The memoir group

"The sun--the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man--burst upon the crowded city [London] in clear and radiant glory.  Through costly-coloured glass and paper-mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice, it shed its equal ray.  It lighted up the room where the murdered woman lay.  It did.  He tried to shut it out, but it would stream in.  If the sight had been a ghastly one in the dull morning, what was it, now, in all that brilliant light!

--Oliver Twist

Thursday of the week before last the Classic Book Club met at Noonan's (formerly Dora Keogh) to discuss Oliver Twist.  Or we would have, except that I was the only one who showed up!  Howard also came, but he thought it was the History Meetup...  I'll give the group one more try with Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, but it looks like it's dying.

Last Monday my memoir group met in person for the first time since before the pandemic struck.  We gathered at Sylvie's house on pretty Alcina Avenue and wrote about cartoons and speculation.  We're going to meet online through Zoom, starting tomorrow.

I can now show DVDs in my Friday watch party! (It took Donald to figure it out, of course.) The last two weeks I've rented and shown David Lean's Oliver Twist and Danny Kaye's Hans Christian Andersen. (This week it's The Wild Bunch, but I can stream that one through Google Play.)

I was going to attend a Karaoke Meetup yesterday, but I couldn't find the place! (Google Maps turned out to be unreliable.) Oh well, at least I got out of the house...

The Ontario election

Nancy: "When such [women] as I, who have no certain roof but the coffin-lid, and no friend in sickness or death but the hospital nurse, set our rotten hearts on any man, and let him fill the place that has been a blank through all our wretched lives, who can hope to cure us?  Pity us, lady--pity us for having only one feeling of the woman left, and for having that turned, by a heavy judgement, from a comfort and a pride, into a new means of violence and suffering"--Oliver Twist

Last week was Ontario's provincial election, and this was the seat result, under the "first past the post" system:

Progressive Conservative:  83

NDP:  31

Liberal:  8

Green: 1

Once again, I've imagined how it would have turned out under the mixed proportional representation system I favour.  That's the one where A seats (about 70%) would be directly elected in the same way as before; B seats (about 25%) would be allotted to parties so that the total of A and B seats would be as close to the popular vote as possible; and C seats (about 5%) would be given to the top party in popular vote, to improve the chances of a stable majority.  But if one party got a landslide, so that its A seats alone were greater than its proportional number of A and B seats, the C seats would go to the other parties to bring them closer to their vote proportion.  Which happens to be the case here.

Party    A seats/    B/     C/    Total

PC       83                                83

NDP    31              13      2      46

Lib        8               17      2      27

Green    1                1       2       4

Under this system, the Progressive Conservatives would still have a narrow majority.  Under the present system they won 2/3 of the seats with just 2/5 of the vote.  Under my system, the opposition parties would each receive half a dozen fewer seats than if the vote were purely proportional, though the C seats would provide a slight compensation.  The Liberals were only slightly below the NDP in popular vote, but the PC advantage in seats particularly works against them.