO INVENTED CHRISTMAS

Scrooge: "I thought this was a ghost story, not a fairy tale!"--The Man Who Invented Christmas

Tonight I saw The Man Who Invented Christmas at Canada Square.  I enjoyed this movie about Charles Dickens writing A Christmas Carol:  like the original story, it's whimsical but ultimately moving.  Dan Stevens is a suitably theatrical Dickens, and there are several fine actors. (The part of the story that really gets to me is Scrooge being shown his schoolboy self choosing books over friends!)

I've decided to make Russia the subject of January's History Meetup, what with the centenary of the October Revolution (which was actually in our November, but Russia still went by the Julian calendar). I chose a short history for background reading, but when I tried to borrow a copy it turned out that it's time to renew my library card!

We finished Godless, which ended with the obligatory gun battle. That was an odd scene where the women were standing on the bar and singing about sex!  Now we've started the fifth season of Damages.

I got possessed to start translating some of those Canadian short stories I was just reading into foreign languages. (I was going to lend the book to John S., but no doubt he can wait...)

Fundraiser

"It really had not occurred to her to think of them in that light.  Scullery maids were machines who carried coal scuttles and made fires"--A Little Princess

"When you think about it, the same God who made you and me made a rattlesnake.  That don't make sense!"--Godless

"He was engaged in counter-counter-counterespionage." "It looks like someone countered his counter!"--The Avengers

Yesterday afternoon we had our opera fundraiser at St. Paul's Catholic church near Queen & Parliament.  There were quite a few snacks at the reception afterward, as usual, and I spoiled my dinner somewhat.

Yesterday Dawna and I saw a couple of episodes of The Avengers, both of which were pretty complicated.  The first one was about an invisibility formula that turned out to be a hoax. (We'd also seen that on a Get Smart episode!)  The second was about spies using pigeon-cams and sending their secrets through a talking parrot. Emma went undercover as a model, not illogically.

A Little Princess is a great story!  I read more than a hundred pages over the weekend.

Godless is getting stranger and stranger, not that I mind.

On Youtube just now I've been listening to Leroy Anderson's instrumental pieces.  I especially like "Trumpeter's Lullaby" and "China Doll."

GODLESS

Woman speaking First Nations language: "He looks simple." Boy translating: "She says you look strong." "I'll name him Stray Dog." "And she's naming you Wandering Star"--Godless

Tonight we saw the first episode of the western series Godless on Netflix.  It was a promising start, with lots of graphic mayhem and bleakness and existential dread. (I noticed that the shaman trying to cure the sheriff's failing sight was Deputy Hawk from Twin Peaks!)

We just saw a DVD of Roberto Rossellini's neo-realist films Paisan and Germany:  Year Zero. (We also had his Rome:  Open City, but we'd seen it before.) I'd wanted to see both for quite a while, and they're powerful depictions of Europe at the end of World War II.

At the opera rehearsal Tuesday night we did the acting exercise where we formed successive pairs and took turns mirroring each other! (The director asked each of us for a rhyme or alliteration of our name so he could remember them, and I called myself "James the Joker"!)

I finished the Civil War book and started Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess.

Athens rising near the pole

Saturday afternoon Dawna, Debi and I watched some episodes of Get Smart and Hogan's Heroes.  Hogan's Heroes was really a little boy's idea of World War II:  that's the key to it! (People who actually lived through military imprisonment are apt to find it tasteless.)

Yesterday afternoon was Reading Out Loud Meetup.  The topic was Canadian writing, so I titled the event Athens Rising Near the Pole (quoting Alexander Pope!). We read several stories from Kaleidoscope:  David Helwig's "Streetcar, Streetcar, Wait for Me," John Metcalf's "Early Morning Rabbits," Hugh Garner's "The Moose and the Sparrow" and David Lewis Stein's "The Huntsman." (Other Kaleidoscope stories I remember from high school are Alice Munro's "Day of the Butterfly," Mordecai Richler's "Pinky's Squealer" and Hugh MacLennan's "The Lost Love of Tommy Waterfield."

The other night I dreamed of getting into a fierce quarrel with my father. (We never fight in real life!) Just last night I dreamed of visiting the old Mount Allison campus and finding it unrecognizably high-tech, and of hearing the torch song "Ten Cents a Dance" in a supermarket.  I've been having vivid dreams because I'm experimenting with cutting back my anti-depressants to every other day.

FOLLIES

Last night I went to the Event Screen cinemacast of London's National Theatre production of Stephen Sondheim's Follies.  They showed an interview with Sondheim where he said that in early drafts the show had a great start with introductory scenes, but started dragging when the plot came in.  So in later drafts they got rid of the plot!

About halfway through the show they got sound problems from the London end.  The accompaniment was coming through fine, but you could hardly hear the singing!  During the number "Hey, Mr. Producer" people in the audience started singing the song themselves! (They must have known the score well.)

