Life on Twitter

    For the last year my number of Twitter followers has been stuck at just below 20,000.  Last month I made a new effort to get above it.  Lately I've been reposting a lot of Tweets by Palestinians requesting funding for refugee relief and been getting a lot of likes and re-reposts as a result, giving me the chance to follow new accounts and hope they'll follow me back.  Unfortunately, the geniuses in charge of Twitter have restricted me several times because of my aggressive following.  As a result, there have been several posts where I commented, "I'd like/repost this post, but Twitter thinks I'm a bot." Then I add one of dozens of emojis because bots wouldn't be capable of such originality.

    Despite these obstacles, I did manage to break 20K!  But soon after Twitter launched a purge of dubious accounts so I lost several hundred followers, like Sisyphus' stone rolling back to the bottom of the hill. (Ain't it the way?)  But I haven't given up on regaining 20K.  I subscribed to Circleboom, then changed to Fedica, both to analyze my Twitter numbers.  First I found out which accounts I'm following that don't follow me back, and unfollowed most of them.  Now I'm figuring out which ones have been inactive for six months, and unfollowing the ones who have written the fewest posts.  I've also found out which accounts follow me that I wasn't following back, and followed a few of them.

    I've started posting on Bluesky as well.  I like the space pics there.

    Right now I'm reading Alex Rowell's We Are Your Soldiers:  How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World for my History Meetup.  It's pretty depressing, really:  Nasser was a bit of a fascist megalomaniac.

    I've started a new Meetup for listening to classic music.  Last Saturday we listened to Chopin pieces on YouTube for two hours and the response was positive.  Next month I'll do Christmas music and try to find less familiar pieces.

    At the Sunday afternoon history salon we've been talking about modern Japan. (We've also eaten out a couple of times, at a Turkish restaurant then a Japanese ramen place.)

    In a couple of weeks my French Culture Meetup will be discussing the French Revolution, so I'm about to read a book from the "A Short Introduction" series on that subject! (I recently showed Diabolique for the French movie watch party, and next month will be Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, which seems appropriate for Christmas.)

First time tragedy, second time farce

    Maybe it was Mark Twain who said, history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes.  Comparing yesterday's election with Donald Trump's first victory eight years ago, I see one of the most predictable rhymes this side of "Hotel California"! (Even the state-by-state results are virtually identical.)

    I remember how numb I felt after the 2016 election.  I wasn't so impressed by Hillary Clinton's campaign, but I assumed that Trump couldn't win! (I was almost right...) But if Hillary was "the lesser evil," the Donald was--just barely--the lesser unelectable.  This time, I can't say I feel any surprise.  It's a bit like when screenwriter William Goldman challenged a 1969 studio executive to guess who the top movie star was in the international markets.  When he made five or ten wrong guesses and learned the right answer was Clint Eastwood, he said, "Yeah, it would be him."

    If the Democrats make the same mistakes in one campaign after another, there's nothing surprising about their failures.  The Democrats haven't won three consecutive presidential elections since the 1940s (the Republicans have only done it once since the '20s), and progressives who placed all their hopes in breaking that pattern, in 2000 and 2016, followed a dubious strategy.  But in this election, after just one term in power they seemed as worn out as after two--the same as with Trump after his first term.

    I'll admit, I actually nourished the hope that this time Jill Stein's Green Party would break 5% and qualify for federal funding! (I wasn't following the polls.) But once again, left-wing voters largely played it safe and voted Democrat in the hope that this would tip the balance against Trump.  No doubt that "pragmatic" progressives will again scapegoat the small principled minority who dared to vote Green, ignoring the actual numbers that show this vote was too small to make the difference.

    The Nation, that embodiment of the "play it safe" left, sniffed in one editorial, "Third parties are a long road to nowhere," and they've been doing their best to ensure that stays the case!  But playing it safe is the long road to what?  Things getting worse more slowly?  It seems to me that when you don't look beyond avoiding risk, you tend to realize the worst of both worlds!

    I think the "pragmatic" left owe Ralph Nader an apology.  More importantly, they owe one to the whole progressive movement!  By making Nader the scapegoat for Al Gore's failure, they sent the exact wrong message to the Democratic Party:  that Democrats can take their left-wing vote for granted. (Like too many leftists, they only cared about their disagreement with a fellow leftist and not about the message they were sending to the people in power...) The inevitable result is that the Democrats focus on ingratiating the centrist voters while assuming the left will vote for them anyway. Such scapegoating wasn't even in the Democratic Party's best interest; on the contrary, it's the Democratic Party that's paid the biggest price!

