The heat is on!

    John finished installing the heat pumps, and a few days ago our new heat system started working, in time for Christmas!  I have to leave my door open most of the time so the heat will get in my room, which is hard to get used to.  I keep waiting for someone to say "Were you born on a raft?"

    Last week I led the book club discussion on Kidnapped.  We had a cookie exchange and I brought gingerbread which I'd baked.  But it was a bit of a disaster:  it stuck to the bottom of the pan and fell to pieces!  But the others didn't seem to mind.  Next month we'll discuss Educated, Tara Westover's memoir of going from a homeschooled upbringing by survivalist parents to a Ph.D. at Cambridge.

    Next month my history discussion will be about Ethiopia, so I'll be reading a book of Ethiopian history by Saheed A. Adejumobi. (I finished that book on the Republic of China in time to return it on the day it was due!)

    Stephen printed a booklet of some of the memoir group's pieces and I bought two copies. (I contributed pieces on my Toronto home, cartoons, the autism spectrum and bereavement.)

    I'm optimistic about my Meetup for people over 60.  I've straightened out my stripe.com account and I'm starting to attract people from stitch.net .  I intend to get the reading out loud group going in the new year--some people have expressed interest.  

    I'm approaching Level 4000 in Candy Crush Saga and Level 100 in Empire City!

    I've ordered new pajamas online, and I'm about to order new winter boots. (My old ones are leaky and the soles got so wet that whenever I use them they leave my socks wet too.) I'd have ordered them already, but I'm a bit of a procrastinator these days.

Netflix

    We've been watching some interesting series on Netflix.  There's Death by Lightning, about U.S. Gilded Age president John Garfield and the lunatic who assassinated him.  We've started watching a new version of Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard. (Those Italians have some great faces!)

    And there's an adaptation of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez' "magical realist" novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.  I was prepared for disappointment because I loved the book so much, but it's actually a worthy adaptation, visually imaginative and well-cast.  It's just the first half of the book, so I imagine they'll do the second half next year or so.

    Meetup restored the members of my 60+ group, so I've started doing the Saturday lunches again.  I tried to start a walking event on Wednesday afternoons, but it's too cold for that. (I'll try it again in the spring.)

    I went to another stitch.com lunch at Dimpfelmeier's Bakery in Etobicoke.  On the way out there the subway was closed west of Jane Station, so I had to take a shuttle bus and was half an hour late.  But it could have been worse--on the way back it was closed west of Ossington Station so I had an even longer shuttle bus ride!

    Read Clare Chambers' Small Pleasures for my book club, and we had an interesting discussion.  It's about a lady reporter in 1950s London investigating claims of a virgin birth, but it proved better than I expected.  Next month we'll discuss Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped and I'll lead the discussion! (I read it when I was 11...) My History Meetup will be discussing Chiang Kai-Shek, so I'm reading Xavier Paules' The Republic of China: 1912 to 1949.

    John P. and I saw Blue Moon at the Varsity few weeks ago, with Ethan Hawke in rare form as Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart.  The other week we saw Guillermo del Toro's version of Frankenstein at the Scotiabank.  It's vivid but gets a bit too talky in the second half: the overly articulate creature is a flaw that goes back to the book... (This week my historical movie watch party is showing Ken Russell's Gothic about how the story got written.) Next Tuesday we'll be seeing Nuremberg.

    Our new heat pumps aren't installed yet, and it snowed last night.  But I can make do with my electric heater for a while longer!

I goofed

    Last month I connected my meetup.com account with stripe.com to create a system where all members of my two Meetup groups would automatically contribute annual dues of $5 or $10 to pay my Meetup fees.  Unfortunately, I botched the stripe.com connection to my bank account--couldn't satisfy the ID requirement--and all but about 30 of the members in my Seniors Meetup got removed automatically!  I've messaged Meetup and asked them to restore them. (I tried to use my residency card for the ID, but it got rejected as unclear, so I'll have to wait till my new passport arrives next month.)

    John's rebuilding our furnace and adding heat pumps and stuff so for a couple of weeks we'll have no heat except from electric heaters.  At least the cold weather hasn't arrived yet!

