Three Bed Two Bath
Jason Mraz?
From the 1/1/04
Ann Arbor News OnlineChasers sing at 8 p.m. Monday at Kerrytown Concert House, 415 N. Fourth Ave. Chasers is Kenyon College's premier coed a cappella group, a select ensemble of 15 men and women who perform contemporary, original arrangements of songs by a variety of artists from Fleetwood Mac to Madonna. Most recently the group opened for guitarist and vocalist Jason Mraz and performed the national anthem for the Detroit Pistons. The concert pieces are from the group's contemporary repertoire, including such hits as "Kiss from a Rose" and "Sweet Dreams." Members from the Ann Arbor area include Jenna Brubaker and Andrea Daly. Tickets: $10 (students, $5). Information and reservations: (734) 769-2999. Yes, I know who Jason Mraz is. How come Chasers alumni didn't hear about this? Maybe I should start a Chasers blog.
Or, I could get a life.
Spiderman vs. William Blake
Yes, the superhero, and yes, the poet.
The first part of
this post from Jacob Levy of The Volokh Conspiracy made my morning.
FYI, the full quote, titled "from 'Milton'" at
bartleby.com, is
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
in England's green and pleasant land.
Spam on the run
One of my work responsibilities is to gather up the e-mail that comes to us through our General Inbox. We will occasionally receive a bonified question from a patron, but mostly it's just a breeding ground for spam and viruses.
One of the disturbing things (to me, at least) is that a piece of spam will pop up in my Inbox, and then about 30 seconds later, I get a message from our virus-detection software that the virus has been dealt with. This seems like getting caught walking in a rainstorm and, after you are soaked, someone running up to you and saying, "D'y'know it's gonna rain?" I know everything must be OK, but still. . . .
Sock update
Pursuant to
this post about the cool new socks that Darren Barefoot ordered:
This post. He has received them, and they feel good.
Requiem for a heavyweight
I have to admit it, my favorite band is no more. Justin Currie (formerly of Del Amitri) is [shudder] "pursuing other projects". On the one hand, I can listen to their albums over and over.* On the other hand, I'm glad I didn't have lyrics like this to fixate on in high school and college:
How are you going to pass the time of day
In your beautiful empty shell,
When you've shaken the hands of so many sinceroes
You feel like a fake yourself.*In fact I have.
Wow, v. 2.1
I've now made it up to Flippery Fish in the Ecosystem. Thanks to the seven sites that link me, you are all awesome. There is a place in heaven (or your version of a reasonable facsimile) for you. My next step is out of the water!
Solid post
From a
Wall Street-enabled mommy of a ten-month old.
Aarrgh!
Copy (as I can remember it) from a radio ad this morning for the Indiana Institute of Techonology:
My business degree from Indiana Tech helped me move forward in my career. And you can, too!What, do you get a cut if I sign up? What if I don't want to help you because your bosses can't construct a grammatically correct sentence?
[jingle] Now there's nothing holding you back!/A new school of thought, Indiana Tech![/jingle]
Don't even get me started on the idiocy of that jingle.
Righteous
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of the seminal book,
The Tipping Point, and he writes about similar subjects for The New Yorker. Since I am a number of weeks behind in my reading, I just came upon this summary paragraph from his article "Big and Bad: How the SUV Ran Over Automotive Safety" in the Jan 12, 04 edition. He's talking about the Bridgestone/Firestone tire recall of 2000 (remember that, kiddies?)