I could have stayed until they sorted it out but I had a bit of a headache and left early.  It didn't help that the place was packed and I could only find a seat in the front rows near the screen.

John Snow and I were going to have lunch today, but he sent an email delaying it a week.  Of course, I only got around to reading the email after going there and waiting half an hour! (My email backlog is bigger than ever...) On top of that, the St. Clair street car had a derailment and they replaced it with shuttle buses.  The electronic board said the next bus was coming in nine minutes, but nine minutes turned into another half hour so I went home by subway.

But when I got home I was in a good mood again, for it turned out that that book of Canadian short stories had arrived in time for Sunday's Reading Out Loud Meetup. (I was worried about that.)

I finished my Portuguese translation of The Wizard of Oz tonight. (Moving ending!) And I had a dream about a TV show where space aliens took over a supermarket and sent super-robots to catch people who stole food!

Dreams

The other night I had that dream again where I'm visiting Russia, which is odd because when I'm awake I don't have any conscious desire to do that. (Moira asked how I knew it was Russia, but in dreams you just know things!) I'll have to tell my shrink Dr. Hassan about it.

Just last night I dreamed of seeing director Stephen Frears and actor Daniel Day-Lewis being interviewed early in the morning.  Where that comes from was some twenty years ago Moira told me about seeing a TV interview with Frears, and said, "He's so cool he looks like he just got out of bed!" I also had another repeating dream where I'm trying to pack clothes and stuff but making a hash of it.  I suppose that's a common one.

On Sunday I finished raking the leaves on the lawn and putting them in big collection bags, which Father had started. (We got an extra-wide rake!) That evening I went to see a master class the opera group put on for soloists, which was at a church just a few blocks east of here.  I wasn't feeling well and left early, but did hear Renato's big aria from Verdi's A Masked Ball and one from Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd.

Next Sunday is Reading Out Loud Meetup.  Through ABE Books I've ordered Kaleidoscope, a collection of Canadian short stories I was lucky enough to read in high school.  A lot of good stuff there worth reading aloud, by writers like Mordecai Richler and Alice Munro and Hugh Garner and Hugh MacLennan.  I asked for Priority Post, so it should be here by Friday.

The other day I upgraded my computer's operating system from Sierra to High Sierra.  There must be some Bogart fans in Silicon Valley.

I misplaced my watch for a week or two, but just found it again in my room!

The late, great SPY magazine

"Why can't you people leave me alone?"--Gran Torino

This afternoon I saw Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino with Dawna and Debi.  It was quite good, with Eastwood at his funniest as an aging curmudgeon who gets involved with Hmong neighbours.  The ultimate message was pretty hopeful. (That movie was the source of the line "Get off my lawn!" which Bernie Sanders' detractors witlessly linked to him.)

You can read archived copies of Spy magazine online!  It's been looking prophetic lately:  long before director James Toback became part of Hollywood's sexual harassment scandal, Spy had done a feature about him picking up women by saying  things like "Hey baby, I'm a famous director!" 

I've been reading the first issue, from October, 1986--with comedian Chris Elliott on the cover--which featured the ten most embarrassing New Yorkers.  Along with people like "Queen of Mean" Leona Helmsley and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, they cited Donald Trump, and quoted him on his desire to negotiate nuclear arms reduction: "It would take half an hour to learn everything there is to learn about missiles....  I think I know most of it anyway." (Shudder!  Spy famously described Trump as a "short-fingered vulgarian.")

I'm not yet quite over my cold. Still eating those pomelo grapefruits!

Almost over it

George C. Scott (lighting a cigar): "My doctor allows me one of these a day.  This is my third!"--Taps

I'm almost over my cold.  Right now I have the song "Shaking the Blues Away" going through my head. (One of the That's Entertainment movies had a clip of Ann Miller singing it in Easter Parade.) Another earworm is "I Only Have Eyes for You" from Dames.

Yesterday our internet and cable TV connection went off for a whole day because of this storm that happened to the east over the weekend. (That's why it's been five days since my last entry here!) 

We finished the third season of Damages and will be seeing the fourth soon.  Last night we watched a DVD documentary about the magazine The Nation. (I read it faithfully in the '90s, back when they had Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn, but lately they've been playing it safe too often.) Tonight we saw part of a series about the history of documentary filmmaking.

Saturday I saw Taps with Dawna, the one where they're going to close down this military school but cadets led by Timothy Hutton grab the drill weapons and end up in a siege.  Well, I saw the first half anyhow.  It's the sort of movie where you know Tom Cruise is a psycho because of his extreme haircut and beret, and the plot requires general George C. Scott to forget that his sidearm still has a live round. (My cold didn't help either.)

My father told me the other week that his mother's father kept a book of Burns poems, the Bible and a bottle of whisky at his bedside.  But I was confused and thought he was referring to my mother's father!

THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT

I'm still not over my cold.  Last night I went to opera rehearsal, but ended up leaving early. (My voice was so weak that I may as well not have been there!) I did make it to the memoir group.