    What does the future hold?  Back in 1988, Rolling Stone had a boring political writer called William S. Grieder. (He ended up at The Nation, of course.) He wrote about that year's presidential election, "Whoever gets elected will be in an extremely precarious position, and judging by their rhetoric, neither candidate is aware of it." Judging by their rhetoric, indeed--did he expect Michael Dukakis to rhetoricize "Elect me and I'll be in an extremely precarious position"? That would have got him lots of votes....  But I think that's actually the case this time.

Semimonthly

    My blog has been sparse recently, but I'm trying to make it semimonthly now.  I couldn't think of a title for this entry and considered "October" (imaginative, huh?) but settled for "Semimonthly."

    Moira returned after spending a week or two in Kingston. (I bought that new fedora at Lilliput Hats while she was away.)

    For a while I got behind in reading my emails:  too many appeals from American progressives on the eve of the Presidential election.  But I got caught up, and now I'm trying to unsubscribe.

    A couple of days ago I gave the lawn one last mow before winter.

    The French Culture Meetup event where I played Debussy was so successful that I started a new Meetup for listening to classic music. (Next month we'll do Chopin.)

    The other day I went shopping to find a new pair of Stanfield's polo-style pajamas. (My old one had holes in the elbow and elsewhere.) I couldn't find it, but did get a belt and new socks.  Moira ordered the pajamas online, and they arrived the next day!  I also want to get new slippers.

    Last night I had dinner with Tianjie's history group. (We ate at the Turkish restaurant near Eglinton station.) Starting next week, our topic will be Meiji-era Japan.  I'm now reading A Concise History of Sweden for next month's discussion in my own group.

Cool weather

    The cool weather's finally arrived.  I stopped leaving my window open at night when September turned into October, though I could have waited a few more days.  Yesterday I went to a hat shop to get a new fedora for the fall (can't find the old one), but it wasn't open on Monday.  Now I just need to get up enough energy to mow the grass one more time...

    Last Tuesday I saw Francis Coppola's Megalopolis with John P. at the Scotiabank, in Imax. (Thursday I'm seeing Lee with him.) It's like an architectural folly, pretentious and vague but grandly colourful.

    Saturday I saw a cinemacast of the Metropolitan Opera at the Yonge & Eglinton.  It was a revival of Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann, one of my favourite operas!  The baritone playing the Four Villains was called Van Horn, which seems appropriate. (I actually think of them as nemeses rather than villains, because the latter term suggests the stories are about Hoffmann's conflicts with them, when they're really more about his inner conflicts...)

    Last month my History Meetup was about Woodrow Wilson, and tonight it was about Spartacus' rebellion. (Next month it'll be about Sweden!) Last month my French Culture Meetup was about Toulouse-Lautrec's art and this month it was Debussy's music. (Next month it'll be Flaubert's Three Stories.) Last month the French movie watch party was going to be Au Revoir Les Enfants, but I couldn't find a compatible DVD, so at the last moment I substituted Max Ophuls' Lola Montes.  This month it'll be Jean-Jacques Beneix' Diva.

    I had to quit on the Reading Aloud Meetup because nobody was coming.  But Maria and Sergey have become co-organizers so maybe they'll take it in a new direction...

    A guy called Tianjie has started an in-person History Meetup of his own on Sunday afternoons, and I've been attending it.  For the last four weeks we've been discussing 20th century China, but next week we'll turn to the Ottoman Empire.

    I started reading the Ebook of Mark Twain's frontier memoir Roughing It, but I've been so busy with other stuff that I stopped for now.

    For weeks I was stuck on Level 2328 of Candy Crush Saga, and I ended up quitting the game.  Tonight I wanted mention this here, but I returned to the game to make sure I had the number right, and couldn't resist playing it some more.  So of course, on my second try I passed it, and now I'm at Level 2333!  It looks like I'll be playing it some more after all...

Summer

Today I went to a Meetup at the Distillery where a doctoral student talked about medieval literature.  Keeping with the theme, I read the first part of the prologue of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. (There were almost twenty people there!) Afterward Debi and I had ice cream.

I recently finished reading Jonathan Spence's God's Chinese Son, about Hong Xiuquan, leader of the Taiping Rebellion that devastated China in the mid-19th century.  I've almost finished reading Mary Macauliffe's Dawn of the Belle Epoque, the subject of my French Culture Meetup the other week. (Next month's subject will be Toulouse-Lautrec's art.) It's a good book and I'm eager to read her sequel Twilight of the Belle Epoque.  My next book will be Louis Auchincloss' Penguin Lives biography of Woodrow Wilson, for next month's History Meetup.

