The day after

"Now I, an under-tenant of the earth, can see

That the branches of a tree

Spread no wider than its roots.

And how shall the soul of a man

Be larger than the life he has lived?"

--Spoon River Anthology

Some years back Lilliana the psychologist was interviewing me for her doctoral dissertation on Asperger's Syndrome.  She was a Serb in Croatia and ended up a refugee in Canada as a result of the 1991 war.  She told me that when the war started nobody could believe it--they all thought someone would stop it!  I guess that's how a lot of us feel after Donald Trump's election as U.S. president.  I was thinking about the poem W.H. Auden wrote about seeing war break out in Europe in 1939.  I went to the Meetup of political discussions tonight, but I didn't have much to say.

It's interesting that I've been reading The Wizard of Oz just now, because Trump seems like the Wizard:  a tough-talking humbug.  For someone like me who supported Bernie Sanders during the primary contest, it's a great temptation to say, "I told you so." I could see all of Hillary Clinton's weaknesses back then, yet on the election's eve I just couldn't believe that they'd take the plunge! (Could there have been fraud?)

This morning Moira and I walked down to Puitak's apartment and took her to lunch.  It was nice weather for November.  But I had a big headache today.

The other night I had a dream where I was visiting my old Sackville home. (I often have that dream, and sometimes meet a friendly, non-existent woman living there now.) In this dream I said, "Viewing your old home is like visiting a parent who's too senile to recognize you"!

We're now learning The Merry Widow at opera rehearsal. (This week I remembered my score!) When we were rehearsing the Habanera from Carmen, Beatrice sang the solo part.  It was nice to hear her sing again--she was a soloist before taking up directing, and Carmen was one of her roles.

THE WIZARD OF OZ

Dorothy: "But, Aunt Em has told me that the witches were all dead--years and years ago...."

The Witch of the North: "... In the civilized countries I believe there are no witches left, nor wizards, nor sorceresses, nor magicians.  But, you see, the Land of Oz has never been civilized, for we are cut off from all the rest of the world.  Therefore we still have witches and wizards amongst us"--The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Well, just after writing the last post I downloaded the Kobo app and was able to read my Wizard of Oz ebook.  I got the idea of translating that book into Portuguese, since children's books have fairly simple language, and I've finished the first chapter! (The Portuguese word for wizard is "feitoceiro," and I've translated "munchkin" as "munchinho," using the Portuguese diminutive.) One thing I noticed is that for a children's fantasy, the first paragraphs about Dorothy's Kansas home are amazingly realistic!  I thought of the Joads.

I'm still reading Spoon River Anthology, which I imagine is best for older readers. (Gore Vidal said you have to be over thirty to enjoy Proust.) I've started imagining what my posthumous Spoon River poem might be.  I translated the first poem, "The Hill," into Portuguese ("A Colina"). I've also been translating the first chapters of Julius Caesar's Latin account of the Gallic Wars into Portuguese.  Yes, I know that I start more things than I finish. "That a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

Wednesday night the History Discussion Group met to discuss Tudor England, but the rain depressed turnout severely. (Someone marked the wrong date as well, and Debi is working on a play on Wednesday nights just now.) But loyal Jane did show up.  She's said that I know everything about everything, and my response is that I know about everything except life...

Saturday I went to the Royal Winter Fair for the first time in years. (It got me out of the house.) Outside there was an animal rights group protesting against "speciesism," and I took their pamphlet.  I remember that years ago I got some nice bread at this Mennonite bakery display, but they don't seem to have it any more.

Margaret came over this weekend because her son Alec was in a foot race, where he finished twelfth in the province!  I was hoping that Donald would come over too and figure out my ebook problems, but he had a cough and didn't want to spread it.  I hope he gets well soon enough.

I finally got through Level 315 of Candy Crush Saga.  That one's a lulu!

Bits and pieces

Last Thursday I went to the Non-Fiction Meetup at the Reference library, where we discussed Barack Obama's Dreams About My Father.  I read the book several years ago but kind of remember it. (Obama makes a better writer than a president!) Afterward we went to Jack Astor's where I ordered the root beer float!

Sunday night I was hours getting to sleep. (Serves me right for napping in the daytime!) When I finally slept, I had this dream where I was playing in some forested, sloping land near my hometown of Sackville, but I kept noticing corpses all over the place!  Maybe Halloween had something to do with it.

At the memoir group yesterday one of our subjects was The Wizard of Oz. (We managed to say a lot about that!) The other day I downloaded a free Ebook of L. Frank Baum's original version, but it was at Kobo and I don't know how to read it on this computer.  Looks like I'll need Donald's assistance again.

Today was my last singing lesson with Andriy for a while.  I was a bit less tense than usual.  The day was pretty warm for November!

I finished reading By the Shores of Silver Lake and started reading Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology. (I'm reading the copy the Burkes from Newfoundland gave me.) Once you start reading those poems, it's hard to stop!

