Father's home!

Father came home yesterday! Moira thought they'd be keeping him for the pacemaker operation, but that won't be for a while yet.  I was taken by surprise when I came home later, like in one of those cheesy movies like Pearl Harbor where a guy thought to be dead shows up without phoning ahead...

I was just coming home from meeting Miriam and Anne at a fabric sale by volunteers from the Textile Museum. (I bought a $5.00 Tommy Hilfinger shirt with dynamic stripes that's probably too big for me, just so Anne can photograph me in it!) I'll probably be helping Miriam with her craft sales events in the near future.

John came over Monday and insulated the sun room so Father can sleep there in the winter.  He poured in the insulation through a hole in my old room, leaving a thick layer of dust everywhere.  Afterward I went into the room and opened the windows to air it out, tracking dust into the hallway that Moira had cleaned just the day before...

Last night I went to a Meetup for people interested in enneagrams.  That's a system where people can be divided into nine categories, which I can demonstrate with characters from Winnie-the-Pooh and Peanuts!

Mediator:  Pooh & Charlie Brown

Reformer (my category): Piglet & Schroeder

Challenger:  Christopher Robin & Lucy

Achiever:  Rabbit & Snoopy

Individualist: Eeyore & Peppermint Patty

Investigator:  Owl & Linus

Helper:  Kanga & Marcie

Loyalist:  Roo & Woodstock

Enthusiast:  Tigger & Sally

I wonder if the nine characters in The Brady Bunch can be so categorized?

Tonight I went to another Meetup, this time for Meetup organizers. (There was a guy who organizes a Cryptocurrency Meetup, and a girl with a remarkable resemblance to Elle MacPherson.) Unfortunately, the event started at 6:00 and what with John's further home and yard work and much confusion, we didn't have dinner till 5:50, so I was over half an hour late.  But it was nice to meet other people dealing with the headaches of organizing Meetup groups...

I've finally got near the end of my backlog of unread emails, which had been accumulating for about six months.  Only seventy are left, and they're all from Counterpunch News and Pocket Hits.

End of the opera

This afternoon was the last Magic Flute performance. Another annual season over with. (The place was pretty full both today and on Friday.)

Yesterday afternoon I went to see Father at the hospital, but he'd been moved out of the critical area and I couldn't see any nurses to say where he'd gone.  He'd gone to the area for patients in less serious condition, but for a while I was afraid he'd got worse!

Afterward I went to Betty-Anne's art walk.  But I was so concerned about Father that I ended up leaving early.

It turns out that they're going to give Father a pacemaker so he'll be in the hospital for a while longer.

The other day on Twitter some American was posting a meme about Our Great, Strong Military, so I commented, "Only weak people feel the need to look strong." They didn't like that!

I rule at Candy Crush Saga!

"Mitzi felt an old, amicable, exasperated pity for him and a momentary desire to hit him.  She laid her fingers spread wide upon his chest, touching the material of his jacket rather than him, an incoherent gesture such as an awkward affectionate animal might have made"--Iris Murdoch, An Accidental Man

Sunday I finished the Luck issue of Lapham's Quarterly. (One down, seven more to go...) Now I've started reading the Flesh issue.

Last night was dress rehearsal for The Magic Flute.  These costumes are simpler for the chorus:  we just put robes over our clothes.  I really like Tamino and Pamina's duet when they go through the fires of the final test! (It's in the second half of the video above.)

I'm past Level 1550 in Candy Crush Saga.  The other day I was doing one of the levels with a time limit, and ended up scoring over 2.8 million points! (It was a matter of continually nailing the candies that carried 5-second time extensions...) I came first in this Coconut Island contest.

It seems that Father suffered cardiac arrest last week!  They were still testing him today.

I'm really enjoying editing Miriam's manuscript.  It's the sort of thing I'd do for free! (Tonight there was a short blackout so I lost some unsaved work.)

Go Comics

I'm now sleeping in Father's old room since he'll be moving downstairs, but I took my old blankets.  Since we've moved the TV set downstairs, I shifted the bed into a position flush with the corner.

I've subscribed to Go Comics, which has several strips that I can't get at the King Features website.  They include some story strips The Comics Curmudgeon often discusses, like Gil Thorp and Gasoline Alley.  And they also include some classics, like Al Capp's Li'l Abner--in its first year!--and Jim Unger's Herman. (Remember that?) I'm interested enough in Brooke McEldowney's 9 Chickweed Lane to subscribe to both the current strip and the classic strip (which is just 15 years old or so!).

