June 16, 2005

Dreamed of a notorious official in the French government from the Directory period (between the Reign of Terror and Napoleon).

Got some more Li'l Abner comics along with a Dick Tracy reprint and a 1960s issue of the British comic The Beano.

Dinner was spaghetti.

Did I say I was finished rearranging my comics?  Actually, I spent quite a bit of additional time singling out some bits for resale.

Saw Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle at the Revue.  It's a highly unique chopsocky comedy.  It actually took me a while to know for sure who the central protagonist was.  Unfortunately, I felt sick around the time of the big climax. (I should have known better than to eat popcorn that night.)

June 15, 2005

Dreamed of being in a cheesy movie about John F. Kennedy at the 1956 Democratic convention where he tried unsuccessfully to become the presidential nominee's running mate.

At today's singing lesson Giuseppe suggested I try Gluck's "O Del Mio Dolce Ardor."

Got some Lone Ranger comics.

They still haven't sent the Twin Peaks pilot DVD, so I ended up returning the later episodes unseen. *&%@#$!

Saw the start of the DVD of the Republic Pictures serial Adventures of Captain Marvel.  It has something to do with a scorpion contraction whose lenses focus the sunlight to turn rocks into gold.

Dinner was steak and scallops.

We did the dress rehearsal for Friday's choral concert.  Giuseppe had us stand like we do during the concert, which it seems to me was overdoing it.

June 14, 2005

Went shopping.

Finished rearranging my comics.

Got some more comics, including a reprint of The World of Lily Wong, a strip from the Hong Kong newspaper The South China Morning Post.

We did the May book-selling accounts.  About $30 profit.

Dinner was chicken curry.

The Common Room had a karaoke evening.  I sang "My Way" and "Dancing in the Streets." (The microphone had an echo that made it sound like stadium speakers.)

Lily Wong is funny stuff!  I'll have to show it to my Hong Kong friend Puitak.

Started typing up my September diary entries.

June 13, 2005

Dreamed of reading a large-size book about World War II, written in fine print (like my edition of the Oxford English Dictionary).

Baked whole wheat bread.

Got some Little Orphan Annie Sundays from back in the 1930s at Dragon Lady.

In the late afternoon a thunderstorm finally ended our dry spell.

Dinner was shepherd's pie.

Went to the Goodenough Association's annual meeting.  Unfortunately, I got caught in the rain in my good suit.  I got quite a soaking because I couldn't find the Toronto Lawn Tennis Club where the meeting was taking place. (Being caught in the rain affects your judgement.) And I arrived somewhat late.  But I got to meet Madeline Melling and Timothy Toyne-Sewell again, whom I'd met in London. (They're retiring from Goodenough College soon.)

June 12, 2005

"Learn to pray correctly, scientifically[!] Employ tested and proven methods. Avoid slipshod praying....  There is enough power in you to blow the city of New York to rubble.  That, and nothing less, is what advanced physics tells us"--Norman Vincent Peale, A Guide to Confident Living (quoted in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life)

Saw Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer at the Royal.  It's an eclectic mixture of sports movie, chopsocky, romance, special effects that George Lucas might find outlandish, and "anything for a laugh" slapstick.  Pretty fun overall.

We finally got around to eating out at Swiss Chalet.

Started rearranging my comic strip collection again.  I just finished reading a whole sheaf of Li'l Abner comics, and there are a couple dozen duplicates that I may as well resell on Ebay.

June 11, 2005

Baked white bread. (It gets eaten fast when we have company!)

Went to a Toronto Heritage waking tour of Cabbagetown. (I found out about it at Meetin.)

There was a huge crowd at dinner time.  We ate churrasco chicken and some vegan stuff.

Went to the Karaoke Meetup.  There were three people there (including me), which was just enough.  I was reckless enough to try singing Barenaked Ladies' "One Week"!

June 10, 2005

A Belgian woman to Erich Von Stroheim, after he executed her aged mother and kid brother (the latter dying in a salute to Belgium): "You foul fiend!"--Unbeliever

Dreamed of being a passenger on a small two-man helicopter powered by foot pedal; having a plane to catch but dawdling anyway; sleeping in a car driving overnight to a Massachusetts highway section named for Canadian Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci.

Saw the last of the Edison silents DVDs.  One of them was feature-length:  the shameless World War I movie Unbeliever, about a guy who joins the US Marines and recovers his belief in God amid the privations of battle (sort of like Mel Gibson in Signs). With Erich Von Stroheim as the Beastly Hun officer who ends up getting fragged by the music-loving German soldier whose violin he smashed.

Dinner was spaghetti.

June 9, 2005

Got some Little Orphan Annie and Kerry Drake and Steve Roper and Li'l Abner comics, along with a Jumbo Comics reprint that includes Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and Will Eisner's Hawks of the Sea.

Baked multigrain bread.

Dinner was KFC. (We were going to eat out at Swiss Chalet, but someone was coming over to buy a couple of books from us and it wrecked our schedule.)

For tonight's Geneva Centre group I brought over The Amazeing Labyrinth and Apples to Apples.  We played both games and both times Linda won.

On the way home, I walked through Beltline Park and passed by Upper Canada College.

June 8, 2005

At today's singing lesson I noticed vibration near my diaphragm for the first time.  That has to be a good sign!

Went shopping.

Got some comics sections from Stars and Stripes, the newspaper for American soldiers stationed abroad.

The hot weather has arrived!  We'll be turning on the air conditioning any time now.

Mowed the back lawn and did some pruning.

Dinner was McDonald's.

It turned out that the Dick Tracy item I'd picked up at Dragon Lady last week was the wrong one.  So I brought it back and exchanged it for the right one.

Saw Greta Garbo in the unimaginatively-titled silent The Mysterious Lady, in which an Austrian officer falls in love with her, only to find out she's a Russian spy.  Sort of like Marlene Dietrich in Dishonored, but with much less style. (They also showed Garbo in a 10-minute scene that's the only surviving part of Victor Seastrom's The Divine Woman.)

June 7, 2005

"What delayed you?" "A storm, sir." "Was she pretty?"--Love

Dreamed of entering a Halifax entertainment palace and almost immediately getting five demerit points (for things like shouting and riding an escalator the wrong way) from some official who spoke of "meticulous obfuscation"; saying "Go meticulously obfuscate yourself, jerk!" (but too slowly for the best effect) and leaving; a slapstick comedy with Cesare Borgia.

Got some 1930s episodes of Thimble Theater with Popeye the Sailor.

Applied for a proofreading job at Harlequin, through workopolis.com. (Mission:  Possible pointed it out to me.)

Dinner was halibut.

Saw Greta Garbo in Love, a silent movie of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.  MGM was shameless enough to tack on a happy ending after the original ending, more faithful to the book bombed in previews. (The Cinematheque also showed that ending.) 

Anyway, it wasn't so much about Tolstoy as about La Garbo's face. (You could say the same thing about the sound version Garbo later made, come to think of it.) But whatta face!  She had one of those faces a movie camera loves.  I'd bought a ticket for a second Garbo movie, but felt too sleepy to stay.

June 6, 2005

Met Debbie at Mission:  Possible.  We filled out an application for library work this fall.

Got a new pair of pajamas at Yorkdale Mall.

Dinner was shepherd's pie.

At choir practice we went through the whole concert program in order.  Rosemarie thinks the choir's finished.

Saw some more of the early silents from Edison's studio on DVD.  One of them was the famous Rescued From an Eagle's Nest, which includes a shot of an eagle flying away with a baby in its claws which they used to show on David Letterman's show repeatedly whenever they wanted some zany comedy

June 5, 2005

"You need us to protect you." 

"I'm in need of you?" 

"Yeah."

"I pay guys ten times what you earn to protect me!"

"Get a refund."

--Miami Vice

Saw the second half of The Best of Youth.  The best character was Matteo the policeman.

John and crew came over for dinner, which was pizza.

Saw the last of the first season of Miami Vice. (Too bad that the voodoo episode isn't until the second season.)

June 4, 2005

"In the hard-driving, competitive, ruthless materialistic world of the Gilded Age, to be unselfish suggested not purity but a lack of self, a lack of capacity for grappling with reality, a lack of assertion, of masculinity"--Anti-Intellectualism in American Life [Sound familiar?]

Dreamed of the song "Bobby Shaftoe"; going to sleep on the floor in a house where Robert Altman was about to start filming Short Cuts (a movie I haven't seen) and ending up with a non-speaking cameo in the movie, filmed lying on the floor.

Moira and I were going to look at the start of the series Twin Peaks on DVD, but it turned out that when I'd placed the whole first season on our zip.ca list I'd omitted the pilot.  So I placed the pilot on the list and made it ASAP, and we'll keep this DVD till we've seen that one.

Saw "The Home Invaders," a particularly disturbing episode of Miami Vice.

Dinner was spaghetti.

Saw the Frank Miller-Robert Rodriguez comic book movie Sin City at the Royal.  Stylishly paranoid, it's pretty cool in an unpleasant way.  Mickey Rourke has an amusing "hard-boiled" role.  Women are victims or deadly whores (or often both).

June 3, 2005

Moira and I saw the first half of the Italian miniseries The Best of Youth at Canada Square.  Somewhat middlebrow but engrossing.

Got some more Dick Tracys and the Jules Feiffer cartoon book Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl.

Dinner was roast chicken.

Baked raisin bread.

Went to the Karaoke Meetup, but this time even the organizer didn't show up!

June 2, 2005

(strangling her) "I hate you!...  I want to kill you!  But... I can't" (kisses her instead)--The Temptress

Got a Prince Valiant monthly reprint magazine.

Dinner was KFC.

Saw Garbo's silent The Temptress. The credits said it was "personally directed by Fred Niblo." (As opposed to a movie impersonally directed by Stanley Kubrick, I guess.) The titles kept making the audience laugh.

June 1, 2005

At today's singing lesson with Giuseppe I started developing my first two songs.

Got a miscellaneous batch of comic strips I'd been waiting over a month for.

Dinner was the rest of the roast pork.

Started reading a new section of Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life dealing with early American politics.

Saw Torrent, a silent movie that was Greta Garbo's Hollywood debut, at the Cinematheque.  It's the kind of movie where a dam breaks and the hero thinks Garbo's house is about to be swept away, so he hurries to her through the downpour only to find out that her house was never in danger after all (bait & switch). La Garbo looks rather conventional here:  they made her smile too often.

Stayed for Hitler's Hitparade, a montage of German film footage from the Nazi era (when movies were tightly controlled for their propaganda value), set to contemporary popular German music.  Telling.

May 31, 2005

Dreamed of a Confederate raiding party in the Civil War entering New York City and wrecking a Brooklyn Unitarian chapel with a female minister(!); sorting out two pairs of red socks before putting them in my drawer. (I only wear white and grey socks.)

Went shopping.

Got some Star Weekly comics from back in the 1930s! (A couple of pages are in two pieces, but I taped them back together.)

Dinner was salmon.

Went to the Linkup book club meeting at C'est What, where we discussed One Hundred Years of Solitude.  I had to leave early because I had a headache. (Those places are a bit too loud for me.)

Baked whole wheat bread overnight.

May 30, 2005

"Within the forlorn figure below the immense intricate life-restoring apparatus a mechanical pulse begins to beat!"--Twin Earths narration

Terran law: "Allow not the males of Terra to diminish further in numbers....  Sacrifice nine females if thou must if it saveth the life of one male"--Twin Earths

Moira taped the accompaniment for "Caro Mio Ben" and my second singing piece, Giovanni Paisiello's "Nel Cor Piu Non Mi Sento." (She wouldn't let me pay her!)

Dinner was roast chicken.

At choir practice Giuseppe told me that the cherry tree offshoot was still alive. (I was anxious because I had to cut off a lot of its roots to fit in in the pot.)

Read a reprint of the first Sunday episodes of the 1950s science fiction comic strip Twin Earths. (It's about an earth doppelganger called Terra, on the other side of the sun.) These episodes are about a Texas boy who sneaks aboard a Terran flying saucer whose crew is entirely female.

May 29, 2007

"Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvellous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end"--One Hundred Years of Solitude

Religious inmate: "By turning you in [for doping boxers to fix prison bouts], I'm saving you."

"Not if I save you first!"--Oz

"People in stucco houses shouldn't throw quiche!"--Miami Vice

Dreamed of a preview mentioning the basic plot of the next Harry Potter book.

Saw Bride and Prejudice, a Bollywood version of the Jane Austen book, at the Revue.  The subtitled opening number was great fun (I've never seen choreographers do things like that before!), but then it kinda went downhill.

Dinner was roast pork.

Finished One Hundred Years of Solitude.  It's a book that rewards rereading.

May 28, 2005

"I know what it's like to be in the bottom bunk"--Oz

Dreamed of going on a field trip and coming back really late and worrying that the parents wouldn't be happy.

It's Open Doors weekend in Toronto!  In the morning I joined a Meetin group and we visited the St. Lawrence Market gallery, the Flatiron Building, the Hummingbird Centre and Union Station. (During the Hummingbird Centre tour, when we walked onto the stage where they put on operas, I started singing Frank Sinatra's "My Way." It got a good laugh.

In the afternoon Father drove me to Etobicoke, where I visited Toronto's Jain centre.

Dinner was McDonald's.

I was going to see Bride and Prejudice but the Roncesvalles streetcars weren't working and I couldn't get to the Revue in time.

Saw the classic Miami Vice episode "Smuggler's Blues," where a homicide cop goes rogue and shakes down smugglers. ("The bottom line is M-O-N-E-Y!" "Usually is.")

May 27, 2005

"Then Aureliano went all out.  Giving her some small orphaned kisses in the hollow of her wounded hand, he opened up the most hidden passageways of his heart and drew out an interminable and lacerated intestine, the terrible parasitic animal that had incubated in his martyrdom"--One Hundred Years of Solitude

Crockett: "Is there anything we can do for you?"

Hooker: "Yeah--eat dirt and die!"--Miami Vice 

(Was the hooker thinking of a stronger word than "dirt"?)

