Back from the dead

Yes, it's been a week since I posted here last, and I do wish I had more to talk about!  Today I suggested we dine on pizza, only to find the corner pizza shop has closed for now because of you-know-what.  Then I went to McDonald's, only to find that you have to place orders through their mobile app!  So we had omelet again.

Brother John's almost finished renovating the kitchen.  All that's left is some shelves and a new counter top. The other day we moved our new refrigerator in there, and our dining room feels less cluttered.

Today my memoir group had a phone conference call where we all recited memoir pieces we'd written.  The subject I chose was anime, and I talked about Sailor Moon.  Too bad I moved the phone away from my mouth at times!

I finished watching the first 47 episodes of One Piece.  The Arlong Park story is great, climaxing in a big four-episode fight with the horrifying fish-men.  Even if you aren't into anime, I highly recommend episodes 35 and 36.  Those episodes show the backstory of Nami the navigator and explain why she's been robbing other pirates. (All the crew have superb back stories starting in their early childhood.) It's emotionally powerful and shows what a deep writer Eiichiro Oda can be--this isn't just another adventure yarn.  Her foster mother Bellemere is a great character for someone who only appears briefly!

I've started watching the new anime Cardcaptor Sakura.  It's from the "magical girls" genre, and the title character is a schoolgirl, about four years younger than Sailor Moon, who has to retake spirits from these tarot-like cards that escaped from an occult book she carelessly opened. (In the first two episodes she recovers Flight and Shadow.) Her sidekick is the spirit Kero, who looks like a teddy bear with wings. She also has a rich girlfriend who makes her fancy costumes to fit her function--remember the Strawberry Shortcake dolls?--and videotapes her heroics. (After each episode Kero spends a couple of minutes displaying Sakura's clothes!)

It's a pretty cute show altogether.  I'm impressed by its low-key tone in comparison to more conventional slam-bang anime, well suited to younger kids. (I remember how my mother admired the low-key tone of Captain Kangaroo.) I have a feeling I'll be checking out quite a few anime before this crisis is over...

Strangely, I have a feeling that overall society may actually benefit from this forced solitude!  Maybe what we most need is time for greater self-reflection and more learning.

Time passes...

The lockdown continues. (Though today I walked out to Hillcrest Park just to get out of the house.)

I finished re-watching the first season of Sailor Moon.  What a powerful finale! The Sailor Scouts found out that in the past Sailor Moon's mother, Queen Serenity of the Moon, had been in a fight with destructive Queen Beryl so she'd sacrificed her own life to give all their spirits new lives in today's world. Then they all went to the Negaverse entrance near the North Pole or somewhere, and all the other Sailor Scouts sacrificed their lives protecting Sailor Moon, then Queen Beryl ordered the brainwashed Tuxedo Mask to kill Sailor Moon, but her Star Locket brought back his memories and he ended up sacrificing his life to save her, then Sailor Moon had her final confrontation with Queen Beryl and felt the spirits of the dead Sailor Scouts and combined forces with them and managed to destroy Queen Beryl and save the earth, sacrificing her own life to do so.... Then there was some "transmigration" by which all of them went back to the lives they had before finding out their superhero destinies, with only their cat mentors remembering what had happened--until the next season...

I've started watching the first season of One Piece again, this time the dubbed version for variety's sake.  Captain Buggy rocks! (Even if he does owe a little something to the Joker...) Just saw a great episode involving a dog still guarding his late master's pet food store.

Biden supporters are exasperating!  If Sanders continues to campaign, either Doddering Joe will manage to survive without being "undermined," or he won't.  If he does, they have nothing to worry about. But if he can't make it through a full primary campaign without being undermined, he's the wrong choice for the nomination. (One purpose of a primary campaign is to show who's the wrong choice, right?) Then he's the one they should be pressuring to drop out instead of Sanders.  In demanding that the campaign be cut short, they're actually showing how little faith they have in his "electability."