Moira got all four That's Entertainment movies from the library, with clips from MGM musicals. (She especially liked Eleanor Powell's tap-dancing.) The first one is the best: the second has too much narration.

I've managed to get up to speed with my Facebook notifications, but my email backlog is bigger than ever!

VICTORIA AND ABDUL

Doctor: "I didn't spend six years at Edinburgh University to look at Indian dicks!"--Victoria and Abdul

Thursday night I saw Stephen Frears' Victoria and Abdul with someone from the History Meetup at the Yonge & Eglinton. It was cute if predictable. These British movies often have great supporting casts, and I spotted Julian Wadham as a Royal butler!

I'm now reading Michael Wood's India for the History Meetup. The first chapter is already interesting, though I'm still getting over my cold and not reading much.

These days I'm not doing much but going online and following Twitter.  The Bernie Sanders haters are really rabid!  I'm also watching Damages in the evening--Wallace Shawn turned up in one episode!--but even watching a TV show is a bit of a chore.

I was going to attend a Poetry Meetup tonight but saw fit to cancel.  Dawna and I were going to see the movie Taps, but that was easy to postpone a week. Next week there'll be a lot of stuff that's hard to avoid, and I hope I'll be in better shape.

Still under the weather

This is a persistent cold!  I had to miss the memoir group yesterday, and tonight I'll have to miss opera rehearsal.  At times like this I feel like I could stay in bed for the rest of my life!  Last night it took forever to get to sleep.  I just hope I'm over it by Thursday night to see Victoria and Abdul with the History Meetup.

Saturday I saw George Miller's second Mad Max movie The Road Warrior (for the second time) with Dawna.  It rocks! Bruce Spence's jokey helicopter pilot makes a good sidekick for Mel Gibson's stolid hero.

Sunday I discussed Jack Kerouac's On the Road with the Classic Book Club.  I was late finishing it:  the day before on the way home I went into No Frills to get some more pomelos and left the book in there!  But I finished it in the Robarts Library just before we went into the food court for the discussion.  

Afterward I went out to Margo's place north of Bathurst & Steeles for a fall party.  But I got lost and by the time I got there I was pretty worn out.  Lucky there was someone to give me a lift to the subway afterward!

We've started watching the DVD of the third season of Damages. Martin Short has a straight role as a lawyer!

Relocating

"Laredo was a sinister town that morning. All kinds of cab-drivers and border rats wandered around, looking for opportunities. There weren't many; it was too late.  It was the bottom and dregs of America where all the heavy villains sink, where disoriented people have to go to be near a specific elsewhere they can slip into unnoticed. Contraband brooded in the heavy syrup air... Just beyond you could feel the enormous presence of whole great Mexico and almost smell the billion tortillas frying and smoking in the night...  Just across the street Mexico began.  We looked with wonder.  To our amazement, it looked exactly like Mexico"--On the Road

Joan Blondell (seeing Claire Dodd's backside): "There's a familiar sight!"--Footlight Parade

I've changed the location for my Meetups.  Some people complained that the Robarts Library was too confusing for them to find me. (I put directions up the steps to the second floor on the webpage, but a lot of people evidently ignored them.) So now we'll meet at Scallywag's Restaurant, which has a huge space on the top floor.

Today I saw Lloyd Bacon's Warner Brothers Footlight Parade again at the Robarts Library theatre with the Movie Meetup group. (I was about ten minutes late, because I'd convinced myself it was at the Reference Library!) It's nice to see James Cagney in a role using his hoofer talents, and Joan Blondell's one of my favorite '30s leading ladies.  Lots of great pre-Production Code dialogue.

The library book with the poem "Tam O'Shanter" has a whole glossary of Scots words in Robert Burns' poems.  I'm going to write them all down for translating poems into Scots. (Father told me the other day that Mother's father kept a book of Burns poems at his bedside, along with the Bible and a bottle of whiskey.  I'd never heard that before!)

Hope I get over this cold soon!

Backlog

"We were telling these things and both sweating.  We had completely forgotten the people up front who had begun to wonder what was going on in the back seat.  At one point the driver said, 'For God's sakes, you're rocking the boat back there.' Actually we were; the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the it of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank traced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives"--On the Road

Just recently I accumulated a huge backlog of unread emails. About a third of them are Meetup and Twitter notifications.  A lot are from activist groups--NDP, environmentalists, animal welfare--with links to online petitions for me to sign. (They also ask for money, but rarely get it.) 

I need to get a new computer mouse one of these days:  too often when I click on a link, it'll do two clicks!  That's a disadvantage with my email, because sometimes I'll trash two when I only wanted to trash one. So I go to the trash and look for the one I trashed without reading. That isn't so hard if it's the same day, but emails from earlier days are harder to find.

Monday night we finished the second season of Damages. (I'm still figuring out the whole plot!) Timothy Olyphant also had a good role.

