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.
