Month: September 2005

There’s always something both sad and exciting about reaching the end of one journey, because it usually means you’re simply at the starting point of another.

Or, at least I hope there’s something exciting about that, because that’s the situation our heroine, Gwynwhyfar, faces in Chapter Eighteen of The Promised King, Book One, which has just been posted and is available wherever blogs are read.

Enjoy, and as always, links to the previous chapters are available in the sidebar over there.

(Remember, by the magic of TimeStamp Technology (TM), this post is anchored at the top of this page. Newer content will appear throughout Sunday, so keep scrolling down.)

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A Chinese erhu, in playing position.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Chinese and Japanese classical music over the last couple of years, as I’ve noted previously. I’ve come to love the different sounds of the Asian ethnic instruments, particularly their percussion and strings. Today I was listening to a disc of erhu concertos — this disc, actually — and I found myself once again entranced by the different sound of the erhu, which I first heard in college when the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra came to play in our auditorium.

The erhu, as seen above, is held rather like a cello, in a sitting position. Its bow is fitted between its two strings, and the resonator at the bottom is covered by a skin, rather like the head of a drum, that gives the instrument its distinct muted sound. Its pitch is similar to a violin’s, but the skin over the resonator makes its sound somehow both muted and yet more piercing than the Western violin. Here is a sound sample, and some more information on the playing of the erhu can be found here and here.

Image from here.

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For some reason, Mr. Sun dropped off my radar until…just now. And he’s still funny. Here’s some stuff I liked a lot from his current front page:

:: Dick Cheney’s about to have surgery, and here’s how he may come out: The Cheneybot 2005!

:: OK, so this is a cheap shot. So what. I laughed.

:: Mr. Sun links a laser-guided slingshot. Man, that would make the David-and-Goliath story read a bit differently.

:: Follow the money.

:: The little piggies went to market, updated post-Katrina.

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Yup, we’ve started Little Quinn on the juice. We figure that if The Juice could turn a cancer-survivor into an unstoppable Tour de France juggernaut, it could do wonders for our cerebral palsy-afflicted son!

OK, I’m kidding. We all know that Lance Armstrong isn’t doping, and neither is Little Quinn. But we have begun incorporating real food into his feedings, in the form of fruit and vegetable juice.

We recently acquired a juicing machine from my sister-in-law (it was a duplicate wedding gift, I think), after we (well, mainly The Wife, but I support the idea) had done research on the feasibility of using juice in some or all of Little Quinn’s feedings. Basically, the idea is that it’s probably better for his digestive system, and maybe his body entirely, if he actually gets some food that isn’t in the form of a powder formula that’s manufactured in a plant via some kind of chemical process that involves real food at some early point in production.

On the advice of a chiropractor/nutritionist to whom we’ve been taking Little Quinn since shortly after we first brought him home from the hospital, we’ve been making a couple of his feedings a day from a certain amount of juice blended with a protein powder, a couple of vitamin supplements, and flax seed oil. It tends to be kind of nasty-looking stuff — the carrot-juice potion is an unpleasant orange, and I’m not looking forward to seeing how the spinach stuff ends up looking. Ick.

So far Little Quinn has enjoyed this concoction based on the juice of carrots, grapes, and peaches, with nectarines, apples, and spinach waiting in the wings. Aside from some fairly large “fillings of the diaper” after the grapes, he seems to have had no problems digesting this stuff — in fact, it seems that he’s digesting it all easier than the manufactured formula, since when I go to vent his stomach for the next feeding after a juice-based feeding, his stomach turns out to be much emptier than usual. Also, his skin complexion seems better and he seems more energetic, spending less hours in deep slumber during the day (today being an exception to this; he’s friggin’ zonked right now).

Of course, if he’s going to be a real Buffalo baby, I gotta figure out how to puree some chicken wings and cram them through his G-tube. I’ll find a way. The wing, after all, has a lot of natural gelatin, which is why properly cooked chicken wings are so wonderfully juicy. Stay tuned….

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Over at 2Blowhards, Michael has a neat post up about French actress Sophie Marceau, who happens to also be a Move Over Britney! Designate.

On a more substantive note, Michael also links a fascinating interview with author Blair Tindall, who has written a book about the inner “business” of the classical music world, and not in the “financial” sense of “business” (the title of her book is Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music). Well, after spending long hours as a kid reading about the lives of the great composers (in books like, appropriately enough, Harold Schonberg’s The Lives of the Great Composers), I would certainly hope that today’s classical music world involves a bit of sex and drugs. Today’s musicians owe it to their forebears, don’t they?

Anyway, from the brief interview — and you’d better believe I’ll read Tindall’s book — I liked this quote a lot:

Many in today’s society are introspective, and yes, some of them are musicians. People in diverse fields can be as intensely spiritual as the most accomplished artists. Musicians are human beings who experience life in unique ways just like everyone else; and fortunately, the ability to enjoy music is more universal than many realize.

That’s something that I wish more classical music lovers would realize: the ability to enjoy music is more universal than many realize. There are ways of venerating music that don’t involve putting it on some kind of pedestal and behaving in its presence the way we do if we’re in a cathedral and the Bishop has just walked in to perform the sacraments.

I read the discussion thread in the comments to this blog post, in which Lynn Sislo is participating avidly, and I have to say that I really truly don’t like the “reverent” approach to music — any music, really, but especially classical music. It’s been my experience all too often that the people who insist on propping up some kind of artificial requirement of decorum before one can even come to classical music’s table and sup on its delights are, in a real way, implying that the music is something separate, something outside of us. The atmosphere in classical music tends to be one of rigidly enforced reverence, and all that does is create an atmosphere where real internalization of the music is, if not impossible, made pretty damned hard. And that’s a shame.

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Wow, folks — I feel that in the last day or so I’ve kind-of “broken in” to Liberal Blogistan: I’ve been linked by both Shakespeare’s Sister and Sisyphus Shrugged, linkage which is immensely appreciated. But the even greater badge of honor came when I logged into my YACCS comments control board and found a comment left on an old post, on the subject of right-wing bloggers blocking referral traffic from liberal blogs (a practice which, I continue to note, is limited exclusively to right-wing blogs). In a move that fills me with glee, Jane Galt (the blogger in question on the commented post) blocked my referral! Imagine: the libertarian genius whose blog traffic dwarfs mine (as of this writing, according to the counter on her main page her total number of hits exceeds mine by over 2,400,000 hits) feels the need to add me to her list of blocked referrals. Looks like a victory for Mighty Mouse!

(Yes, I’m Mighty Mouse in this scenario.)

However, Ms. Galt appears to have not really mastered the fine art of referral-blocking; maybe she should bone up on the Instruction Manual that the LGF guy wrote when he pioneered the trick. The links from the individual post-pages (I also linked that Galt post here) are blocked, but they’re not blocked from the monthly archive page, here — scroll down to the posts (Saturday, September 5) and see. As of this writing (about 10:30 p.m. Eastern time) the links still work from the monthly archive. Whoops.

But anyway, it doesn’t matter, because there’s an easy way for us liberal bloggers to get around this, and as a service to my fine liberal brethren, here’s how it works. Instead of using the URL to the right-wing blog post in question when creating your link, first take this string:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=

Then, you simply append the post URL to the end, immediately after the equal-sign. So, if you’re going to link Byzantium’s Shores, instead of linking this URL:

https://forgottenstars.net

…you’ll actually link this URL:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=https://forgottenstars.net

What you’ve just done is create a redirect through Google, which according to my brief experimentation with SiteMeter and this blog, shows up as a hit but one with an unknown referring URL. Likewise, I doubt Technorati would pick it up as a link. And besides, no blogger is going to be insane enough as to block referrals from Google, right?

So there you go, liberal bloggers — break free of the traffic-blocking shackles! Link whomever you desire!

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Welcome aboard, Sisyphus Shrugged readers! Comments are open (although I’ve recently clarified my comments policy); some links to favorite posts of mine can be found in the sidebar section labeled “Notable Dispatches”. Feel free to stay a while and come back repeatedly. My content isn’t usually as political as it’s been lately, but let’s just say that Katrina pissed me off. (Or, rather, our President pissed me off. Not the first time, of course, but….) My general topics tend to lean toward life in Buffalo, NY; music (mainly classical, Celtic, and filmscores); the challenges of raising two kids when the younger of them happens to be an infant with cerebral palsy; blatherings on fantasy and science fiction (I’m an unrepentant Star Wars fanboy); and whatever else leaps to mind. I generally have no resistance to those blog-quiz meme things that flit around Blogistan every so often, and by some weird compulsion I tend to answer every one of them that I come across (the more general ones, and not usually the “Which one of the insufferable Camdens from Seventh Heaven are you?” type quizzes). My politics are unabashedly liberal, but that sort of thing usually constitutes around twenty percent of my content here. (Although I have the feeling that might change somewhat in the future.)

Cheers!

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If you, like everyone else who works for corporate overlords who put those posters around the office with the beautiful photograph captioned with something “motivational”, ever wondered what such posters would be like if tailored for Major League Baseball teams, wonder no more.

For the Pirates one, I might have shown a photo of Brian Giles and captioned it something like, “PERFORMANCE: Keep working hard, because you’re only a year or two away from the next fire sale.”

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Right now the Daughter is watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on the teevee (via one of them deeveedee’s), and as I’m sitting here munching on a turkey sandwich and reading blogs, some of the movie is seeping into my head via osmosis, and really, it’s a lot better movie than I remember it being. I recall not being terribly excited by it when I was a kid, but she’s enjoying it muchly, and I’m finding the production impressive, the songs and music good, the acting fun in that “scenery-chewing kids’ movie” kind of way, and I’m even finding Dick Van Dyke (whom I normally don’t grok) enjoyable. So why isn’t Chitty Chitty Bang Bang more of a classic family movie?

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