More Short Items

Offered in the belief that two miscellanea are better than one.

I just saw this item that seems to capture the spirit of my previous residence, Montreal: It's official: Montrealers can dress down and mount up for the World Naked Bike Ride this summer

While the message of the World Naked Bike Ride continues to be about the reduction of fossil fuels and the promotion of alternative, greener forms of transportation like cycling, Dare says the event has grown to include more voices.

“The ride has a primary focus and that is the reduction of oil. The secondary message is about nakedness,” Dare explains, emphasizing that nudity is a constitutional form of legal protest in Canada. “This ride stops traffic, and people get the message; less gas, more ass!”

All Montrealers who wish to participate are permitted, and nudity is optional.

More good news in Montreal is that public events like concerts and theatres can reopen as of March 26.

* * *

As a current project I am reading a couple of Shakespeare's comedies starting with Twelfth Night which begins with this lovely speech by Duke Orsino:

 If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

That strain again! it had a dying fall:

O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,

That breathes upon a bank of violets,

Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:

'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,

That, notwithstanding thy capacity

Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,

Of what validity and pitch soe'er,

But falls into abatement and low price,

Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy

That it alone is high fantastical.

Let's hope for a little "high fantastical" in all our lives as we slowly return to normal.

* * *

 For a suitably celebratory envoi here is Le Concert Spirituel with Marches pour les trompetes by Marc-Antoine Charpentier: