Day: April 28, 2005

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Musical teleology

There is just no other art so strong as a piece of music that knows where it’s going…
 
Every now and then I hear a piece that simply captures me. The piece can be a longer work, even symphonic, or a short song.  The magical part is that it’s designed to travel to a specific meaning and it effectively works to arrive where it’s designed to go.
 
It’s easy to see why Sibelius’ Finlandia was the first piece that strongly struck me so. Mahler’s #1 was another such. More recently, such choral pieces as Marta Keen’s Homeward Bound and Nick Glennie-Smith and Randall Wallace’s Mansions of the Lord. In particular, I have felt a yen to listen to Mansions a lot today/tonight. 
 
The link above leads to a portion of the performance at Ronald Reagan’s funeral. Here are the lyrics.  You tell me: is it as effective a piece as it seems to me?
 
“The Mansions of the Lord”
Music: Nick Glennie-Smith
Lyrics: Randall Wallace
 
To fallen soldiers let us sing
where no rockets fly nor bullets wing
Our broken brothers let us bring
to the mansions of the Lord
 
No more bleeding no more fight
No prayers pleading through the night
just divine embrace, eternal light
in the mansions of the Lord
 
Where no mothers cry and no children weep
We will stand and guard to the angels’ sleep
All through the ages safely keep
the mansions of the Lord
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Just Can’t Keep Eyes Open

Honestly, I wanted to pay attention to President Bush’s press conference, but…
 
Until Bush says, bluntly, to the Loony Left Moonbat Brigade, “Shut up, sit down and listen: my judicial nomineees ARE going to get a straight up and down vote; you ARE going to stop lying about Social Security and we ARE going to close the damned borders,” I’m just not all that interested.
 
*yawn*

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Envelope, please…

…and the stupidest statement (so far) this week by a politician is…
 
“I understand what they’re trying to do, but when you start targeting a community like the homeless, I think that’s poor policy,” –[Houston, TX] council member Ada Edwards
What was that? “The homeless” are a “community”? Pardonez moi, but as one who has had close contact with “the homeless” in various venues and locales, I can tell you (as can anyone else with more than ONE working brain cell can) that “the homeless” do not comprise a “community.”
 
And why the bizarre statement about “targeting” so-called “homeless” folk?  Oh, that’s rich.  The Houston City Council passed an ordinance designed to get bums to stop using public libraries as their own personal hostels–sleeping, eating, bathing, etc., in libraries. One provision that was apparently particularly offensive to moonbat Edwards was the provision against germ and gas warfare ummm, “offensive bodily hygiene that constitutes a nuisance to others.”
 
What? Sleep, eat, bathe and remove your stench before hauling your bum butt into the library?  How dreadful!  What ever in the world was the Houston City Council thinking!
 
(Thx to Kris of Anywhere But Here for the link)

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I’m a good boy; yes, I am

And don’t listen to those voices in your head that say otherwise, you hear me?
 
Every single time the same (10 year old?) kid calls our number and asks for his lil friend (same kid calling and asking for same lil friend, mind you), I resist telling him he’s too stupid to use a phone.  If it had been once or twice, no problem, but over and over and over (and over…) again?
 
But I resist temptation and merely ask what number he is  trying to call, then correct his error.  Sometimes he calls back immediately, making exactly the same misdial error. *sigh*
 
I did get a small bit of satisfaction when I checked our answering machine one day and heard several messages from the same kid (to the same lil friend who is not and never has been at this number) “making sure” that friend’s name here had his part of the science project due the next day ready, and what changes needed to be made to the project/class presentation.
 
If he can’t learn to dial the silly number (after all this time), he (maybe, just maybe) got slammed on the project grade… I do not care if the kid has a perception problem.  Bugging me because he’s too lazy to learn to cope (or just too lazy to look at the touch pad when dialing) is evidence of the need for a little chlorine in the shallow end of the gene pool, or something…
 
(Now, that felt good.)
 
 

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What KIND of Polyhedral am I?

Not that it’s any of your business, but…

I am a d100

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

Here’s what the comments on my quiz results were:

There’s [sic] two ways to end up with this result. Either you picked the silliest possible answer to each question, or you answered honestly, and happen to be hyperactive, manic, loon. Assuming you answered honestly, your profile is as follows: You are the 100-sided dice, also known as the legendary Zocchihedron. You are the bit of data that registers so far off the chart that the average person doesn’t even know you exist… Your jokes have the lowest laugh ratio, but you go for quantity, not quality. Once you get started on a pointless tangent, it takes a group effort to bring you back to reality and make you shut up… The one secret they aren’t telling you, is how they sometimes actually miss the noise when you’re gone.