I visited Father yesterday, bringing him a toothbrush, but he'd been having some more tests--won't be home for a while yet--and was sleepy.

Miriam sent me the first part of her memoir to edit.  It's pretty enjoyable so far.

Tonight we rehearsed The Magic Flute at the Al Green Theatre. (Tomorrow's the dress rehearsal.) A couple of people had their birthday today, so there was a birthday cake!

I've forgotten to mention that last Thursday night I saw the DVD of the French movie Indochine with the History Meetup.  The story was no great shakes, but fiftysomething Catherine Deneuve looked great! (She actually had better hair here than in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.)

Interesting art

Time for a post of art that interests me!

Michelangelo Merisi di Caravaggio, "The Burial of Jesus." Caravaggio uses light so dramatically that the source of light implicitly dominates the image, in a way that suits religious art well.

Diego Velazquez, "Coronation of the Virgin." I like how clear this whole image looks!

Nicolas Lancret, "A Lady in a Garden Taking Coffee With Some Children." Cute rococo from 18th-century France.

William Hogarth, "Gin Lane" and "Beer Street." While the first drawing chose the destructiveness of gin, the second shows the problem being solved by people drinking beer instead!  (There's something disturbing about the way Hogarth combines realism with caricature, a serious message with a tongue-in-cheek tone.)

Francisco Goya, "The Grape Harvest." Goya created some powerful wartime images, but I do like his early, sunnier paintings. (Robert Hughes said about Goya, "We expect a great artist to change over his lifetime.  But this much?")

J.M.W. Turner, "War:  Exile and the Rock Limpet." With his proto-impressionistic style, Turner depicts Napoleon in his last days on St. Helena. (Turner painted this in his sixties:  is there a subtext about his own old age?)

Utagawa Hiroshige, "Kambara." Maybe it's because I'm Canadian, but I really like Hiroshige's Japanese snowscape prints!

Wassily Kandinsky, "Don't Miss:  Important Art." Kandinsky is one of my favorite twentieth century artists.  He's very, very original!

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, "On the Terrace." A lot of artists have tried to imitate Renoir, but nobody gets it right.  What a cute little girl!

Here's another Fritz Eichenberg woodcut, illustrating Wuthering Heights.

Opening night!

Last night was the opening night for Fidelio.  This year we're using liquid foundation, so it's a bit harder for me to judge by feel whether I have enough.  My costume did show up, but I must have lost some pounds in the four months since the fitting, since my pants were pretty loose. We solved the problem by attaching it to my shirt with safety pins.

Today I finally went to see Father in the West Toronto hospital. (Nice atrium!) I remembered coming to see Mother at the hospital at Yonge & Queen five years ago. (I brought my book, Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop, but didn't stay as long as I expected because John was there too.) We were getting ready for her return home when she left us after just a week.  I was afraid that Father would leave us before I got to see him! 

Father will be coming home Monday or Tuesday.  He'll be sleeping downstairs so he won't have to use the stairs so much, and we can turn the sun room into his bedroom when it gets warmer.  That means I can take his old room, which doesn't need the electric heater! (I offered it to Moira because it seems so luxurious, but she's happy with her present room.) We'll also be moving the widescreen TV set downstairs.

The other day I saw the photo of the 7000 pairs of sneakers left on the Capitol Hill lawn in support of gun control.  It reminded me of that shot in The Pianist of the square cleared of Jewish deportees, containing only the luggage they had to leave behind. (Can you believe that Trump fired that guy just before he would have qualified for a pension?  Mean and petty.)

I just noticed that they've torn down the Honest Ed's building!  Frankly, the neighbourhood will be better off without that eyesore facade...

Numbers

I've got interested in prime numbers lately. (You can use the Sieve of Eratosthenes to determine which numbers are prime:  any composite number will have at least one prime factor less than or equal to its square root.) I've even written out an array of those below 630!

