Zoom!

Sailor Venus on Esmerald: "Not only does her attitude bite, but so does her voice!" Sailor Jupiter: "Well, she has the loudest voice in the universe, so I guess we'll know when she's here!"--Sailor Moon

I've downloaded the zoom.com arc and entered the world of online conferencing. (In the '70s wasn't there a PBS children's show titled Zoom!?) I was at an online Meetup event Sunday, and Monday I participated again in my now-online memoir group:  I read them that piece I'd written several weeks ago.  I've also moved the Meetup groups I organize to the online format.

Just finished rewatching the "Dark  Moon" arc of Sailor Moon, which comprises the last two-thirds of the second season.  The story gets pretty convoluted:  a rather bratty younger girl called Rini literally falls out of the sky, who eventually turns out to be the daughter of Serena and Darien's future selves in 3000 A.D. when they're ruling Crystal Tokyo! (She returns to our time in the later seasons and becomes a Sailor Scout herself...) Darien, who's finally become Serena's boyfriend, gets these visions that Serena will be in mortal danger if he marries her, so he dumps her.  Later it turns out that the future Darien was messing with his mind to make sure that their relationship was strong enough for the battle ahead... (Destroy their relationship in order to save it, huh?)

This arc has a hit & miss array of ten villains, including Rini who briefly turns into Wicked Lady because the Wise Man villain has been messing with her mind! Counter-intuitively, over half of them get "redeemed" in the end.  I liked it when Neflyte got redeemed in the first season, and Alan and Ann in the previous Doom Tree arc, but this yields diminishing returns.  I do like the sheer shamelessness of the villainess Esmerald! (The first season villains took their names from varieties of jade, and several of these villains are named for precious jewels.) 

Like the Malachite arc at the end of the first season, this arc is uneven but has some great episodes--particularly after the Sailor Scouts enter the Time-Space corridor to fight the villains, who want to conquer the future earth.  I especially like the moment when Serena's heading off for the final battle and meets her civilian friend Molly, who hints that she knows Serena's true identity and ends up praying for her. (It works better in the original Japanese version--the DiC dub softens the religious aspect.)

Finally did my taxes!

Youtube musicals

My new time-killing interest is watching stage musicals on Youtube.  You can find whole shows of a high quality there!  I'm interested in stuff like Oliver! and Pacific Overtures and Guys and Dolls.  Yesterday I watched a video of the 2018 Broadway revival of Carousel (actually a preview of the show). 

And today I saw Sam Mendes' famous 1993 Cabaret production with Alan Cumming as the MC.  Powerful ending!  That show seems particularly timely in 2020, with so many people sleepwalking into disaster...

I finally finished The Vertigo Years, which my mind keeps mistitling The Vortex Years!  I've now started reading Walt Whitman's poetry opus Leaves of Grass--I just read a few poems at the start so I could write here that I've started it.

I finished rewatching the second year of Dragon Ball and started the second season of Sailor Moon.  The first third is the Doom Tree arc, with two aliens pretending to be schoolkids Alan and Ann. (They're my favourite second-season villains.) That arc has my personal favourite episode, "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall," where they're putting on a play of Snow White and have to deal with a clown monster!

I've started reading manga online.  Right now I'm reading Candy Candy, a romantic girl's comic from the late '70s about an orphan called Candy White who's hired by a rich family to serve as companion for this nasty sister and brother pair but gets treated as a servant and has to live in the stables, but this boy on a neighbouring estate falls in love with her... It has a certain Cinderella sensibility, and that's just the start of a soap opera spanning decades of her life.  I just found out that forty years ago they made an anime of Anne of Green Gables!

We've finished putting everything in the kitchen, so our dining room is in pre-clutter mode again.

Last weekend was warm, so I walked out to Hillcrest Park. (There were few people there, so I had an easy time keeping social distance.)

Post-Easter chocolate

Bulma: "If there's a boat there must be people, and where there's people there's shopping!"--Dragonball

I got off my bum today and went to Shoppers Drug Mart for my annual ritual of buying discounted Easter candy.  I had to wait in a queue to get in, but when I left it was significantly longer.  My favourite stuff is the chocolate-covered marshmallows.

I finished the second year of One Piece. Episodes 85 and 86 are must-see, telling the back story of the anthropomorphized reindeer Chopper.  Now Moira has started watching it!

Now I'm watching the dubbed Dragonball again, six episodes a day.  It's really fun, though I admit a lot of the humour is on the vulgar side. In the storyline I'm now rewatching Son Goku is up against the sinister Red Ribbon Army in a new search for the seven balls, resulting in some funny villains.  Goku climbed into Muscle Tower and met the Frankenstein-like Android #8, who turned out to be a  mild-mannered pacifist he made friends with and dubbed 8er!  That's the sort of thing Luffy often does with prospective enemies on One Piece too. (One Piece artist Eiichiro Oda started out as an assistant on Dragonball, and the earlier show's influence is clear.)

Yes, I am disappointed about Bernie Sanders endorsing Joe Biden.  I think that the best way to stop Trump is by stopping someone as unelectable as Biden from getting the Democratic nomination.  Don't be passive and accept it as a done deal!  And the only chance of preventing Biden's nomination is if enough voters promise not to choose him in November.  It's time for Sanders' movement to outgrow him.

My Twitter account got another three-day freeze after following too many fellow Tweeters!  On Twitter I've seen talk of a general strike, and I think the best time would be after the self-isolation ends and the elite is relying on the economy getting restarted. (I feel like a syndicalist from a century ago...)

I'm almost finished The Vortex Years.  There's a lot of talk about Freud and Nietzsche and the latent violence that presaged the Great War.

Our kitchen is almost finished--we now have all the shelves installed and most of them are filled.  I hope we can go back to eating at the dinner table again soon!

OZARK

There still isn't much to talk about.  I'm now in the second year of One Piece, with the gang entering the Grand Line and getting involved with a very sinister organization. (Right now they're at a prehistoric island with dinosaurs, volcanoes and two giants!)

We've almost finished the third season of Ozark on Netflix.  It's hardly morally uplifting, but it's a pretty great show.  These characters aren't admirable, but they're smart and believable!  Janet McTeer has a good role as the drug cartel's icy lawyer.  There's a great quarrel at the start of the sixth episode.

On Twitter I'm always on the lookout for new Tweeters to follow.  On Friday I found a thread devoted to Tweeters with few followers, and I followed a lot of them because they're more likely to follow me back.  I gained almost a hundred followers in one day, and I'm getting closer to a total of 4000!  The catch was that Twitter suspected I was a bought, and suspended my ability to follow for three days, along with my ability to like and retweet other posts. But now I'm back.

I've had to suspend the Meetup events I organize for a month.  I just hope the self-isolation is over by May!  Oh well, Canada's doing better than several places...

It's time to do my taxes!