[Update: though update isn’t really the word. “Redaction” maybe. The opening comment in the quoted material above, in addition to its glaring grammatical error, makes an error of reasoning, as well.  Of course there’s at least one more option to the two mentioned above.  I could have answered each question honestly AND THEREFORE picked the silliest answer to each question.  It’s not an exclusive proposition, as the atatement above seems to indicate. heh]

No one who’s ever heard me recite P.L. Heath’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on “Nothing” could possibly agree with that, could they?  Could they?

🙂

Oh, and thx for the link to goes Jenna Thomas-McKie , whose blog I found following a link on a comment she made  at Boudicca’s Voice .

Hey! You guys do go visit these links, don’t you?  Well, get on it!!

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B-Movies vs. Junk Fiction Reads

I love B movies, and usually, the cheesier the better
 
 

But when it comes to books, stereotyping characters, predictable plots, implausible settings and circumstances just don’t cut it for me.  I can suspend disbelief easily enough if the characters, circumstances and settings maintain some plausibility and plots are at least interesting even in the most far-out fantasies.  But authors like Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code, Digital Fortress and others) just give me a rash.  Writing such as Digital Fortress, which I just “gutted through,” isn’t even good enough to be “suckitudinous”—it’s just plain bad fiction, in spite of (or even more so) because of the technical proficiency Brown has with verbs, nouns, adjectives (lord, does he ever love to load on the adjectives! *blech*), etc.  He apparently knows how to construct sentences that parse, he just chooses to construct sentences that are largely not worth reading.
 
The neat thing about B movies, on the other hand, is that their very cheesiness can provide entertainment that cheesy books cannot.  Chomping on popcorn, mocking stupid plots, ham-handed acting, poor direction, stupid continuity problems, etc., is just plain fun.  Watching B movies that provide unwitting self-mockery and meta-comments on their purveyors and (if they were box-office successes) their audiences is entertainment that’s worth far more than the $1.00 rental they can usually be had for.
 
But spending even half-price at a used book store for a badly-written piece of junk and wasting a couple of hours slogging through it hoping for something—anything!—better to appear is painful at best.
 
BTW, I didn’t buy the Dan Brown book I just read.  I can understand its appeal on one level to folks who have the intestinal fortitude to look past the stereotypical “characterization” and dumb plot because it has a remotely interesting premise.  But for anyone who has the slightest (and by that I mean what some in this neck of the woods would call “teen-eint-siest”) clue about computer systems, that premise is so fatally flawed to begin with that it sinks under its own weight almost before one can even notice the book’s other HUGE flaws.
 
Better to go rent a cheesy movie like the 1991 (1992?) Captain America (which I watched and thoroughly enjoyed for its flagrant B-movie-ness last week) than to read another Dan Brown—ANY Dan Brown—book.
 
Another one marked off the list of authors to check out for entertainment. YMMV, of course.  🙂

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Something-or-other rice

Another “What’s there to cook?” quasi-recipe
 
OK, cupboard looking lean. Had a can of lobster/tomato pasta sauce  (which Wonder Woman will NOT eat) .  Some decent jalapenos. Rice.  Chips.  Hmmm…
 
That’s it, friends, neighbors and countrymen countrymen-women and all the ships at sea…
 
little lobster/tomato pasta sauce…
 
water (to make up enough liquid for the amount of rice I had: 2X liquid/rice proportion)
 
minced jalapenos (keep the seeds, otherwise you’re wimping out way, way too much) more is better.
 
minced onion (Oh, I hadn’t mentioned I had some onion, had I?)
 
curry powder—you decide how much for yourself.  For me, less if fresh, naturally (and this was old: need to replace)
 
tumeric (was NOT going to use saffron on an experiment… though the way it turned out, maybe I should have!)
 
A little time and…
Somthing-Or-Other Rice n corn chips for a quick (~20 mins) lunch.
 
Next time, I’ll use saffron.  And there will be a next time.
 
🙂
 
Hey, while you’re here, CLICK on one of the other links in my sidebar. One of my other, non-food posts or someone in my blogroll.  (IMAO has a Carnival of Comedy happenin’ right now, you know.)

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Trite? It’s a small world, anyway

Not as much of a shock as it might once have been
 
Kris, over at Anywhere But Here, revealed today that she’s an OBU alum. I had wondered at what her background might have been to produce so many shared memes. Now I know part of it. Different generation, of course, but from all reports (from recent grad who once lived here at home 🙂 and continuing contacts over the years (including an email from a new contact, a prof in the College of Fine Arts, just the other day), much of the atmosphere and outlook remains very similar to the a&o when I attended.
 
But the small world effect?  Well, ever since 1971, when I spent a summer touring darned near all the contiguous 48 and found OBU alum in every single state I visited that summer, the small world effect is more of a “Huh, that’s nice: add another one” than a shock.  For a school that hovers around a 2,000 enrollment and had, at the last graduation I attended (2003) fewer in the graduating class than were in my high school’s graduating class, it’s sometimes surprisingly easy to make contact with previously unknown OBU alums, nearly anywhere… but here, in America’s Third World Countyâ„¢.
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