The First Hoarse Man of the Apocalypse

            I got up at 4:55 on Saturday with an aching back because of my cold. Although I’ve been doing yoga every day for about twenty years, it felt like I hadn’t done it for a year. I was coughing and sneezing much more than the day before and my sneezes were so rough that someone would have mistaken them for mega-coughs.
            I was much more hoarse during song practice to the extent that I had to sing everything in a lower key, which did not work out very well, since my voice is pretty low already. After about half an hour I gave it up and went back to bed. I stayed there till about 9:45 then got up with a little more energy.

            I was able to do a couple of French grammar exercises and I read a few pages of Anne Carson’s “Autobiography of Red”.

            Since it was New Years Eve, I decided to go out and buy four cans of Creemore, and I beat the line-ups by going before noon.

            I needed something to occupy my time that wasn’t going to tax my brain too much, so I decided to finish organizing my books according to the Library of Congress system and this time to put them all on a database. The project was almost done anyway so it only took a couple of hours. The only books I don’t have room for are a three volume set called “Systematic Theology”. I remember buying them at a lawn sale in the Annex back in the late 80s.The guy sold them to me along with a desk and an Elvis picture book and a few other things for ten dollars. I figured that since the set was old I’d be able to make some money off them, but I never found a buyer. It seems a shame to toss them in the garbage, so I keep holding on just in case. Maybe I’ll try Kijji.

            I ate sour cream, salsa and nachos with beer for dinner, which is probably not a good idea when I have a cold, but it was New Years Eve. I watched X-Men: Apocalypse, which remains trapped in the X-Men formula, but fortunately it’s a pretty good formula. I think Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique is stiff compared to Rebecca Romijn’s earlier portrayals of the character.

            The most bizarre character presentation is that of Quicksilver because he showed up in Avengers: Age of Ultron with an entirely different back-story. He’s supposed to be the twin brother of the Scarlet Witch and they are supposed to be the children of Magneto, but in Apocalypse he’s a kid who lives in his mother’s basement and there’s no mention of a sister, though he says he is Magneto’s son. He also has a US accent in X-Men while in Avengers he’s Slavic. I guess this is explained by the fact that two different studios are using the character and they are not bound legally to coordinate with one another.

            This X-Men movie was set in the late 1990s before the events of the first three X-Men movies. Maybe we can think of it as an alternate reality.