Some of my Meetup events have been attracting nobody.  I was going to host a midtown walk for the Meaningful Genuine Connections group on Saturday, but nobody was interested, so I'll try again in October.  And my Reading Out Loud Meetup event with O. Henry stories that night also drew a blank. (But I'll try again next months with Walt Whitman's poems.)

I've been spending a lot of time on a Facebook group that posts classic comic strips.  Rip Kirby especially interests me!  (They also have some early Modesty Blaise adventures.)

My machine for crushing ice cubes is on the blink, so I ordered a new one from Walmart.  But I don't know how long it'll take to arrive:  possibly close to a month!

Meaningful Connections

I've joined the Meaningful Connections Meetup, a social group for people over 60.  We met online the week before last, then on Saturday we convened in person at Jack Astor's near the Scarborough Town Centre. (Bruce was driving there from the west, so he was nice enough to pick me up and spare me a long TTC trip.) I was afraid there'd be way more women than men, but so far we've had a good balance.  I like our ethnic diversity:  Earle the organizer is from St. Kitts-Nevis (he quipped that he's from Mars!), and there are a German and a Greek too.  Bruce is 80, but definitely looks younger.

The St. Clair Avenue streetcars are finally running again!  But it'll be a few more months before they finish the St. Clair West station renovations so we still have to get off to access the subway.

I just read a history of the Weimar Republic for July's History Meetup.  I'm also rereading Balzac's Pere Goriot for the French Culture Meetup. (We watched Godard's Breathless the other week.) In the Reading Out Loud Meetup we read Alice Munro's "Day of the Butterfly" and Margaret Atwood's "My Evil Mother" in the English week, and Charles Perrault's "Sleeping Beauty" the French week.  We would have read "Beauty and the Beast" too, but didn't have time.

It took me weeks to get past Level 2243 in Candy Crush Saga!  But persistence ultimately won the day...

Voted NDP in the St. Paul's by-election yesterday. (I've volunteered for the NDP in the past, but this time I didn't have so much energy.) The ballot paper was really long because an organization arranged for about eighty people to register as candidates in a protest against our "first past the post" electoral system!  The Conservative edged out the Liberal for the first time in 30 years, as if I care...

Last week I downloaded the Too Good to Go app so we can order cheap surprise packages of unsold food from neighbourhood eateries! (We have to use our cellphone instead of a desktop.) So far I've bought some baked goods from Tim Horton's and Daisy's.

I'm pleased that Julian Assange is finally free!

A cold

    I caught a cold last week, so I've been slow.

    Finished the book about the Mexican-American War, so I've put a hold on Barbarian and Emperor, a book about Charlemagne for the June History Meetup.  I've started reading the water issue of Lapham's Quarterly, which looks interesting.

    We read the first half of Moliere's Ecole des Femmes last week and decided to do the second half this week instead of the end of the month.  We're also reading some funny Stephen Leacock stories next week, and seeing Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle the week after.

    I've been relearning Classical Greek.  I'm now at a particularly challenging level of participles and the perfect tense.

    With Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons finished, I'm now watching Stingray, another 1960s British puppet show about two sailors on a submarine.  They're accompanied by Marina, a sea maiden who doesn't talk. (Shades of the Little Mermaid...) You'd think she'd be more useful to their missions!

    This Sunday my singing group is performing for the last time before the summer break, at the Duke pub in the East End.

    Time to start the garden...

New Meetups

Marie Windsor's last words: "This is a bad joke, with no punch line..."--The Killing

I'm now busy with Meetups most Saturdays.  First Saturday afternoon of the month is the French Culture Meetup:  this week we're going to discuss French art, so I'll talk about Gauguin, citing the Korean children's book I finished translating. Second Saturday is Reading Out Loud in English:  last month we started with Oscar Wilde's fairy tales and this month it'll be the poems of Robert Frost.  Third Saturday (in the evening this time) is a watch party for French-language movies:  last month Eric Rohmer's "tasty talk" comedy Claire's Knee, this month Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game.  Fourth Saturday is Reading Out Loud in French:  last month it was La Fontaine's fables, this month Molier's comedy L'Ecole des Femmes.  It's so long that we'll just do the first half, and leave the second half for next month. (If the month has a fifth Saturday, as happened last week, there'll be nothing then.)

I'm still reading that short biography of Jawaharlal Nehru for next week's History Meetup.  Next month the subject will be the Mexican-American War, so today I went to North York Centre library and borrowed Peter Guardino's The Dead March.

I finished the psychology issue of Lapham's Quarterly and I've almost finished the "Rule of Law" issue.