At opera rehearsal tonight they were tarring the roof over the auditorium so there was a bit of a smell.  We started learning The Merry Widow but I forgot to bring the score!  Fortunately, the other tenor had an extra copy.

The Lusiades is the sort of poem Russians might like, what with its bombastic style!

Os Lusiadas

The other day I finished Duolingo's Portuguese "language tree" course.  I felt rather disappointed:  I was hoping it would go on longer.  So what do I do now?  (Duolingo doesn't have a higher-level course.) I found a blog where someone suggested Readlang and Memrise.  I got into Readlang, and read a Portuguese version of Aesop's "The Fox and the Grapes." The problem with that site is that it needs an App made for my Chrome browser, where my ebook Googleplay app hasn't been working. (Actually, it hasn't been working on my regular Firefox browser either.)

Out of curiosity I found Os Lusiadas on the Gutenberg website.  That's Portugal's national epic, written in the 16th century by the one-eyed poet Luis Vaz de Camoes. (There's a bust of him in the Portuguese neighborhood on College Street.) The language wasn't as tough as I feared, considering that this was the age of Shakespeare.  I've even started doing my own translation of it!

The Lusiades is written in iambic pentameter, with each stanza using an ABABABCC rhyming scheme.  I've managed to use a similar scheme, except that I also use ABBAABCC and BAABABCC and such.  Lucky for me the Romance languages tend to be more verbose than English, so you can often say the same thing in English with fewer syllables.  It's easier to pad out a line to fit the same length than to cut it down.

Here's my translation of the first stanzas:

1

I sing of arms, I sing of barons outstanding

Who from Lusitania's western shore

Set out on oceans never sailed before,

Yet beyond Taprobana sailing, landing, [Taprobana: ancient name for Sri Lanka]

Perils grave and many a war withstanding,

Beyond mankind's familar strength to endure,

Among those faraway lands to erect

The New Kingdom so sublime, and protect;

2

And also of the memories sacred, glorious,

Of those successive dauntless sovereigns spreading

The Faith, the Empire, in desperate war victorious,

Africa and Asia's vicious lands left bleeding;

And of those others with their work so valorous

Winning immortality, not conceding;

My song shall spread away through every part,

Should I be blessed now with the skill and art.

3

No longer do the wise Greek and the Trojan

Sail great voyages on the threatening seas;

No more do Alexander and great Trajan

Reap glory from their armies' victories;

I sing of Lusitania on the ocean

Whom even Neptune, even Mars obeys;

The song of the ancient Muse at last ceases

When a new, higher valor in my breast rises.

4

And you, my Tagides, you who created [Tagides:  classical nymph-muses]

In me a new and blazing inspiration,

Your joyful river of odes and declamation

Ever in my humble verse celebrated,

Give me now a high sound, sublimated,

A grandiloquent, flowing style of creation,

Because great Phoebus decrees that your waters [Phoebus:  classical sun god]

Shall be unmatched in Hippocrene's quarters. [Hippocrene:  spring on Mt. Helicon sacred to the Muses]

5

Give me a fury grand and sonorous,

No tones of rustic oats and rude fruit's seeds,

But a tuba singing and bellicose,

Sparking hearts with the sound of daring deeds;

Give me a song that's worthy of your valorous

People, that in honoring Mars succeeds;

Which spreads and sings all through the universe,

If words sublime enough can be fitted to verse.

Cold weather

"'I don't think Jerry steals horses,' Pa said.  But Laura thought he said it as if he hoped that saying it would make it so"--By the Shores of Silver Lake (sounds like some American liberals today!)

 

It's finally getting colder.  I brought out my warm autumn jacket and scarf on the weekend and my furry winter cap the other day.  Sunday it was warmer so I managed to get the last potatoes from the garden. (I got a few more beans, but they probably weren't good enough for eating.)

Friday night I saw The Birth of a Nation at the Carlton. (As I mentioned before, I tried to make it a History Book Club event, but nobody else was interested.) Frankly, it was pretty conventional:  William Styron's novel The Confessions of Nat Turner may be "appropriation," but it was far more original and imaginative.  At one point they even had the flashback montage cliche--of course, Cabaret had that too.

Today I've started reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's By the Shores of Silver Lake (for the third time) History Book Club.  It's one of my favorite Little House books, and I've already read about half of it!  It's the one where they move to Dakota Territory where Pa has a clerking job in a railroad under construction, then spend a winter in isolation and get a homestead claim near a place where they're about to build a new town.  I recall that there's a Silver Lake near my hometown of Sackville, N.B. 

At opera rehearsal tonight Beatrice came up with an exercise where we sang scales while extending our arms out and kicking our left and right legs in alternation!

On Duolingo I've been learning Portuguese business words ("loja" means shop), and just started learning political words.  Portuguese has a subjunctive mood in the future and pluperfect tenses, which I haven't seen in other languages.  I hope they'll soon be teaching nautical words, considering Portugal's illustrious seafaring history. 

