I’d forgotten, until just now, that Mira of The Oubliette is a resident of both my blogroll and of Huntsville, Alabama. She cat-blogged Katrina’s arrival yesterday. Best wishes to her and all those in those states. Like many, I went to bed last night thinking, “Well, looks like New Orleans didn’t get it as bad as everyone thought”, only to find out earlier this evening that it might be just as bad as originally feared — although in slow motion.
Two teeth at five months?!
Geez…apparently Aaron’s kid, who is now five months old, has in that brief time suffered both colic and teething. This, I suspect, put seriously to the test Aaron’s status as the most mellow human being to ever come from Iowa.
(By the way, go look at the photos of the kid that Aaron has posted. I found them funny, because I’ve seen Aaron make every single one of those exact facial expressions, usually in some degree or other of inebriation.)
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Queen of the Memes, part the second
Lynn has another meme, in which one lists the first five things one would do if suddenly installed, without warning, in the office of President of the United States. Hopefully my answers are a little more interesting than the ones Dan Quayle gave in that infamous 1988 Vice Presidential debate….
(For the sake of argument, I assume that since I’d be President without warning, I would have little time to think through my first five actions, and thus that listing these items do not necessarily constitute five actions that I think any President should necessarily engage.)
1. Decorate the Oval Office with Star Wars and Lord of the Rings related artwork.
2. Order the immediate declassification and release of all papers and materials relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
(2a. Order that I be fully briefed on whatever the hell really is going on at Area 51. This, however, I’d keep secret from the American people, just because all Presidents should get to keep stuff secret from the American people. What’s the fun of being President otherwise?)
3. Immediately cancel all contracts with Halliburton.
4. As per Lynn: start work on an energy policy, opening the doors to everything. Including nuclear power.
5. Begin formulation of a space exploration policy with the emphasis on real space science, followed by genuine colonization, as opposed to the current emphasis on projects that are little more than space-based pork and lofty announcements of unattainable goals.
Bonus Item #6: Begin scouring the country for my senior staff, with the main requirement being that their names be Leo, Josh, Sam, Toby, CJ, Donna, Charlie, and Mrs. Landingham.
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Queen of the Memes, part the first
Lynn has a meme today: you just throw out there, for all to see, ten strongly-held, possibly politically-incorrect opinions of yours. Just because. Here are mine.
1. CDs are inherently superior to digitally traded/downloadable music, and the techno-dweebs at WIRED who keep harping on how “uncool” the compact disc is are goofballs who are just cheerleading for anything new and shiny that comes down the pike. (Hey, WIRED readers — and remember, I adore WIRED and never miss an issue — remember that awful CueCat device they fell in love with some years back?)
2. No good political argument at all starts with the words, “I don’t want my tax dollars going for XXX!”
3. The “Free World” (such as it is) does entirely too little to oppose brutal dictators like Saddam Hussein.
4. Taking out Saddam Hussein, while ignoring all manner of other brutal dictators who are hardly less odious, renders all of our high rhetoric unconvincing.
5. I’ll grit my teeth and concede that the New England Stupid Patriots are a dynasty, but I will not rank them with any of the greatest teams in NFL history. Period.
6. People who think that the Internet renders libraries obsolete are wrong, wrong, wrong wrong wrongity-wrong wrong wrong. Wrong.
7. The Usual Suspects is a shitty movie.
8. I voted for the guy, but I think that John Kerry would have been a very underwhelming President.
9. I don’t find anything particularly interesting about Condolleezza Rice. To me, she’s just another garden-variety surly-looking Republican.
10. The music of Jerry Goldsmith is overrated to a staggering degree.
OK, that should annoy some readers!
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IMAGE OF THE WEEK
I haven’t freeloaded off the Government’s bandwidth in some time, so here I go again, freely filching from NASA. Apparently some new observations have astronomers increasingly suspecting that the Milky Way Galaxy isn’t a pure spiral galaxy, but rather a barred spiral, like this:
Of course, lots of people in the United States have a different spiral-shaped natural entity on their minds right now:
I don’t know if I have any readers in the line of fire of this thing, but if I do, my thoughts are with you all. (And the non-readers, too.) My understanding is that a storm of this magnitude directly impacting New Orleans could be a natural disaster of stunning proportions. Keep well, and if you’re still there, get out!!!
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Sunday Burst of Weirdness
If you’re squeamish about looking at photos of people with large tumors growing in strange places, don’t follow this link. But if you are not squeamish about such things, by all means, have a look at a guy who’s really figured out a way to turn the lemons life has handed him into a nice pitcher of ice-cold lemonade. Wow.
(via Warren Ellis)
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Unintended Ironies
Among my more recent obsessions is Asian classical music, to which the Naxos series “Japanese Classics” is a huge boon. This series of recordings presents works written by Japanese composers, some from pre-WWII Japan, some from post-WWII. It’s fascinating stuff, although some of it I’ve found disappointing — particularly those discs from composers who worked in more directly European classical idioms, as opposed to the composers who try, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to blend European classical traditions with Japanese melodic material. The latter tends to sound more genuine to me, and I’m always one to prefer a faulty work that’s genuine to a more polished work that isn’t.
Anyway, I’m listening right now to one of the most recent releases in the Japanese Classics series, the Piano Concerto #3 and the Symphony No. 3 by Hisato Ohzawa (1907-1953). Ohzawa’s sound is described on the back blurb as a blend of “jazz, late Romanticism, Debussy, Ravel, Bartok, Hindemith and other contemporary composers”. That’s quite a blend of styles, no? American jazz, French Impressionism, and a bit of post-Romantic atonality? Wow. To be fair, though, I do hear some of this in Ohzawa’s music — mainly the jazz and the Bartok, though. I’m not really hearing the Debussy or Ravel. (I don’t know Hindemith well enough to make any kind of judgement here.)
But on to the topic of this post, named in the title above: an unintended irony. The Piano Concerto #3 was written in 1938, three years before war between Japan and the US broke out, so there is clearly no malicious intent behind the concerto’s subtitle: “Kamikaze”. That’s right, it’s the “Kamikaze Concerto”. The word kamikaze literally translates to “divine wind” or “the wind of God”, and for Ohzawa at the time of writing his concerto, it referred specifically to a civil airplane in use at the time that, according to the CD’s liner notes, “represented an important feat in Japanese aeronautical engineering”. (Here’s what it looked like, I think. The plane pictured here seems to match the one on the cover of the Naxos booklet, but it’s hard to tell because the photo on the booklet has the plane sitting on the ground and surrounded by a mob of people.)
In the Concerto’s second movement, the jazz idioms Ohzawa uses really come to play, especially toward the end, when there’s a really nice passage that has the piano doing obligato work while a trumpet plays one of those sad, slow jazz tunes that sounds almost like Jerry Goldsmith’s theme to Chinatown. So here’s music with a distinctly American sound that bears a subtitle that would soon be one of the most infamous words to Americans.
I always find little cultural twist-abouts like this fascinating.
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A metaphysical conundrum….
I wonder if, for the sake of determining which souls go to Heaven and which go to Hell in these days of the Web and Blogistan, just what God’s linking policy is. For instance: does it count against me if I link this, noting that I think it’s pretty funny?
But then, I do like to think that God has a pretty good sense of humor. I don’t see how He could run this Universe without one.
(Oh, and in the last panel, the depiction of God looks a bit like how I’d expect PZ Myers to look at the end of a typical semester — sort of a blend of Gandalf, George Carlin, Richard Feynman, and the guy who comes into The Store every Wednesday morning with a giant garbage bag full of beer cans….)
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Tag’d Ag’n
Jennifer hit me with this one, so here goes:
7 Things I plan to do before I die:
1. Stand within Stonehenge at dawn
2. Stand atop Glastonbury Tor at dawn
3. Have dim sum in Hong Kong
4. Watch Little Quinn crawl
5. Listen to Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in one sitting (somehow, I think this may be the most unrealistic item on this list)
6. Publish a piece of fiction — anything at all.
7. Walk The Daughter down the aisle.
7 Things I can do:
1. I can make a pastitsio that will make you cry.
2. I can read a full orchestral score.
3. I can fasten a sign to a brick wall. (I didn’t know how to do this before I started working at The Store.)
4. I can write.
5. I can declaim for hours on just about any topic within Star Wars you can name.
6. I can shut my own hair in the car door. (This f***ing hurts!)
7. I can talk myself into liking the current Buffalo Bills quarterback for months after everyone else here has given up on whoever that happens to be. (I didn’t give up on Rob Johnson until he was actually on IR.)
7 Things I cannot do:
1. I can’t stand the sight of a woman crying, for just about any reason.
2. I can’t say no to a chocolate chip cookie.
3. Or a free piece of pizza.
4. I cannot grant that the New England Stupid Patriots are the greatest dynasty of all time. (Because they’re not, dammit!)
5. I can’t forgive the Atlanta Braves for the 1992 National League Championship Series. (Francisco F***ing Cabrera?!)
6. I can’t do much of use under the hood of the car, save changing the air filter, checking the oil, and filling the windshield washer. (I suspect that given the opportunity to learn, I’d do OK at such things. But as it is, I have no knowledge whatsoever of the workings of an automobile.)
7. I can’t shoot a basketball to save my life. (Some years ago I learned from an eye doctor that my ability to judge distances accurately is, well, minimal, which is why my attempts at sports involving throwing are always disastrous.)
7 Things that attract me to the opposite sex:
1. Long hair.
2. Red hair.
3. A beautiful smile.
4. Cute glasses.
5. Curves.
6. The presence of overalls in her wardrobe.
7. A lovely, and often-used, laugh.
7 Things I say most often:
1. “Oh, for the LOVE of GOD–!”
2. “You want me do what with the who, now?” (Managers love hearing this.)
3. “Bite me.”
4. “GAHHH! Put that down!”
5. “Well, there’s a reason why Mommy and I tell you not to do stuff like that.”
6. “I’d like a large coffee, please. Stat.”
7. “Oooooh, look! He pooped! Aren’t I the lucky ducky!”
7 Celebrity crushes:
Well, you could just pick seven women at random from the MOB! roster. The big one right now, though, is Sela Ward, due to my viewing of Once and Again on DVD.
7 People I Want To Do This:
I gotta pick seven? Yeesh. OK, here are a few: Aaron, Aaron’s Sister, LC Scotty (who has his own new blog and is thus tagged for the first time, heh!), Lynn (who will probably resist this rather jejune quiz), and, well, whoever else wants to take a whack at it. Lazy, I know, but them’s the breaks.
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Damn. Gotta write more slash fanfiction!
Here are the results of another quiz-thingie I took. Enjoy. Or not. (Quiz via Aaron.) Personally, I still like the One-Question Geek Test: “Pronounce the word coax.” But this was fun.
| Joe Normal
47 % Nerd, 39% Geek, 43% Dork |
| For The Record:
A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia. A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one. A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions. You scored less than half in all three, earning you the title of: Joe Normal. This is not to say that you don’t have some Nerd, Geek or Dork inside I’d say there’s a fair chance someone asked you to take this test. In any event, fairly normal. Congratulations! If you enjoyed this test, I would love the feedback! Also, you might want to check out some of my other tests if you’re interested in either of the following: Thanks Again! — THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST |
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My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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| Link: The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test written by donathos on Ok Cupid |