Last night the opera started The Magic Flute.  But they're using a different translation from what's printed in the scores and we had to write it in, and I didn't have a pen!  Lucky for me I have such a great memory...

Next Sunday is my book club, and I still haven't finished On the Road.  Tonight just when I was going to start reading it again, I couldn't find it!  But it turned up at last under a shirt.

I hope I'm not getting a cold. Today I bought some pomelo grapefruit.  

Don't open that door!

Hitchhiking on a truck: "And what a driver-- a great big tough truckdriver [sic] with popping eyes and a hoarse raspy voice who just slammed and kicked at everything and got his rig under way and paid hardly any attention to me.  So I could rest my tired soul a little, for one of the biggest troubles hitchhiking is having to talk to innumerable people, make them feel that they didn't make a mistake picking you up, even entertain them almost, all of which is a great strain when you're going all the way and don't plan to sleep in hotels"--On the Road

On a potential US Secretary of Energy: "Trust me, his only loyalty is to the Capitalist Party!"--Damages

Saturday afternoon with Dawna I saw two episodes of The Monkees and two of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

The Monkees were the first ersatz pop group-- my mother hated them!-- in a mildly goofy show. (There was a funny bit during a hotel caper when one of them entered a linen closet and ran off with a towel, and they showed the caption "Everyone does it"!) The Dick Van Dyke Show is still fairly funny today, and Mary Tyler Moore as his wife does a lot for it.

Yesterday afternoon was the Reading Out Loud Meetup with scary writing the topic:  I titled the event "Don't Open That Door!" Eleven people came!  One of them was an American opera singer now performing in the COC's Arabella, who read a pretty good scary poem he'd written some years back.  

I read "Tam O'Shanter"; a story within a story in Richard Adams' rabbit adventure Watership Down, in which the rabbit hero Elalairah goes to the Black Rabbit in charge of death and tries to sacrifice his life to save his starving people; and the last chapter of Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, set in a charnel house for the executed. There was a Lovecraft story, a science fiction story someone had written, and a poem by James Agee! (I also got one girl to read Poe's "The Raven.")

We met in the Robarts Library food court, where there was a Chinese woman called Wendy drawing sketches of everyone in the place!  That's mine at the top.

No Twitter for me today

"That [injured] thumb became symbol of Dean's final development.  He no longer cared about anything (as before) but now he also cared about everything in principle; that is to say, it was all the same to him and he belonged to the world and there was nothing he could do about it"--On the Road

Patty (to her teenage son's cougar girlfriend): "You'll hurt him, and I'll come to you and rip your face off!"--Damages

German strategy: "We'll pretend to retreat on all fronts..."--Europa Europa

Some feminists had a boycott of Twitter today in response to Rose McGowan being suspended for accusing Ben Affleck of lying about Harvey Weinstein.  So I stayed off Twitter today in support of them. (Or maybe it was to show I could go without Twitter for a day.)

Wednesday afternoon I went to the Lillian Smith library to borrow a book of Robert Burns' poetry because I want to read "Tam O'Shanter" at Sunday's Reading Out Loud Meetup.  I borrowed the book, turned to the pages with the poem on the way home, and someone had torn them out! (Selfish...) Today I got another Burns book at the Maria Shchuka library.

Wednesday Moira was using the Metropass, so I used TTC tokens. But the Spadina streetcar's token-accepting machine wasn't working, and at the Spadina station that day the fare inspectors were active! Fortunately, they accepted my excuse.

Thursday night I watched Agnieszka Holland's Europa Europa for the third time, screening the DVD at Debi's place. (Poor Debi has bronchitis!) That's the one about a teenage Jewish boy whose family flees Germany for Poland, then the Nazis invade Poland and he flees east to Soviet territory and a communist orphanage, then the Nazis invade Russia and he gets adopted by an unsuspecting German regiment and sent to a Nazi military school...  Great story, wonderful movie.

The one thing I don't like about Damages is VLA's theme song "When I am Through With You." (The same producers' Bloodline did better with Book of Fear's "The Water Lets You In.")

DAMAGES

"Only a guy who's spent five years in jail can go to such maniacal helpless extremes; beseeching at the portals of the soft source, mad with a completely physical realization of the origins of life-bliss; blindly seeking to return the way he came.  This is the result of years looking at sexy pictures behind bars; looking at the legs and breasts of women in popular magazines; evaluating the hardness of the steel halls and the softness of the woman who is not there"--On the Road

We're now watching the second season of Damages.  It's an unpredictable show that keeps you guessing.  In the first season class-action lawyer Patty (a well-cast Glenn Close) took tycoon Ted Danson to the cleaners; in the second, she's after a polluting West Virginia CEO and gets shareholder Danson to sue him! William Hurt has a good role as a researcher playing both ends against the middle.

