June 12, 2011

Quint: "Here's to Swimmin' with bow-legged women!"--Jaws

    Dreamed of meeting Desiree McGraw, whom I knew at my Goodenough College stay in London in 1995.

    In the morning I went on a Walking Meetup in the Forest Hill area.

    Because I'd woken up early, I napped after getting back home.

    Dinner was beef stroganoff.

    Saw Steven Spielberg's Jaws (for the second time) at the Underground.  It's best to ignore the fact that a real shark does not lurk around a beach waiting for hunters to chase him.  Quint does a lot for the movie:  Robert Shaw plays him with just the right degree of ham.  If they were making it today, they'd show the shark a lot more and it wouldn't be as good.

June 11, 2011

    Dreamed of trying to play a saxophone; finding a coupon that entitled me to a free Volkswagen; the song "Thank Heaven for Little Girls."

    Went shopping.

    Dinner was pork steak.

    Moira and I got most of the seeds planted. (Only the potatoes are left.)

    Saw the DVD of Raoul Walsh's They Drive by Night (for the second time).  It's a realistic Warner Brothers trucking melodrama, which happily costars Humphrey Bogart.  The second half, with Ida Lupino as the boss' dangerous wife, got pretty silly.

    Saw Dion Conflict's Trailer Trash show (for the second time) at the Underground.

June 9, 2011

    Dreamed of the song of the William Butler Yeats poem "Down by the Sally Gardens."

    Visited my shrink Dr. Hassan.

    I'm ready to start planting the garden, but just don't have the energy!

    Dinner was spaghetti.

    Saw the DVD of the TV play Bang the Drum Slowly.  Compared to the movie, it did more with less.

    The city turned off our water for a short time in the evening because they're replacing the ancient pipes that connect us to the water main.

June 8, 2011

    Dreamed of the children's book Heidi; an episode of the comic strip Alley Oop with a cameo appearance by characters from other comic strips (including the Phantom) concerned about Oop's fate; getting teary-eyed.

    I now have a fifth Kingdoms of Camelot city, which I called Sandby.

    Got my hair cut, then went to the Tim Horton's doughnut shop near St. Patrick station and met some of the people in the Aspergers Meetup group.

    Dinner was chicken curry.

    Saw the DVD of Rod Serling's TV play Requiem for a Heavyweight (the version with Jack Palance).

June 7, 2011

    Dreamed of writing a test that asked how I'd organize a protest against car dependency for maximum impact; wanting to write that I'd stage the protests near places with high traffic, but writing erratically, skipping to different pages of the test paper, changing pens and crossing out many words; driving in southwestern Ontario and seeing an explosion that seemed to be an A-bomb but turned out to be a space shuttle launch; stopping in a town called Jughead; gathering large piles of leaves.

    Baked multigrain bread.

    We went to Fiesta Gardens and bought some more seeds.

    Dinner was stir-fry (using the leftover pork).

    Moira and I bought some more seeds at Canadian Tire, near St. Clair & Keele. (She wants to plant kale this year, and we finally found some kale seeds.)

    Saw the DVD of the first episode of the Kevin Brownlow series D.W. Griffiths:  Father of Film.

June 6, 2011

    Dreamed of trying to explain the cleverness of the script for the murder mystery The Last of Sheila.

    Father and I walked to the nearby No Frills and bought some seeds for the garden.

    Finished the ditch, and started evening the garden surface with the hoe.

    Dinner was McDonald's.

    At choir practice Giuseppe was saying that we should sculpt our words, and that even when you throw your chisel it'll leave a mark!

June 5, 2011

    Dreamed of "waking up" at about 08:30, in plenty of time for today's concert. (I actually woke up at around 10:00, still in enough time.)

    Took part in a Coro Verdi concert as part of the festivities marking the sesquicentennial of Italian unification.  We sang several folk songs, along with a few opera classics.

    Dinner was pork roast.

    I've been posting a lot in a Huffington Post forum about Pentagon whistle-blower Bradley Manning. (I was this active three years ago in a form about Proposition 8 and the African-American victimology.) Some of the posters are really full of hate!  But there was one who said that the question wasn't whether Manning had the right to leak the information but whether the U.S. government had the right to keep it secret!  I fanned him and added "Couldn't have said it better."