 

I just learned on Youtube that the treaty of friendship between Portugal and England goes back to the 14th century!  Something else I've found on Youtube is a channel about dating different nationalities.  Seems that if you date a German girl she'll be brutally honest ("Don't you think it's time you got a haircut?") while a Mexican girl will expect you to walk with her on the outside of the sidewalk.  I don't know how true such generalizations are, but it's fun to watch.

I put a hold on a couple of books of Roald Dahl stories at the library, but the holds expired and I got fined two dollars.  They tried to phone me, but I hadn't updated my phone number! (I wish they'd email you too.)

Acting class

"You're about as fatale as an after-dinner mint!"--Cabaret

 

I'm now reading Bill Bryson's short biography Shakespeare:  The World as Stage (for the second time) for the History Discussion Group.  It's one in a series of Eminent Lives biographies, which could be convenient as background for future events in this Meetup.  Seems that in Elizabethan theatres it was customary to follow up a play by dancing a jig, even after tragedies!

 

Tuesday when I went to Alexiy's singing lesson the transit was against me!  First I just missed the St. Clair streetcar and had to wait twenty minutes for the next.  Then the Yonge subway line was moving slowly.  Then at Richmond Hill Centre I had to wait over fifteen minutes for the High Tech Drive bus.  When I finally got to Alexiy's house I was over forty minutes late, and got him to postpone our lesson till next week so he'd have enough time for a full one.   At least my York Region transit ticket was good for two hours, so I didn't have to buy a return ticket.

 

Half of Tuesday's opera rehearsal was an acting session, for which we divided into three groups.  Each group pretended to play a sport, and mine did baseball. (I was either shortstop or third base.) Then each group formed dioramas displaying given emotions.  We also did improvised dances, and did emotions with (non-verbal) sounds alone, then facial expressions alone, then body movements alone, then all three at once.  Those sessions are always fun.

It was really warm on Tuesday, then got cooler again the next day.  These temperature swings give me headaches!

 

Last night the Political Meetup met to watch the last U.S. Presidential debate on a Scallywag's screen.  I came just to hang with the others and didn't stay for the debate itself.  I was talking a lot to Carron, who resembles Cecilia Bartoli!

 

Tonight the History Discussion Group showed Bob Fosse's Cabaret. (I scheduled an event for next week where we'd go to the movies and see Birth of a Nation, but nobody was interested.) I'd seen it quite a few times, but it's always worth seeing again.  It's a terrific production, and the scene where the young Nazi sings "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" is jaw-dropping!  I want to read Good-Bye to Berlin someday! (But the two flashback montages near the end are definitely a cliche.)

 

I brought in some more potatoes and all the carrots from the garden the other day.  There are still some spuds and one head of cauliflower left.

The other day I was learning scientific Portuguese on Duolingo.  But scientific words are particularly easy because they tend to come from Latin and Greek in both Portuguese and English!

A wedding

"Those people who were previously in the habit of complaining about the ever-increasing traffic problems, pedestrians who, at first sight, appeared not to know where they were going because the cars, stationary or moving, were constantly impeding their progress, drivers who having gone around the block countless times before finally finding a place to park their car, became pedestrians and started protesting for the same reasons, after having first voiced their own complaints, all of them must now be content, except for the obvious fact that, since there was no one left who dared to drive a vehicle, not even to get from A to B, the cars, trucks, motorbikes, even the bicycles, were scattered chaotically throughout the entire city, abandoned wherever fear had gained the upper hand over any sense of property, as evidenced by the grotesque sight of a tow-away vehicle with a car suspended from the front axle, probably the first man to turn blind had been the truck driver"--Jose Saramago, Blindness

 

I'm in a good mood just now.  I've been getting several things done the past few days. (I'm in a good mood whenever I have much to write about here.)

On Thursday I visited Dr. Hassan and in the evening went on Betty-Anne's art walk.  We were at the premiere of an exhibition of Joseph Connelly paintings of abstracts and flowers. (I liked the flowers painting with trees and clouds in the background.) We even got to talk to Connelly himself!

Friday I got a filling at the dentist.  I was scheduled for the afternoon, but there were a couple of morning cancellations and Dr. Hrabalova wanted to end early, so I agreed to do it in the morning.  The sooner started, the sooner finished!

Saturday afternoon I went to the Play Read-Through Meetup and we did Arthur Miller's great play The Crucible.  I had to leave early because of the next event, but I'm going to find the text in the library and read the last act I missed, along with some prologue stuff we had to skip over.

Then I went to John Snow's wedding at City Hall to his longtime companion Rene. (I've hardly ever been to straight weddings even!) I  gave them the coffee table book 100 Years of American Comics as a wedding present, as I happened to have two copies of it!  Mother once told me she didn't care for weddings.