The central character is Ellen (Rose Byrne), a beginning lawyer working for Patty.  In the first season she was engaged to a doctor who got murdered, a crime for which she almost got framed.  In the second season she's out to nail the real killers, and they're after her too.  Also, she's working for the feds to help nail Patty, because Patty tried to have her killed in the first season for reasons I still haven't figured out. (Maybe it's all clear when you see it a second time!)

John and Kathrine came over for Thanksgiving and we feasted on vegan chili.

The number of my Twitter followers is steadily approaching 2000.

Refining Twitter

"Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof?  Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life"--On the Road

"You know, we should be thankful that we live in the United States." "That's what people in Poland say!"--Laugh-In

Thursday night was the History Meetup, where we discussed World War II.  One of the people there was a German woman whose father had been drafted at fourteen or so, and whose grandfather spent years as a Soviet POW.  Another was a Chinese guy whose father rose from a peasant to a colonel in China's Red Army.  Two or three people got into long exchanges.

This afternoon I saw a couple more episodes of Laugh-In with Dawna.  Mother hated the show, and I guess she had good taste.  It was full of lines like "That's as funny as a bumblebee in a nudist camp!"

I've been refining my list of Tweeters I'm following. (Opening the page with the whole list takes quite a while, so I got a system of putting my glasses case on the command key and my wallet on the down-arrow key so it'll download without me pushing the keys again and again.) I've been removing Tweeters who use a foreign language, those whose profiles say "We don't own any of the content posted," and those with Trump in their name or profile picture.

Last night I was reckless enough to do a "neverbernie" search of tweets and reply to some of them. (Clintonites on Twitter are insane--a couple even called Sanders a "grifter"!) A few Tweeters have blocked me, and I'll just have to assume that they have no answer for my brilliant comments.

SHANGHAI EXPRESS

"I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief.  I was getting the bug myself.  I even began to try to see if doors were locked"--On the Road

"Why are you going to Shanghai?" "To buy a new hat"--Shanghai Express

"The government would have had my head long ago if it weren't such a good head"--ibid.

Monday night I saw Josef Von Sternberg's Shanghai Express with Marlene Dietrich (for the second time). It's pretty stylish.  I didn't finish my popcorn.  Lillian and Anne and me had a nice chat afterward.

We have a new conductor at the opera.  Last night she said we're already sounding professional!

Today I finally started harvesting the garden.  I got in the carrots and started with the potatoes.

We finished the first season of Damages and will be starting the second one soon. (The rather annoying theme music has been going through my head.) What a double-crosser Patty is!

Simplify, simplify!

"Although Gene was white there was something of the wise and tired old Negro in him, and something very much like Elmer Hassel, the New York dope addict, in him, but a railroad Hassel, a traveling epic Hassel, crossing and recrossing the country every year, south in the winter and north in the summer, and only because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars, generally the Western stars"--On the Road

Hayley Mills (smoking on a train): "I'm not a child, lady, I'm a midget with a bad habit"--The Trouble With Angels.

These days I'm trying to have a shakeout of things like Meetups I never go to and activists who send me emails but I can't sign their petitions because I don't have a U.S. zipcode.  And I've stopped playing the online game Island Experiment.  And just the other day I reached the maximum number of Tweeters you can follow (5000), so now I'm going through the list and removing the ones I know I'm not interested in.

Yesterday afternoon I saw Ida Lupino's The Trouble With Angels (for the third time, but the first time since I was a kid), with Dawna and Debi.  That's the one with Hayley Mills as a mischievous girl in a Catholic school run by nuns. (She reminded me of Claire in Six Feet Under.) Of course, it gets soft in the last half hour and she ends up entering the order. For me it's something of a guilty pleasure. 

On the Road is a pretty fun read, if not so profound as yet.

The cool autumn weather has arrived.  It's time to dig up the potatoes.

Dental appointment

On Hindu-Moslem violence among the Viceroy's servants: "Like Glasgow on a Saturday night!"--Viceroy's House

"Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write!  How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears..."--On the Road

Yesterday I had a dental appointment to replace a filling that got dislodged.  It turned out that to get O.D.S.P. to pay for my checkup two weeks before, I'd brought them the receipt from the wrong month--June instead of September.

Back when O.D.S.P. said I'd be getting a dental card, I thought that meant something you put in your wallet, but it's actually in the monthly receipt they send you.  I must have thrown away September because to me it just seemed one more receipt to clutter up my room.  But I brought them the receipts for July and October, and I hope that's good enough. (Do they think there'd be a two-month gap in my coverage?)

Last night I saw Viceroy's House, about the partition of India and Pakistan, at Canada Square as a History Meetup event. (I'd meant for us to see Victoria and Abdul, but its release got delayed a week.) 

The film increased my sympathy for Lord Mountbatten, who hadn't been told that Churchill and Jinnah had already cut a deal to partition India--he was the fall guy somewhat.  If Congress had let Pakistan take all of Punjab and Bengal, instead of dividing the two states, partition would have been simpler; would it have meant less violence? (Much of the panic and violence resulted from people being uncertain which nation they'd end up in.) At any rate, Pakistan/ Bangladesh would have enjoyed greater diversity, and India still would have been huge.  Nice to see Michael Gambon and Simon Callow in the supporting cast.

