Allegro Giocoso

"That's not what Your Holiness wanted." "No, I planned a ceiling--he plans a miracle!"--The Agony and the Ecstasy

"But what we're talking here is attitude.  Burt [Reynolds] has got it down now.  He can do a whole movie without any plot to get it all mucked up"--Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In

Friday I went to the campaign HQ again and met the candidate Jill Andrew.  I divided about 3000 campaign flyers into bundles of fifty.  I figured out a fast way:  count out 25, then make a second pile of the same height and combine them to make fifty, saving half the time.  Later I figured out an even quicker method:  make two piles of the same height and combine them, so you'll only have to count out the 25 once!

Saturday afternoon I saw Carol Reed's The Agony and the Ecstasy at the Lightbox, part of a series of movies about artists.  Based on a book by unreliable middlebrow biographer Irving Stone, it's about how Michelangelo (Charlton Heston, hopelessly out of his depth) came to paint the Sistine Chapel.  It's the sort of movie where they show his Statue of David but add a fig leaf!  Yet I'm a bit of a sucker for those Hollywood epics from the '50s and '60s with huge crowd scenes and ritzy production values.  I can somehow believe that Pope Julius II was as much of a pill as Rex Harrison...

Afterward I went on Betty Anne's art walk.  We went to places like the Ben Sherman boutique, where I bought a black bow tie at a ten-dollar discount.  What a big bag they gave me for such a small item!  She also pointed out Terroni's, the Italian restaurant that royal bride Meghan Markle frequented while filming Suits here. (She's done a guided tour of Toronto sites with connections to her!)

Later I went to The Beguiling and bought Cullen Murphy's Cartoon County, a memoir about growing up the son of comic strip artist John Cullen Murphy (Big Ben Bolt, Prince Valiant) and getting to know other leading lights in his father's trade. (I've been looking forward to that one.)

Today was the Reading Out Loud Meetup, and the topic was funny writing, so I titled it "Allegro Giocoso." I read part of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, where he fights a well-dressed boy; part of This Boy's Life, where Tobias Wolff describes the antics of him and his tweener friends; Joe Bob Briggs' review of Burt Reynolds' Stroker Ace in Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In; and Carl Sandburg's poem "Yarns."

I've started a new Facebook game Big Farm.  In the Vikings game I somehow got a package of 100 three-hour speedups, so I've been building so quickly that my resources are getting depleted, except for iron.