    On Saturday I had lunch (spaghetti) at Terroni's with a stitch.com group.  But I had a hard time finding the place--I was looking for the street address, which wasn't posted out front--and was half an hour late.  Afterward I passed by Toronto's No Kings protest near the U.S. embassy. (There was an evangelist with a megaphone nearby!)

    Finished reading Ann Patchett's novel The Dutch House for my book club.  It's a great book, with an unconventional narrative approach that resembles a first-draft memoir before it's been edited...  I gave the book to Moira, and she likes it too. (Now I'm reading Lindsey Hughes' biography of Peter the Great for my History Meetup.)

    Yesterday John P. and I were going to visit the Royal Ontario Museum and see the exhibit of Flemish artifacts.  But he told me to meet him "under the dome" at the entrance, and I somehow thought he meant the dome that used to be the McLaughlin Planetarium! (I haven't been thinking straight lately.) Oh well, we'll go on Friday.

    Today I went to Bay Street Video to rent A Royal Affair for my Friday night watch party, but they only had it in incompatible Blu-Ray format!  So I rented Lawrence Kasdan's 1985 western Silverado instead, which I've never seen. (Back at the time I was put off by its ad line "Get ready for the ride of your life":  I don't care for these oversell lines that presume my inattentiveness.)

    I've started watching a PBS documentary series about Lincoln and his wife.  It's quite good.

An interesting week

    Last Thursday I had lunch with Debi at an Indian restaurant.  My chicken biryani disagreed with me so strongly that I was sick the rest of the day!  The following day I was still worn out, though I still showed the Danish movie The Promised Land at my historical movie watch party. (It's everything they say!)

    It turns out that our boiler is leaking gas, so we've had to go without hot water until it gets fixed.  Thank goodness John's working on it!

    At the Saturday snack with the 60+ Meetup at Yorkville Village food court, half the people came there but couldn't find me! (I thought I was wearing my cowboy hat...) Arif now wants to try Sunday events, and we'll do one this weekend.

    Sunday afternoon I visited Edwards Gardens with a couple of people from stitch.com .  Today I also had lunch with a Stitch group, at the Aroma Expresso in Yonge-Eglinton Centre.

    Tuesday I saw the Spinal Tap sequel with John P.  Another droll comedy.  John was complaining that the theatre was too loud and I quipped, "They raised it to 11."

    I've been reading The Roman Republic:  A Very Short Introduction for my History Meetup.  When I went to the movies I lost it!  So Wednesday I had to go to Maria Schuka Library and straighten that out.  I also went to Bay Street Video, as I usually do on Wednesdays, to rent the historical movie DVD I'll be showing Friday night.  But I rented the wrong movie and had to go get the right one today! (This week's Beloved; The Great Caruso isn't till next week.)

    The book club is next week, and I haven't even started reading 15 Dogs, which I got in Ebook form. (Oh well, it's a short novel.)

    A very interesting week indeed. (I could go on twice as long, but there's a privacy issue...)

Stitch.net

    I've joined stitch.net , which is like Meetup but for people over 50.  I'm now inviting Stitch people to my GTA 60+ Meetup events. (We're now meeting at Yorkville Village every second Saturday afternoon and Demetre Danforh every fourth.) Next Saturday we're also meeting at High Park again.

    Last week I visited the Aga Khan Museum with a couple of Stitch people.  Muslims took a very original approach to calligraphy!

    I finally had to give up on the Classical Music Meetup.  Nobody came last month!

    The other week John P. recommended Chat GPT to me.  I subscribed but had trouble thinking of anything to ask it--guess I don't have many questions.  But I started out by asking where in Toronto you can get sugar cane juice (they have a few places) and how to stop Zoom bombers from drawing graffiti on our shared screen (you disable the annotation feature).  I've also asked what was the first talking feature with no musical numbers:  it was the lost horror movie The Terror.

    This month I'm reading Matthew Parker's Panama Fever about the making of the Panama Canal, for the next History Meetup.  It's a great story, involving engineering, finance, microbiology, civil wars and geopolitics. (When I was little I read about William Gorgas, the sanitation expert who solved the yellow fever problem--Gorgas struck me as a cool name!)

    This week my book club is discussing Cutting for Stone, which I haven't read! (Too long for me to read in just a month.) But I'll come anyway.