Today I picked up Jack Kerouac's On the Road at Oakwood library. I've also been reading Xenophobe's Guide to the Danes.

THE ATTRACTIONS OF MAY

"I liked making love with the lights on.  He liked making love with someone else"--The Attractions of May

Tuesday night I finally made it to opera rehearsal.  We've been learning "Oh, Welche Lust!" the number where the prisoners are let out into the sunshine. (Raquel Welch played Lillian Lust in Bedazzled--see how easy to remember German words are?)

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Play Read-Through Meetup, which started at Yorkville Library but ended in the Reference Library.  We read Norm Foster's The Attractions of May, and I played Hank.  It's really funny!

Finished Manon Lescaut.  I was reading that Abbe Prevost had a lot of real-life experiences like Des Grieux, including an extravagant, enigmatic lover much like Manon!

Last night I was going to go to the Introvert Meetup at the Snakes and Lattes board game hangout, but once again I completely forgot it! (Don't like being one of those Meetup no-shows...)

Hot weekend

"Since, after all, there was nothing in my conduct, taken as a whole, that could totally dishonour me, at least when compared with that prevailing in certain circles of young men, and since a mistress is on considered shameful in the century in which we live, any more than using a little art in persuading fortune to favour one at cards, I described to my father the life I had been leading frankly and in detail"--Manon Lescaut

This weekend was a scorcher. You wouldn't know that it's autumn already!

Saturday I went to a potluck lunch with the Aspergers Meetup group.  I brought fruit salad; someone brought cookies made from corn flakes!  Evie hosted it, and had some discussion questions like "If you were on a desert island with just enough for survival, how would you make your life meaningful?" I'd watch the night skies and get to know the stars.

Afterward I went on Betty Anne's art walk.  We started in Trinity-Bellwoods Park, where they were having an arts festival. (The music was a bit too distracting for me, unfortunately.) Betty-Anne pointed out a Filipino ice cream shop where they have charcoal-black waffle cones and very exotic flavors.

On Twitter people are talking about the controversy over the football players kneeling for the national anthem.  Why shouldn't you kneel?  To me it seems every bit as "respectful" as standing!

As a Canadian, I'm ashamed that our government won't let Chelsea Manning into the country.

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE

"'It is impossible,' he said, 'that the wealth that maintains you in your dissolute way of life should have come to you lawfully.  You have acquired it dishonestly; it will be taken from you in the same way.  The most terrible punishment that God could inflict on you would be to leave you to enjoy it in peace.'... I listened amicably to his advice; and although I was not in the least disposed to follow it, was grateful for his zeal, for I knew the source from which it sprang"--Manon Lescaut

"The things I do for England!"--James Bond

This afternoon I saw Lewis Gilbert's You Only Live Twice with Dawna.  It's one of the more offbeat James Bond movies. (When Sean Connery was in Japanese disguise, he reminded me of Marlon Brando in Teahouse of the August Moon!) Major plot hole:  at the end they escaped through the tunnel where they couldn't enter earlier because it contained poison gas.

I'm enjoying my reading these days.  Manon Lescaut must have been ahead of its time:  there's something really modern about the contradictions in Des Grieux' character. (Remember when I said that the book and opera Carmen was the first film noir?  Now I think this was it!)

I'm also enjoying J.L. Granatstein's coffee-table book about Canada in World War II, especially the chapter about the home front.  In the broad terms of Canadian history, the wartime period seems like something of an aberration...

Lawyer Glenn Close on Damages is pretty scary, like Tina Brown on speed!  Talk about a poker face...

D'OH!

Des Grieux on Manon being sent to the Hopital jailhouse: "It was not that she was treated barbarously; but she was kept in close confinement, alone, and condemned to complete each day a particular task, the necessary condition for her securing a portion of disgusting food"--Manon Lescaut (Forced to work for a living--poor baby!)

Last night was the first rehearsal for the new Toronto City Opera season.  We'll be doing Beethoven's Fidelio and Mozart's The Magic Flute. (We were going to do the Canadian opera Transit of Venus instead of The Magic Flute, but plans got changed.) This year the chorus will be unusually big.  We'll be doing Fidelio in its original German, a language I don't recall we've ever done before:  pray for us.

I wasn't there, however. (I know of the chorus size because it was mentioned on a TOR-related webpage.) So why did I miss it? Because I completely forgot about it!  I guess John Snow's right -- I do have too many activities.

We've started watching the legal drama Damages on DVD from the library. (We're interested in it because it's created by the same people as Bloodline.)

Saw Blurred Lines at the Bloor. It's a documentary about the modern art scene and how it's been distorted by millionaires paying huge sums at the big auctions. (As far as I'm concerned, you can have Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.)

