Opening weekend

The opera started this weekend, with The Merry Widow last night and Carmen this afternoon.  The audiences were pretty enthusiastic.  Moira came to see Carmen today (she liked it) and we walked home together in the mild weather.  I'm now wearing my non-winter shoes again!

Yesterday we finally got around to returning the new malfunctioning printer.

I finished Angela's Ashes yesterday and started reading the rest of the Lapham's Quarterly special issue about Alexander Hamilton.

Father and Moira have finally caught up with me, and now we're watching The Sopranos together again.

It turns out that we're doing two more dress rehearsals this week for the operas' other lead casts.  You'd think I'd have noticed that earlier, but I'm my mother's son!

Dress rehearsals

"Elizabeth, your justice could freeze beer!"--The Crucible

Tuesday and Wednesday were the dress rehearsals for The Merry Widow and Carmen respectively. On Tuesday I didn't wait for a mirror but put on most of my makeup by feel! (Kathy says I did an OK job.)

Tonight I looked at the video of Nicholas Hytner's movie of The Crucible, Arthur Miller's play about the Salem witch trials.  It was pretty good, though I got sleepy in the middle part.

Last night I dreamed of being in a Heart of Darkness type adventure, except that instead of a man the target was a woman in military uniform, and the team out to get her included a teenage boy. Then I dreamed of a non-existent tall building west of Keele & St. Clair that exploded into a big fireball. (That must be from hearing about the tennis club fire near Yonge & St. Clair.)

Because of that fire, Scallywag's is closed for now, so I'll have to move the History Meetup location elsewhere, presumably to the Ryerson Hub where I've moved my other Meetups.

I've been contributing to a lively discussion at the Salon website about an interview with Susan Sarandon and her being blamed for not supporting Hillary Clinton.  Something that bugs me is that when I say that Bernie Sanders would have had a better chance at beating Trump, Clintonites respond with a circular argument: "We Democrats didn't vote for Bernie, therefore Bernie wasn't electable, therefore not voting for Bernie wasn't a mistake!"  I posted that Democrats who voted to nominate Clinton were "dumb as styrofoam"!

Costumes

Young Frank McCourt (being told that his baby brother was going to be christened Alphonsus): "That's a stupid name.  It isn't even Irish"--Angela's Ashes 

(He got slapped and missed out on the christening.)

This morning I went to the Bickford Centre and helped them unload the costumes for the opera. (I also tried on both my costumes.  Our male gypsy costumes for Carmen include a serape-type thing you drape over your shoulder--I wonder if it'll keep falling off unless you pin it or something.) I went to Beatrice and the other girls in the women's dressing room to tell her, "The male costumes are all hung," and couldn't resist adding "...and well hung too!" (That got a groan...)

Yesterday I attended John Snow's book club in his apartment building on Adelaide Street, where we discussed Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac. (Years ago Moira called her Anita Droopner!) I didn't have much to add, however, since I didn't have time to read the book. Getting there in the snowy weather was an adventure in itself.

When John visited a week ago he spent half the visit trying to fix my new printer.  Then Donald visited yesterday and spent a lot of time on it too. It reminded me of a time about thirty years ago when Donald was visiting the family in Sackville, but our new Atari 2600 computer was on the blink and I had a college paper to print out, so he spent most of the visit working on our machine!

As it is, it looks like we'll have to return or exchange the machine.  This time Father and I will carry it back together!

Just read the part of Angela's Ashes where his father went off to work in the factories of wartime England but never sent any money home, so his mother had to go apply for relief to two officials who made the experience even more humiliating than it had to be. Limerick may be a city, but it definitely reminds me of a small town!

The cable signal finally came back so we're watching The Sopranos again. (I'm an episode ahead of the others.)

LA LA LAND

On Los Angeles: "They worship everything and value nothing"--La La Land

Thursday I visited Dr. Hassan and with his advice completed my O.D.S.P. application. (My description of how Asperger's Syndrome affected me was on the brief side.  Maybe I should have mentioned my occasional bouts with insomnia!)

Last night I went to Bulk Barns near Keele & St. Clair and bought brown flour and rye flour there for the first time.  Our cable connection is off so we haven't been watching The Sopranos for the last few days.

This afternoon I was going to attend the big rally for electoral reform.  Unfortunately, it was in Nathan Phillips Square and I went to Queen's Park instead. (D'oh!) Oh well, it was a nice mild day for getting out.

Tonight I saw La La Land at the Market Square. It's a cute confection that gets better as it goes along.  It reminded me of Jacques Demy's 1960s musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, though that film had more passion.

The other night I dreamed of being involved in this scheme where they smuggled me into one of the Gulf States in the Middle East and I posed as Arab royalty and attracted pretty women!

ANGELA'S ASHES

Frank McCourt's father at his christening (to a priest who'd implicitly criticized his speakeasy habit): "Take off that collar and we'll see who's the man."

I've started reading Frank McCourt's memoir Angela's Ashes for my history group, for the second time. (The first time I read it, some fifteen years ago, I finished it in just four days or so:  it helped that I'd already seen the movie.) Depressing yet funny--I've heard that he developed the story from telling and retelling it over the years.  When they were interviewing him on 60 Minutes he said, "A Limerick man said to me, 'You shamed your mother, you shamed Limerick and you shamed Ireland!' A holy trinity of shame!" His Teacher Man is also excellent.

I had lunch with John Snow again yesterday. (We were going to eat at a new Indian restaurant called Ji, but it turned out that it's only open for dinner, so we went to Schnitzel Hub again.) Unfortunately, I didn't have much to talk about because so much of it I've already written on this blog, which he reads.

At opera rehearsal Beatrice said to the women doing the Gypsy Dance in Carmen, "Smile, ladies!...  Think of sex, think of shopping, think of ice cream, think of something that excites you!" I hope I have enough energy for the performances.

Someone compared Donald Trump's adviser Steve Bannon to Tony Soprano, and Trump himself to Tony's protege Christopher Moltisanti.  If you ask me, Trump is more like the twisted gangster Ralph Cifaretto!

55

Today I turned 55.  We ate Chinese food and a strawberry shortcake with white chocolate curls. My fortune cookie said "You have an excellent imagination." (Someone said that you can improve any fortune cookie prediction by adding the words "...in bed"!)

I got a whole lot of "Happy birthday" messages on Facebook from people I don't know.  I replied with a smiley emoticon for each of them, but with people who clearly had Spanish/ Portuguese/ Italian names I wrote "Gracias/Obrigado/Grazie"!

When I brought the new printer Friday, the salesman talked me into buying a fresh ink cartridge too.  So I assumed I'd have to add that cartridge when installing it, but it wouldn't go in. Eventually I figured out that there was already a cartridge inside!  I felt quite the monkey.

The printer is almost installed, except that when I try to print something I get a message that the printer isn't responding.  Oh well, I can wait for Donald or John to figure it out.

We're now watching the fourth season of The Sopranos.  We skipped the last part of the first episode where Christopher avenged his father's death.