    I've reached Level 69 in the game Empire City.  One of the fortifications is the Eastern Wall, and it keeps reminding me of the lines from "If I Were a Rich Man":

If I were rich I'd have the time that I lack

To sit in the synagogue and pray,

And maybe have a seat by the eastern wall...

    Tianjie's going back to China to get married, so his history salon is on hiatus for a while.

Heat wave

    Last week Toronto had a big heat wave and we turned on the air conditioning for the first time this year.  (I'm now using the ice-shaving machine again.)

    I missed the book club because I thought it was the week after! (But they did enjoy the Larry McMurtry book I'd suggested.) This month we'll be discussing Will Schwalbe's The End of Your Life Book Club.

    John P. and I visited the Royal Ontario Museum again.  Afterward we ate Indian food.

    Last Saturday my Seniors Meetup had lunch at the Grenadier Restaurant in High Park.  Next time I'm wearing my cowboy hat so everyone will recognize me!

    That evening I had my Classic Music Meetup and played movie music.  There were some trouble-makers, but one guy gave me good feedback so I guess I'll do it for another month. (Hope over experience...) Next time it'll be ballet music.

    I've almost finished A Concise History of Hungary for my History Meetup.  Hungary's an interesting country in that it's hard to categorize.  Next month I think we'll discuss Tamerlane!

    Tianjie's Sunday afternoon history salon is now discussing English history. (Last Sunday it was the Plantagenet dynasty.) I've offered to lead the discussion if he does American history.

    There's an ice cream truck that drives by our house every day and keeps playing "La Cucaracha"!

New book club

    Last week I joined a new book club that meets at Anne Marie's apartment just east of St. Clair West station.  Our first book (my suggestion) was Larry McMurty's entertaining essay collection Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, which I read over twenty years ago.  It's about rural Texas, a writer's life and a lot more!  Last week I also met with the memoir group at Sylvie's house again.

    I got a new pair of curtains for the windows in my room.  It's been a cool spring, but now it's warm enough for open windows!  Soon it'll be warm enough to leave them open at night...

    We finally got the garden planted, but there's still a lot of space left over. (John will be bringing us some tomato plants.) Moira made a couple of rhubarb pies!

    The problem with crunchyroll.com is straightened out.  One Piece is now doing Kuma's compelling backstory. (The show's full of compelling backstories!) I've also started watching Dragon Ball Daima.  I'm not sure it'll be any good, but it is part of the Dragon Ball saga.

    Today John P. and I visited the Art Gallery of Ontario again. (We can't find any movies to see just now.) Afterward we ate Chinese food.  My fortune cookie told me not to do tomorrow what I can do today, which reminded me to make a new entry in this blog!

    I've almost finished the book about Assyria.  Next month I think I'll make Hungary our subject!

    I've found a new city-building game on Facebook set in the Roman era, Empire City. (I passed Level 3000 in Candy Crush Saga, and now I'm in the 3030s.)

    We've been watching some interesting silent movies on Kanopy.  Last week we saw Ernst Lubitsch's German silents The Doll and The Oyster Princess, which were really funny!  Last night it was Louise Brooks in G.W. Pabst's The Diary of a Lost Girl. (I remember seeing these movies at the Cinematheque in the 1990s with a live piano accompaniment.)

The election

    I'm kinda depressed about Canada's election last week.  We're moving into an American-style two-party system where people vote for one party to defeat the other!  I can understand people voting Liberal instead of NDP to defeat the Conservatives:  they're rejecting Conservative policies.  But what gets to me is people voting Conservative instead of NDP to defeat the Liberals. (They're just rejecting the party.) The result was that the NDP lost more seats to the Conservatives than to the Liberals.  The House of Commons badly needs proportional representation.

    With the election canvassing over with, I've finally started digging in the garden. (It's been a cool spring anyway.)

    With the anime One Piece back after a six-month hiatus, I've subscribed to crunchyroll.com to follow it again.  Just saw an 80-minute recap of the Egghead arc so far, but it conked out every five minutes and I had to restart it!  Oh well, each regular episode will only have four interruptions...

    I've started reading Eckhart Frahm's Assyria:  The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire for my History Meetup.  Over a millennium it evolved from a commercial city-state to an absolutist kingdom to a true empire...

    We've been watching Martin Scorcese's documentary about American movies on Kanopy.  But we could only find the first part of his show about Italian movies, on YouTube.

