Weeknotes: Week 32, 2023
These are the highlights from the week of August 7 to August 13. It was a busy work week but at the weekend we drove to Canada 🇨🇦 to check an item off my bucket list.
🤩 For many years I’ve wanted to go to the Stratford Festival and this week we finally made it up there to see King Lear. Watching Paul Gross on the stage I was a bit starstruck, just as I was when we saw Patrick Stewart and TR Knight years ago on Broadway. Stratford is a fairly small town and easy to get around on foot. We walked along Lake Victoria before the show and stopped for margaritas and dinner on Ontario Street afterward.
🥐 It’s difficult to get accommodation in Stratford at the last minute, so we stayed an hour away in London. It is a small but quite vibrant city where we enjoyed some amazing baked goods from a French patisserie and met the proprietress of a lovely tea shop at the Covent Garden Market, ate breakfast at The Early Bird, and watched a World Cup match at a local sports bar called Tiger Jack’s.
Fun fact: once you cross the border and hop on the 401 there is absolutely nothing for two hours between Windsor and London except farmland and tons of huge windmills.
This Week’s Media Highlights
Reading
- Hawaii is a Warning and we are running out of time to protect ourselves from calamity.
- I’m a Luddite (and So Can You!) – Progress needs to be people-focused.
- Deng Xiaoping’s China was open and brought a lot of economic and political promise. In the era of Xi Jinping, The End of China’s Economic Miracle represents an opportunity for US policymakers — if they choose to seize upon it.
- China also has an opportunity, but unlike Japan they may already have blown it.
- There’s a lot that boys and men can learn from Ken, but many are missing the point.
Watching
- I’m about half way through season 2 of Star Trek: Picard and I’m really into it.
- I finally watched the classic film Spirited Away, which is one weird acid trip of a film. Slow pace and not very compelling characters. Better toward the end, but hardly a masterpiece. I was not dazzled.
- Since I’ve been on a Star Trek kick lately, I also watched (for the upteenth time) Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which I guess is fitting since it’s been sort of a Shakespeare-themed week.