 

Afterward we had dinner at the Hot House, where I ordered the salmon fillet.  I was sitting next to Gaby, whom I hadn't seen for months, and we got to talk a lot (by my standards anyway).  I might have ordered tiramisu for dessert, but I had a bit of a headache and wanted to finish up.

Someone else I hadn't seen for months was Bev, and last week I finally got around to emailing her.  I mentioned my next Reading Out Loud Meetup event, and she was interested enough to come! (She brought a Halloween lamp.)

That event was today, and titled "Skin Crawlers":  scary stories for Halloween.  Twelve people showed up, one of our best turnouts ever!  A lot of people said they enjoyed it.  I read the Scottish ballads "The Twa Corbies" and "The Cruel Sister," originally collected by Walter Scott, and C.S. Forester's "The Turn of the Tide." (The latter was from Murder, Short and Sweet, an anthology of murder stories that I found in the library.) I also gave Malcolm and Bev two more items to read:  Roald Dahl's "Lamb to the Slaughter," from the same collection, and Robert Southey's poem "Bishop Hatto." Bev says she'll be coming again.

In addition, I finally finished the disaster issue of Lapham's Quarterly, where I read the Saramago quote.  And I finally passed Level 254 of Candy Crush Saga, which was a real bearcat! (My friend Blanche has been stuck there.)

In Duolingo today I was learning Portuguese medical words!

Free samples

Sunday night the Google Player problem righted itself.  It must have helped that I upgraded the Mac operating system to the new Sierra and moved to the Foxfire browser.  I got some worm in the Safari browser so that whenever I reopened the window it took me to some page I didn't want.

I've been reading that book about short-lived TV series.  After the first season in 1948, I went to the 1978 end and started working backward.  It only goes into detail about a minority of them, and not always the most interesting ones. (With ebooks you don't get the luxury of flipping through them to get an overview.)

One interesting thing about ebooks is that they'll give you the first six pages free as a sample.  Do you remember when I talked about those French comics featuring a little bear called Petzi who sailed over the world with his friends, which was based on a Danish comic about Rasmus Klump?  I've been looking at the start of some Rasmus Klump adventures in their original Danish, and using Google Translate on the captions.  The catch is that I don't know how to enter the "A" with a circle on top or the "O" with a slash.  I've also been looking at some French comics. (None of the Spanish Mortadelo y Filemon comics, alas.)

Tonight I went to the Political Discussion Meetup, which they've now moved to Scallywag's.  I mentioned that after the Clinton-Trump debate someone online asked "Who won the debate?" and I posted, "I won, because I didn't watch it"!  On Salon and The Huffington Post I've been writing, in effect, "Trump's going to lose anyway so go ahead and vote for Jill Stein!"

I've been having some more unusual dreams.  In one I was on a luxury ship with my father (we'd got booked at the last minute) and following him down a long escalator a short distance behind, but when I got to the bottom I'd lost him and couldn't figure out which of the two possible ways he'd gone.  In another we had a house in Amherst, N.S., near my hometown of Sackville, N.B.--we never had a house there--and I was in the basement and found a lot of interesting books there, including some Classics Illustrated comics.  And I was also dreaming about that cheesy scene at the start of Dirty Harry where Clint Eastwood challenges a punk to guess whether or not his Magnum is out of bullets...

On Duolingo I've just been learning how to say "I've been doing" in Portuguese.  In that language you say it as "I've done" instead! (In French I think you say it as "I do"...)

The other day we ate scalloped potatoes, cauliflower and carrots out of our garden.

The world of Ebooks

The other night I weakened and bought an Ebook online.  I feel a certain loyalty to paper books, but there are some books you can only get in this format!  The book I bought was Short-Lived TV Series 1948-1979. (Why yes, I am interested in reading about shows like Cool Million and Anna and the King.) But when I tried to read it on the Safari browser, I got nothing but blank pages!  So I downloaded the Chrome browser and tried to read it on that.  But now I got a message that I couldn't open it and had to go into the browser's settings and specifically enable cookies on the website play.googleusercontent.com .  So I did exactly what I was supposed to, but I still had the same problem!  I had to phone brother Donald and ask him to come over once more and fix the problem.

Today I started digging up the russet potatoes in the garden.  The first row was a whole bowlful, including one big enough for baking.  I also brought in a really big head of cauliflower.  The carrots are looking good.

On Duolingo I've been learning the past tense and the imperative mood in Portuguese.  I've been doing about a dozen lessons a day. (There's a tongue-in-cheek clip on Youtube suggesting that Duolingo is a tool of the Devil, and Moira got a big laugh from it.)

