I had no idea that the photograph featured here was taken sixty years ago this past week.
Does anyone know if that flag still stands on that spot?
Hey! It’s that guy!
I wrote a few days back on why I’m not watching LOST anymore, and in that post, I briefly mentioned one of my favorite actors, Terry O’Quinn, who plays the mysterious Locke on LOST.
Well, MSN has a fascinating profile of Terry O’Quinn today. It’s a good article, even if it fails to mention O’Quinn’s role on the brilliant Millennium.
Share This Post
Sunday Burst of Weirdness
Yes, the Burst of Weirdness is back on its regular day! Joy! Rapture!
Anyway, Jayme links a site that provides instructions on how to construct an item of headgear that will protect you from being abducted by aliens.
What’s even more amazing is the goofy smile on the face of the guy who was actually willing to have his photograph taken whilst wearing this thing, and posted on the Web. Now there‘s a guy with confidence!
Share This Post
Traffic — I’d like some!
[Wherein I whine about not getting enough traffic. Boo hoo hoo….]
There’s been a kerfuffle around Left Blogistan over the last week or so over traffic and blog linkage. (That’s what’s great about Blogistan in general: you can almost always find a kerfuffle. Nothing like a good kerfuffle to spice up life, I always say.)
Anyway, Kevin Drum got roasted for speculating that women don’t blog as much as men for — well, I couldn’t really figure out why. And Atrios printed a caustic e-mail from someone who really, really wanted a link from him (which they got). All this is very interesting, I guess. I’ve thought for a while that Left Blogistan should do a bit more to promote its own internal voices, something that Right Blogistan seems to do quite a bit better.
Why do I say this? Well, Kevin Drum’s blogroll has remained in its current state, so far as I can tell, basically since he started up. I can’t tell if Atrios has added much for linkage to his blogroll, since he doesn’t even bother to alphabetize the thing. Matthew Yglesias and Brad DeLong have now decided to link some blogs other than “the usual suspects” of Left Blogistan, apparently conceding that not enough linkage of smaller blogs goes on. We just had the awarding of the third annual Koufax awards, and I have to note that the winner of the “Most Deserving of Wider Recognition” category, Suburban Guerilla, absolutely stomps all over my blog, in terms of traffic. (SG’s daily average is about what my monthly average is. Ouch.) I’m not sure, here, what exactly is meant in terms of “wider recognition”.
Yes, this is basically a “whining” post. So allow me one further whine: nearly nine months after he stopped posting to USS Clueless, Steven Den Beste still gets four times as many hits per day to his blog than I do. Harumph.
OK, I’m done.
Share This Post
Musical Linkage
:: Lisa Hersh on performing under Robert Shaw:
Shaw had an obsession: he wanted every last rhythm to be perfectly precise, and we had been working more on notes, choral sound and the musical line than on perfect rhythmic precision.
He had a solution to that: he threw out everything we’d been working on and had us count all the rhythms, and sing them with numbers, mostly staccato, for the next several days.
He got more precise rhythms, all right, but at rather substantial cost. Most of the choristers were ready to kill him; I certainly was. The beautiful work that was emerging from the first, relatively chaotic rehearsal got lost under the precise rhythms. Our voices were starting to shred, too, from all the staccatto singing.
:: Lynn Sislo offers a few musical jokes:
How do you tell the difference between a violinist and a dog?
The dog knows when to stop scratching.A conductor and a violist are standing in the middle of the road. which one do you run over first, and why?
The conductor. Business before pleasure.
:: Scott Spiegelberg has some thoughts on perfect pitch. I never had perfect pitch, but I generally had a good ear. (Well, until it came to jazz improv. When it came to that, I was about as effective in the aural sense as Helen Keller.)
Share This Post
Wanna travel on the cheap?
It’s pronounced “Duh-VOR-zhak”.
I didn’t play through the entirety of this elucidation of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony (compelte with animation!), since I know the work very well, but I like to see this kind of thing. While I’m not sold on the practice of hooking up classical music to specific imagery in “Mickey Mousing” style, I do think that this general kind of thing can help to demystify classical music, which at times seems to me to be about as accessible as nuclear physics.
Link via MeFi.
Share This Post
But on the other hand….
In the previous post I use a blog post to defend the utility of libraries. Meanwhile, the incoming President of the American Library Association, Michael Gorman, doesn’t think too highly of the utility of blogs:
It is obvious that the Blog People read what they want to read rather than what is in front of them and judge me to be wrong on the basis of what they think rather than what I actually wrote. Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs. In that case, their rejection of my view is quite understandable.
Having read the article, I just have to wonder what blogs this man has been reading. When one encounters a screed like this, it’s natural to wonder just what the writer’s sample happens to be. Unfortunately, names are not named here, so basically Gorman’s piece reduces to “The unnamed people who called me an idiot are illiterate poopyheads”.
Share This Post
Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.
Terry Teachout has a list of things he either doesn’t see or do anymore — things which twenty-first century life has made obsolete, at least for his life. It’s a pretty interesting list, although there are a couple of items that take me back a bit.
First, I no longer use floppy discs anymore either, but I do use CD-R’s for backup purposes, and I do plan one of these days to do some backing up to my G-mail account, seeing as how I’ve got a whole GB just sitting there with all of six e-mail messages in it. But I don’t want to forsake having a physical disc on hand. I’m still very wary of relying entirely on digital means of storing my stuff.
Second, I still use the USPS for most of my package shipping — no, all of my package shipping. It’s simply easier for me to do so. I have no idea if UPS or FedEx are cheaper — maybe they are — but I’ve yet to live in a place where the local post office isn’t more conveniently located to me than the nearest place I’d go to use UPS or FedEx. (Those UPS Stores are popping up more, but still, the post office is closer.)
Third, I find the one that stops me in my tracks. Mr. Teachout doesn’t use the public library at all. I am forever mystified by people who don’t use their libraries. I’ve always had a library card, but a few years back I had the epiphany that I simply don’t have unlimited space to buy every book that I might want to read, and if there’s a book that I know I want to read but I know I don’t want to own, why should I buy a copy anyway? I’m a huge believer in libraries, and I simply do not understand the mindset of people who don’t use them. Heck, the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library has enough of a DVD collection that I see no reason to use NetFlix for movies — I have access, through the library system, to more films than I’ll ever have a chance to see, so why pay for a service to bring them to me? (I know, NetFlix has a far larger selection from which to choose, but that’s not enough of a concern for me.)
I also love just walking through the library, finding things that I might never have picked up in the first place. Amazon, I find, is good for grabbing specific items, but it’s not very good for browsing — especially since they switched on that “Search the Entire Text” search engine juggernaut of theirs.
Of course, Mr. Teachout is older than I, and I presume he makes quite a bit more money, so a number of factors that bring me faithfully to the library every week likely don’t apply to him. But to never use the library, at all? To buy a copy of every book one might need or want, even in passing? Ugh!
Share This Post
I heart FireFox
No surprise here, but I have officially adopted FireFox as my default browser, and I have uninstalled Mozilla. Thanks, Mozilla, for showing me how to love the Web again, but FireFox is my girlfriend now. Or something like that.
And I still haven’t played around with those extension things yet! (The BugMeNot extension is first on my list.)