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!

HISTORY'S PEOPLE

I finished reading Bill Bryson's One Summer last week, and started reading Margaret MacMillan's History's People:  Personalities and the Past, based on the Massey Lectures she gave last year.  It's about leaders and such.  I noticed that when she talked about Mackenzie King she dated Canada's conscription referendum at 1940, when it was actually 1942! (You'd think an editor would have caught that goof.)

Wednesday night the History Discussion Group screened the video of the MGM movie The Good Earth, which I saw for the third time. (I'd borrowed it from the library.) Debi the host and I were the only people who saw it, because I was careless and forgot to post the event till a few days before!  But we had a good time anyhow.

I've started watching The Adventure of English on Youtube.  It's a British documentary series about the history of the English language, hosted by The South Bank Show host Melvyn Bragg. (The puppet satire Spitting Image made fun of Bragg's post-nasal drip, always showing him with nasal spray!)

I just figured out that I can do a zoom-in on the window of my Safari browser by pressing the plus sign with the command key. (I discovered it by accident, pressing the minus sign with the command key and getting a zoom-out!) So I reduced the browser's minimum font size from 24 to 18, and when I read the movie box-office figures at http://boxofficemojo.com --I'm a geek about things like box-office figures, though I pay them less attention than I used to--now I can see the movie title and its budget at the same time without shifting the scroll bar.

I finally finished reading Why Read Moby-Dick? a book John Snow gave me by Nathaniel Philbrick (In the Heart of the Sea). Moby-Dick, I imagine, is one of those books whose meaning deepens with each successive reading.  He might have talked more about Elijah, the old sailor they meet in Nantucket who warns them that Ahab is nuts and the Pequod is doomed.

brilliant.com

I've been getting lazy in this July heat!  Even doing one thing takes an effort just now.

Today was Reading Out Loud.  There were nine people, more than usual.  I read some of the character descriptions at the start of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Orwell's essay "Decline of the English Murder." Jane read Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit and a couple of Hamlet's soliloquies. (I borrowed her book and read Polonius' speech to his son!) Some other girls read Coleridge's "Kublai Khan" and Tennyson's "The Lady of Shallot."

I have a Facebook app for the website brilliant.com , which sends me a challenging puzzle every day.  There was one involving Fibonacci series, where the first two entries are 1 and the later ones the sum of the previous two:  1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597... This puzzle asked what the sum would be for 1+1/2+2/4+3/8+5/16+8/32+... I figured out that it must be 4. That's because this sum equals 1+1/2+(1+1)/4+(2+1)/8+(3+2)/16+... which equals 1+(1/2+1/4)+(1/4+1/8)+(2/8+2/16)+... which equals 1+ (3/4)*(1+1/2+2/4+3/8+...) (I never look up the answer:  either I know it or I don't.)

Just the other night there was another question where we know that a+b=a*b=3, so what does a^3+b^3 equal?  You can figure out the answer through simple algebra: a^3+b^3=(a+b)^3-3*a*b^2-3*b*a^2=(a+b)^3- 3*(a*b)*(a+b)=27-27=0.  

But I like to do things the hard way, so I imagined the complex numbers that a and be could be.  I figured out that a would be 3/2 +i*[3^(1/2)/2] while b would be 3/2 - i*[3^(1/2)/2] (or vice versa!). Alternatively, you could say that a= 3^(1/2)*e^[i*pi/6] and b=3^(1/2)*e^[i*-pi/6].  And I noticed some other interesting things:  a^2+b^2=3, a^4+b^4=-9, a^6+b^6=-54, a^8+b^8=-81, a^10+b^10=243, a^12+b^12=1458!

That's the sort of puzzle that keeps me awake late at night!  Imagine the puzzle where a+b=a*b=1...

Salsa weekend

This weekend was the Salsa on St. Clair festival, so my neighbourhood was pretty noisy again.

Wednesday night I saw The Free State of Jones at the Yonge & Dundas with the History Discussion Group.  It was pretty good despite being overlong.  Matthew McConaughey is getting meatier roles these days.

I was going to see another Hitchcock movie, North by Northwest, on Thursday night but it was on early and John and his family were coming over for dinner, so I had to cancel.  Today I planned to go to The Man Who Knew Too Much ('50s version), but again dinner was late so I cancelled again.

Yesterday the History Discussion Group met at Black Creek Pioneer Village to discussion Pierre Berton's Canada.  Getting there was an adventure: I took the express bus to the York University campus, then walked west.  I'd never noticed that the two places were so close together!