My history discussion group met on Wednesday night and we discussed Ten Lost Years.  We got half a dozen people. (Our discussions tend to go off on tangents, but we have a good time.) I suggested some new year subjects to Jane, and she said that she's always skeptical about my ideas but gets won over when I explain them!  A few days ago I posted Cabaret, Anne of the Thousand Days and Tom Jones as movie events for the rest of the year, and I just posted the subjects for the first three months of 2017:  the 1950s, the United States and Ireland.  The background books will be John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, Don't Know Much About History and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.  For movie events the same months, I'm thinking of Peyton Place, The Crucible (the version with Daniel Day-Lewis) and David Lean's Ryan's Daughter.  I guess maybe I'm getting ahead of the game, but I do enjoy planning this stuff!

Now that I've finished Ten Lost Years and the Frost poems, I'm back to reading the Lapham's Quarterly about disasters.

Deadlines met

"My speech will be like the old woman's dance, short and sweet"--Young Mr. Lincoln

Well, I finished the Frost collection on Saturday night, though I skipped his two masque plays. (I finished Ten Lost Years yesterday, with three days to spare.) Yesterday afternoon the Classic Book Club discussed Frost, and we ended up reciting a lot of his poems, which was something new.  A newbie called Karen is really enthusiastic about the group.  Frost with his sensibility reminds me of my mother.

Last week I saw a documentary at the Bloor about the Barbican estate in London.  The Museum of London is located near there, but didn't get mentioned.  I was thinking that it's time for me to visit London, probably in May.

Friday the History Discussion Group screened John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, which I've seen quite a few times.  It's Henry Fonda's first great role!

Yesterday on Youtube there was a video about this puzzle they give to engineering applicants:  an alien arrives on earth, and each day the aliens on earth have a 1/4 chance that you'll die, a 1/4 chance that you won't die or reproduce, a 1/4 chance that you'll reproduce one alien, and a 1/4 chance that you'll reproduce two.  What are the odds that the aliens will die out on earth?  I guessed 40%, which wasn't so far off from the right answer, which is the square root of two minus one, or about 41.4%.

The puzzle intrigued me so much that I did some more figuring.  The chance that they'll die out in the first two days is 85/256, just under 1/3.  The chance that they won't increase is 112/256, or 43.75%.  The chance that they'll go from one to either two or three will be 76/256, or close to 30%, so the chance of a bigger increase will be the remainder, or something over 26%.  And the chance of dying out in three days is something under 37%.

In the long run, once the alien population gets critical mass the trend will become more predictable.  They'll increase about 50% every day, which virtually guarantees doubling after two days, tripling after three days and quintupling after four days.  I love numbers!

Facing deadlines

Next Sunday my book club is discussing Robert Frost's collection, and next Wednesday the history group is discussing Ten Lost Years.  So I'm anxious to finish my complete Frost collection by Sunday, and Ten Lost Years in the next week.  To tell the truth, I work pretty well under pressure.  Reading Frost's poetry gives me a desire to write my own poems. (Please don't laugh!)

Saturday I went to a late-season barbecue Margo from Russia was hosting. (She warned us to wear jackets against the cold.) She lives a bit north of Bathurst & Steeles, and getting there was an adventure!  There were a dozen people there.  She got a game going where everyone had to name a fruit or vegetable with the same initial as his first name.  All I could think of was "juniper berry," though I don't know if that fruit is used for anything but flavouring gin.

Sunday afternoon I went to a "town hall" discussing electoral reform, hosted by MP Adam Vaughan in City Hall council chambers.  I left a printout of the post I uploaded here last October with my proposal for a mixed proportional representation scheme.  Here's a pet peeve:  When people sit in those plush benches for the spectators, you might think they'd go to the middle, but half of them just sit down next to the edges, so I have to step past them to get a seat!

At opera rehearsal, Beatrice added some makeshift taijiquan to our warmups!

Duolingo can be odd.  I was recently learning some romantic pickup lines in Portuguese, and one of them translates as "If I could see you nude, I'd die happy!" (Is that what Brazilian girls want to hear?) Another is, "I'm not a pirate, but I've found a treasure!" I also learned an expression that translates as "helpless as a blind man in a shootout," except that they translated it as "helpless as a nun on honeymoon"!  Just today I learned Portuguese sentences that translate as "She sleeps in an empty room," and "You don't exist!" I'm now officially 27% "fluent." To tell the truth, there seem to be a lot of Portuguese words that are easy to learn:  guess what "companhia" means?

Another thing that bugs me:  the Duolingo logo for the section teaching about the verb "to be" is a skull.  Sure, Hamlet does say "To be or not to be..." and hold a skull, but he does it in different scenes! (Very persnickety of me, I know...)

Back to the opera

Sunday was Read Out Loud.  It's September, so I did banned and challenged books again.  Someone was reading from Bulgakov's Master and Margarita (I should read that again someday!) and someone else was reading a rant by journalist Oriana Fallaci.  I read the chapter in Salinger's Catcher in the Rye where he's travelling on a train and bullshitting the mother of a classmate, a section from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale that was reprinted in the Lapham's Quarterly spying issue, and the chapter in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn where the judge tries to reform Huck's father.