The allegation against Firestone amounts to the claim that its tires failed, with fatal results, two hundred and seventy-one times in the course of six hundred and thirty billion vehicle miles. Manufacturers usually win prizes for failure rates that low. It's also worth remembering that during the same ten-year span almost half a million Americans died in traffic accidents. In other words, during the nineteen-nineties hundreds of thousands of people were killed on the roads because they drove too fast, or drank too much. And, of those, a fair proportion involved people in S.U.V.s who were lulled by their four-wheel drive into driving recklessly on slick roads, who drive aggressively because they felt invulnerable, who disproportionately killed those they hit because they chose to drive trucks with inflexible steel-frame architectures, and who crashed because they couldn't bring their five-thousand-pound vehicles to a halt in time. Yet, out of all those fatalities, regulators, the legal profession, Congress, and the media chose to highlight the .0005 per cent that could be linked to an alleged defect in the vehicle.Right or wrong, I just got a buzz reading that.
Three-prong plug
Q at Assumptions are dangerous said nice things about me. It's the first time I've been caught in a bit of blog punditry.
NewMexiKen has officially moved over to Movable Type. Go to his site and congratulate him, and feast at a site that is like the ultimate page-a-day calendar.
After two live wires, the ground. After a winter of discontent, Don at Hands in the Dirt is heavy into gardenblogging again. Yay!
A Question to the Blogosphere
I've e-mailed this problem to Blogger, and I think they answered it, but I then deleted that e-mail, and so don't remember (a) if they had an answer to the question and (b) if I solved it last time. So, here goes:
Occasionally (like, right now), as my page is loading, the links column (which is usually at the right) will disappear and load at the bottom of the page, underneath all the Blogger entries. Is this, as they say, the cost of doing business with Blogger, or is there something in my template that I can change so as to avoid this in the future?
No kidding
For those of you interested in the future of classical music (or "art music", or "serious music"), the ArtsJournal blogs are fantastic, real, and relevant.
Greg Sandow has a
great post on CD covers.
Goerne looks as though he's just about to heave on Brendel's lap, and Brendel looks like he's resigned to the fact. Granted,
Die Winterreise, isn't
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, but geez, if no one had fun performing this, why should we have fun listening to it?
From the ridiculous to the sublime
Last night, I started my usual "the kids are in bed, the wife is working, let's plop down in front of the TV and surf for 3 hours" routine. But then, some things happened:
I realized that I was sleepy.
I realized that I had absolutely no interest in the outcome of the Oklahoma State/Pittsburgh game.
I realized that I had a wonderful book, A Gentle Madness, by Nicholas Basbanes, waiting for me on my nightstand.
45 minutes later, I was asleep.
NPR you being served?
I don't usually blog on popular memes, but these are the two saddest parts of the
WaPo's article on Bob Edwards' ouster [emphasis mine]:
At 7:30 a.m. yesterday, after the show's first live run was over, staffers gathered in a third-floor conference room for a planned staff meeting and Edwards gave them the news. He had learned it himself two weeks earlier, he said, but had been asked to keep it to himself, which wasn't easy.
"I talked for about 25 minutes," he said, "and when I got to memories and thanking them and all that, I kind of lost it." Alcohol was produced and consumed, though not by the host, who said he had to drive home and get to a doctor's appointment. "They drank and I watched," he said. . .
Edwards said he thought that Jay Kernis, NPR senior vice president for programming, had been "primarily" responsible for his ouster. Asked if he'd had any warning about the change, he said: "That's hard to say. Did [Kernis] express his feelings that he would prefer somebody else or that he didn't like my style? Yes." But Edwards said he never thought he would actually lose his job.
"I think it's a style thing," Edwards said. "I think he's tired of listening to me."
Playing favorites
Y'know, it's not that I love either of my children more than the other, but Daughter #2 has some unfair advantages: She is just two years old, and still at that point where she hangs on my every word, is inordinately happy to see me every morning when I get her out of bed, goes right to sleep almost every night, is still fascinated with the world, loves her older sister, and does things such as the following:
[After changing her diaper in the morning which (very considerately on her part) is always wet and never poopy]
D#2: [loud] New diaper, New diaper!
Shhh, Mommy sleeping.[whispering and putting her finger to her mouth] OK, Mommy 'leeping, shhh.
And she is quiet the rest of the way. What's not to love?