The other week John P. and I saw Denis Villeneuve's second Dune movie.  A solid follow-up, which has me looking forward to the next one.

This month they're showing Stanley Kubrick's movies at the Yonge & Dundas, even his early Grade Z efforts Fear and Desire and Killer's Kiss.  Last night I saw his heist movie The Killing again.  It's intelligent and exciting, with Stirling Hayden a well-cast hoodlum--indeed, most of the roles were pretty well cast. (Though Colleen Gray had to say the line "I'm not pretty," which she definitely was!) Next week I plan to see Full Metal Jacket again.

I had to quit the Rise of Cultures game, because I was stuck at a point where you had to win battles and I couldn't figure out how.  But I'm still playing Sunrise Village, where I made my persona a guy named Aloysius.  With Candy Crush Saga I got stuck on Level 2165 for about a week, but I finally cracked it!

French Culture Meetup

On Saturday we met online for the first Culture Meetup.  I talked about The Count of Monte Cristo, Maria talked about Flaubert's "The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller," and Sylvie talked about Maupassant's "Old Boniface's Crime." Next month we'll discuss French art. (I'll talk about Gauguin.) I'll also be doing a monthly watch party for French movies!

Last week some of the people in my memoir group met for lunch at Moulins Lafayette.  And none too soon, because the place was about to close! (I liked the quiche Lorraine and Chantilly eclair.) Maria and Sergey have now joined the group too.

I've finished the book about Prussia, and my next history book will be about Nehru. (They say the Toronto library website is finally back on line!)

Today I spent some time with Maria.  I'm reading the "States of Mind" issue of Lapham's Quarterly and she mentioned St. Augustine of Hippo, and that issue had a piece written by him!

I'm now reading La Fontaine's fables, which we'll be reading aloud in my other new Meetup in a few weeks.  I tried reading some of them in the original language, which is often old-fashioned French like you see old-fashioned English in a lot of our poetry. (At one point there was an imperfect subjunctive!)

I've also started a couple of new online games: Sunrise Village and Rise of Cultures. (The miller in Sunrise Village is called Jenny Mills, a clever pun on General Mills!)

I changed my mind

Last week my History Meetup discussing the Roman Empire's fall attracted a dozen people, and I changed my mind about quitting. (Props to Maria and Sergey for encouraging me!) Next month's topic will be the Kingdom of Prussia.  I'm now reading another good history book, Sebastian Haffner's The Rise and Fall of Prussia.

In fact, I'm going to try a couple of new Meetups.  One will be on French culture, and Maria will co-organize with me.  Next week for our first event we'll each discuss a French book we liked. (I'll do The Count of Monte Cristo.) I'm also going to make another try at people coming together online and reading a text aloud.  I'll be doing both English and French texts, and start with easy stuff like children's stories. (No idea if anyone will be interested in it, but it won't add to my organizing fees.) Maria's also interested in the French reading.

My birthday was a couple of weeks ago and last week the family got together for a joint birthday party for me and Donald.  Moira baked a vegan birthday cake, but it was a bit too big and we couldn't finish it.

I finally quit the online Elvenar game after playing it for about five years.  I went back to Candy Crush Saga, where I'm at around Level 2000.  I tried to open some other games on Facebook, but they also got stuck at the "0% loaded" level!

I've gone back to watching the anime Dragon Ball Super.  I've also been watching Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, a remarkably creepy British puppet show from the 1960s that I saw a bit of when I was young.

Yesterday I had lunch with Maria, Sergey, Debi and Sylvie at What a Bagel!  We discussed my Meetup ideas.

Burnout

I've quit as organizer of the History Meetup.  Nobody came to my last monthly event, discussing the Gilded Age.  I've been doing it for a decade and I guess I'm a burnout.  I'm showing two more movies in the Friday watch party--Isadora and My Life as a Dog--and doing one more monthly event, then I'm done.

My last monthly event will be about the fall of the Roman Empire, so I've been reading Peter Heather's book on the subject. (It's pretty good!)

I've now started catching up on my long backlog of Lapham's Quarterly issues. (I'm still reading the music issue.)

A few weeks ago I saw Michael Mann's Ferrari, which was pretty effective:  Adam Driver got to show some range.  The other day I saw Noryang:  Deadly Sea, about Korean admiral Yi Sunshin's final defeat of the Japanese in 1598.  It's a sequel to Hansan:  Rising Dragon which I saw a while ago, and now I really want to see The Admiral:  Roaring Currents, about his biggest victory.  I'm a sucker for these Asian naval movies...