Tuesday was the first Toronto City Opera rehearsal.  We started on Bizet's Carmen, and did pretty well with it. (We did it three years ago, so I guess it's still fresh in our memories.) This year I'm singing tenor for the first time, and Beatrice is grateful:  the chorus has three members this year, as opposed to none last year!

Andriy is now charging $50 per lesson, which is reasonable since we go on for an hour and a half! (He'd go on even longer if I didn't get tired.) We've mostly been doing Gluck's "O del Mio Dolce Ardor," and he suggested the exercise of singing the song in vowels alone, without consonants, which seems pretty useful.  The other day we started on Pergolesi's "Nina" too.  It's actually just a guess that Pergolesi wrote it:  if they had no idea it would be a folk song!

Last night I went to a new Book Club Meetup at the Bedford Academy.  It turned out that I was the only boy there! (I quipped, "Book clubs are a good place to meet girls!") This was just a meeting to discuss what to read next, and I suggested Maria Chapdelaine since I just finished it.  Denise is the organizer, and I invited her to join my Toronto Bookshelf group on Facebook.

On Facebook today someone mentioned a report that a public school employee quit because she was forced to deny a school meal to a kid who couldn't pay.  I pointed out that that's the sort of thing I've been reading about in the Great Depression history Ten Lost Years!

The other night I dreamed about being in Glasgow (where I spent a year almost thirty years ago) and remembered an actual toy store called The Jolly Giant!  I also dreamed about travelling around in a London Routemaster bus with double deckers, like Cliff Richard did in the movie musical Summer Holiday, but in this dream it was painted blue.

Square dancing

My new interest is square dancing.  They started a Square Dance Meetup group, and I went to the first event on Thursday night at the community centre near Church & Wellesley.  Then I went to a second event last night at Dovercourt House, with live country music!

To someone who's taken ballroom dancing lessons, square dancing isn't so complicated.  The main thing is to keep in step with the music, left-right like in marching.  I've been learning stuff like promenade and allemand left and peekaboo, and of course do-si-do.  The Thursday night group had enough people for three rings (at eight dancers each), but back twenty years ago when there was less competition, they got over a hundred people!

I've been learning Portuguese on duolingo.com .  I learned that in this language cobra means any snake, not just one breed.   The word "banana" must come from Portuguese because it's the same in that language.  Xicara means cup, while copo means glass, which can be confusing.  They say I'm now 17% fluent, whatever that means. (Did you know that there was a period in the 16th and 17th century when Portuguese was a lingua franca in a lot of Asian commerce, like English today?)

This afternoon the Play Read-Through Meetup did Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None.  That was pretty fun, and we got almost ten people!  Next month we're doing Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

I've started re-reading Ten Lost Years, Barry Broadfoot's oral history of Canada in the Great Depression.  This is what reading history should be, full of compelling stories about people trying to survive unusually hard times. (Maybe we should do Six War Years too.)

I finally got around to buying a new set of pajamas.  I'd tried to buy one at Walmart, but they only had them in extra-large size!  This evening I went to Yorkdale Mall--had to take a shuttle bus because the subway's being serviced--and found a pair at the Bay.  They're a bit tight, but cost only twenty bucks!  I'm wearing them right now.

Two TV shows

I've been looking at two new series on Crave TV.

Deutschland 83 is a German miniseries about a 1983 East German who gets manipulated into spying in a West German general's office under a stolen identity, so the East German government will give his mother priority for a kidney transplant operation.  It's a terrific show, intelligent and exciting. (We rarely appreciate how lucky we were to survive the irresponsibly hawkish Reagan presidency.) Those little East German cars looked curious.

I've also started the remake of Roots.  It isn't as cheesy as the 1977 original, but it still lacks subtlety.   Alex Haley's book is way better than either version.  Forrest Whittaker has a good role as Fiddler. (It was a good role for Louis Gossett.) At least it lacks the bad acting of white stars like Edward Asner!

Last night I found a puzzle at brilliant.com where you have to figure out x where (x+1)^1/2 - (x-1)^1/2 = (4x-1)^1/2.  I think their answer is that there's no x that fits the equation, but that assumes that these are all positive square roots.  x=5/4 works, when the second term is a negative root while the others are positive, or when the second one's positive while the others are negative!

Odds & ends

Monday night we saw the movie of August:  Osage County, which Moira borrowed from the library.  The cast included Dermot Mulroney, whom she calls "my favourite goon." Unfortunately, the video skipped several times in the second half. (She says library DVDs are notorious for that.) The soundtrack included the Eric Clapton song "Lay Down, Sally," which I always thought went, "Way down south"!

Tuesday night we saw Rene Clair's And Then There Were None, from the Agatha Christie play, also from the library.  It's pretty scary, with a tasty cast. (Moira said, "The cat did it!") It turns out that the play has a different ending from the book!

Wednesday I had lunch with Pam at Butler's Pantry.