This afternoon the Classic Book Club discussed The Good Earth.  Which reminds me that I'll have to get Moira to order the library copy of the movie because I've misplaced my card!

Malware

Friday the internet connection went out on the downstairs computer.  Sunday it went out on mine!  Nothing like internet interruption to make you appreciate how important the web is.  I needed to set the location for tomorrow night's History Discussion Group screening so I went to the library.  I couldn't find my library card but Moira brought hers and I got online through her assistance!

Monday night my techie brother Donald came over and solved the trouble quickly.  It turned out that the downstairs computer had some malware that got downloaded a couple of years ago and only became active now.  And Father was fiddling with the connection Saturday night and lost mine too!

I'm now re-reading Bill Bryson's One Summer:  America 1927 for the History Discussion Group.  It's still a really entertaining read!  Lindbergh sounds like an Asperger's Syndrome case like me.

Thursday night I saw Hitchcock's Psycho again.  Only just now did I notice that when Anthony Perkins starts smiling at the end of his last scene--just before the last shot of the car being towed out of the swamp--for a few frames Hitch superimposes his mother's skull on his face!  Why didn't I notice that before?

I've started rereading my Menomonee Falls Gazette collection.  That's the paper from the early '70s that reprinted story strips like Secret Agent Corrigan and Modesty Blaise and Rip Kirby.  I've started compiling an index of it, listing the strips and their main characters and the stories covered in the MFG reprints.  It's one of those projects of mine that's easier to start than to finish!

More on my Ph.D. research

Some of my Ph.D. research material was missionary writing.  I did some research at the United Church archives near the U. of T. campus. (The Methodists, later the United Church, took over a mission from David Livingstone's London Mission Society shortly before the revolution of 1912.) 

The Protestant missions in Sichuan came together to form an organization for joint efforts.  I don't remember the exact name, but they had a great motto: "In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity." (The NDP should adopt that motto!) One of the things they did was put out a monthly journal, but after the Japanese started a full-scale war in 1937 there was such a paper shortage that they had to print it on tissue-like paper that could only be printed on one side!

One book I read was Test Tubes and Dragon Scales, written by someone who'd been a medical missionary in Chongqing in the 1930s.  He mentioned a colourful if shady foreign businessman, but not by name.  But I guessed that he was probably G.D. Lichfield because he had a motor-car in the city before anyone else did!

After finishing my thesis I actually went on a tour of China, which included Chongqing.  The city was smaller than I'd imagined it, of course. (Just like when you meet celebrities they're never as tall as you expect, except for basketball players and models.) One interesting thing in today's Chongqing is that they have a network of sidewalks that go over the street!  We should get something like that in Toronto too.

I just read that the Chinese are making a movie about the Japanese bombing of Chongqing, the Nationalist Chinese capital, between 1938 and 1943. (It was comparable to the Blitz of London, including death tolls.) It'll star Bruce Willis.

If this subject interests you, my thesis has been posted online.  It's at http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp03/NQ56244.pdf

LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY

The other night I finally finished the fashion issue of Lapham's Quarterly.  Now I've started reading the spying issue from last winter. (After that come the disaster issue and the gambling issue.)

I also finished Pierre Berton's Canada.  Next I'll be rereading Bill Bryson's One Summer (about America in the summer of 1927) for the History Discussion Group.

Saturday afternoon I went on a march in Bloordale, from Jane to High Park stations.  It was a march to show support for Moslem refugees, in response to one by the anti-immigrant group PEGIDA the week before.

Sunday afternoon I saw King Vidor's Show People at the Revue, a Marion Davies silent comedy (for the second time).  What with her reputation as William Randolph Hearst mistress, it's easy to forget that she did have talent!  But in the sound era he ended up putting her in overproduced musicals.

I've recently started rereading my Menomonee Falls Gazette collection.  It's a weekly magazine from the early 1970s that reprinted the finest daily dramatic comic strips from the time.  (Stuff like Modesty Blaise and Rip Kirby and Secret Agent Corrigan and Tarzan...) I accumulated the collection by buying it on Ebay about a decade ago, and have all except a few issues at the end of its run of over four years.  There are still a few parts of it that I haven't read!  My new ambition is to compile an index showing all the strips the magazine carried, along with the writers and artists and capsules of all the reprinted stories for each strip.  The story strip was past its 1930s peak by then, but the art and writing were still way better than today!

Researching my Ph.D. thesis

Since John Snow is curious, I decided to do a blog post describing the research I did on my Ph.D. thesis twenty years ago.  It was on the treaty port of Chongqing in Sichuan, which was only opened in 1891.  And it was among the only treaty ports that hadn't been overrun by the Japanese when the system of extraterritoriality was ended in 1943.

The first thing I looked at was reports issued by the Imperial Maritime Customs, a department created by the Qing dynasty to handle the empire's foreign trade, including trade between treaty ports, which was mostly staffed by foreigners. (After the 1912 revolution it was just the Maritime Customs, and gradually got taken over by Chinese officials.) They issued five ten-year reports between 1891 and 1931, but also a long series of annual reports.

For me the summer of 1994 was the Summer of The North China Herald.  I spent the whole summer reading reports by that Shanghai-based English newspaper's Chongqing correspondents, on microfilm at the Robarts Library.  By the time I was finished, I had opera music going around in my head! (Wagner in particular, like "Elsa's Dream" and the Prize Song.)

Between May of 1995 and January of 1996 I was in London, staying at Goodenough College. (Lucky for me that my sister had stayed their the year before and put in a good word for me!) Most of my research was consular reports at the British government archives in Kew, which was quite a commute.  I also found some stuff at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies.

I often found interesting details in "throwaway" comments.  Like when they showed figures for passengers on the foreign ships sailing between treaty ports, they mentioned that some of the Chinese passengers were actually Japanese who passed themselves off as natives for the cheaper fare!

Some of the individual "characters" were interesting too.  Chongqing got "opened" as a treaty port, then opened to steamship trade, through the efforts of a merchant called Archibald Little, who wasn't so successful but did play the pioneer role.  His wife Alicia  was a travel writer, and one of the leaders of China's first anti-footbinding movement!

SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT

"What a strong little sugar plum you are!"--Smiles of a Summer Night

Wednesday was another History Discussion Group screening at Debi's place.  I was going to borrow a DVD of Tony Richardson's 1968 version of Charge of the Light Brigade from Malcolm, but we couldn't get together, so at the last minute I changed it to Ingmar Bergman's 1950s sex comedy Smiles of a Summer Night (which I saw for the second time).

It went over pretty well.  I was thinking that the '50s was the last time when they made subtly sexy movies. (After that came the '60s, and sex got obvious, especially in the movies.) This was about the time of the summer solstice, which was appropriate enough.

So the British have taken the plunge and voted to leave the EU!  It seems a boneheaded move:  the EU will still dominate the British economy, but now Britain will have no input!  Yet if I'd been a British voter, I would have been tempted to vote Yes just to "shock the system," as they said in the 1960s. (Sort of like heaving a rock at a beehive...)

Last night I had an unusually vivid dream in which I visited Chongqing (the Chinese treaty port I wrote my Ph.D. thesis about) just before World War II, and told a Chinese girl some of the things that were about to happen!

Tonight the choir did a concert at an old folks' home near Keele and Sheppard.  When we sang "Que Sera, Sera" I did the second verse solo! (That's the one that starts, "When I grew up and fell in love...") Oksana drove me and Clotilde up there and back.  Paolo always pulls a surprise or two, and this time we sang "You Are My Sunshine," which I didn't know except for the chorus.  Gary from my memoir group has now joined!

While I was there I also arranged to take singing lessons from Alexei, another choir member.  He lives up in Richmond Hill and could come to my house on Monday afternoon, but that's the time of the memoir group, so I'll have to come to him, on another day.  He charges $30 a lesson, which is very reasonable! (Even Giuseppe charged $50!)

BILLIONS & MANHATTAN

"What's the point of having 'Fuck you' money if you never say 'Fuck you'?"--Billions

Daughter: "It's Kafkaesque!" Mother: "At least she's reading"--Manhattan

We've started watching some new shows on Crave TV.  One is Billions, a really sharp show about Manhattan prosecutor Paul Giamatti about to take on Wall Street billionaire Damian Lewis.  The kinky opening scene seemed a bit gratuitous.

The other one is Manhattan, about the World War II scientists developing the first A-bombs, and their families living in top secrecy at Los Alamos.  This subject interests Father since he's been a nuclear physicist.

Tuesday we watched Listen to Marlon, a documentary built around the voluminous voice recordings Marlon Brando made over his lifetime. (I read Peter Manso's Brando biography some years back, but I couldn't quite finish it because it got too sad!)

Wednesday night I went to John Snow's lecture on Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt at the Gladstone library.  I ought to do his Main Street in my book club someday.  He asked me to become assistant organizer of his two book clubs, for what it's worth. (I take a much more casual approach than he does, and maybe we need to combine both approaches!) I've just been shipped half a dozen books to read for his upcoming American book club.

Six days since my last post and I can't think of anything more to write about!  It's one of those weeks...

A chip off the old tooth

Barbra Streisand: "Don't you know who I am?" Officer Bar Brady: "Well, if you aren't Fiona Apple I don't give a rat's ass!"--South Park

Wednesday night I chipped a back tooth.  It happened when I was flossing. (Maybe it happened because I was using waxed dental floss for the first time in quite a while.) Yesterday morning I went to my dentist and Dr. Hrabalova gave me a filling to replace it.

Wednesday night I went to the Politics Meetup at the Fox and Firkin near Eglinton Station.  It was interesting enough, but the place was so noisy that it was hard to follow conversations!  Thursday night I went on the Art Walk, back on Queen Street for the first time in months.  Friday night I went to the Scottish Meetup, which was at the Piper's, just a short distance from my house!

I've been binge-watching South Park on Crave TV.  It's no big revelation that the show is highly uneven.  Funny about suspension of disbelief:  I can accept that Stan's goldfish keeps sneaking out of his bowl and going around killing people, but I can't accept it when he brings the bodies back to Stan's room!

Since we still have Netflix till the end of the month, I started watching Aquarius, a series with David Duchovny as a square 1967 LAPD detective whose investigations involve Charles Manson.  It's pretty scary, of course:  I don't know how many more episodes I'll see.

I'm really appalled about the DNC's systematic vote suppression in the Democratic primaries! (Just because The New York Times doesn't report something doesn't mean it isn't happening.) They're asking Bernie Sanders to run as an independent.  If I were American, I'd vote for him!  The Clintonites are acting like "sore winners."

Crave TV

(to Brigham Young) "Did those golden tablets teach you to lie like that, or were you born a sonuvabitch?"--Hell on Wheels

Saturday I planted the rest of the potatoes and the peas, sunflowers, beans, carrots and onions. (I did all this just before a big downpour that night.) All that's left is some head crops like cabbage and broccoli.

After Monday night's choir rehearsal I saw a big rainbow in a full arc from left to right, with a dim second arc!

We've finished Bloodline and Hell on Wheels so I ended our Netflix subscription.  But we'll continue to receive it until July 6.  If we'd cancelled it a day earlier we'd have saved an extra month's payment, but them's the breaks!

We're going to subscribe to Crave TV for a while.  They have a lot of interesting shows, including the Clair Danes series My So-Called Life from the early '90s.  They even have Twin Peaks!  I've already started watching South Park again. (It's a guilty pleasure, a subject I was just writing about in my memoir group.)

Tonight the choir and the Columbus Centre band did a concert together, including the big "La Grande Guerra" medley. (Those are pretty good songs:  I'd like to learn more about them!)

I'm depressed about Hillary Clinton winning the California primary.  Be afraid of November, Democrats, be very afraid.  If Bernie Sanders decides to run as an independent he'll get no objection from me.  At the very least, he'll quickly overtake Mrs. C in the polls, then she'll be the spoiler! (Will the "pragmatists" practice what they preach and get behind Sanders to defeat the Republicans?  Or will it be "Hillary or bust"?)

Pax Mongolica

Tuesday night the choir did a rehearsal with the Columbus Centre band for the first time, before next week's concert.  They seemed impressed by us.

Sunday I got a message from the Schnitzel Hub that they wanted a $300 prepayment before Wednesday's History Discussion Group event, so I provided the payment through my credit card.  Maybe it was the wrong decision, but I didn't know what to do so close to the event, and didn't want to screw things up.

When we met on Wednesday night, there was a big kerfuffle, and in the end they refunded most of my payment and we moved to the Jester nearby.  The event, titled "Pax Mongolica" was a discussion about the Mongolian empire and its legacy, starting from Jack Weatherford's book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.  It was a very interesting discussion that went on for almost three hours.  There was a new Chinese guy with the name Mega. (His parents saw a Megabucks sign in Las Vegas and decided that would be a good name--would I lie to you?) We'll have future events at Scallywag's, where I've gone for the Political Meetup.

Netflix has some new episodes of Hell on Wheels, with the hero overseeing the building of the railroad from California east to the prairies, and dealing with Chinese workers. (I guessed that the Chinese boy was actually a girl because the lead cast included a Chinese female!)

I started planting the garden today, and did half the potatoes. (I would have started yesterday, but I was feeling unwell for some reason.) Moira's going to plant some herbs as well!