What I learned from Sailor Mercury

"In reality it was just what is usually seen in the houses of people with moderate means who want to appear rich, and therefore succeed only in resembling others like themselves:  there are damasks, dark wood, plants, rugs, dull and polished bronzes--all the things people of a certain class have in order to resemble other people of that class"--"Death of Ivan Ilyich"

Tonight was going to be the Short Story Meetup, but it got cancelled at the last minute.  And I'd spent the morning and afternoon reading the whole of "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"!  Oh, well--I'm proud that I could read a novella of almost 70 pages that quickly. (It was a revelation, oddly life-affirming.)

What with the coronavirus, I'm being a homebody just now--not that I'm not often a homebody at normal times.  The local No Frills supermarket had a queue of people waiting to get in! (They've run out of bananas.) I've been feeling a bit under the weather, so I went out and got some huge pomelo grapefruit on Sunday morning when it was less crowded.

I heard about all the untruths Doddering Joe was telling Bernie in their debate last night.  A liar says things he knows aren't true; a bullshitter doesn't care whether he's telling the truth!  I think Biden's a bullshitter, just like Reagan. (Rob Reiner Tweeted, "Sanders is an advocate.  Biden is a President." I commented, "Sanders is a leader.  Biden is a weasel.") Hard to believe they haven't delayed tomorrow's voting in the current emergency...

Which brings me to Sailor Moon, which I've been binge-watching again.  The other day I started the second half of the first season, when the show's quality sharply increased.  The turning point came when Molly fell in love with Neflyte the Negaverse villain, standing in front of him to protect him from Sailor Moon's tiara, and Neflyte died protecting her, achieving a certain redemption.  Now I'm watching the Zoisite arc, which is about how seven innocent people--six people and one cat, actually--have the spirits of Negaverse warriors inside them and nasty Zoisite uses the Star Crystal to awaken the spirits and turn the innocents into monsters for Sailor Moon to restore with her Moon Healing Sceptre.  

If Neflyte is the best first-season villain, Zoisite is a strong second.  (In addition, she was female in the manga, male in the Japanese anime, and female again in the DiC English dub!) When the monsters come forth, they also produce seven Rainbow Crystals for the Sailor Scouts, the Negaverse and rescuer Tuxedo Mask to fight over.  These are "filler" episodes that weren't in the manga, but like the second season's Doom Tree arc, it's darn good filler! (The seven McGuffins device, of course, was also used in Dragon Ball.)

Of particular interest to me just now was the third episode, "Mercury's Mental Match." (It's one of the ones animated by Masahiro Ando, where the characters look a bit different with more rounded faces, the sort of difference us Moonies notice.) It involves Greg, a schoolboy with psychic powers that he used to ace school exams just ahead of mousy brainiac Amy, whom he has a crush on and wants to meet. Amy, of course is also Sailor Mercury, the one with the defensive Bubbles Blast.  But he's also one of the crystal carriers, and with his psychic powers he knows that Zoisite wants to awaken his inner monster! 

There's a scene where Greg is talking to Sailor Mercury, who he knows is Amy because he's psychic, and asks her to promise to destroy him when he becomes a monster because he doesn't want to become a Negaverse tool.  But Mercury urges him not to give up but  to fight against the evil.  Then Zoisite comes along and turns him into a monster, but even in monster form he manages to turn against his master!  Sailor Moon heals him, and the Sailor Scouts even get his crystal. (Zoisite gets it back in the "Tuxedo Melvin" episode, but that's another story...)

I was thinking about this because of the Sanders-Biden debate.  Progressive Democrats mustn't give up; they have to keep fighting for Sanders and not succumb to being Biden's tool!

THE VERTIGO YEARS

I've finished the books on the French Revolution and started Philipp Blom's The Vertigo Years:  Change and Culture in the West, 1900-1914.  It's a fascinating look at the world just before the Great War broke out, the historical period that interests me the most. (Moira's already read it.) I'm reading it for next month's History Meetup.