Yesterday I finally got my eyes tested at a clinic near St. Clair & Dufferin. (I tried to wait until after my OSDP interview, in hopes that a new health care plan would pay for it, but it's been taking forever!) My long-distance sight is still improving, so I got a new prescription.  The eye doctor expects that my headaches will be reduced, but they never seem to go away.

Today I got my hair cut.  When she was finished, the Hungarian barber said, "Now you look ten years younger!" My gray hairs are a bit more visible near the temple, but I find that look dignified!

I saw a video on Youtube by someone talking about the best and worst national flags.

Last night I dreamed about meeting an American fundamentalist and pointing out that Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson was a deist.  I said, "Deists think that God is like that rich uncle who never takes you out to dinner!"

Several Meetups

"Actually, 'forsook' is acceptable usage too." "Forsook you and the horse you rode in on!"--August:  Osage County

Sunday afternoon was Reading Out Loud.  The subject this month was science fiction.  My earlier efforts got weak attendance, but this time there were seven people.  One attendee had some copies of a zine he'd published, and the other had a manuscript of a fantasy novel she'd been working on!  I read the penultimate chapter of Tom Swift and His Giant Robot, along with the closing passages of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and H.G. Wells' The Time Machine.

Tuesday I had another singing lesson with Andriy.  Not only is he really cheap, he'll continue for an hour and a half, until I get tired!  I've figured out that Route 1 on York Region Transit will take me along High Tech Road (they actually have a street with that name!) to Silver Linden Drive, not far from Andriy's house.  His focus is on technique, and I think I'm learning a lot.

Wednesday afternoon I went to the Play Reading Meetup at Annette library.  We read through August:  Osage County, which was really fun.  Now I'll have to see the movie!

Wednesday night I went to the Political Discussion Meetup at the Fox & Firkin near Eglinton station.  Much talk about the Trump campaign.  I still wish they'd find a somewhat quieter place.

Last night I went to Rose's Non-Fiction Meetup for the first time in a while.  Our book was History's People, the same book my history group will be discussing in a couple of weeks!  Afterward we hung out at Jack Astor's, where I had a cream soda float.

I've finally finished the winter issue of Lapham's Quarterly (on spying), and started the spring issue on disasters.

I think I need to get my eyes tested again.  The place where I went before is gone, so I'll have to find a new optometrist.

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA and INHERIT THE WIND

"The only man who can strut while sitting down"--Inherit the Wind

Sunday afternoon I saw the Marx Brothers movie A Night at the Opera at the Revue.  It was their first movie without Zeppo, having moved from Paramount to MGM.  It was their biggest financial success, but it isn't my favourite of theirs. (That's Horse Feathers!) Parts of it are very funny, but there's a really lame romantic plot between Alan Jones (in the Zeppo role) and Kitty Carlisle.  There's also a bad-guy opera star who slaps Harpo around, as annoyingly obvious as Billy Zane in Titanic. (Part of the movie is set on an ocean liner.)

Thursday night the History Discussion Group watched the video of Stanley Kramer's movie of Inherit the Wind, a fictional play based on the Scopes Monkey Trial.  It's a pretty good adaptation, with veterans Spencer Tracey and Frederic March in fine form as veteran lawyers.

Today I went to a history walk in High Park.  It was hosted by Trevor, who has a video company in the Junction that emphasizes the Steam Punk fashion.  I met Martha, whom I haven't seen since we were in Nancy's acting class.  That reminded me of how we did the exercise in that class of creating a character from scratch, and I came up with a socialist revolutionary from 1914. (Trevor's character was from 1880 or so.)

Singing lessons

I've started taking singing lessons from Andriy Kartuzov, whom I know from the choir.  He charges even less than my first teacher Giuseppe Macina did!  We had our first lesson today, and he takes a more technical approach than Giuseppe did.  I've taken to moving my arms around like an Egyptian dancer while singing to keep them relaxed.

Getting to Andriy's place in Richmond Hill was an adventure in itself!  The first lesson was supposed to be on Tuesday, but I went to Caymus Street instead of Callowhill Street!  Today I carried a printout of his location from Google Maps, as I should have done previously. (There's a lot of my mother in me--she could be goofy about finding places too.) His neighbourhood has some exotic street names like Far Niente and Monet and Iron Horse...

I finished Margaret MacMillan's History's People the other day.  I didn't care for the part about politicians, but liked the part about diarists.  Now I'm reading Hemingway's In Our Time for my book club, and the spying issue of Lapham's Quarterly.

Tonight I saw a documentary about the making of Marilyn Monroe's The Misfits on Youtube.  A sad, poignant story.

We finished the second season of Fargo.  It was even more brilliant and original than the first season!