    I'm getting close to Level 3000 in Candy Crush Saga!

Canvassing

    Now that it's federal election time in Canada, I've been canvassing for Bruce Levy, the N.D.P. candidate here in St. Paul's. (It helps that the campaign HQ is close to my house!) I've been putting leaflets into mailboxes--and giving some to passersby--through the southwest corner of the riding, where our greatest strength is.

    Bruce is a retired diplomat, who used to be Canada's ambassador to Sri Lanka. (That must have been a challenge, what with Canada's vocal Tamil community who aren't happy about the government's heavy-handed suppression of the Tamil rebellion.) Ingrid, his wife and de facto campaign manager, is very friendly.  She gives me a ginger ale when I'm finished every day!

    I've had an ambition of walking a mile a day, and lately I've been managing it! (And yes, my feet are rather sore.) It's still cool for April, and the other day I felt cold in the front but sweated in the back...

    Putting all those leaflets in mailboxes reminded me that our rusty mailbox needed replacing.  Moira bought one and I screwed it in today. (It isn't quite level.)

    Lately we've been watching stuff on Kanopy. (It's free and all you need is a library card!) Two weeks ago we were watching Lonesome Dove yet again, then we saw Ken Burns' documentary American Buffalo.  I just finished watching Burns' documentary about jazz. (Wynton Marsalis dominates it the way Shelby Foote dominates Burns' Civil War documentary.)

    Right now I'm reading Susanna Moore's Paradise of the Pacific:  Hawaii Approaching for my History Meetup.  19th-century Hawaii had a lot of "third world" problems.  Sandalwood was a lucrative export to China, so they chopped down the sandalwood forests so quickly that the tree was largely gone by 1830! (That reminded me of the buffalo in America.) Later they came to depend on sugar exports, leaving them vulnerable to American tariffs.

    Tonight I started watching Titans on Kanopy.  It's a docudrama about the businessmen who founded Hollywood.  A good story, though the music's heavy-handed and annoying.

    This Saturday, since it's Easter weekend, my Classic Music Meetup will be playing religious music.

Cholesterol

"Don't blame yourself for what other people do."

"I blame myself for what I did!"

--The Alto Knights

    I recently had a medical examination and it showed a high level of cholesterol. (Seems to run in the family.) So I've switched to skim milk, and quit ice cream and yogurt.  I'll try to walk more, in pursuit of my pipe dream of walking a mile a day...

    Last weekend my Seniors Meetup convened at Cafe Demmetre in the Greek area.  And last night we had a movie discussion. (I'm going to see if I can revive my book club among them...) And my Classic Music Meetup listened to Canadian music last Saturday.

    The History Salon I go to on Sunday afternoons is now discussing the Russian Revolution, which is a bit depressing. (Lately I've been the first to leave...) Our next subject may be English history.

    I've almost finished a biography of Ieyasu, the shogun who united Japan around 1600, which I've been reading for my History Meetup the week after next. (I remember reading James Clavell's Shogun over 40 years ago.) For May I think we'll talk about Hawaii.

    Yesterday I saw Barry Levinson's gangster movie The Alto Knights, with Robert de Niro in two roles as rival mob bosses.  Wasn't bad, though it took a while to get into.

    Today I had an online session with Dr. Hassan my shrink.

    I've reached Level 2790 in Candy Crush Saga!

Comics scans

    In my last post I mentioned the scans of old comics at readcomiconline.li .  I originally found out about that because I follow Dick Tracy at gocomics.com .  That strip did a recent story involving a neo-Nazi terrorist scheming to detonate a big explosive at the clock tower.  In the comment section for one episode, I mentioned a similar story in a 1967 issue of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, in which Donald Duck foiled a plot to blow up a clock tower with a big statue of Uncle Scrooge whose arms provided the hands for the clock face.  Someone else remembered it, and mentioned where you could read it at that webpage!

    I've found some other comic books there I read back at the time.  I found the 1970 comic All-Star Westerns with a reprint of "Pow-Wow Smith," about a Native American sheriff, which we had back then.  One thing I recall from it is the promos in its pages for other issues. One was for "The Outlaw," with the cover page showing a lawman's son gone bad saying "Put that gun down, Dad!  Don't make me kill you!" Another was for "Manhunter 2070" a mini-series within DC's Showcase series.  

