The World is my Back Yard

https://kseniaparkhatskaya.com/portfolio/dance/

The other day I found a link of an incredible Russian woman dancing the Charleston on a Russian TV talent show! (It's the lower left video on the page linked above.) It actually got put in a Facebook group devoted to the Gilded Age, but why be fussy?  No-one dances like the Russians--nobody else has that craziness!

Saturday afternoon I went to that costume warehouse in New Toronto where they were having a big sale in period clothes.  Nothing interested me, but getting there and back was a fine adventure. Afterward I went on Betty-Anne's art walk, but I left a bit early what with the heat.

Yesterday was the Reading Out Loud Meetup.  The topic was translated foreign-language writing, and I titled it "The World Is My Back Yard." (That's a line from a song in the Disney animated feature The Aristocats!) I read Heinrich Heine's poem The Lorelei, a story from Boccaccio's Decameron about a convent gardener pretending to be a deaf-mute, and my translation of Camoes' Lusiades (the part where the Greek gods debate Portugal's future).  A blind guy brought some Arabic poems by Adonis and a Zimbabwean read a Neruda poem. (We also read the part in Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris where Quasimodo's ugly mug gets him crowned King of Fools and the part in Cervantes' Don Quixote where he charges at the windmills.)

The Comics Kingdom run of Popeye strips from the '30s is finished. (Just before that great story set in the Wild West where Olive Oyl became a dancing girl!) I replaced it with Bruce Tinsley's conservative satirical strip Mallard Fillmore (like 19th-century POTUS Millard Fillmore, geddit?), in the hope of some nice political quarrels in the comments section.  But the strip and the comments are both pretty mild...

John came over today and cut down the crab apple tree in the front yard.  When we first bought this house 25 years ago it was barely my height, but in a decade it got as high as the attic!  Oh well, even the days of trees are numbered. (He's also returned Strap Hanger, a book about urban transit which I still intend to read one of these days...)