FARGO

"You're a Gerhardt!" "That's like Jupiter saying to Pluto, 'You're a planet!"--Fargo

I wasn't quite finished with NYC when I got home.  On Tuesday night we watched the documentary Six by Sondheim, about Stephen Sondheim's career as a Broadway composer, focusing on half a dozen of his songs.  Then I went to the Bloor and saw another documentary, Norman Lear:  Just Another Version of You, about the '70s sitcom creator who created the anti-Moral Majority movement People for the American Way.  The Bloor showed the giant ant movie Them! on Thursday and I would have seen it, but I thought it was at 9:00 when it was actually at 7:00.

Wednesday night the History Discussion Group met at Scallywag's for a Roaring Twenties event discussing Bill Bryson's One Summer:  America 1927. (Jane didn't care for the book so I lent her the 1929 book What a Year! which she liked better.) For the occasion I wore my fedora with my green cardigan and a tie.  There were just three of us but we had a good time.  Margo from Belarus (not to be confused with Margo from Poland), who'd suggested the idea, couldn't be there because she's visiting the Maritimes.  She passed through my hometown of Sackville, N.B.!

We've started watching the second season of the TV version of Fargo, which Moira borrowed from the library.  This is a prequel to the first season, set back in 1979, back when the policewoman's father who runs the diner was a cop himself.  This is how movies should be adapted for TV:   loosely similar, with somewhat parallel settings and characters, but with the same sensibility. 

We're getting into corn season and I had some corn on the cob for dinner! (It's good to have an oblong butter dish so you can roll the cobs in the butter.)

I've been watching some interesting videos on Youtube talking about languages.  Today I actually took a stab at learning Korea's Hangul alphabet!  I also saw the hilarious Gavin McInnes video "Don't Move to New York City."  I just took a free personality test at visualdna.com which concluded I'm a "stargazer" type.

Weekend in New York

When I get stressed, my mouth goes dry.  I noticed that on a weekend tour of New York I took with a group of 50 people whom I hooked up with through the People Over 50 Meetup.  It was all a bit overwhelming.  I made the mistake of entering the Times Square area, where there's now street repairs going on, forcing people into an even tighter squeeze than usual.  I ended up not going to any shows but returning to the hotel early.

We left Friday morning and were on the bus almost around the clock.  There were about six women for every man.  The most scenic part of the drive was in New York State southeast of Syracuse, in James Fenimore Cooper country.  We stayed at the Empire Meadowlands hotel in Secaucus, New Jersey.  I was in a room with Peter, who'd coincidentally been sitting next to me on the bus.  I heard that the rooms on the eastern side had a view of Manhattan, but we were on the west.  He and I and a woman whose name I've forgotten (I warned her I was terrible at remembering names!) had dinner at a Japanese buffet in Secaucus.  On both Saturday and Sunday I took a New Jersey transit bus back to the hotel, which was an adventure in itself. (Route 129 can drop you off just around the corner from the hotel!) At the hotel breakfast I ate yogurt for the first time in years.  It isn't that I didn't like yogurt but that I'd just lost interest in it.

Saturday we took on a tour guide and drove around Manhattan.  He was talking about a public dance Friday nights at the Lincoln Centre Plaza (A Midsummer Night's Swing) and said, "Young men and women come together to spawn." Classic New Yorkese!  We got behind schedule because of heavy traffic and only got a short time at the 9/11 Memorial Park, but no complaints from me about that.  We ate at an upmarket food court in Rockefeller Center, where I had a lobster roll that was a lot pricier than back home.  In the afternoon we did a walking tour of Central Park, where we saw a crowd of people staring at their iPads, playing Pokemon Go!  I had dinner at Carnegie Deli:  a corned beef and egg sandwich so huge that I ended up skipping dinner on Sunday.  American food can make me feel unclean.

On Sunday morning it was raining sore. (Thank goodness I took my raincoat!) In the morning we visited Ellis Island but didn't get to stay there long.  I could have stayed with the main group, had lunch at Chelsea Market and walked through the High Line Park, but like a couple of others I let the bus take me on to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  My lunch was a hot dog--a New York dog, with sauerkraut as well as relish--which I ate outside the Shakespeare in the Park theatre, where they were performing Troilus and Cressida with snatches of heavy metal music.  My favourite part of the Met is the American Wing, but I went through some other areas and saw stuff like a 17th-century French painting where a young woman asks an old gypsy for her fortune as her entourage picks her pockets!  And there was this bust of the young Roman emperor Caracalla, with an unimperial perplexed expression like Hamlet.

One of the group went home by train, so on the way back the bus had one empty seat, and guess who got extra space to stretch? (I was born lucky!) I was talking to a very friendly Italian-Canadian called Pena, who'll now hook up with me on Facebook.  As I took the TTC home I saw Toronto in a new way, since my extra alertness wasn't relaxed.

I'm not really one for group tours.  Next time I'll go to NYC alone, stay for a week and try to do things a bit more slowly.  It's the seventh time I've visited that city, but I always feel like I've only scratched the surface.  Great cities are fine for visiting, especially London, which I lived in for eight months so I got below the surface a bit.  But it's better to live in a near-great city like Toronto!