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Late today with this post! Anyway, I have several pieces that I’m in the process of writing about, but none of those are ready, so for now, here’s an overture from one of Richard Wagner’s early operas, Der Fliegende Hollander (The Flying Dutchman). This was Wagner’s first major success, paving the way for everything that came after. I’ve never listened to the entire opera, but the overture is evocative in that great Wagnerian way: thrilling and adventurous, and at times romantically lyrical.   Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

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In: and General Matters of Style, Life, On Bib Overalls, Photographic Documentation
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At some point last year a Facebook ad appeared in my feed for Renaissance-festival style shirts. I saw them, thought, “Wow, I’d like one of those!”, and I bought one. And then I waited…and waited…and waited. Took forever, to the point where I figured I’d been scammed. But no: it just took, well, forever! The shirt came, and I loved it. Flash forward to this year, when I decided to buy another one, when I saw a different ad. However, this time instead of just pulling the trigger on the spot, I actually threw the question out into FB and the Twitterverse,Down the rabbit hole….

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You probably didn’t realize you wanted to hear a suite of music from The Lord of the Rings arranged for solo piano, but thankfully, I realized that you needed to hear it! Here you go: This arrangement is really quite well done, and at points it really highlights some aspects of Howard Shore’s original orchestral work that’s easy to miss, such as the shift in the initial Shire music from the bouncy, Percy Grainger-esque folk sound to the more lyrical tone that follows as we get to know our Hobbit heroes better and get more acquainted with the deeper nature of theirDown the rabbit hole….

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A lovely post about autumn, over at Nerdishly: Punctuated by long nights and scented by benign smoke and wet leaves, the period between first frost and December is my favorite part of the year. The furnace is pressed into service by 5 a.m., and I, now be-sweatered and -socked from rising until bedtime, begin yawning before 6:45 p.m., but the rest is a sort of everyday magic, from the perfect circles bored into the pumpkins by what I imagine to be a stout but agreeable-enough nocturnal animal to the prehistoric trumpeting of the sandhill cranes as they gather in ever-wideningDown the rabbit hole….

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It’s Halloween week, and if you don’t think classical music can do “scary”, well then…you’ve never really listened much. Here are a couple of works that put the darkness of the universe on full display. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both these pieces are by Russian composers. I’m always wary of nationalistic stereotypes, but there’s just something about Russians when it comes to brooding fatalism. I genuinely think they do that better than anyone else. First up is Modest Mussorgsky. Mussorgsky lived an unusually tortured life as a composer, and when he died in 1881 at just 42Down the rabbit hole….

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Happy Saturday, y’all! Here are some links from things I’ve seen this week. ::  First, a very somber one. By now we’ve all heard about the horrible gun-related mishap that took place on a film set, in which the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, was actually killed. Sheila O’Malley posted about it, and she wisely centers Hutchins and her work, as opposed to centering the gun or, as some other outlets did, Alec Baldwin. This should not have happened, and a life was snuffed out because of it. ::  Shutting Down the Manufactured Critical Race Theory “Debate”. Good piece on theDown the rabbit hole….

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Readers may recall that earlier today I discussed how to make a pot of chili. I have now completed the pot of chili. The Wife made cornbread to go with it (because cornbread is the thing that goes with chili), and thus we dined! Thank you for your attention.   Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

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I saw this pic on someone’s Instagram story last week and it made me laugh, because when it comes to food, I think I may be part-Southerner, in a lot of ways. The first pot of chili of the season is a big deal for me! I love chili. I love making it. I love how easy it is to make. I love how versatile chili is in the way you serve it. You can do so much with the leftovers over and above eating re-heated bowls of chili for the next four days. So yes, as a Northerner*, I get it!Down the rabbit hole….

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An interesting discussion erupted over on Twitter the other day, occasioned by this tweet: https://twitter.com/nakedvix/status/1448595705128529920 Almost exclusively the discussion hewed to one side of this argument: that it is, in fact, deeply silly to suggest that a reader is insulting an author by leaving a book unfinished, for whatever reason. One writer and book commenter and critic and reader after another came forth to insist that no, as a reader, you absolutely should stop reading books that for whatever reason aren’t clicking for you. You owe the author nothing, and there is utterly no insult to an author simply because one reader didn’tDown the rabbit hole….