2,3,5      031\       061\       091\       121\       151\       181   

007\011 037\041 067\071 097\101 127\131 157\161 187\191

013\017 043\047 073\077 103\107 133\137 163\167 193\197

019\023 049\053 079\083 109\113 139\143 169\173 199\203

      \029       \059        \089       \119       \149       \179      \209 

211\       241        271\       301\       331\       361\       391\

217\221 247\251 277\281 307\311 337\341 367\371 397\401

223\227 253\257 283\287 313\317 343\347 373\377 403\407

229\233 259\263 289\293 319\323 349\353 379\383 409\413

      \239       \269       \299       \329       \359       \389       \419

421\       451\       481\       511\       541\       571\       601\

427\431 457\461 487\491 517\521 547\551 577\581 607\611

433\437 463\467 493\497 523\527 553\557 583\587 613\617

439\443 469\473 499\503 529\533 559\563 589\593 619\623

      \449       \479       \509       \539       \569       \599       \629

In setting up this array, I've started with the numbers that don't divide 2, 3 or 5, eight numbers to which you keep adding multiples of 30. (The strikethroughs are of composites.) And each row has seven repetitions of these eight numbers, so that the composites of 7 will repeat themselves row by row through adding multiples of 210!  Prime numbers fascinate me...

I've been thinking some more about that problem where you bet money with a 50% chance of losing it and a 50% chance of a 150% profit.  Consider what happens if you bet the same proportion of your money twice and you win once and lose once, as will happen half the time. (Whether you win and then lose or lose and then win doesn't matter:  the result is the same.)  

If the proportion is one sixth,  with a one-quarter gain half the time, you'll end up with a one in twenty-four gain. (This is the proportion that yields the peak profit:  you can prove it through differential calculus.) But if it's 20% (one-fifth), with a 30% gain half the time, you'll  still get a one in twenty-five profit (4%). That's only marginally less, so I'd make that my regular bet:  a bigger bet is likely to get bigger returns overall.  On the other hand, if you raise the proportion to one half, you'll end up with a one-eighth loss, so you shouldn't bet any more than that.  (With a proportion of one third, you'll break even.)

When you're on a winning streak, however, it pays to increase the bet because you can afford greater risk.  I'd start raising it when I've had two wins in a row, leaving me 69% ahead of the level before the first win.  If you raise it to 25%, even if you lose you'll still be 27% ahead, only slightly behind where you were before the second win. But if you win, you'll be just over 130% ahead!

Similarly, after a third win I'd raise it again to 30%.  If you lose, you're 60% ahead; if you win, you're 235% ahead!  And so on until you reach 50%, at which point you should stay until you finally lose. (Of course, that'll only happen when you win eight times in a row...) And after you lose, you go right back to 20% until the next consecutive wins.

The point is that when you have a winning streak, you'll really clean up. (And even your first loss will leave you little worse off than just before your last win.) If you lose six in a row and then win, you'll be down to a third of your earlier level, but if you win six in a row and then lose, you'll have a sixfold increase!

I abhor gambling, but I like to follow in Blaise Pascal's footsteps (that's him in the pic!) and study the odds.

A medical emergency

Monday afternoon at the memoir group one of our topics was fairy tales, and I mentioned Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment.  It turned out that the same book was on display on the Lillian Smith library's main floor!

Monday evening I read Miriam's entertaining article about hitchhiking to Vancouver in 1969 for Anne's magazine, and made some editing suggestions. (When I emailed the suggestions, I quoted a dentist: "I'm the expert, you're the boss.") I really enjoy editing!  I could do it for the rest of my life. Afterward I suffered from insomnia.

When I got up Tuesday morning Father wasn't around, which surprised me because he'd been sick.  In the afternoon Moira came home and said they'd taken him to the hospital in an ambulance for some tests. (They gave him extra blankets because his body temperature was low.) He keeps a watch on his blood-sugar count, and it had a big spike Monday, but by the time they got him to the hospital it was returning to normal.  They think he may be hemorrhaging.

That evening we rehearsed Fidelio at the Al Green Theatre for the first time.  They'd brought our costumes there, but I couldn't find mine! Let's hope it shows up before the dress rehearsal tonight.  I'd got hardly any sleep the night before, but I didn't start to feel sleepy till the last hour of the rehearsal.  The stage barricade us prisoners are behind reminds me of the spiked barricade in Spartacus that the gladiators pulled up and turned flat into a weapon!

Fritz Eichenberg

I had another vivid dream last night.  I was in William Goodenough House at Goodenough College where I spent eight months in 1995 (I often dream that), but there was a mixup about the rooms so another person was in the room and he and his friends were watching a loud TV show when I was really sleepy and just wanted to sleep.  Also, there was a (non-existent) emergency slide down to the main floor that kids were playing on.

