Under the weather

"Nothing wrong with 'dead reckoning' navigation'--except for the name!"--The Spirit of St. Louis

"When grownups say something is "for your own good," don't trust them!"--Revolutionary Girl Utena

I have a bit of a cold, which has slowed me down. (I've been eating pomelo grapefruit for it.) I had to leave last night's opera rehearsal early, but before I did there was a fun bit where we walked around singing the Nabucco chorus, to get us used to singing and walking at the same time!  We've been rehearsing in the choir seats at St. Matthew's, but for this we walked among the pews.

I've finished two seasons of Dragon Ball and the first two-thirds of Revolutionary Girl Utena that I'd seen before.  But now I'm going to take a break before seeing the rest, and focus on finishing that book of Polish history before the Meetup a week from now.

Tuesday night I saw The Wife with Anne.  It's about a Nobel Prize-winning writer whose wife (spoiler alert!) has always been rewriting his drafts.  Seems to me they should do that more often:  two literary heads can be better than one.  I was thinking that I'd be good at the wife's job! Christian Slater has a good role as a nosy biographer.

Tonight I watched Billy Wilder's The Spirit of St. Louis for maybe the fourth time.  I streamed it through Google Play for just $5.00, and used Chromecast to watch it on our downstairs set in high-def, in all its Cinemascope glory! (Earlier versions I recall seeing with the sides cut off.)

Granted that the movie's uncharacteristic of Wilder, lacking most of his usual acerbic wit. And of course James Stewart was a lot older than the real Lindbergh.  It's more Lindbergh as Stewart than Stewart as Lindbergh, like Lisztomania was Franz Liszt as Roger Daltrey.  (That's a rather understandable choice, considering that the real Lindbergh wasn't big on personality:  as someone with Asperger's Syndrome, I think he had it too.) But I still greatly enjoy the movie, whose second half is mostly a Stewart monologue during his flight.  High adventure, with a striking musical score by the great Franz Waxman.