Dreamed of trying to light a candle; Peter Gabriel's song "Biko" with the line "You can blow out a candle, but you can't blow out a fire."
Donald came over and looked at the Leopard software. Now he things the extra RAM we got was defective.
He stayed for dinner, which was salmon.
"'What's wrong with another Vietnam?' said President Ford. 'We should do it over and over until we get it right'"--Saturday Night Live
"If you can't believe what you read in comic books, you can't believe anything!"--Bullwinkle
Donald was going to come over to look at the computer today, but I was going to go to a Multicultural Meetup, so he delayed it until tomorrow. But then I decided not to go to the Meetup after all. So it goes.
Dinner was pizza.
Went shopping.
Dinner was roast chicken.
Returned The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste (which I finished yesterday) and Mondo Canuck (which I only skimmed through) to the Davenport library. They were due back today.
While I was returning them, I borrowed George Monbiot's Heat, which they say has a specific plan for ending global warming.
Bullwinkle: "Because my feet would stick out."
The Leopard replacement disc arrived! But several installation attempts failed.
Dinner was lasagna.
Saw the DVD of the first Doctor Who adventure (for the second time) It involved a tribe of cavemen trying to figure out fire. Pretty fun.
Dinner was roast pork.
At choir practice we continued to learn the Gounod mass. We'll get the list of pieces for the winter concert next week.
"Super Best Friends," a South Park episode lampooning cults like Scientology, was actually pretty good.
It's really cold but that didn't matter because I never left home today.
Saw some more Popeye cartoons on DVD. I especially liked the animation in The Dance Contest. (Everything in Max Fleischer's world seems to be made out of rubber!)
"Your mother's dead, Llewellyn!"
"Then I'll tell her myself."
--No Country for Old Men
"Ma'm, you know what beer leads to."
"Beer leads to more beer!"
--ibid.
Went to the big Loblaw's near Bathurst & St. Clair but couldn't find rye flour.
Dinner was McDonald's.
Saw the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men at the Sheppard Grande. Ultimately, it was deeply disturbing. (I was going to see it with a Meetup group, but I couldn't find them.) There was a good trailer for There Will Be Blood.
Baked multigrain bread.
The latest Harper's issue has a lot of interesting stuff: on reading, speculative bubbles and sewage.
Dinner was spaghetti.
Went to the Low-Key Social Meetup at Timothy's in Scarborough Town Centre. I felt sick, so I didn't stay long.
Went shopping.
Sinus trouble. I've been sneezing a lot.
Dinner was roast chicken.
Saw the Rue Morgue magazine horror presentation The Abominable Dr. Phibes at the Bloor. That's the one where Vincent Price murders a succession of doctors in ways that parallel the Egyptian plagues in the book of Exodus. Pretty stylish, with a fancy look for its low budget. (And Terry-Thomas had a cameo!)
Dinner was pork chops.
I've scheduled a Groundhog Day lunch for my Lunch Club Meetup. Several people have already decided to come.
Dinner was fish.
Went to the first Chinese Literature Meetup at the Starbuck's in Rosedale. The organizer handed out computer discs with an unpublished full-version translation of Dream of the Red Chamber, scanned into PDF files. We'll be meeting twice a month, but it may take us all year.
After I got home, I read the first chapter. It looks gripping.
Wrote a post on my blog about Mister Kitty's "Stupid Comics" website, and the comic-book cover scan I found there showing a gorilla robbing a library to advance his plan to conquer the earth. I also discussed an issue of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen I remembered reading, and posted a cover scane of it that I'd found at comics.org . (It shows Jimmy as a hippie leading a protest against Superman.)
Dreamed of visiting my hometown Sackville, NB, with Donald and John; wondering when was the last time they'd visited Sackville; rising up into outer space; being in a layer of cloud and waiting for the sun to come out.
Dinner was the roast I'd spiced the day before.
Coro Verdi had its first rehearsal in a month. We started learning Gounod's Mass in C.
Dreamed of waking up at 13:00 and missing my Meetup today (I actually woke up at 08:30); translating a Latin text and finding that one word was gibberish alient to the Latin language.
Nobody showed up for the Lunch Club Meetup. (I might as well have overslept...)
Saw Chris Weitz' movie of The Golden Compass at the Revue. (The place was packed.) It was a pretty conventional adaptation. Maybe it would work better as an anime series.
Dinner was McDonald's. Last night I said I'd spice the roast so we could have it today, and I actually did that night. But Mother didn't look at it close enough and thought I'd left it unspiced.
Dreamed of having gum stuck on my arm; a team of secret agents turned against each other and killing each other to survive; telling Moira about the Mesopotamian origins of the Great Flood myth.
Saw the Met production of Verdi's Macbeth at the Sheppard Grande. Those Met people sure know how to put on an opera! Lady Macbeth was really juicy. Curiously, the witches' chorus were costumed to evoke Diane Arbus.
Puitak and Gordon came over for dinner, which was Indian butter chicken and some other stuff.
We saw the DVD of the first episodes of the second season of The Bob Newhart Show. The therapy group is really funny!
Dreamed of a book titled A Short History of Number Systems; filming a TV commercial with two gangstas who couldn't do anything right; trying to get even with an unfaithful girlfriend but ending up the butt of Wile E. Coyote-type slapstick; getting into a career of filming commercials.
Baked multigrain bread.
Dinner was lasagna.
Found out that Mela's has gone out of business! So I'm changing Sunday's Lunch Club Meetup event to Kama's, where I got a reservation.
Went to Mary's apartment for another games night. There were about 20 people there! We played Outburst. It got too noisy for me so I was the first to leave.
Emailed Apple support to inquire about exchanging that farchachda Leopard disc!
Bart: "Bad influence my butt! How many times have I told you not to listen to your Mom?"
--The Simpsons
Dreamed of putting on a pair of in-line skates with knee socks; not knowing what time it was when I went out, but guessing it was evening because the sun was in the west.
Dinner was scalloped potatoes and ham.
Went to the Architecture for Humanity Meetup. There were over thirty people, thanks to last night's lecture. I left early to make a movie I'd planned to see.
That movie was Once at the Revue. It's a nice little film about a Dublin busker. A conventional story told in a fresh, low-key way. (The brogues were so thick that I missed some of the dialogue.)
Dreamed of an episode of the comic strip The Family Circus (ugh!) where the kids wanted to earn money by shovelling snow, so they dumped a truckload of cornmeal where they could shovel it.
Went shopping.
Dinner was roast chicken.
Went to a talk at the Ontario College of Art and Design by Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity, all about providing housing for refugees and such. It was quite heartening. There was an audience of hundreds!
Wrote the blog post "My pissing match with Harry Shearer."
Saw the DVD of the documentary John Ford Goes to War, about the World War II documentaries his unit created.
Dinner was salmon.
Went to the Non-Fiction Book Club Meetup at the Bookworm Cafe. We talked about In Praise of Slow, and decided to read Hot Air next month. (It's a book about Canada's global warming policies, co-written by Jeffrey Simpson.)
(on same crook) "He's the cancer and I'm the... what kills cancer?"
--The Simpsons
Dreamed of being about to take a flight; a girlfriend slipping me into the airport as a crew member because there was less security to get through; a prank in an airport food court carried out by pro-lifers; finding a cinema in London that started its daily program at 07:00 with an episode of a TV series.
Went to the Titanic artifacts exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre. (I hadn't gone ther for over 20 years!) I left with a huge headache.
Dinner was spaghetti.
Because of my headache, I went to bed for over three hours just after dinner.
Dreamed of preparing for the impending death of John Wayne (who died in 1979); visiting a non-existent mausoleum south of our old house in Sackville, NB; seeing them bringing in the body of Eartha Kitt (who's still alive); meeting Bettie Page in lingerie; giving her a hug; seeing Charlotte Street in Sackville renamed September Avenue, now so busy that I could hear an ambulance going along it.
Saw the DVD of the first episodes of the third season of The Simpsons. It's getting funnier and funnier. (The episode where a Reader's Digest-type magazine's essay contest brings Lisa and family to Washington, DC, is a classic!)
Donald came over for dinner, which was churrasco chicken. Afterward he spent a long while on the computer, and now we have the Safari app back.
Resumed my blog. I did a post relating our computer travails, ending with the line "Oh, for the abacus!"
Boris Badenov: "That's no drive--more of a short putt."
Dreamed of visiting the beach where they filmed Jaws; meeting in my apartment with people who turned out to be burglars; being warned not to press charges against them; getting elected an MP back in 1968; participating in a prank to protest the abortion laws of the time; Simon and Garfunkel.
Baked cheese bread.
Went to a rescreening of the Met production of the Gounod opera Romeo et Juliette at the Sheppard Grande. I met my singing teacher Giuseppe Macina on the way out, and told him "You know an opera is well directed when the subtitles aren't really needed!" (He told me there's no choir practice this Monday.)
Dinner was KFC. (They now have corn as a side order!)
"Things got so bad that even the witches couldn't tell which witch was which"--Fractured Fairy Tales
Got up before 08:30, for a change.
Went to see my shrink Dr. Hassan. (On the way there, I read some more of The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste. Very illuminating.)
Dinner was pork chops.
The Firefox app seems to be working OK now.
Dreamed of reflecting that Sidney Poitier in To Sir, With Love was annoying; preferring Malcolm X; saying "Malcolm's da Man!"
Went shopping.
Got a package of romance comics, and Jungle Jim in comic-book form; and one of some more comic strip reprints.
Dinner was turkey pie.
Saw the DVD of Disney's Saludos Amigos, an animated travelogue of South America in 1942, which started in a tour Walt Disney and his artists took to promote FDR's wartime "good neighbour" policy. The samba music was cool.
I downloaded the Firefox app but that browser's crashing too!
"I don't wanna go, Mom."
"So don't go."
"But I gotta go."
"So go."
--Mask
"What's radio, Mr. Peabody?"--Sherman
Dreamed of a woman lying on top of me; my placing my hand so she wouldn't feel my erection.
Saw the DVD of Peter Bogdanovich's Mask (for the third time). It's shameless but effective, with Cher at her best.
Dinner would have been scalloped potatoes and ham, but I had such a big headache that I went to bed early.
Father put another nail on my wall (he was doing it for Moira too), so now my Hiroshige calendar is on display!
In the afternoon Moira and I saw the DVD of Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera in a 1980 Met production starring Luciano Pavarotti. It was all very handsome.
John and Kathrine came over for dinner, which was lasagna and ham.
The Safari app is now quitting automatically when we open it, so we have to use Internet Explorer instead. (But that app quits a lot too.)
Dreamed of "waking up" on a sidewalk downtown; a lady asking if she should write a note excusing me from school; getting dressed in a back alley.
I'm finally reading the comics in the latest package I bought from Barry King.
I went out to dinner at McDonald's. (The rest of the family ate leftovers.)
Then I went out to Anthony Ng's New Year's Eve party at his apartment on Dora Spencer Road. I only stayed for about an hour.
I took a sleeping pill so I'd be asleep by midnight.
"Until your mission is a success, Max, she'll learn to live without you."
"Yeah, but what if my mission is a failure?"
"Then we'll all learn to live without you."
--Get Smart
Saw the last episodes of the latest Get Smart DVD. I remember quite a bit of it, like the chambermaid carrying in the refrigerator; and Max covering up his spy work from visiting relatives with the co-operation of a Kaos agent he'd just been fighting, who suggested he say "We flew together in the Luftwaffe!"
Dinner was spaghetti. We made a huge amount, yet managed to finish it!
Scheduled the first Lunch Club Meetup event for Mela's Indian Cuisine in two weeks. (I'm changing the name from Brunch Club Meetup because it turns out that Patricia, the previous organizer, had asked them to close the group down. At any rate, it'll mean a bunch of new people in addition to those I hope will follow me there.)
I noticed that our Safari app is only at level 1.2, while the hard disc thinks it has 1.3.9 software. Fahter thinks that figuring that one out could solve a lot of other stuff.
My feud with Harry Shearer continues. He corrected my spelling of Harry Connick Jr. and I pointed out he was a prick. (This is fun! (I'll have to reprint it on my blog.)
Dreamed of a Dick Tracy reprint that included a 1940s story that supposedly inspired the movie Jaws; Father and I rowing together; figuring out how to row with co-ordinated strokes so we wouldn't go all over the place.
I can't think straight when we have company.
The organizer of the Brunch Club Meetup stood down, so I've taken over. (What was I thinking?)
Dinner was Chinese food. My fortune cookie said "Love is around the corner." (That seems a bit cruel.)
I'm going to write another story, based on a romance comic cover I found at comics.org .
Headache!
I read a Harry Shearer post about New Orleans at The Huffington Post, and wrote a comment asking if high-density housing in the higher areas would reduced the need for rebuilding in the lower areas. He added a response to my post (as he often does), but he didn't answer my question and was quite rude. I wrote a second post pointing that out.
I stayed awake till after 06:00, and didn't get up till after 14:00!
Dreamed of acting on the stage in Halifax; hanging out with the band Van Halen; hearing that one of them was dying(?); a newspaper that printed a lot of classic comic strips like Terry and the Pirates.
Went shopping.
Dinner was turkey pie.
Saw the DVD of Robert Greenwald's documentary Outfoxed, about the operations behind Fox News. Pretty appalling.
Found a great website at comics.org where they post scans of a slew of comic book covers. I've found several that I remember reading as a kid.
Baked whole wheat bread overnight.
Dreamed of having a wife and sitting on her shoulders; early Disney TV shows; the Chaka Khan song "I Feel For You."
Got a big Ebay package of Sunday comic strips from Barry King!
I decided to install Leopard since the hard disc was clared and I hoped that would bring back the startup process. But it didn't work, and when I tried rebuilding through Disk Warrior it caused big errors. I hate computers! At times like this I think about everything that makes me angry, or so it seems.
Dinner was shepherd's pie.
Donald came over and we finally got back to where we were before. I'll have to refund that benighted Leopard software!
I need to get out of the house.
Dreamed of Moira getting a big pile of things from Oregon by mail order, including oranges and a geographical map; walking along a tunnel where York Street was in my hometown of Sackville, N.B.; wondering whether this was real or a dream.
I stayed awake till around 03:00 and finally took a sleeping pill.
Moira came back from Kingston.
John and family came over with a vegan dinner. (I later sneaked out for a few McNuggets.) He and Kathrine spent winter in Israel. Merle is moving to the Yucatan peninsula next year, and she doesn't speak Spanish!
I tried copying the old hard disc onto the new one and clearing the first one so we can install the Leopard upgrade. (Donald says it should be done on an empty disc.) But something went wrong and now it won't do the startup. I know I shouldn't have been mucking around with the system, but I got sick of all the waiting!
Bullwinkle predicts the weather:
"Will there be any precipitation on my Natal Day?"
"Depends whether you leave it out in the rain!"
"Sleep don't drink no beer!"--Undeclared
Dreamed of having peanut butter in my mouth; spending the night at a restaurant where you kept eating until dawn; seeing Sharon Stone and her husband there; going home with Mother; seeing the view in my hometown of Sackville, N.B., then remembering that I was in Toronto and needing a moment to "wake up" and get my Toronto bearings; taking photographs of a woman wearing jodhpurs and riding boots; wrongly remembering her as an actress in Days of Heaven; holding a non-existent New York Times blogger in contempt.
Donald came over for Christmas dinner. Just after he arrived the computer gave a "kernel panic" signal (I thought it was spelled "Colonel Panic") and he was available to try to figure it out. [Another busman's holiday for him!]
Dinner was turkey, of course.
Saw the DVD of the first episodes of the Rocky & Bullwinkle story where Bullwinkle's bunion predicted the weather.