I just set the topic for July's History Meetup.  It'll be on July 4, and we'll be discussing the American Revolution.  I've been getting far ahead in posting these events because I love writing out a basic historic background in the event description!  The background reading will be from the "Very Short Introduction" series, which has a lot of stuff about history and won't be too great a challenge for other members.

A few days ago I was posting in my This Time 15 Years Ago blog about starting to read Jane Eyre, in an edition with woodcut illustrations by Fritz Eichenberg.  I was just looking at his work online, and he was an expressionistic genius--in his woodcuts the trees and the sky are like characters in themselves! (You can find a lot of his pictures on Pinterest.)

I've taken to adding pictures to my blogs whenever I can think of an appropriate one. (I also included a link to a notable Salon article I read fifteen years ago.) The other night I was posting a memoir piece about waste that mentioned men taking trains to buffalo herds and shooting them just for the thrill, and I found a 19th century drawing that showed such a shoot!  The illustration at top is Eichenberg's self-portrait "The Dream of Reason," with some of the authors he's illustrated. Of course, it's an homage to Goya's etching "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters."

Formative and central events

What with my interest in history, I was thinking in terms of how each century has a formative event and a central event (Remember that I'm viewing these events from the perspective of Western history!)

Century  Formative Event  Central Event

13th       Third Crusade      Imperial-Papal

-----         (1189-92)      conflict (1237-50)

14th          Creation of the     Black Death

-----          Mongol Empire

15th          Papal Schism     Renaissance

-----          (1378-1417)

16th          Da Gama's          Reformation

-----          voyage to India

17th            Counter-          30 Years War

-----          Reformation          (1618-48)

18th          War of the         Enlightenment

-----          Grand Alliance

-----          (1689-1702)

19th          French                Industrial      

-----          Revolution          Revolution

-----          (1789-1814)

20th           World War I      World War II

-----             (1914-18)          (1937-45)

I noticed that there's less certainty with formative events than with central events.  I chose Da Gama's discovery of the sea route to India over Columbus' discovery of the route to America:  that's because Da Gama transformed Europe a lot more quickly.  I chose the War of the Grand Alliance over the later War of the Spanish Succession (1702-15) simply because this was basically a continuation of the earlier war.  And I chose the French Revolution over the American Revolution (sorry, Americans) because it changed Europe more directly.

Notice also that I have the Second World War starting in 1937 instead of 1939 because I see the Pacific War as starting with Japan's 1937 invasion of China.

I've also been thinking in terms of millennia!

Millennium     Formative     Central

                        Event            Event

Late             Median         Alexander the

Ancient     conquest of    Great's conquest

(500 BC-    Nineveh             of Persia 

500 AD)    (612 BC)            (331 BC)

Medieval     Fall of the     Creation of the

(500 AD-      Roman           Holy Roman

1500)          Empire (476)   Empire (800)

Modern     Renaissance     Enlightenment

(1500-)

Very schematic of me, I know...

Nap season

Monday at the memoir group, Michael from Moncton wrote about the time he was a temp worker at a Calgary solid waste processing center.  One day they were going to have an open house and hoping for good P.R.  But Michael found himself in a mountain of waste standing on something that felt odd, and it turned out to be a dead moose!  They had to cover it up and keep the discovery secret from the guests.  I hear lots of funny stories from this group.

While I was at the Lillian Smith library, I borrowed an updated Canadian edition of The Book of Lists.

Yesterday we rehearsed Fidelio with the soloists.  I came early and helped the stage manager move some props.

Did I make a resolution to stop napping?  Today I had a long nap in the afternoon, then a long nap in the evening!

I was just posting from my 2003 diary about seeing Ralph Fiennes in David Cronenberg's Spider.  I should see that again!

More music

Time for some more music clips!

Joseph Haydn, Trumpet Concerto, featuring Wynton Marsalis.  I especially like the third movement--real Saturday morning music!

Georges Bizet, "Parle-Moi de Ma Mere" from Carmen.  A Placido Domingo-Angela Gheorgiu duet from a Metropolitan Opera production. If I could bring one composer back from the dead, it would be Bizet. Mozart, Schubert and Chopin also died young, but they were so prolific that you can feel they had full careers. What might Bizet have created if he'd lived longer?  You'd think that "nice girl" Michaela would be a thankless role, but Bizet even came up with wonderful music for her, both here and in her third-act aria!

