Off the Cliff

And of course not two pages later the author of Ghostland mentions John Gordon and The House on the Brink. But I am reading more Insp. Littlejohn because I can't read dead tree while bicycling and I must bicycle to offset the alcohol if not the actual carbs.

Wasn't intending to listen to Saturday at the Opera but happening to turn the radio on, there was The Marriage of Figaro which of course I had to stay in for. Alas that the broadcast only demonstrated that no one else quite comes up to the standard of Te Kanawa and von Stade. I should put that on the CD player for bicycling to, having exhausted my collection of Bach and not sure where to get more, now that amazon is a no go. Also Vivaldi. I like the Four Seasons but the hunting section now reduces me to giggles. Tumpti-tump-tump, tumpti-tump-tump, tumpti-tump-tump tum tum tum, tumpti-tump-tump tumpti-tump-tump tumpti-tump-tump TUM.

Got downstairs yesterday before breakfast to weigh myself because I was afraid my bagel and butter habit of the last week plus not moving much on my twinging leg would have had deleterious effects. Mind, the aging metabolism doesn't usually register these things for ten days, but still. In the event, am exactly the weight I was last week. So I'm not gaining, or at least not yet.

Got out to the store yesterday in between thunder showers and shower showers. Missed a chunk of Fidelio on the CBC thereby and when I came back they were playing something else, very oompapapa.  Except that was the end of Fidelio.  No idea how they stretched a two act opera into three hours: must have been a long intermission with talking heads. And since the voices of the CBC's male talking heads annoy me in their lack of mellifluousness, just as well I missed it. Mind, I'm impossible to please, because the extreme mellifluousness of Classic FM's female announcers irks me even more, and yes, Marilyn Lightstone, I am looking at you. 

Stayed in today because there was no break in the rain until too late for a Sunday shop.  Beaver on through False Value which is bearable-ish once you get past the split nareative chapters, and don't try to unravel the relentless Douglas Adams' references, which in my case I have not read, and for a break read Abigail, which is far more entertaining.

Couldn't sleep last night in spite of no caffeine all day and Zzquil before bed. So read Falco one-eyed until 4, packed it in, and slept- as ever with 4 a.m. bedtimes- until 10:30. Woke to find my Good Neighbour snowblowing the sidewalks up and down from his house.  Except it's SND Oliver's mom who has the snowblower and faceblind me couldn't tell if it was really the GN or SND's male tenant. OTOH can't see the tenant doing six frontages. Whatever, sidewalk is done and somebody  (I suspect NND) did my steps. So all I had to do was my front path.  At which point a rather late in the day bobcat came trundling down the sidewalk clearing those who don't have Good Neighbours.

Thought I'd listen to Saturday at the Opera, which became an exercise in frustration. It's on CBC-FM, but that was having some talk show. Got it on my phone, which seems to be how people are expected to listen to radio these days but is not optimal for listening to Rigoletto. Finally had recourse to my ancient boombox. Boombox's CBC is happy to play opera, so fine. How lucky I didn't put it out on the boulevard as I was tempted, since it won't play CDs or tapes anymore.

Mind, Rigoletto is shit. God but Verdi liked fridging his heroines. As did Puccini. It's not a necessity. Mozart managed not to. He fridged his hero, and good for him.

Succeded in cutting down a swath of the creepers out back and inflicting some damage on the mulberry that's trying to take over the AC compressor, but clearly I need to rake up the leaves that have fallen from the cherry tree. A nuisance, because stoop labour hurts, dammit. Have been looking at ads for back braces but I *have* back braces, they just don't brace enough. Will core strengthening ever have an efffect?

We're getting the brocade effect on the trees now, and about time. The maples in particular decided to turn red about three days before they began to fall. My poor  physio booked a bus tour of the fall colours up north a fortnight or so ago, and there was nothing to see.

That Guardian article about Horrible Histories has me ear-wormed now, because I was so taken with faux-Simon and Garfunkel singing the praises of the kinder gentler Vikings that I watched it about five times. And of course it referenced one of my two favourite codas of all time, so now the mental muzak is playing The Boxer nonstop. (The other one is Layla, of course.) Must admit I've lost my ear for Brit accents because I couldn't make out the lyrics of anything else the article linked to, and especially not Rowan Atkinson's Henry 8.

Not used to having physio on Tuesday. Wednesday has always been my day and would have continued as such but I was caught in the groove when booking online, which I do several weeks in advance to guarantee a spot. Saw the list of available hours, picked something as close to my preferred 2:30 as possible, and only much later realized that the 23rd was not a Wednesday because Ji Won has started coming in on Tuesdays as well. But alll to the good because tomorrow is forecast to be, what else, rain. Appears this is the rainiest summer on record which I can scarcely believe, not after 2008. But 2008 rained constantly while this year just dumps a month's worth of rain in a day, and does it repeatedly.

Pratchett LJ entry revives the memory of Flanders and Swann's Gnu Song. First lines are

A year ago last Thursday I was strolling in the zoo
When I met a man who thought he knew the lot.

If in future I should happen to remark 'A year ago last Thursday' you'll know what I mean.

Have finally located a song heard only once, decades ago in my distant youth. Turns out to be The Kingston Trio, Chilly Winds. Good. Scratch that itch.

Bought Ivory soap for the bathroom because my poor hands are sooo dry. Ivory soap *stinks*. Shall put the remaining two bars in the local Small Pantry along with the menthol shaving cream, in a bag marked 'can't stand the smell.' 

Someone in a local FB group was asking if anyone had a bike that would fit a 5'10 recent immigrant short on cash. Offered Old Paint but someone else had a man's bike so didn't hear back. That fell through, she messaged me today, so I went to double check that I can't in fact get my leg over the bar and no, no I can't. Not even close. So Guy can have it.

Woke up at 7:30 old time to pee, then said Not getting up at even 8:30 new time, and went back for another 3.5 hours to wake at noon new time, which was not unheard of even before this. Grey and flurrying all day, like watching cherry blossoms fall, especially since none of it stuck. I have a memory from childhood, fragmentary like all my memories, of a late November day like this. My mother had bought several boxes of Christmas wrapping paper,  square folded in square boxes,  which enraptured me at the time. The smell of it is on the tip of my nose, almost almost almost... so this kind of weather has  innate happiness associated with it.

Have also been earwormed with The Proclaimers' I'm Gonna Be the Man, which is great for exercising to, and which happily replaces the catalogue aria from Don Giovanni of which I was heartily sick. 

The trouble with sleeping past 11 is that I can't roll over and go back to sleep as I can do if I wake at 9. Yes, well. Life is rough.

Of course I also woke out of a frustration dream of trying to get three babies back to daycare, at night, in a triple stroller, through the University College (UofT version) campus, gone suddenly baroque with steps that aren't there and narrow gas lit passages, also with steps, that lyingly promised to take me up to Hoskins and Trinity College (again, UofT version: universities in the Brit-sphere have no innovation with respect to either names or architecture.) Could gave done without that, especially as my Christmas Eve dream was a  charming cosy murder mystery. I believe the white-haired Miss Marple-ish sleuth was in fact the murderer.

Weather is mild but grey and dank, and is supposed to rain all week, which is par for the Dead Days but also dispiriting. We may see some sun on Saturday. I went out today since the PoP was only 56% and got misted on. Tony Korean restaurant was fairly full, even at 3 in the afternoon, but the Koreans make the most of their holidays. When they get them, because the big supermarket and greengrocers were open. Bought celery for future turkey salads but was so full from egg and beef donburi that I skipped dinner. 

In a very ill hour, prompted by I forget what online, I looked up the Flanders and Swann skit in which Michael Flanders sings the French horn solo part of Mozart's fourth concerto for horn. Ill Wind, it's called, which arial font renders as a Roman 3, and I am now hopelessly earwormed.

I once had a whim and I had to obey it
To buy a French horn in a secondhand shop
I polished it up and I started to play it
In spite of the neighbours who begged me to stop.

I can beg all I like but it won't stop.

Evidently Valentines is a red letter day on the spammers calendar. Five calls before noon, or was it six? and a couple more in the afternoon when I'd arranged to be out. Because I'm never sure how clean cold water gets my clothes, and because with the forecasted early April temperatures I won't have the furnace on and hence hanging my clothes in the basement won't get them dry, I took a dark wash to the laundromat. Entering which I was greeted by the Skye Boat Song played on bagpipes, which was unexpected but nice. The television was showing news clips of Hazel McCallion's funeral, the long-time (into her 90s) mayor of Mississauga, the urban complex to the west of us. Died a fortnight short of her 102nd birthday. Politics doesn't often make for such longevity. And yes of course, later in the service they played Amazing Grace because no major funeral in these parts can happen without a piper playing Amazing Grace, even the Catholic ones. We're no longer the Scots city we were a century ago but certain traditions don't die.

(The pipers predate Amazing Grace even if I can't remember what they used to play back in the 60s and 70s while escorting Lord Rajandraneth in his chariot down from the Hare Krishna temple on Avenue Rd, formerly what else a Presbyterian church.)

Fiesta Farms was also holding a funeral for its owner and may well have had bagpipes, but I couldn't go to see even if I'd wanted to. Funeral was in Heere bee dragonnes land ie Brampton, the urban complex north of Mississauga, inaccessible without car.  General public was invited and store was closed for the event, which was well enough. They were also closed yesterday morning for some unexplained police 'n' firetruck incident, which was kind of a first.

I note that Brampton may be on the chopping block: Tory premiers, of which alas we have one at the moment, like to create megacities under the mistaken notion that large = efficient. So Drug Fraud, as he is lovingly and correctly denominated, may well make it part of Mississauga. OTOH word is that Ford really wants to be mayor of Toronto like his little brother, the aptly named Rob, was back before. Our current mayor, the aptly named John Tory, suddenly declared his resignation on the weekend because of an affair he'd had during covid. Affair was long over, resignation was abrupt, everyone wondered what was the real reason. Pressure from DoFo? My ideal scenario is that Ford resigns as premier, runs for mayor, and is roundly defeated: but that's only a dream unless a really charismatic candidate pops up from somewhere. Which is unlikely.

Gladys Mitchell is ever so much more entertaining than any of Fowler's Seerius Litracher recs (though to be fair he recs her too) that I shall give up the latter until I've made a dent in TPL's collection of the former. Yay that she was so prolific and woe that TPL doesn't have them ALL. Am now reading the one about the standing stones of the Orkney Isles (gazing out to sea) with many interruptions to google pics of same. Damned unheimlich, those stones, let me say.

Let me note that I have also vacuumed the downstairs and swiftered the kitchen and hallway, so it's not all couch potatodom all the time. But even so, I still step on sharp little things that pain my sensitive feet. I want a new vacuum cleaner: or else, more likely, I want a cleaning service to get it done professionally

'Your brother hates music,' says my s-i-l. No surprise. I hate music too, when it plays in the background, because when music plays I have to listen to it. This puts me at odds with, at a conservative guess, 90% of the population because they seemingly can't abide silence. Not sure why. Are they afraid of their own thoughts? like those people in the experiment who gave themselves shocks rather than sit for fifteen minutes without stimulation. Whatever, it was always a problem for me at work, because it's hard to hear the nap room monitor-- or indeed another staff imparting information-- when Lady Gaga is blasting from the player. Of course, it could just be my hearing going, because I've been losing the higher pitches for at least a decade now, and lower pitches when there's ambient noise. And music is ambient noise for me.

But then there's that scientific conclusion that your musical preferences are set in your teens and twenties, and that maybe I wouldn't mind music at work if it was the Beatles or the Mamas and Papas. What made me think that was coming home the other day and crossing paths with a guy on a bicycle whose boombox was blaring behind him. But the box was booming Dock of the Bay and it didn't bother me at all.

The air show however, with its sonic booms, is noise, pure and simple, and physically painful. It's supposed to rain tomorrow and Monday and I sincerely hope it does, with low cloud cover obliterating the CN Tower. One day of it was quite enough, thank you.

Lying with one's legs up against a wall can get very boring unless you're an experienced meditator which lord knows I'm not, so I rousted out my luddite's walkman and listened to a random tape instead. (I can't do mp3s or whatever the latest digital is. Most of my tapes were made from obscure records in the 80s and 90s. Best I could do now is get one of those players that records to digital, but the state of my records after 30 years is not to be considered, and I have nothing to play the files on even if I did.)

Random tape turned out to be the Harlock sound track. That dates to the late 90s, that half decade lost to reverse culture shock, but references a much earlier fannish golden age. Not that I was personally involved in it. My sister was, and American friends in Tokyo, and I caught sideways glimpses of those mid-80s glorious days from her APAs and their conversation. The reality may have been excruciating- raw tapes if you were lucky, appalling butchered dubs as the norm- but the ethos, as reflected both in the fans' recollections and, oddly, in the gung-ho Harlock music itself, is of a brave new world and an immense buoyancy.

The complete ending theme is at
https://youtu.be/u7BFIAn9wug

Translation text here, from .mit.edu. Fannish, as I say.
http://www.mit.edu/~rei/MANGA/harlock-song

* More Than a Feeling was roundly panned when it first came out-- lightweight, lacking musical complexity, blah blah blah, as if anything 70s had depth-- but now it's a locus classicus of some kind.

 DHL's business practices suddenly make more sense when I see what DHL is: Deutsche Post DHL Group. Thus the barrage of information and the promptness.

Watched the fundraising performance of Cats which was somehow available in Canada, but the link to donate wouldn't work. When I refreshed everything, got the message 'This video is private.' So maybe I reached the time limit? And can't recall who the beneficiary was. Somehow thought it was an English actors guild-- it was the London production-- but googling only gets me the American one. 

And yes of course I wept like a drain. Those songs don't get any easier with age.

(Really, why is Spenser in the Canon? A more lumpen poet I never read.)

My scale's battery has died only a few months after I changed it. Very disconcerting because I weigh myself every morning to remind me *why* I can't have pasta and cake and cookies. And because today was a rainy owie day, and a weekend, I couldn't get out to buy a new one. However rain let up in the afternoon so Boy Next Door got to have his birthday party in our mutual back yard. Happy shrieks of five year olds banging the pinata which had to be hung from the cherry tree in the sad absence of any other tree to hang it from. I do miss the plum tree and its evanescent fragrance, though for all I know it might have stopped producing blossoms and fallen over by now if we'd left it to its own devices.

Some odd tangent took me to Streetview where I discover that Markham St, currently and for at least the last three years a wasteland construction site, has been preserved in its 2017 glory because Streetview cars can't go up it. That is, in Streetview the chainlink fences are up on both sides of the street but the buildings, though empty, are still standing. Alas that there seems no way to capture that particular shot to remind me what was where; and once they've finished building their satanic towers the view will go.

Turned out the drawers of the study cabinet looking for Cohen's Ten New Songs and found it, along with a bunch of memorabilia last looked at in 2010. Meishi from Japan, people's addresses, maps of Tokyo restaurants. 'Guess I'll throw it all away...' And then Cohen sounds all different on the stereo than he did on the boombox and I'm gakkari all over again.

Half an ativan unaccountably failed to put me to sleep but did loosen the muscles up so that I awoke relatively limber. Two hours in the dentist's chair took care of that, but it was nice while it lasted.

OTOH I swear there's a special feature cab drivers use that renders one's phone mute because this is the second time this week a cabby has called me from precisely the wrong location, and though I had my phone in my pocket on 'ring and vibrate' I registered nothing. But when I say I'm at 2 Carleton there's no point you sitting in front of 8 Carleton behind a truck so I can't see you, calling me up to demand where I am in cellphone garbled blabbidyblah. Equally, when I say King and University on the University side, why are you sitting a block away at York St? Why, because that's the main entrance for the building at King and University and the dispatcher said nothing about 'waiting on the University side.' This is why cabbing it is such a fraught activity and I hope I'm done with it for a bit. Though with the gales of March/ April being as they are, there's no guarantee.

Finished?

Nghi Vo, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain
-- still have a hold on the first volume but this novella is fun.

Pratchett, Reaper Man
-- not intentionally, but read on the fifth anniversary of his death

Plutarch, On Friendship
-- or whatever its title is. Mostly about false friends/ flatterers which, as I say, is a breed the common person is not likely to encounter. Two more essays and I'm done with this, and a good thing too because the book is falling apart *and* smells strange.

Mabinogion, The Lady of the Fountain and Peredur
-- oogie. Then started Culhwch and Olwen and dear god you if thought the Catalogue of Ships was bad... Can't see me going farther with this.

Reading now?

Gardner, ed, The Metaphysical Poets
-- let's get this straight: I do not like the metaphysical poets, those clever-clog snots. By me they write the most unpoetical poetry it's possible to write. As Gardner says, "...the constant complaint of its critics is that it confuses the pleasures of poetry with the pleasure of puzzles. ...its lovers have always a certain sense of being a privileged class, able to enjoy what is beyond the reach of vulgar wits." Of course Peter Wimsey always has a volume of Donne about him, just to demonstrate how superior he is.

But I read this to have it read after umm 45 years maybe? and as I'm slogging along through the earlier metaphysicals I suddenly find myself in very familiar territory. It says it's Southwell, Mary Magdalens Complaint at Christ's Death, but here in the middle:

O true life, since thou hast left me,
Mortell life is tedious,
Death it is to live without thee, 
Death of all most odious.
Turne againe, or take me with thee,
Let me dye or live thou with mee.

This and the next two verses I know as  a song by Thomas Morley that actually reverses the order of the stanzas. And works very well as such, but the rest of Southwell's poem doesn't fit the tune at all. I mean, maybe all the metaphysicals need is a musical setting to render them palatable?

Next up?

Many things on hold in both e- and paper format, and I could make some of the latter active. Or I could go on rereading Pratchett.

Exercising to carols, which is fine, but would someone please tell me what was *wrong* with Benjamin Britten? Never met an old harmonious song- carol, folk song, you name it- that he didn't hate and couldn't wait to torture into (I assume; am musically illiterate) a pentatonic scale. And then a buncha 20th century composers did the same and all the choirs in Oxbridge jumped on the bandwagon. Really truly there's nothing wrong with the original tunes of There Is No Rose or Adam Lay Ybounden, and the Britten-tachi being all clever with them pisses me off far more than it should.

To clean out the ears: the Gesualdo Six singing Es ist ein Rose entsprungen in Ely Cathedral:
https://youtu.be/OAIro_A1CYw

The current Gesualdo Six + One doesn't seem to include the Sikh(?) guy, about whom I'd like to know more.

To celebrate the moment, and because my new card came yesterday, I ordered in for dinner. So did everyone else, it seems, because in the ten minutes I stood on my ill-lit front porch,  wearing white so I'd show up even if my house number didn't, two other Door Dash deliveries arrived for two separate houses across the street. My guy called me because, like many people before including myself on occasion, he or someone had writen my 543 as 534. I'm inclined to blame the map Door Dash likes to use, which showed my house to be on the west side of the street where the even numbers are. Though when I checked it again, they had me on Manning, the next block over.

I've ordered from these guys before but don't remember them being so generous with their portions. Granted I always order at least two dishes to make it worth their while, I still had a large bowl, looked at what remained, and thought 'Well, that's dinner sorted for the next four days at least.'

To work off some of the excess (pad thai noodles, hem hem) I did an extra 45 minutes on the bike machine. Turns out  Handel's Royal Fireworks  is the perfect music for this. Didn't even notice the time going by. That's half because I was reading my phone part of the time, and when I wasn't I was doggedly plowing through The Burning Heart, which is Kenneth Rexroth and a Japanese woman translating women poets of Japan. Granted the book dates from the 70s, and granted Rexroth or his co-translator have some satisfyingly nasty things to say about that dweeb Yosano Hiroshi- '(he) was a typical emotional exploiter of women. He attempted to disguise these proclivities with romantic nonsense about the spiritual glories of clandestine polygamy'- when we get to the classic poets who are translated by Rexroth alone, one finds this note on Izumi Shikibu:  'There survives a book of her poetry and her diary, one of the masterpieces of Japanese literature. Most of her poetry is erotic: she seems to have spent a life largely devoted to making love.' Yeah, sure, just like Catullus' life was largely devoted to making love, or Diana Rigg's. Like, we know Izumi Shikibu had a daughter and served at court. It wasn't all men all the time, even if men like to think so.

The book is falling apart and I'd happily trun it- Rexroth is so not my translator any more than Miner is- but I have no other translations of Yosano Akiko, so...

However, in other come-by-chance news, it seems Ovidia Yu has a series of detective stories stsrring a teenage girl in 1930s Singapore. Have put holds on two of them and shall pleasurably await their appearance.

Oh, seriously? I've been reading that title wrong for what? five, six years now? It's Umibe no Kafuka, shore, not hamabe, beach. Helps to actually look at the kanji occasionally.

Next door's music as well as the tedium of peddling a balky machine for thirty minutes straight has the upside of reintroducing me to a bunch of CDs bought in the 90s and rarely listened to since. These include several boxed sets of Dance Music Through The Ages and Best of Bach, bought to drown out my neighbours at International Women's House in Heiwadai. When I came back here it was no longer necessary to drown out my neighbours and, since I prefer silence to anything when I'm studying or reading, silence is what I opted for. Also my bought-here boombox, though a lovely Sony made in Japan beastie, in relatively short order (6 years) became picky about what it would and would not recognize, and the boxed sets were first to go. This made me sad because I still listened to the opera ones. But now, Renaissance dance music is just fine for bicycling to, though it really is a bit monotone.

Balky bike machine is why I can't do anything else except bike. Stop paying attention to where my feet are and it sticks. Otherwise I might be biking for hours.

Cold and rainy again, and I realize that this year I won't be able to turn down the thermostat and go partake of someone else's heat for five or six hours a day. So I turn down the thermostat and layer up, starting with the insulated longjohns I've contemplated throwing out for several years now because long underwear is far too hot once you're inside any Canuck interior. Never throw anything away: you never know when the world will turn upside down and you'll need it again.

Hmm, I think I rather like Pachelbel's canon in the original up tempo.
https://youtu.be/l8Jjs36bHd4

Last night's early(ish) morning dream had me back at 'home' where my parents and sibs were, and me saying how nice it was because 'when I come home after work there's never anyone to talk to and I'm lonely.' This was a very convincing emotion in the dream and for a few minutes after I woke up, but then I realized that it was all backwards. When I moved into my first apartment nearly 50 years ago, yes, then when I came home from classes and on weekends there was no one to talk to, and it felt weird to go a whole day (Saturdays, f'rinstance) not speaking a word to anyone. But for decades it's been 'social contact during the day, me time when I come home,' and what I'm missing is the casual human contact from work. Well, and also the option to step next door for alcohol and conversation, a bit: while acknowledging I'd never have been able to lose weight if the option had still been open to me.

Having eaten out last week the temptation was to do it again, especially since I was already out, for acupuncture, and hadn't eaten lunch so was hungry by 3:30. As a compromise I had a take-out 'rice dog' from a new Korean place, which is a hot dog surrounded by sticky rice that's then baked. Filling, but yappari I want my hot dogs bursting from the grill and put in a bun with mustard and green pickle relish. Ah well. Have now had a sticky rice dog and need not have another.

 Since I'm getting nowhere with ancient Greek, onaccounta I have to memorize vocabulary that's given casually in the examples, not even in a table for each lesson that I can refer to, I'm reading French instead. Alas, I'm reading Jean de Florette because that' s what was to hand on the living room table. With a little effort I could have unearthed a Simenon someplace. The idea is just to read and not bother looking up vocabulary, but of course that doesn't last, not amid all these countryside terms. So I hauled out the large Robert's I rescued from the gomi many yeas back and use that. Am amazed we used paper dictionaries for so long. Heavy book, thin paper, ages to find the right entry. Even my unsatisfactory phone browser would work better. (Phone's google app is useless. Molasses.) But no one seems to have ever made a wordtank equivalent for French, one with a  comprehensive F-E / E-F dictionary. It's all phrases for travellers. What do they expect students to use these days? Their phones, I suppose.

If I were reading Hamabe no Kafuka in English, it wouldn't have taken me so long to figure out that Major Chord 2 (二長調 ) is D-major, not B, and I could have gone off to youtube and listened to Schubert's sonata in same much earlier. Not that Schubert is my man at all; I have little use for either the unaccompanied piano or the romantics in general. But of course there's a long disquisition about that sonata in Kafuka, which implies it's kind of 平凡 erm uninspired. Which to me it is. But of course everyone else who turned up at Youtube for it was there because of Murakami.

Accomplished today by getting to Korean super and buying enough gyoza to see me to the winter. Bought a new kind as well as the old reliables and hope they're good, because the last new brand I tried wasn't. Chicken doesn't work with potstickers, or not for me. But at least I have some defence now against those urges to order them online, that assail me periodically.

Also washed the stairs after far too long. Had to stop halfway to rest. All the core strengthening doesn't seem to have touched the lower back that simply has to sit down if I've been standing for more than five minutes. I hope that a new knee will alter some of that, as it does for hip replacements, but I'm not betting on it.

 Feeling scratchy and out of sorts, an emotion I trace, oddly, to Pico Iyer's The Open Road, talking about the Dalai Lama. There's no logic to this, just as there's no logic to the mental muzak being stuck on Night Moves. Usually the mental muzak bears some relation to the happenings in my life: as for instance, when I used to CPR and Amtrak it down to New York, having Phil Collins stuck in my head: 

So you're leaving
In the morning
On the early train...

or Springsteen's Independence Day last winter when next door was moving out. Bob Seger, I just don't know.

Newest mask arrived, is wearable. Roasted  a chicken with dressing and then ate the veg I made with it instead. Otherwise, meh.

Mental muzak being as it is, it's no surprise that I should currently be earwormed with Ringo songs, specifically It don't come easy and Photograph. Why the visual accompaniment to the latter is Honest Ed's is another question entirely.

Random twitter thread over at Nora J's leads me to the Skyrim sound track, with its theme song in Dragonish. I shall never game, not with these elbows and wrists, but oh what earwormy music:

Dovahkiin, Dovahkiin naal ok zin los vahriin,
Wahdein vokul mahfaeraak ast vaal
Ahrk fin norok paal graan
fodnust vok zin dro zaan
Dovahkiin fah hin kogaan mu draal!

(Now how does one embed youtube videos when everything plays in the app and the app has no url?)

So one of the fulltime replacements at work has a Spotify account and used it today to play Golden Oldies from my childhood and adolescence. I may have to do the same, because I've never been able to make such a comprehensive compilation myself. Lacking a record player, say, and finding all 60s Greatest Hits CDs to be terrible in sound, and not techy enough to master mp3s or whatever the format is. Much better to let Spotify play it for me.

But it was *weird* having those forgotten bands suddenly thrust upon me again. The Beau Brummels, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Chad and Jeremy, The Tremeloes, The Buckinghams, The Exciters... Good times, guys, good times.

(R's mom was born in the late 50s so no, these weren't a hit before she was born, but close, very close.)