Anime

I recently completed the third year of One Piece.  After the Alabasta arc ended, the last dozen episodes were filler between the manga stories.  The first ones were pretty good, but the last ones were an odd story about entering a time warp and finding children who'd entered fifty years ago.

I've almost finished the third of seven years of Dragon Ball Z.  I'd have to say I prefer the first Dragon Ball overall.  The second show is focused mostly on the fighting and the story's less fast-moving.  At the climax of the Frieza arc, the planet Namek was going to blow up in five minutes but so help me, it takes over half a dozen episodes to get to the complete explosion!  I've been watching the Garlic Jr. filler arc, and that's pretty weak (besides being a sequel to a DBZ movie I haven't seen). The bad guys take over Lord Kami's sky realm and release a chemical that turns most of the world into evil brainwashed zombies...

Now I've started the last season of Sailor Moon.  This one introduces the Sailor Stars, three fetish-costumed girls with a remarkable resemblance to three guys in a boy band who go to the same high school(?) as Serena and friends. Serena's now transforming into Eternal Sailor Moon, who has white boots and a pair of wings!  Fortunately, Sailors Uranus and Neptune are back.

Last Friday I showed the Sondheim musical Pacific Overtures for the Friday night History Meetup watch party.  It improves with repeat viewings. (It opened in 1976, and it's like Sondheim's contribution to the Bicentennial: America as other people see it.)

We just saw Fear City on Netflix, a documentary about the New York Mafia in the 1970s and '80s and the efforts to destroy it through the RICO act. (They interviewed Rudolph Giuliani, whom I call Adolf Bullyani!)

Earache

"After no more than a minor swerve the misfiring vehicle of his conversation had been hauled back on to its usual course.  Dixon gave up, stiffening his legs as they reached, at last, the steps of the main building.  He pretended to himself that he'd pick up his professor round the waist, squeeze the furry grey-blue waistcoat against him to expel the breath, run heavily with him up the steps, along the corridor to the Staff Cloakroom, and plunge the too-small feet in their capless shoes into a lavatory basin, pulling the plug once, twice, and again, stuffing the mouth with toilet-paper"--Lucky Jim

This past week I've had a bit of an earache.  I still have some trouble hearing.

Tuesday we got a new bin for removing our back yard dirt and managed to fill it in a single day!

Thursday I finally got my hair cut, for the first time since the lockdown started four months ago.  My head feels lighter!

I've been following a page on Facebook that's posting episodes of Alfred Andriola's comic strip Kerry Drake from 1973. (I remember reading the Sunday episodes back then.) It's an underrated police procedural about a plainclothesman with a wife and four kids--quadruplets in the form of two pairs of identical twins, something extremely rare in real life--that's more realistic than Dick Tracy.  

This strip had some clever stories, like one about a guy whose wife miscarried in a home invasion by his co-worker, so he decides to take the law into his own hands!  And one involving Kerry's private eye brother Lefty, about a rich builder's son who falls in love with an untalented singer who in turn attracts the interest of an agent who eventually pressures her into helping him acquire evidence of the father's building substandard housing and bribing government inspectors so he can blackmail the guy...

I've finished the Arabasta story arc in the third year of One Piece.  It's so complex that I'll definitely have to see it again! (Moira and I are watching earlier episodes on Netflix, where we're at the start of the second year.) I'm also watching Dragon Ball Z, and just got to the point where Son Goku turns into a Super Saiyan!

Dog days

It finally rained yesterday.  The air felt fresher afterward.  The only problem was that today the dirt in the basement was a lot wetter and heavier--so was the the sand for the concrete.  I moved a lot of dirt in the morning, but when we mixed concrete in the afternoon I got worn out and had to quit with one more batch to gather. (I was starting to think less clearly and was afraid of getting into an accident!) Fortunately, Moira managed to take up the slack for that last batch.

Nobody showed up for my book club discussing Sister Carrie on Thursday. But a few people came to see the movie version the following day.

Last Monday, to be different, I bought some frozen juice at the supermarket.

Tonight I got about nine people (including me) for the History Meetup discussion of the Dutch Empire.

I found a Youtube channel with clips of the music on the anime One Piece.  It has some really brilliant background music by Kohei Tanaka and Shirou Hamaguchi!

Can't think of much to write about--this hot weather is getting to me!

A concrete plan

"What the so-called judges of the truth or morality are really inveighing against most of the time is not the discussion of mere sexual lewdness, for no work with that as a basis could possibly succeed, but the disturbing and destroying of their own little theories concerning life, which in some cases may be nothing more than a quiet acceptance of things as they are without any regard to the well-being of the future. Life for them is made up of a variety of interesting but immutable forms and any attempt either to picture any of the wretched results of modern social conditions or to assail the critical defenders of the same is naturally looked upon with contempt or aversion"--Theodore Dreiser

We got the last dirt out of the cellar on Thursday, filled the bin on Friday and got it towed away Monday.  Yesterday we got loads of sand and gravel, so today we started mixing concrete for the cellar!  We're using a small mixer that's very noisy.

Mixing concrete is three-person work.  I had the simple muscle job, producing buckets of sand and gravel from the piles.  Moira had the precision job, measuring out cement and water in the right proportion. (Each batch needs four buckets of gravel, two buckets of sand and one bucket of the cement-water mix--I think.) John did the mixing and pouring, the noisiest job.  When he was finished for the day, we had a surplus of one bucket of sand and two buckets of gravel, giving us a head start tomorrow.

Friday my watch party showed the Titanic movie A Night to Remember, which is way better than the shameless 1997 blockbuster. (I've always found David McCallum pretty cool!)

Finished Sister Carrie on Saturday.  It's honest in a bleak, impressive way.  My next novel will be Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim.