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!