I made a goof scheduling this months Reading Out Loud Meetup.  I thought that the opera's eight performances would be like last year, over two weeks with four performances each.  But it turns out that there are two performances in the first week, three in the second and three in the third. Which means it conflicts with that Meetup event, so I had to move it to March. (First time I recall doing that with Reading Out Loud!)

ROGUE ONE (spoiler!)

Good Guy: "You'll never win!" Bad Guy: "Now where have I heard that before?"--Rogue One

Yesterday afternoon I returned to the previous day's interview site with a void cheque (so they can put money directly into my account) and a copy of my 2015 tax return.  I had to miss the first event of a new Meetup group for people over 55, but there were almost thirty people going and I don't care for groups that big.  Besides, I'll only turn 55 this Sunday!

Last night the History Meetup discussed the United States.  Predictably, our discussion ended up being about The Donald.

This afternoon I went out to Staples near Keele & St. Clair and bought a new printer for my computer as a birthday indulgence. (First I checked out the Best Buy competition.) I'd been planning on getting a color inkjet, but on the way over I realized that I could use the downstairs computer's color printer, so I might as well get a monochrome laser printer.  It was somewhat more expensive but in the long run it'll save ink costs.  I was hoping they'd deliver it, but instead I had to tote it home.

I've started reading the original articles in the new Home issue of Lapham's Quarterly.

Tonight I finally saw Rogue One at the Carlton. Like the Star Wars series in general, it was rather shameless fun. The blind martial artist seemed to be derived from Japan's blind swordsman Zatoichi. One thing I liked about it was that... (Here comes the spoiler!)

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...all the important characters died in the end! (Like The Hateful Eight, it reminded me of those Biddle Family childhood plays where my siblings and I would all die in different ways.) While the Star Wars movies owe a lot to serials like Flash Gordon, this one reminded me as much of a war movie.

Welfare

Paulie: "You're late!" Ralph: "Well, tomorrow I can be on time, but you'll be stupid forever!"--The Sopranos

John Snow asked what I was doing today.  I had an interview about getting onto the welfare rolls so I can apply for O.D.S.P. (Moira came along with me and helped out.  I was late in thanking her, because I was ashamed that I couldn't do it all by myself.)

Unfortunately, I got the place wrong.  I'd convinced myself that the interview was at the office near Metro Hall when it was actually at the office near Eglinton Station!  We were half an hour late, but things went pretty well.  There was some confusion because I'd put down Father's income source when I was supposed to give my own, but it got figured out in the end.  I also got my name put on this list that can involve me in recreational activities and such.

Opera rehearsal is now on both Tuesday and Wednesday night.  We're finally working onstage with the soloists.  Last night was Carmen and tonight was The Merry Widow, and we staged the whole operas and stayed for four hours!  Us men had fun diving for the Merry Widow's dance card, but we had to do it three times to get the right place:  first time we were too close to the center stage entrance, second time we were too far upstage near the curtain.

In Carmen I get to kneel next to the star during the later part of her Habanera number until she pushes me away and I do a pratfall!

20TH CENTURY WOMEN

"Why can't something just be pretty?"--20th Century Women

This evening I saw 20th Century Women at the Yonge & Dundas.  It was a pretty good comedy set in 1979 California, with a fine cast. (Shame that there are so few worthy roles for middle-aged actresses like Annette Bening.) I identified with it somewhat because in my childhood I was known as Jamie, like the son in the movie, and was also born in the early '60s, and my mother, like his mother, gave birth to me in her early 40s.  Really funny scene where one girl insists on talking about menstruation among mixed company!

This afternoon was the latest Classic Book Club event where we talked about Steinbeck's Cannery Row. I also recited the short chapter from The Grapes of Wrath about the turtle crossing the highway.

Yesterday Moira and I had lunch with Puitak and Gordon at the King's Noodle near Spadina & Dundas.  That sort of Chinese food is rather oily for me.

I've been getting thinner, or else my long johns have been stretching.  When I was at the movies the other night those long johns fell down to my knees inside my pants.  It gave me a funny feeling, like I was walking around with my outside pants down and nobody noticing!

I finally cracked Candy Crush Saga's Level 530 after a couple of weeks.  It's one of the hardest levels ever!

We skipped the Sopranos episodes where Dr. Melfi got raped and A.J. and his friends trashed their school, and we should also skip the one where Jackie Jr. is dumb enough to try robbing the big poker game.  And there's a scene at the end of the fourth season's first episode worth skipping!

SILENCE

Sometimes I run into a drought with this blog and can't think of anything to say.  I seemed to be in one earlier today, but this evening when we were going to watch another Sopranos episode (we skipped the one where Dr. Melfi got raped), we couldn't get the cable signal!  So I went out to see a movie instead.

I saw Martin Scorsese's slow but fairly powerful Silence at Canada Square. That's about a couple of Jesuits who go to Japan to track down Liam Neeson, a priest reported to have gone apostate.  As Jesuit movies go, mind you, I'd give the edge to Bruce Beresford's Black Robe just because of its Canadian scenery!

Andrew Garfield plays one of the Jesuits, who comes under pressure from a Japanese inquisitor to publicly recant his faith too. (This reminded me of Hacksaw Ridge, where Garfield was pressured to abandon his pacifism.) Neeson only turns up late in the movie, and I couldn't help thinking about his losing his wife Natasha Richardson and how that must have been like his character losing his Catholic faith.

Half-assed agnostic that I am, I identify with religious dissidents, whether they're Catholics facing a Japanese inquisition or people facing the Catholic inquisition.  Here the Japanese inquisitors had taken the course of making priests recant by executing their followers. (There's nobody lower than hostage takers!) I couldn't help thinking of the interrogation in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is back in the news these days.  They say, "With power comes responsibility," but I say that power is the ability to hold other people responsible for your actions!  Those in power always have a rationale, you see...

Tuesday at opera rehearsal we blocked the rest of Carmen and started doing The Merry Widow. Peter also gave us tickets to sell.  When some guys brought out the Madonna statue (Mary, that is) for the pre-bullfight scene, it was slightly tilted, and Beatrice said, "Mary's drunk!"

BEST WORST THING THAT EVER COULD HAVE HAPPENED

Alan Alda's advice to a young actor: "If you can see yourself doing anything else, do it"--Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened

Saturday night I saw the Harry Potter prequel Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them at the Kingsway. (Haven't been there since that whaling movie about a year ago.) It was complicated but moderately entertaining.  Those scenes where a whole building gets destroyed in a wizard battle then restored by further wizardry strike me as a cheat!

Yesterday I saw Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened at the Bloor, with the Sunday Afternoon Movie Meetup.  It's a documentary about Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince's 1981 Broadway musical Merrily We Roll Along, with three characters shown in reverse chronological order, going from middle-aged cynicism back to youthful ambition. (I was lucky to see the cinemacast of the award-winning London revival a year or two ago.)