Didn't get to sleep till almost 04:00!

Dreamed of visiting a community in the Northwest Territories just north of the 60th parallel (the border with Alberta and Saskatchewan).

Got some Cleveland Plain Dealer Sunday comics. (I also picked up some more Prince Valiants and Dick Tracys at The Dragon Lady.)

Dinner was pork chops.

Saw Los Angeles Plays Itself (for the second time), a knowing documentary about the Hollywood image of Los Angeles, at the Royal.  Moira came too, but it was so long that she left in the intermission.

Visited the dance studio and met Cynthia again.  She gives a tight hug!

May 26, 2055

"I just love it when you poor little rich kids slip up twice.  You know why?  'Cause then you're just like everybody else!"--Miami Vice

Dreamed of attending a Halifax meeting of the board running Canada's largest men's club.

Got through to Hirsch.  It turned out that he couldn't open my CV attachment. (A Mac attachment on a Windows computer, of course!) So I copied the text directly into my email.

Got a couple of Toronto Star and Toronto Telegram weekend sections, including comics, and a new batch of Menomonee Falls Gazette issues and a Twin Earths reprint.

Forgot to have lunch!

Dinner was spaghetti.

The Geneva Centre group and I saw George Lucas' Revenge of the Sith at Silver City Eglinton.  It wasn't as inept as Attack of the Clones, but it was still a bit too long and dreary.  Ewan MacGregor did a cool Alec Guiness, but Hayden Christiansen was a remarkably inadequate Vader. (Poor Natalie Portman was given lines like "He says you're under a lot of pressure," and "I don't know you any more!") My favourite gadget was the two-wheel contraption General Insidious (or whatever his name was) rode around in. [His name was General Grievous.]

May 25, 2005

Tubbs (seeing a pretty stenographer packing up): "T-G-I-F, huh?" "F-O-R-G-E-T-I-T!"--Miami Vice

Woke up; about 06:00.

At today's singing lesson I sang "Caro Mio Ben" for Giuseppe for the first time.  I gave him an offshoot from our front yard's cherry tree, which pleased him.

Called Hirsch's office three times but didn't manage to get ahold of him.

Dinner was salmon.

Choir practice was on Wednesday because of Victoria Day.  We really need to dissect "Innegiamo al Signor" from Cavalleria Rusticana.

Baked cheese bread overnight.

May 24, 2005

"He could not understand why he had needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough:  fear"--One Hundred Years of Solitude

"We're democratic, in some ways"--The Prisoner

Dreamed of surviving a plane crash near a hill beside the road between Sackville and Moncton and starting a long walk along that road;  singing at karaoke a long poem of social comment by a Pablo Neruda-type Hispanic "magical realist" author, with a melody I was making up as I went along; having the discretion to quit in the middle.

Went to Mission:  Possible to tell them about the job possibility.  Seems that Dann's back is bothering him again and he had to take health leave, so Debbie is back on my case. (It's a shame I didn't get this chance while he was still in charge of me, so he'd have something to show for his time.) I also stopped by Hollywood Canteen again and bought a book about Saturday morning TV and a reduced-price coffee-table guide to horror movies.

Dinner was KFC.

Went to Yuk Yuk's for the Writer's Meetup.  I didn't meet any other group members, but I did get to see some mostly weak shtick. (I liked this East Indian guy who talked about video store customers and their lack of social skills

May 23, 2005

"It was then she decided to drown the child in the cistern as soon as the nun left, but her heart was not strong enough and she preferred to wait patiently until the infinite goodness of God would free her from the annoyance"--One Hundred Years of Solitude

"So where else can a big-city player have fun in town like... [eyeing a babe] this?" "Everywhere!  If Miami doesn't have it, nobody's thought of it yet"--Miami Vice

"What was Gifford doing to get himself killed?" "He was a snitch and a thief!  And he went to Yale"--ibid.

Dreamed of bicycling to New York City with Moira; settling in a place near the northeast shore of Manhattan; an astronaut criminal sentenced to live on a small satellite of Jupiter for the rest of his life.

Sent my CV to Robert Hirsch of Acumen Information Services. (He's the guy Barry King mentioned.)

Donald came over for dinner, which was Chinese food.

Hirsch answered my email pretty quick.  He wants me to phone him tomorrow!

May 22, 2005

"Do these [drug] dealers so anything else besides buying clothes, or what?" "Yeah.  They buy cars"--Miami Vice

Dreamed of coming home to Sackville, N.B., on a bus; dozing off and only waking up when the bus came to my stop; the book Peyton Place.

The parents came back from Kingston with Moira.

Dinner was fettucine in pesto sauce (which I cooked).

Baked multigrain bread.

For the first time in quite a while, the number of Ebay items I was bidding on (temporarily) dwindled to zero.

I was still awake past 2:00.