*GASP!*

"Everything they say at Saint-Sulpice about free will is an idle fancy.  I already see that I will lose my fortune and my reputation for your sake.  I can read my destiny in your lovely eyes"--Manon Lescaut

Friday morning I had a dental checkup. (In the reception area I met Kathy from my opera group!) I still haven't got my dental card from ODSP so I'll have to deal with that soon. Because I had a headache Thursday and had to get up early Friday, I got behind in my emails. (I need to unsubscribe from more of those lists!)

Yesterday afternoon was the Reading Out Loud Meetup. September is Banned Books Month, so as usual our topic was banned and challenged books. (The event's title was *GASP!*) I read a chapter from Frank McCourt's memoir 'Tis, in which he tried to teach J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye to his high school class but the principal came in and confiscated all the books!  We also read the chapter from Catcher where Holden meets Luce the college boy.  

Other readings were the first chapter of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (from the second edition--I suppose John Snow knows the differences between the editions!); the part from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita where Humbert Humbert recalls all the places they visited driving around the U.S.; and Tomi Ungerer's children's book No Kiss for Mother (which a librarian panel denounced, leading to all his books being removed from some school libraries!) I would have read a bit from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but we ran out of time.

Through sheer persistence, I've come to follow over 2500 people on Twitter. (Some of them are nice enough to tweet their thanks!) I skip the singers and the business firms and those using foreign languages, but there are still a lot of others.  And mostly as a result of that, I already have close to a thousand followers.

Manon Lescaut is a cracking good read!  I'm still not sure what to think of Manon:  is she a "bad girl" or just making the best of her limited options?

Nightmare!

"That human resolutions should be subject to change is not something that has ever surprised me:  being born of a particular passion, they may be destroyed by another; but when I think of the sanctity of the resolutions that had brought me to Saint-Sulpice, and of the inner joy Heaven granted me so long as I continued to carry them out, I tremble at the ease with which I was able to break them"--Manon Lescaut (Something Catholic about that!)

Flip Wilson as Adam: "It wasn't the apple in the tree, it was the tomato on the ground!"--Laugh-In

Last night I had a nightmare. That doesn't happen often, but I was tardy refilling my Cipralex prescription and that tends to cause vivid dreams. (The night before I had a dream involving Liv Tyler and Colin Firth in a movie about invaders destroying London landmarks, with me an actor playing Firth[?] and improvising lines about how depressed I was being in such a stupid movie.) 

In my nightmare I was in the movie I Want to Live! the one where Susan Hayward ends up in the gas chamber, which I actually haven't seen. (A glamorous-looking death row prisoner, isn't she?  If you ask me, a movie with an exclamation mark in the title is trying too hard.) In the dream I wasn't a character in the movie, but an audience-like observer who knew what was going to happen and wanted to get out before seeing it.  Sort of like when Wile E. Coyote went off a cliff and got them to end the cartoon before he reached the ground.

This afternoon I saw a couple of episodes of Laugh-In with Dawna.  Yes, it is pretty dated. (The funniest bit was Tommy Smothers introducing Rowan and Martin and struggling to pronounce their names!)

I've started reading Abbe Prevost's Manon Lescaut for John Snow's book club and J.L. Granatstein's The Last Good War, about Canada in World War II, for the History Meetup.

Last time I forgot to mention that at this week's memoir group, there was a rare subject that I couldn't think of anything to write about:  sports cars.

LEAVING HOME

"As for Pierre Gringoire, he not only managed to save the goat, but he became somewhat a success as a dramatist.  It appears that, after delving into astrology, philosophy, architecture, hermetics, and having tasted every variety of silly pursuit, he returned to tragedy, which is the silliest of all.  It was what he called coming to a tragic end....  Phoebus de Chateaupers likewise came to a tragic end--he married"--The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Sunday night I saw a documentary at the Bloor about A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the East Indian who brought the Hare Krishna movement to '60s America, then the world. (I couldn't remember his name and had to look it up on Wikipedia.) 

Then Monday night I saw the documentary Hitler: A Career on Netflix.  (They were rather opposite personalities, of course.) It mentions that part of the reason the Nazis caught on in early '30s Germany was because their activities were more fun than the other parties!

Yesterday I ran through David French's Leaving Home with the Play Reading Meetup at Yorkville Library. (We had to move out to a park in the middle because a book club had the room.) It's a 1972 play about a Newfoundland family in Toronto, and I was Ben, the son about to leave home.  I saw the play on the CBC back in the '70s, or maybe it was the sequel Of the Fields Lately.  At any rate I remember the grace: "Bless this food that now we take and feed our souls for Jesus' sake!"

I've finished Hunchback. Its style is rather theatrical, almost operatic! (I wasn't surprised to learn that Victor Hugo wrote a libretto for an opera version.)

I now have over 500 Twitter followers!  I guess I reached a critical mass after following a thousand Tweeters...