For the original production Prince cast only actors under 25, in the hope of capturing youthful essence, and had them wearing T-shirts with labels like "Best pal" and "Wealthy backer" and "Fan." (I have a feeling he was trying to be original for the sake of originality...)  But critics were largely unimpressed and the original production closed after two weeks, though the show got a cult following through revivals. (Twenty years afterward the cast reunited to perform the songs in a benefit concert.) 

The documentary interviews the performers three decades later and considers how the experience changed their lives.  One of them went on to become a theatre director, and directed this film; another, Jason Alexander, became a TV star on Seinfeld. (Fifteen or twenty actors producing one star:  that gives you an idea of the heavy odds in the profession these people devote their whole beings to!) Quite interesting, especially for Sondheim fans.

I noticed that in Trump's inaugural speech, in a dig at Obama, he complained about leaders who were "all talk and no action." That reminded me of Aesop's fable about the frogs who wanted a king, so Zeus sent them an inert log.  The frogs decided they deserved better than that, so Zeus sent them a serpent who ate them all!

The other day I was translating Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into Portuguese (because, why not?). Now that's a speech!

I'm a welfare queen!

Or I will be soon.  When we talked to Dr. Hassan last week, he said that I should start by applying for welfare so that they'll send me an ODSP kit. Yesterday I went to an Ontario Works office near Sheppard station, and they sent me on to a Social Services office near Metro Hall.  

Today I went to that office, but they told me you have to apply by phone or online, so that's the next step.  Moira hates the idea of applying online, but applying by phone means staying on hold for about 40 minutes, so I'll be weighing both options.

We're finished with the second season of The Sopranos. (I doubt that the others would be interested in the last few episodes.) Next we'll be looking at the third season, which introduces Ralph the twisted gangster.  I like Joe Pantaliano in the role, but I don't know how the others will feel.  The episode involving the ill-fated stripper is considered a classic, but I don't think they'll want to see it; I know I don't want to see it again.  And there's the depressing storyline about Jackie Aprile Jr., a young guy Tony wants to keep out of trouble, but if he succeeded there wouldn't be any point. (I mentioned the other week that I don't like that kind of plot.) But I'm sure we'll see that last episode where Tony tries to put his son into military school:  some of my favorite episodes involve A.J.!

The Donald got inaugurated today.  I'm pretty frustrated that so many Democrats are still in denial about their unfair primary.  I posted online, "If the primary had been an election for president of the Teamsters union, the government would have made them do it over." If the DNC elite isn't held answerable for their shenanigans, they can be expected to stack the next primary for another "insider" candidate, as they clearly care more about controlling the party than winning elections. When the Democrats screwed Bernie Sanders in the primaries, they screwed themselves in November, and they screwed America for the next four years!

Back to the opera

Last night was the first opera rehearsal of the new year.  We went onto the stage and blocked out the first half of Carmen. It turns out that both stage director Beatrice and music director Adolfo are going elsewhere next year.  I can't imagine Toronto City Opera without them! (Then again, a decade ago I couldn't have imagined it without stage/musical director Giuseppe Macina.)

Beatrice is a fun director.  Tonight she showed the girls how to fake hair-pulling in the catfight scene! (The pullee puts her hand on the puller's hand and guides it down her head.) For the gypsy dance at the start of the second act, she has the men watching it on the stage this time.

Tonight I went to that Cozy Drinks & Books Meetup again.  One of the girls there reminded me of Giovanna Baccelli in that Gainsborough painting, so I printed it out to show her.  On my first attempt, the paper got stuck inside the printer and I had to drag it out a little at a time. (I'd had the same problem a few days earlier trying to print something out for Reading Out Loud.) I ended up printing three copies!  When I showed it to her, I realized she didn't look that much like the picture...

I wrote about the incoming U.S. president online, "Wait and see, but don't hold your breath!"

Sez you!

Janice Soprano: "Did you know there's a Zuni saying, 'Of twenty things a child does, pay no attention to nineteen'?" Tony Soprano: "Did you know there's an Italian saying, 'Fuck up once and you lose two teeth'?"

Yesterday was Reading Out Loud, and the topic was opinion pieces, with the title "Sez you!"  I'd moved the location from the Victory Cafe to the Ryerson Hub next to Jorgenson Hall.  It seems to be a good location, with lots of seats and nobody else around.  One person couldn't find the place, but they should figure it out before long.

Seven people came.  A few of them read their poems, and Beatriz read a Spanish poem she'd written, along with an English translation.  I read a Christopher Hitchens article from The Nation about Bill Clinton executing brain-damaged Ricky Ray Rector on the eve of the 1992 New Hampshire primary; and a review from Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn column of the British version of the reality TV show (more like unreality!) Temptation Island.  A couple of items I brought but let other people read were Roger Ebert's review of Her Alibi (the one with a romantic denouement at Tom Selleck's country house which had been blown up half an hour earlier!), and Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant."

Looks like Bernie Sanders is taking the lead in resisting Trump.  Someone has to!

Season finale

Livia Soprano (to her grandson): "You die in your own arms!"

Yesterday I took Moira to see my shrink Dr. Hassan. (She'd never met him before.) We discussed my application for ODSP, but the subject's too boring for me to give any details here.

Last night I was going to go to an Introvert Meetup but I ended up cancelling at the last minute because John and Kathrine were bringing over dinner (burritos). I don't feel good about making those last-minute cancellations.

Tonight we saw the season finale of the first season of The Sopranos.  John Heard had a good role as a corrupt NYPD detective!  Moira's favorite character was Livia. (An Ellen Willis article on the show in The Nation titled "Our Mobsters, Our Selves" referred to Livia as one of "the damned.")

We're going to pick and choose with the second season, since there are parts that I'm sure Moira and Father wouldn't like. (I didn't like those parts so much myself.) We'll see the first couple of episodes, then in the third see the part where Meadow and her friends trash Livia's old house but fast-forward through the part with sociopath Richie Aprile.  Then we'll skip the fourth episode where Tony visits Naples and the sixth episode where he lets the guy enter the big poker game and accrue a big debt, leading to him and his business being squeezed to the last penny.  But we'll see the fifth episode where Christopher takes an acting class, and the seventh where A.J. is into Nietzsche (which he pronounces "Nich"!). In the ninth episode we'll see the part where Christopher describes a nightmarish "out of body" experience, but skip the part with the mob execution.  And we can skip the rest.  Lucky that I've seen it before!

GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES

Junior Soprano (explaining why his crew has to attend funerals for people like the guy they murdered): "Fucking manners!"

Last night I saw the Studio Ghibli anime Grave of the Fireflies for the third time, at the Lightbox. Directed by Isao Takahata, it's a compelling story about two doomed orphans in Japan in the last year of World War II, still the most terrible of all wars, whose death toll includes millions of children. (I tried to make it a History Meetup event, but nobody else was interested.) I'm not spoiling the ending:  we learn of their deaths right at the beginning!  It sounds like a downer, and in some ways it is, but it's also very life-affirming in its details.  Animation can somehow depict such a story more powerfully than live action.