Giacomo Puccini, Humming Chorus from his Japanese opera Madama Butterfly.  One of my favorite choruses, an atmospheric conveying of waiting.

Rudolf Friml and Herbert Stothart, "The Donkey Serenade" from The Firefly.  Just about my favorite operetta song ever. Alan Jones, who had the Zeppo role in a couple of Marx Brothers movies, serenades Jeanette MacDonald in the 1937 MGM movie of Friml's 1912 operetta. (Yes, Jeanette did make movies without Nelson Eddy or Maurice Chevalier!) That song was actually added to the show, with the melody coming from another Friml composition.  It was originally set in Bermuda but they moved the setting to Spain during the Napoleonic Wars, presumably because the Spanish Civil War was in the news.

Tommy Dorsey and Buddy Rich, "Hawaiian War Chant." A clip from the 1942 MGM movie Ship Ahoy from the golden age of big jazz bands. (That's the great Eleanor Powell at the end!)

The Beach Boys, "Wouldn't It Be Nice." From their classic album Pet Sounds, this song grows on us as we get older and feel nostalgia for the time when we were young and impatient. (I especially like the opening!)

Ravi Shankar at the Monterey Pop festival, 1967.  DA Pennebaker's Monterey Pop is one of my favorite concert movies, and Ravi Shankar's  long sitar piece is one of my favorite numbers.  It works even better in a cinema!

Patrick Williams Orchestra, theme from The Streets of San Francisco.  One of the great TV series themes, it's a wocka-wocka classic!

Ultravox, "Dancing With Tears in My Eyes" from Lament. This tragic video meant a lot to me back in the '80s.  Nice touch with the film melting away at the end!

Kevin Spacey doing Bobby Darren's "Beyond the Sea." in Beyond the Sea.  Sure, Spacey's in the doghouse now, but I must say that this is a funny number. (Like "My Way," "Beyond the Sea" is based on a French song: Charles Trenet's "La Mer"!) Mad magazine used to make fun of Darren a lot, depicting him as Narcissus once.

THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES

"Are you going to pull those guns, or whistle Dixie?"--The Outlaw Josey Wales

On Thursday Donald, John and Kathrine came over for Indian food to celebrate Father's 88th birthday.  I had to leave early for the History Meetup where we discussed Vietnam.

Saturday afternoon I saw Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales for the second time.  It's a solid, realistic western that improves with second viewing. (Of course, the first time I saw it 27 years ago I'd just had a wisdom tooth removed and my jaw was gradually becoming unfrozen, which feels like being punched in the mouth but 1000 times as strong, so I wasn't in a receptive mood.) Chief Dan George was always a welcome addition.

Last night I dreamed of being in Halifax, and the folksong "Un Canadien Errant," but in nine-eighths rhythm with a melody more like a slow "Here We Go Loopy Loo."

The best-laid schemes...

I was recently using Facebook chat to correspond with a girl from the Waterloo area.  We'd been in touch a year and a half ago, but had a falling out when she wanted me to buy this plush toy for her on Amazon. I told her I'd forgotten my Amazon passport--which was actually true--and she sent me weeping emoticons! (Someone advised me to block her, but she was harmless enough.)

Anyway, we got in touch again recently, and she wanted me to send her a message with my voice in it.  I actually have the technology to do that, and sent her one.  The thing was, I wasn't sure what to say and ended up singing!  That turned out to be the wrong thing to do, and now we're estranged again. (Gee, everyone else likes my singing!)

We have a subscription to Crave TV that runs out in a week or two, so we've been seeing how much is left to see there.  Sunday night we saw a documentary about Debbie Reynolds and her daughter Carrie Fisher, then Monday night it was a documentary about the historian David McCullough.

At opera rehearsal last night we worked on The Magic Flute again, this time with soloists.

The weather's been warm the last few days, and I've stopped wearing long johns. (I stopped wearing winter boots the other week.) Of course, there's going to be a big snowstorm tomorrow!

I finished that book about Napoleon the other day, and now I'm starting to catch up on Lapham's Quarterly.  I'm currently reading the Summer 2016 issue, whose topic is luck.

Last night I dreamed that I'd just woken up along Eglinton Avenue (in this dream it was on a shore!) and started walking south, in a homeward direction.