    You know those westerns where a gunfighter comes to his father's grave to tell him "I've killed all the people who killed you"? (You don't?  Oh, well...) This cover was similar, except it was set in the space age, with the son visiting a cemetery in a mini-asteroid field!  The idea of someone being buried in a mini-asteroid got to me at the time, to the point that I skipped the rest of the comic!  For me, there was something extra-disturbing about an outer space burial...

    I've now read that "Manhunter 2070" series too.  It's about a space-age bounty hunter, with a flashback story about how he was a kid and some space pirates murdered his father and turned him into a kitchen slave, and when he got older he trained himself, waited for the right moment and killed all the pirates responsible for the murder and handed over the rest of the crew for the reward.

    For those who prefer "the Stoned Age," that webpage also has scans of Marvel's Conan the Barbarian.  I'll have to check them out too!

    On Saturday the Seniors Meetup is having another lunch, this time at Patisserie La Cignone on Danforth Avenue.  And my Classic Music Meetup will be listening to Russian music.

Sixty-three

    Yesterday was my 63rd birthday.  I bought a strawberry dream cake at Loblaw's and we ordered felafels from the place around the corner. (Prices are going up these days!)

    Through social media I heard about readcomiconline.li .  It has a lot of comic books I remember from my childhood, stuff like Donald Duck.

    I was thinking about dimensions.  With zero dimensions, you have a point.  With one, you have one segment with two points on the end.  With two, you have one square with four side segments and four corners (except that if you take the sides individually, you have a total of eight end points).  With three dimensions, you have one cube with six face squares, twelve edges (or 24 if you take the faces individually), and eight vertices (or 24 points).  So I made a table:

                            Dimensions

                  0      1        2      3        4         5

Points        1      2       4      8      16        32

(ends, corners, vertices) 

                 (1)   (2)    (8)   (24)   (64)  (160)

Segments          1        4     12     32        80   

(sides, edges)

                         (1)     (4)   (24)   (96)   (320)

Squares                       1       6      24       80

(faces)

                                   (1)    (6)   (48)  (240)

Cubes                                   1        8       40

(sub-cubes)

                                            (1)      (8)    (80)

Tesseracts                                       1       10

Super-tesseracts                                        1

How did I determine what the numbers must be for four and five dimensions?  By seeing the common patterns!  For n dimensions you have 2^n points.  A segment has 2 ends, a square has four corners, a cube has 8 corners, suggesting a linear increase (2, 4, 6, 8, 10...).  To figure out the bracketed numbers for each dimension, take the unbracketed numbers from the previous dimension and multiply by 4, then 6, then 8...  Viewing successive diagonal lines, the bracketed numbers will surpass their unbracketed counterpart by 2, then 3, then 4...

    In addition if you look at the unbracketed numbers at dimension n, their total sum will be 3^n!

    That's the sort of thing I sometimes think about when my mind is wandering...

New Year

    I had to give up on my French Culture Meetup because nobody was coming.  Instead, I became co-organizer of Meaningful Genuine Connections (my seniors group), which I renamed GTA 60+ Meetup.  Last Saturday we had lunch at the Wake a Boo restaurant, and the Saturday after next we'll go to the Tango Palace Coffee House. (In a couple of weeks I'll have an online event where we'll each talk about any book that interests us--I'll discuss Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, which I read the year before last.)

    At Christmastime I intended to bake gingerbread, but couldn't find any molasses so I made something with honey instead. (It was still pretty good.)

    On New Year's Eve I saw The Brutalist with John P. (I usually stay home on New Year's Eve, but traditions are made to be broken.) It's pretty good but requires patience.  Midnight struck as I was coming home and I got to hear the fireworks.

    The History Salon I go to on Sunday afternoons is now discussing French history, all the way from the Revolution to the Fifth Republic.

    My History Meetup will be discussing the Peloponnesian wars next month, so I've started reading Jennifer T. Roberts' The Plague of War:  Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece.

    On YouTube I've discovered Mistare Fusion's podcast, all about the manga and anime series Dragon Ball.  He goes into remarkable detail about the narrative. I've also found a channel Keeping Walt in Disney, with decades of episodes of The Wonderful World of Disney! (That was one of my favourite TV shows in my youth.) I've been watching some Ludwig Von Drake cartoons...