And tonight was this month's History Meetup, where we discussed the French Revolution.  Ten people came despite the coronavirus scare.  The Dora Keogh people were nice enough to give us a room in the back!  It had a rather low overhead light, so I felt like we were a group of revolutionaries getting together to plot an insurrection or something... (I've been watching that series about Trotsky on Netflix.)

Yes, I am depressed about the Democratic primaries.  If any Democrat can blow the November election, it's Doddering Joe!  Democrats who vote to nominate him aren't just idiots but cowards.  They're already bringing back the "Vote Blue No Matter Who!" mantra, which is preaching to the choir. "It doesn't matter who we're nominating, just vote for him unanimously!" isn't the best way to win over the "swing voters" you need in the general election.  It's a signal that you've already lost the argument.  It's demoralizing that the Democratic Party keeps repeating the same mistakes year after year...

I misplaced that book of Walt Whitman poems I bought a couple of months ago, so I had to buy a new copy at Chapters-Indigo near Eglinton Station.  Someone in the book club wanted me to post a scan of the cover so she could get the same copy, but in the end I could only describe it.

Last Saturday afternoon I met Maria and Sergey at Demetre's near Chester Station for a crepe.  I'm always glad to meet them.

On Youtube I saw the first video in the Nostalgia Critic series, posted over a decade ago.  It's a scream! (See above.)

Classic Book Club

Tuesday John P. and I visited the Royal Ontario Museum.  Like the AGO, John has a membership so he got me in free, including the exhibit of award-winning wildlife photographs. (My favorites were one of a buffalo in the winter and one that a Hungarian kid took that looked like an impressionist painting!) Afterward he treated me to dinner at the Museum Tavern, where I had fish and chips.

Wednesday I had a huge headache! (Must have been the weather, of course.) That night I saw a Kirov Ballet production of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake on Youtube.  I hadn't seen the whole thing before, except for Matthew Bourne's strange '90s version with the male swans.  But I had seen the second act when I was 12 and we saw a touring Bolshoi Ballet in Wolfville, N.S., just after Mikhail Baryshnikov had defected from them in Toronto.  Mother thought they looked demoralized...

Today my Classic Book Club discussed Steppenwolf.  Only three people showed up (including me), and there was a private event at Dora Keogh so we had to move to Zaza Espresso a few blocks away.  But we had an interesting enough conversation!

I've been watching more of Doug Walker's Nostalgia Critic movie pans on Youtube. (He's reviewed all four Care Bears videos!) The other day I saw his attack on the misconceived live-action version of Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat, which reminded me of a horror movie. Among Doug's costars, Rachel Teitz was really funny playing a little girl.

Putty, putty

I spotted a mouse in my room, so we've made a big effort to clean it, including ripping out the carpeting in my closet.  I was stuffing steel wool into the gap at the bottom of the walls, but put in too much and ran out.  You haven't lived till you've stuffed steel wool into those gaps!  Some British writer in The Guardian was wondering why anyone would want to live to 100, but there are always these new experiences...

Yesterday was the Mathematicians Meetup.  We were discussing Paul Lockhart's The Mathematician's Lament, and I wondered how his way of teaching math would work in practice. (Educational reform has been full of ideas that looked great on paper but didn't work well in practice...)

Speaking of theory vs. practice, I just finished the Beginner's Guide book about the French Revolution and started the Short Introduction by William Doyle. (Why read just one book about it?)

Today we were pouring liquid concrete on the kitchen floor to level it out.  My job was to provide water from the bathroom in four-litre batches to mix the concrete. (The kitchen water was out of commission, of course.) It reminded me of this episode of M*A*S*H where they were laying a concrete floor and Father Mulcahy was singing the song "Cement mixer, putty, putty." I didn't watch the show much but I do remember that scene!

I've been binge-watching the anime Sailor Moon again.  I like the moments where she uses the first-season lunar pen to transform herself into an adult appearance. (Like in the pic above.) Some of us grownups feel like kids in disguise--I'm typing this with the Julia doll in my lap...