There's a scene near the end just after the little sister Setsuko has died--is her name a reference to Yasujiro Ozu's actress Setsuko Hara?--when a phonograph plays the song "Home Sweet Home" as we see a montage of brief moments of her while she was alive.  That song, of course, is a reference to Kon Ichikawa's Harp of Burma, about Japanese soldiers at the end of the war seeking atonement in music.  A cheesier movie would repeat moments we'd already seen, but these moments are one-time! 

I've seen the movie three times, and three times that scene has brought me to tears.  I guess that comes from the realization that the movie, which seemed to be about death at first, is really about life!  It left me with the thought that at the end of the day, love is the only thing we're left with.  The whole world should see it, especially Donald Trump.

Today I went to Mark's Work Warehouse near St. Clair and Keele to get a new sweater.  I got a light one because I have enough heavy ones. (They seem to be moth-proof.) I was hoping that Father would come with me, but he wasn't up to it so Moira came instead.  I hope he gets better so we can have a few outings like that:  he'll be 87 in a couple of months, and I don't know how much longer he'll be able to get out. I also got a big new bag of peanuts at the nearby Bulk Barn in the place where the stockyards used to be. (I visited that place just after it opened, and it still had a bit of a stockyard smell!)

Tonight I put on a spurt and finished Cannery Row.  Now I can focus on reading Don't Know Much About History for the History Meetup next month!

CANNERY ROW

I've had some more unusual dreams. The other day I dreamt I was back in our Sackville house and it was summer but there was snow on the ground! (The temperature was expected to rise to thirty degrees.) I also dreamed about going to a film festival documentary from Nicaragua--or was it a TV episode from Germany?--except that when we got to the cinema they put us on a bus to the screening!  And I dreamed of trying to remember all the movies George Roy Hill directed, and being unsure whether the Chevy Chase comedy The Funny Farm was one. (Awake, I confirmed that it was.)

I also dreamed of finding my father lying on a hillside fast asleep.  And of reading a big children's book with the chapters in reverse order, including the story of a superhero who morphed into a little quail who was about to be attacked in the street by hundreds of armored rats, but when they walked off the curb they fell into an acidic puddle that disintegrated them!

Ever read a book or see a movie where it lost you at one key moment? Screenwriter William Goldman, in Adventures in the Screen Trade, remembers a preview for his The Great Waldo Pepper and this scene where Susan Sarandon was supposed to perform this wing-walking stunt but froze in the middle of it, and barnstormer Robert Redford tried to save her, but she fell to her death. The audience had liked the earlier scenes, but right at that moment the movie lost them. (That was one of the movies George Roy Hill directed.) Similarly, Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander lost me in the scene where the kids were in two places at once.

I was thinking of this because of Steinbeck's Cannery Row.  The first half was pretty fun, but then there was this chapter where the local low-lifes had been gathering hundreds of frogs for Doc the marine biologist to sell, and he was out of town then so they decided that when he came back they'd throw him a surprise party at his place, which they'd sneaked into.  But he was late getting back and they started the party without him, and things got so out of hand that by the time he returned they'd trashed the place! (And the frogs escaped, of course.)

The book kind of lost me at that point.  Things have to go wrong, of course, otherwise there'd be no point!  That sort of plot I find depressing.  It reminded me of George Orwell's novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which I haven't read, but I saw the movie with Richard E. Grant as a full-of- himself advertising copywriter who decides to go through a poverty stage so he can become an Artist.  After a while he actually sells something and comes into some money, but it just results in him going on a tear, getting arrested and screwing up royally.  Because if he didn't screw up there'd be no point.

Presidential election figuring

Tony Soprano (to his shrink): "I'm a man and you're a woman.  End of story!"

Wednesday I had lunch with Pam at the Schnitzel Hub.  She had fish and chips and let me finish her French fries!

Wednesday night was the History Discussion Group.  The subject was the 1950s and I got a pretty good turnout of six people.  I've started collecting the dues for 2017, which I've lowered from $7 back to $5. (My Meetup groups have been growing somewhat.)

The other day I dreamed that we were in our Sackville house for the last time when we got visited by the rock band Journey!  That's an odd dream because I'm not a Journey fan by any means.

A Movie Meetup went to see The Poseidon Adventure at The Event Screen last night. ("...and he's dead, and that's it--or do you want to make something more of it?") I thought of seeing it but didn't bother in the end.

Today I did some figuring.  How would the American election have gone if they'd reformed the Electoral College system of each state being "winner take all"?  First I figured out what would happen if each state's total electoral votes--House seats plus two Senate seats--were allotted as close as possible to its popular vote.  This system, under which small states would have a slight advantage, would give this result:  261 electoral votes for Democrat Clinton, 260 for Republican Trump, 15 for Libertarian Johnson, 1 for Green Stein (in California), and 1 for independent Evan McMullan (in Utah). A squeaker victory for Clinton!

Then I figured it under a system where each state's electoral votes would be two fewer, with just its House seats--a system closer to overall popular vote.  Now we get 217 Clinton, 209 Trump, 8 Johnson, 1 Stein, 1 McMullan.  A less narrow Clinton victory.

But another possible system is for the two votes from a state's Senate seats to be "winner take all" and the votes from the House seats to be proportional, maximizing the advantage for small states.  Clinton won 20 states and the District of Columbia while Trump won 30 states, so the new result is 259 Clinton, 269 Trump, 8 Johnson, 1 Stein, 1 McMullan.  A Trump victory, and compared to the first system his gains are mostly at Johnson's expense.

I enjoy figuring stuff like this from time to time...

MOANA

"Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical and aesthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation.  Two generations of Americans know more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars"--Cannery Row

Tonight I saw the animated Disney Polynesian movie Moana.  I was basically seeing it so I'd have something to write about here, but it was actually pretty good as the present-day Disney formula goes.  There were quite a few imaginative touches, like the demigod's animated tattoos.  The climax owed a little something to Hayao Miyazaki anime like Princess Mononoke. (The father was voiced by Temuara Morrison, who was in the Maori movie Once Were Warriors twenty years ago.)

They showed a trailer for the live-action version of Beauty and the Beast.  In the B&tB version I'd like to see, Belle would marry Beast and give birth to mutants, causing visiting friends to say, "What cute little mutants you have!"

Yesterday I booked my Air Canada ticket for London in May. (I'm leaving on the 5th and returning on the 22nd.) It cost about a grand in total.  I could have saved a few hundred, but there was always a catch.  I didn't want to land at Gatwick: that would mean taking a train into Victoria Station and catching the tube from there, whereas I can take the Picadilly Line to Russell Square station right from Heathrow.  Neither did I want to take a flight early in the morning, which would mean spending the night at the airport first. (I've landed at Gatwick and left in the early morning before, but now I feel too old for such trouble now, a feeling my father understands well.) Also, I didn't want to take a flight where I'd have to get off at JFK Airport then get to the connecting flight at La Guardia Airport, or one where we'd go by way of Rome and take a very long time.

More Googleplay Ebook trouble.  I opened The Ghosts of Inverloch to look at it again, and it showed the pages from The Wrath of Hypsis!  The Wrath of Hypsis has been sneaking into my other Googleplay Ebooks too.  I posted a question about it in the Google problems forum.

Valerian and Laureline

Mikey (to Brendan, just before shooting him): "Hi, Jack.  Bye, Jack."--The Sopranos

Tonight I bought a Googleplay Ebook version of a French science fiction comic book--they call it a "bande dessinee"--about Valerian and Laureline. (I got a version already translated into English; there was a time when I would have got the French version and translated it myself.) Valerian is an agent born on the future earth colony planet Galaxity, who goes on missions through space and time to pre-empt disasters. Laureline is his partner (and lover!), whom he picked up in the Middle Ages:  I have a feeling she's the real reason for the series' success, sort of like Captain Haddock in the Tintin comics.

I downloaded a double story from the books "The Ghosts of Inverloch" and "The Wrath of Hypsis." The clever thing about the story is that their mission, and how they can accomplish it, only gradually emerges over two books--even they're in the dark at first!  It turns out to involve beings on the planet Hypsis wanting to trigger a nuclear holocaust on 20th-century earth to prevent the eventual founding of Galaxity, and our hero and heroine finding a way to prevent this.  A full explanation would take forever, so you might as well read the books directly.  It gets really weird when they reach Hypsis!

Friday afternoon I saw Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann at the Bloor. (It started at 11:30 A.M.!) It was a Royal Opera revival of a classic 1980 production directed by John Schlesinger.  The story with Antonia and Dr. Miraculous gives me the creeps!

Someone I know doesn't want me to write about him on this blog. (For which reason, I can't say who he is.) Frankly, I'm impressed that he thinks anyone will read it.  John Snow and Pena, I value your readership highly.  In that Proust-based Vanity Fair celebrity questionnaire one of the questions is, "What do you consider your greatest achievement?" I'd say that my greatest achievement is making friends.  It isn't like Jerry Seinfeld collecting Porsches; every new friendship is unique!

THE SOPRANOS

Hasidic Jew (after telling the story of the siege of Masada): "And the Romans--where are they now?"

Tony Soprano: "You're looking at 'em, asshole!"

--The Sopranos

Did I say we dropped our subscription to Crave TV?  We resubscribed because Moira wants to watch The Sopranos. (She tried it before, but couldn't get past that episode with the Hasidic Jew.) Tonight we watched the first episode with him blowing up his friend's restaurant so the fried won't lose business from a hit being carried out there. (A Rhode Island gangster actually did that!) James Gandolfini would have made a good silent movie actor.

I must say that the first season was the best, what with the conflict between Tony and Uncle Junior, though Joe Pantoliano as Ralph Cifaretto did a lot for the third and fourth.  As with Six Feet Under and Mad Men, the later seasons have diminishing returns:  after Adrianna got killed in the fifth season the show couldn't really be funny any more.  And Carmela's character arc, in particular, got inconsistent.  That's what happens when shows get planned one season at a time. (One of many things I admire about Breaking Bad is that all five seasons were planned out from the start!)

I finally fixed the problem with Google Play not loading. (I did it by clearing the memory cache, or something like that.) I paid actual money for an Ebook with a translation of the Lusiades into modern Portuguese.  I've already found a few mistakes I made in my translation:  I thought "frauta" meant fruit when it actually meant flute! And "Parcas" wasn't parks but the Three Fates. I've also resumed reading that book about TV shows that only lasted one season.

We've been eating scalloped potatoes and diced ham almost all this weak!  And I never get tired of it, like Archie Bunker with Edith's meatloaf.

Kobo

"Once, when he had me pinned against a wall, I asked him straight out what had I done to make him dislike me so much; suddenly he relaxed, let me loose and said, 'You're a sissy.  I'm just straightening you out.' He was right, I was a sissy of sorts, and the moment he said it, I realized there was nothing I could do to alter his judgement, other than toughen myself to accept and defend the fact"--"The Thanksgiving Visitor"

I've been making slow, steady progress with my Portuguese translation of The Wizard of Oz on my Kobo reader.  Right now I'm at the point where the Tin Man has just joined the group.  It occurred to me that Charley is Steinbeck's Toto, except that Steinbeck was going from Oz (the New York metropolis) to Kansas (rural America)! I've also started translating "Desiderata" into Portuguese.

I noticed that the Kobo reader offers quite a few free ebooks, especially in Christmas week. Cheapskate that I am, I've been downloading quite a few of them, mostly history and "classic" literature. (Who knows how many of them I'll actually get around to reading?) I actually paid a few dollars for Dee Brown's famous Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a '70s history of the western frontier from the First Nations perspective, and that's a book I've long wanted to read.

I read two more Truman Capote stories in the same book as "A Christmas Memory": "One Christmas" and "A Thanksgiving Visitor." Now I want to read more of his stories, and might even do them in my book club!  I've finished Travels With Charley, and Steinbeck's Cannery Row is next on my list, along with the Lapham's Quarterly special issue about Alexander Hamilton.

On Acorn TV we've started watching a '70s TV miniseries of Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, with Geraldine McEwan in the Maggie Smith role.  The dialogue is a bit hard to hear.

JACKIE

"But Charley doesn't have our problems.  He doesn't belong to a species clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live in peace with itself"--Travels With Charley

Thursday night I saw Jackie at the Yonge & Dundas. (I hoped to make it into a History Discussion Group event, but nobody else was interested.) It was pretty depressing, really--I basically got out of it what I put in.  Natalie Portman wasn't bad in the title role, considering that she was stuck with the job of imitating the inimitable.  I couldn't help noticing that the early 1960s was a very sexist time, when women were expected to be "charming" and "feminine."

John F. Kennedy strikes me as an oddly overrated president, along the same lines as Obama.  Maybe he did have a plan to get out of Vietnam, but if so he hesitated fatally.  You can only judge leaders by what they actually did while they had the chance, and he seriously escalated the Vietnam conflict in his time.  He's been praised for proving less hawkish than his advisers during the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet a better president wouldn't have surrounded himself with hawks in the first place! (The same applies to Ronald Reagan 25 years later.)

As for Kennedy's assassination, I'm an agnostic (on this as on many other things). For all I know Lee Harvey Oswald may have acted alone--I'm no oddsmaker--but we'll presumably never know.  As a motive for conspiracy, mafia payback seems more plausible than keeping the U.S. in Vietnam.  Anyway, Kennedy was no angel himself!

Last night I dreamed of watching a movie about a serial killer, with this one closeup of a woman he's about to kill who's wearing dark glasses, and we see in the reflection of her shades a car that she thinks will save her, but it drives away and we see her expression as she realizes she's about to die!  Why do I have such sicko dreams? (At Christmastime, yet!) It isn't like I'm a horror fan.

Acorn TV

"Once you are in Texas it seems to take forever to get out, and some people never make it"--Travels With Charley

We've started subscribing to Acorn TV, which has lots of interesting British shows.  Unfortunately we don't seem able to get it on our widescreeen TV, but we can still watch it on our computers.  Last night we saw the first of three episodes of a Waldemar Januszak documentary about Baroque art, which anticipated cinema in some ways.  But I couldn't get in into fullscreen on the downstairs computer, so we ended up watching it in my room. (I later figured out that my mistake downstairs was using the Safari browser instead of Foxfire.  B for Brains...)

Acorn TV also has some classic series like Upstairs, Downstairs.  It's one of my all-time favorite shows despite the occasional cliche.  I've started watching the third season, which is when it really hit its stride. (The first two are somewhat uneven.)  It begins with mother Lady Marjorie going down with the Titanic--most upper-class women actually survived!--and Captain James the jerky son taking an interest in father Richard's mousy secretary Hazel.  I fell in love with Hazel--why do I like mousy women so much?  Hazel soon married James, which was a mistake:  she should have married Richard despite his age!

My favorite character was Hudson the Scottish butler:  watch the ongoing contrast between his strictness toward the other servants and his deference toward the masters!  Anglicized Scots sometimes have a way of seeming more English than the regular English:  witness the Queen Mother and Colin Firth.

I still can't leave off the subject of Hillary vs. Bernie!  One Clintonite line is that Sanders wanted to get the Democratic nomination without doing the "work" that Clinton had done to earn the nomination over the past thirty years.  Yet, it seems to me, Hillary spent thirty years schmoozing and making connections and advancing within the party organization, while Bernie spent the same time actually promoting the policies that most Democrats care about, at a time when they've been in desperate need of that.  Which work is more important to the party?  The Clintonites who are still repeating "Sanders was not a Democrat" create an impression of the Democratic Party not as the famed "big tent" but as a high-class club that doesn't admit riffraff like Bernie!

4000 books!

Dialogue on a sweltering summer day:

"Carrie wanted a drink, but she pushed the cup away and made a face and said, 'Nasty!'

"'You better drink it,' Mary told her. 'I want a cold drink, too, but there isn't any.'

"'I wish I had a drink of well water,' said Laura.

"'I wish I had an icicle,' said Mary.

"Then Laura said, 'I wish I was an Indian and didn't have to wear clothes.'

"'Laura!' said Ma. 'And on Sunday!'

"Laura thought, 'Well, I do!'"

--On the Banks of Plum Creek

Aquilon Books, my father's used book-selling venture, sold its 4000th book last week after a dozen years of online sales through ABE Books.  We celebrated with a party, and the whole family was present, along with four nieces and a Chinese friend Moira met teaching English.  Father spent $140 on Indian food, which took three days to finish.  Moira also baked a vegan chocolate cake (accommodating brother John's family), and decorated it with the digits 4000.  I tend to find large-scale company tiring, and now I feel like I've gone through Christmas already!

Donald was there and solved the problem of my computer not allowing you to open Google Play Ebooks and ignoring the prescribed steps to solve the problem.  Unfortunately, after he left the problem came back! (I don't have the heart to tell him...) But he did fix our widescreen TV set so that when you start the DVD player the screen no longer cuts off an outer ring.

Yesterday I went to the Lillian Smith library to borrow some books, but it turned out I'd lost my library card!  I thought I'd left it at the Yorkville library the day before, but I checked and it wasn't there.  I couldn't find it at home either, so it looks like I'll have to get a new one.

This afternoon was the last Reading Out Loud at the Victory Cafe. (Next month we'll try the Ryerson Hub.) It was December so our topic was children's writing, and I titled the event with the Whittier line "Blessings on thee, little man!" I read the Walt Whitman poem "There Was a Child Went Forth"; the middle part of "A Christmas Memory"; and the chapter of Huckleberry Finn where Huck gets separated from the raft in the fog, then tells Jim he's been dreaming, hurts his feelings and ends up apologizing.  You know, I think I'm pretty good at reading things aloud!

There was a new member called Beatriz from Argentina.  I gave her a chapter to read from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House book On the Banks of Plum Creek. (Unlike Huckleberry Finn, that's easy English for a foreigner.) It was "Rings of Fire," where their haystacks are threatened by burning tumbleweeds from a prairie fire to the west.  And I gave Max the chapter from The Wizard of Oz I've just been translating, where the Scarecrow describes his brief life before meeting Dorothy.  Afterward Doreen gave me some chocolates!

ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE

"Maybe everybody needs Russians.  I'll bet even in Russia they need Russians.  Maybe they call it Americans"--Travels with Charley  

 

Last night I saw the documentary All Governments Lie at the Bloor.  It's about the legacy of I.F. Stone among today's non-mainstream muckraking journalists like Green Greenwald and Amy Goodman.  I must look up the websites intercept.com and tomdispatch.com , which the documentary mentioned.

Today I went to Yorkville library to find a copy of Truman Capote's wonderful story "A Christmas Memory," which I want to read part of at Reading Out Loud Meetup this Sunday.  The snow was pretty heavy, suitable for Christmas. (At the Bloor-Yonge station the TTC set up a fancy Christmas exhibit with some electric trains!)

 

This evening I went to a Non-Fiction Meetup event where we talked about what we'll be reading next year. (I ordered a chocolate lava cake.) I mentioned my theory that the Soviet system of shortages, rationing and long queues may be our future!

 

Father and Moira can't find anything interesting on Crave TV, so I've been looking at alternatives.  Both Acorn TV and Fandor look promising!

 

As you can see, I've noticed how to use a larger font on this blog. (I like nice big fonts!)

THE NUTCRACKER

"I wanted to go to the rooftree of Maine to start my trip before turning west.   It seemed to give the journey a design, and everything in the world must have design or the human mind rejects it.  But in addition it must have purpose or the human conscience shies away from it.  Maine was my design, potatoes my purpose.  If I had not seen a single potato my status as vacilador [a Spanish word referring to someone going somewhere but not so serious about reaching his destination] would not have been affected.  As it turned out I saw almost more potatoes than I needed to see.  I saw mountains of potatoes--oceans--more potatoes than you would think the world's population could consume in a hundred years"--Travels With Charley

"My nerves are stretched to the breaking point! [PING sound effect] There goes one now"--The Goon Show

Sunday afternoon I saw a screening of the Bolshoi Ballet production of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker.  It was a terrific show, even better than the Royal Ballet production I saw screened a couple of years ago!  The Arab Dance was especially impressive.  I hoped to meet Mary of the Classical Music Meetup, but we came in at different times and only met briefly.

I thought I knew everything about The Nutcracker, but I learned something new the other week, with the usual help of Wikipedia.  In the original score, several of the dances are assigned a flavor:  the Trepak is peppermint sticks, the Dance of the Flutes is marzipan, etc.  Also, the musical suite was more popular than the ballet at first:  the ballet only became a North American Christmas staple in the 1960s following George Balanchine's New York Ballet production.

Back in 1974, when I was twelve, I saw the Bolshoi Ballet on their Canadian tour shortly after Mikhail Barishnikov defected. (We drove to Wolfville, Nova Scotia.) They had to change the program because of his departure, so I didn't know what I was watching!  Mother thought they looked demoralized.

I've started listening to The Goon Show on Youtube.  That was a zany BBC radio comedy in the 1950s, starring Spike Milligan (who also wrote it), Harry Secombe and Peter Sellers at the start of his career.  My parents were in Britain at that time, and Father liked it more than Mother.  Sometimes Father says "I don't wish to know it," and I just learned that was one of the show's many catchphrases!  Another BBC radio comedy they listened to was Take It From Here, and he often repeats Jimmy Edwards' line "'Allo, 'allo, 'allo!"

My Peyton Place DVD arrived today!

TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY

"In long-range planning for a trip, I think there is a private conviction that it won't happen.  As the day approached, my warm bed and comfortable house grew increasingly desirable and my dear wife incalculably precious.  To give these up for three months for the terrors of the uncomfortable and unknown seemed crazy.  I didn't want to go.  Something had to happen to forbid my going, but it didn't"--Travels With Charley

 Yesterday I had lunch with John Snow at the Schnitzelhub again.  He gave me a couple of books, and I wish I'd brought something for him!  We talked about the schedule for our book clubs (he has a new one), so we wouldn't conflict.  I was going to do The Dubliners in mid-March and Gulliver's Travels at the end of April, but moved them to late March and the end of May, after I get back from London.

I was going to show the DVD of Tom Jones at the next history event this Tuesday, but it turned out it wasn't on DVD!  So I changed it to John Ford's Stagecoach, to match our discussing the frontier earlier this month.  

Next month the history group's subject is the 1950s.  I've scheduled Lana Turner's Peyton Place for next month:  couldn't find it in the video stores, but I ordered a used copy online for ten dollars and some.  I'm now reading Steinbeck's Travels With Charley for the history group (for the second time), which actually takes place in 1960, but close enough.  The library was short of copies so this afternoon I bought a copy at Chapters in the Yonge-Eglinton Centre.  Some long queues there!

It bugs me that Clinton worshipers want to blame Trump's election on everything except the most obvious cause:  the Democrats chose a very problematic candidate.  Some of them are even blaming Bernie Sanders for promoting what they consider "false narratives" about Hillary Clinton!  And some are still insisting that Sanders was never a genuine Democrat.  I want to say to them, "Well, he's more of a Democrat than Trump, isn't he?  Who's being a 'purist' now?" And which candidate was the true Democrat when Congress was voting on invading Iraq?  If any candidate was cynically "using" the party to advance his personal ambition, it seems to me, that would be Clinton.  

But too many Democrats had a specious notion of loyalty to their "team," and chose the wrong moment to be clannish.  I say this as someone who had seen Hillary's weaknesses, yet actually ended up swallowing the line that she'd win anyway!  It wasn't so much that I was won over to admiring her political skills, more that I just gave up on doubting.  I've been accused of "gloating," but I'm really rather annoyed:  when the Democrats screwed Bernie Sanders--the Republicans have no monopoly on vote suppression!--they screwed themselves, and the nation.  

Some people are denying that Sanders could have beaten Trump, but their arguments don't impress me.  Almost everyone who voted for Hillary would have voted for Bernie too; while almost everyone who would have voted Republican to defeat Bernie voted to defeat Hillary anyway.  Bernie would surely have managed a higher turnout among Democratic voters, especially in the all-important category of young voters.  And he clearly would have got greater support from the independent voters, a crucial group. (He probably would have won the nomination if independents hadn't been excluded from crucial state primaries.) I also think he would have grabbed more Republican votes than did Hillary, whom the Republicans had a longstanding hate-on for.  At the very least, it's very hard to imagine him doing any worse than she did--would he have taken Wisconsin for granted?  Sure, the Republicans would have thrown the works at him, but I think he would have won anyway.  Trump only had to outperform the polls by a couple of percentage points to upset Clinton, but to upset Sanders he would have had to outperform them by almost ten points!

Some people have been calling on the Electoral College to rebel and install Hillary as president, but I think they should install Bernie!  Democrats, who mostly supported Hillary, are about 30% of the U.S. population; Republicans, who mostly supported the Donald, are also about 30%; but independents, who mostly supported Bernie, are more like 40%.  The two-party system is a barrier to American democracy.

A Greek philosopher said: "The fox has a thousand ideas in his head.  The hedgehog has one big idea." It occurred to me that Trump is a hedgehog.  Hedgehogs are sometimes underestimated, though in this case it was more that Hillary Clinton was overestimated.

Gonks!

Since I have a second fan, I intend to become more prolific with my vanity press.

"What the hell is a gonk?" either of you may say.  It's a round toy that was popular in Britain in the '60s. (See the picture--I should attach more pics here!) My family spent a year in mod Brighton in the mid-60s, and we got one of those. They also figured in Gonks Go Beat, the sort of bizarre Swinging London movie where you'd expect Spike Milligan to turn up, but he doesn't.

Why am I talking about gonks?  Last night I watched Produced by George Martin on Crave TV.  That's a documentary about George Martin, the Beatles' genius producer who left us earlier this year. (He had a head like a sports car!) But he produced a lot more than the Beatles, introducing a sort of impressionism to recording.  He once produced a CD of Dylan Thomas' radio play Under Milkwood with Tom Jones doing a musical number:  the documentary didn't mention it, but I recall Melvyn Bragg's South Bank Show doing an episode about it.  The '70s band America was also his project.  He built a recording studio on the Caribbean island of Montserrat which produced some great music in the '80s--the Police and such--but got wrecked by a hurricane.

Back to the gonks... Early on he produced a lot of comedy records--Peter Sellers and such--and in 1962 came up with Bernard Cribbins' novelty single "Right, Said Fred." (That's also the name of a British band in the early '90s whose one hit was "I'm Too Sexy.") Anyway, they showed a bit of a video of the song with Gumby-type dimensional animation, using gonks!  I found the whole thing on Youtube, and looked at it so many times that the tune's going around in my head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5XX9LX2es4 

 (I can attach links too!) 

We've also started watching a Crave TV documentary about Frank Sinatra, another musical genius.

I've booked a room at Goodenough College in London, where I'll be staying in May. (Sending them a scan of their credit card form with my signature turned out to be a bigger challenge than I expected!)

Tonight was the history Meetup, where we talked about the frontier and the Little House books.  The political Meetup was at the same place (Scallywag's) but started an hour later, so we ended up seguing right into that one!

NORMA

Yesterday afternoon I saw a screening of the Bellini opera Norma at the Bloor, the one about the Druidess who holds sway over the rebellious Gauls but's been in love with an unfaithful Roman proconsul.  It was a Royal Opera production with a 20th-century design, which I didn't care for with this sort of story.  I remember seeing a Met production of Lucia di Lamermoor set in Victorian Scotland which didn't seem right either. (But I could imagine a Lucia production set in the antebellum South, what with its notorious feuds.) The lead soprano reminded me of Melania Trump!  

My favorite part of the opera, besides the famous "Casta Diva" aria, is the Norma-Pollione duet just before the finale.  I also like the war cry chorus, which reminds me of Indian music in westerns. (I suppose that Gauls were the Indians of the Roman world!) It's very challenging music:  I read that the first production had good singers in the lead, but they just weren't in their best voice and the show flopped.

We saw another library DVD with an episode of the Overland Trekker series.  Last week it was Australia; this week it was the Silk Road in central Asia.

This afternoon was the latest Classic Book Club event:  Dicken's Christmas novellas A Christmas Carol, The Chimes and Cricket on the Hearth. (I'd finished rereading A Christmas Carol just yesterday morning.) Karen even recited part of Dylan Thomas' "A Child's Christmas in Wales"! Recitations are a useful addition to these events.  I ordered an omelette and when they were late bringing the home fries the Victory Cafe people generously threw an a free mulligatawny soup order to make up for it.  And I don't even care for home fries!

I met a new member called Ryan, who's an archaeologist.  What an odd calling archaeology must be!  It's all about the old days, yet it's one of the most modern sciences--to the extent that you can call it a science at all.  So much of it is conjecture which can't be proved or disproved that I think of it as an art!  You dig up the bones of your ancestors, and imagine how they must have lived.  In one sense it's the world of the dead, but in another sense it's all about life!  Ryan was amused when I mentioned a quote by Agatha Christie, who married archaeologist Max Mallowan: "An archaeologist makes a perfect husband, because as his wife grows older he gets more interested in her!" A gerontologist would make a good husband too.

In these events our conversation can go all over the place!  Karen mentioned how much she liked Fritz Lang's movie M, so Ryan started talking about Lang, and I mentioned Lang's film noir Scarlet Street, and mentioned how a couple of bits near the end of the Warner Brothers cartoon One Froggy Evening were borrowed from that movie. (One with the hero sitting alone on a park bench in the winter; another with him plodding along the sidewalk, a broken man.) So we got into Warner Brothers cartoons, which Ryan and I both love.  We were also discussing the different movie versions of A Christmas Carol:  I'll have to see the George C. Scott TV movie someday!

Since the history group subject in January will be the '50s, I wanted to screen the Lana Turner movie Peyton Place.  But I couldn't find it in the video stores so I was thinking of showing Leo di Caprio in This Boy's Life instead.  But then I found out that Suspect Video has Peyton Place after all!  Suspect Video is closing at year's end, however, so I'll see if they'll sell it to me.

Daffy Duck

Last week was the American Thanksgiving, and some people online were mentioning things they were thankful for.  Even though Canada's Thanksgiving was seven weeks ago, I want to mention something I'm grateful for:  Daffy Duck cartoons.  The later, curmudgeonly Daffy is the greatest of all Warner Brothers animated characters, and not for lack of competition! (When I was young I would have named Bugs Bunny as my favorite, but now that I've grown up I prefer Daffy.)

The greatest Daffy Duck cartoon of all is Duck Amuck, with Daffy in a cartoon world drawn by a prankster cartoonist who keeps changing things around, to Daffy's indignation. ("Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin!") At the end Bugs looks up from the drawing board and says, "Ain't I a stinker?" They tried making a similar cartoon with Bugs in the changing cartoon world, but it didn't suit his character as well.

There are some great cartoons pairing Bugs and Daffy, such as Ali Baba Bunny, in which they find themselves inside Ali Baba's treasure cave.  While Bugs just wants to find Pismo Beach and all the clams you can eat, Daffy starts pouncing all over Bugs and saying, "It's mine!  It's all mine!" What, share?  In the end Daffy offends a genie who turns him into a tiny figure trying to snatch the pearl from Bugs' clam. (Pismo Beach must have some oysters as well.) Such a fate has a Dantean logic, since Daffy's greed has already made him small!  And there's also Beanstalk Bunny, where Bugs and Daffy climb a beanstalk and tangle with a giant Elmer Fudd.  (At one point they run around inside Elmer's predictably empty head!)

Even the minor Daffy Duck cartoons have some great moments.  Take the late cartoon Aqua Duck, in which Daffy finds a big nugget of gold in the desert, but can't find water! (A parody of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, of course.) I like the bit where he starts hallucinating and saying things like "Belly up to the bar, boys!"

But I've never cared for Robin Hood Daffy, a cartoon which many people consider a classic.  Daffy's goofy Robin Hood and Porky Pig's derisive Friar Tuck are both funny in themselves, but the combination of the two isn't so funny.  There's a one-note story in which Porky wants to join Robin Hood's band but refuses to believe that someone as bumbling as Daffy is the one he's looking for, so Daffy sets out to prove he's Robin Hood by carrying out a robbery, but only confirms how goofy he is.

Tonight was the last opera rehearsal before the new year.  Some girls brought a box of chocolate treats that included some party hats.

The other day online I came up with this saying:  Who's the bigger fool, the fool or the one who underestimates his foolishness? (I admit that despite realizing what a weak candidate Hillary Clinton was, I still couldn't believe that American voters would be foolish enough to elect Donald Trump!  I wasn't alone there, of course.)

LOVING

Closing passage of Cricket on the Hearth:  "But what is this!  Even as I listen to them, blithely, and turn towards Dot, for one last glimpse of a little figure very pleasant to me, she and the rest have vanished into air, and I am left alone.  A Cricket sings upon the Hearth; a broken child's-toy lies upon the ground; and nothing else remains."

 

Last night I saw Loving at the Varsity.  It's a quietly compelling drama about an interracial couple who challenged Virginia's law against mixed marriages, with heroic help from the American Civil Liberties Union, leading to a Supreme Court decision that struck down all such laws and formed the precedent for a similar decision regarding same-sex marriages a few years ago. (I couldn't help recalling attending that same-sex wedding last month, which wouldn't have been legal in Canada fifteen years ago.) The husband was like a cross between Dobie Gillis and Popeye the Sailor!

I finished Cricket on the Hearth the other day and started reading A Christmas Carol for the second time.  The part where Scrooge sees himself as a lonely schoolboy finding company in books is moving! (Was Dickens describing his own childhood?)

 

Moira borrowed from the library a DVD of an episode of the series Globe Trekker, about Australia's history of convicts and gold prospectors and outlaws.  I'm fascinated by Australia, the way everything's a bit different there. (We once bought some Australian fruit cocktail packed in pear juice!)

Tonight was the fundraiser concert at Christchurch Deer Park, the Anglican church near St. Clair station.  Besides the chorus numbers, there was also stuff like Frank Sinatra's "All the Way" and a flute arrangement of Carmen highlights!

We've taking to putting our unsaleable books in a box outside so anyone can take them. (One day the other week we put out about twenty and all but two moved!) The other day I noticed we were giving away Don't Know Much About History, which my history group will be reading in a couple of months, so I kept it.

I've started translating Walt Whitman's poem "There Was a Child Went Forth" into Portuguese, because, why not?