Organizers Meetup

"I wonder if anything gives a mother more delight than the contemplation of her infant's shoe, especially if it be a holiday, a Sunday, or a baptismal shoe, a shoe embroidered to its very sole--a shoe worn before the child has taken its first step.  That shoe so cute and tiny covered a foot to young to walk; it is the shoe that recalls her baby so poignantly that it seems as if the child were present"--The Hunchback of Notre Dame

"What place are you bound for?" "Same place as you, Jeremiah--hell, in the end"--Jeremiah Johnson

Wednesday night I went to an Organizers Meetup at Spring Rolls near Yonge & Bloor.  I met quite a few people I knew, including the Russian Margo (not the Polish Margo).  Some people speaking for Meetup were talking about the site's new look and looking for feedback from us. But I really can't judge such changes until I've actually been working with them.

Thursday night was the History Meetup.  The subject was the Renaissance and we discussed Machiavelli's The Prince.

Yesterday I saw the 1972 Sydney Pollack-Robert Redford western Jeremiah Johson with Dawna. Anne came too, but she left early because she couldn't face its turning violent.  It's one of the cooler westerns, though the last half hour is weak.

Today I went to Dutch Dreams for ice cream with a Meetup group.  The weather's been changing, and I've had a severe headache.  This evening we watched an architectural show on Netflix about ten outstanding bridge designs. (The series also does museums and city squares and such.)

MILDRED PIERCE

"He did not know, he whose heart was as light as air, he who observed no law in the world but the ordinary laws of nature, he who allowed his passions to follow what course they wanted, so that the spring of his emotions was always dry because he opened daily so many fresh channels--he had no idea with what fury that flood of human passions swells and surges when it is refused outlet, how it gathers strength, and overflows, how it wears away the heart, how it has broken away its dikes and burst from its bed"--The Hunchback of Notre Dame

"A ruler who just plays the lion and forgets the fox doesn't know what he's doing.  Hence a sensible leader cannot and must not keep his word if by doing so he puts himself at risk, and if the reasons that made him give his word in the first place are no longer valid.  If all men were good, this would be bad advice, but since they are a sad lot and won't be keeping their promises to you, you hardly need to keep yours to them.  Anyway, a ruler will never be short of good reasons to explain away a broken promise"--The Prince

"One of these days you may have a weak moment." "When I do I'll send you a telegram--collect!"--Mildred Pierce

Sunday we finished the Netflix series Ozark.  As much as I like shows with smart characters, so many characters being this smart is rather hard to swallow.

Tonight I saw Michael Curtiz' Mildred Pierce for the third time. It's a hard-boiled Joan Crawford melodrama and corny fun, with some great dialogue. (The Kate Winslet version wasn't as good, despite having a handsome look.) Jack Carson and Eve Arden have good supporting roles.

I'm now following over 500 tweeters, and have over 30 followers of my own. (The big topics on Twitter just now are Trump announcing he'll abandon the Dream Act, and Hillary Clinton's weaselly-sounding campaign memoir.)

What weather!  Harvey hit Texas last week, Irma is about to hit Florida, and Jose is already forming.

DIRTY HARRY

"Women understand and respond to one another more quickly than do men....  To tinge a whole company of pretty women with a certain amount of ill-humor, it is enough for just one prettier woman to arrive on the scene--especially when there is but one man present"--The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Dirty Harry (to his new partner): "I hope your college degree doesn't get you killed, because I might get killed with you."

Thursday night I tried to screen Zhang Yimou's To Live at Debi's place for the History Meetup. But the subtitles wouldn't play, and about a third of the way through it got completely unplayable! Pity, it's a wonderful movie...

Yesterday afternoon I saw with Dawna Don Siegel's Nixonite vigilante classic Dirty Harry, which made Clint Eastwood a star in America. (He was already the top star overseas!) To call it a caricature is putting it mildly: in the last third it becomes a full-fledged cartoon!  The villain, out to extort money from the city government,  assassinates random people, then says he has a girl buried alive, then gets released on a technicality, then pays someone to beat him up so he can say Eastwood did it and stop the latter's surveillance, then takes a school bus hostage.  It's the sort of movie where Eastwood's watching for the villain through binoculars and ends up seeing naked women who haven't closed their curtains. (I'd thought that Animal House invented that cliche!) Never a dull moment, I'll admit.

What's depressing about movies like this isn't just that they're transparently manipulative. (Dedicating the movie to San Francisco policemen killed in action was especially shameless!) It's that people are so easy to manipulate, at least in America. Just like those Jell-o Pudding Pops commercials where Bill Cosby says in a smarmy voice, "Mom won't give you the Evil Eye because it's made of real pudding!" Then they show a pair of motherly hands mixing the pudding and adding milk from a pitcher.  We all know it's made in some factory and filled with sugar and fat and exotic chemicals, but American moms have a vague image of pudding as "wholesome."

Twitter is a first-class time-waster!  I've been following every tweeter they suggest just in case any of them comes up with something interesting...