Making Sense of A Child of Our Time
During the Thursday night opening performance of Sir Michael Tippett’s modern oratorio A Child of Our Time, I started to understand the piece a little better. I had been struggling to interpret the libretto in light of the circumstances of its composition—specifically, as a response to the tragic story of Herschel Grynszpan, the young Polish [...]
Old Arlington maps
Speaking of the Arlington list, someone just posted a fantastic find: a working map of the town dating from 1898. What is most interesting about this map is that it sets some theories of our neighborhood’s development on their head. I have been told by my neighbors, and even by the folks we bought our [...]
Snow? In October??
I figured that since most of the leaves in our neighborhood were still firmly in place, we were safe from winter weather a while longer. No such luck. As I was leaving my barber’s shop in Arlington Heights, there were honest-to-goodness flakes of snow. Small, still, but getting bigger. By the time I picked up [...]
Taking care of business, in a flash: closing up the walls
I’d like to introduce you to the table saw on the right, also known as The Machine That Saved My Ass. Ryobi isn’t a lusted after brand of power tools the way Porter and Cable or DeWalt is, but for my money and for today this is the Power Tool That Walks on Water.
Perhaps I [...]
Well, that was a surprise
For someone (like me) interested in the Bush administration’s ongoing troubles, it was a bad morning to spend in a dress rehearsal. The withdrawal of Harriet Miers’ nomination for the Supreme Court signals more troubles on the horizon and a further diminution of the President’s mojo. Even if the withdrawal came as no surprise.
And it [...]
Note to composers
A realization that came during the orchestra rehearsal with the BSO for Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time today: in a highly complex, chromatic choral work with shifting meter and uncertain melodic lines, it is perhaps unwise to ask the chorus to sing the text “We are lost.”
Otherwise rehearsals are going well. The performances [...]
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks’ world seems a million miles away. It’s hard to believe it was (just) less than fifty years ago that segregation was commonplace, that someone could be arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus, that we accepted unequal treatment for citizens of our country based on the color of their [...]
Thanks, Trend Micro, for your overzealous blockage.
Today’s definition of frustrating is finding out that your company’s new antivirus software considers the eMusic Download Manager to be a “virus” (ok, adware). Especially frustrating since I pay for that service and now can’t use it. The download experience in Firefox is dramatically worse without the download manager, as you lose the option to [...]
Radiator niches and bathroom work
Ow. Ow. Even though contractors are hip deep in our first floor bathroom renovation, we still have plenty of projects of our own, including (ow ow) framing in the niches where the radiators used to be, so that the plasterers can make them flush with the walls. This, as always, turned out to be more [...]
Blogging to Manila from Flock.
If this works, I will have successfully blogged from Flock. To get posting to my Manila site working, I had to bypass Flock’s blog autosetup and hand-edit the configuration file, which on my Windows machine is saved in my Documents and Settings directory under \Application Data\Mozilla\Flock\profiles\[default]\blog_alpha.rdf.
The problem with Flock’s autodetection technology is that both the [...]
Flocking, almost.
Flock has launched its public Developer Preview. Congrats to Sloanie Geoffrey Arone and the rest of the Flock team.
I’m playing with the release, but it’s living up to its designation as a developer preview release. For one thing, it doesn’t appear to work with my Manila blog; though the release notes state that it [...]
The Wilkerson transcript
Financial Times: Transcript: Colonel Wilkerson on US foreign policy. Don’t let the title throw you—this is one of the most astonishing insider critiques of the administration, and of the execution of US foreign policy generally, that I have read yet—and it’s only a partial transcript. The summary: a “cabal” of insiders led by Cheney and [...]
Free death date databases
I may not be using their software, but I definitely appreciate the work that Family Tree Legends is doing in putting free databases of death dates on line. So far the most comprehensive one looks to be the Social Security Death Index—that is, provided the person had a SSN. Other free databases are listed on [...]
Introducing the alternate merge
I feel unfair posting this in my Boston category, since it’s equally applicable to Seattle residents, but I feel compelled, after my 30 minute commute stretched to an hour this morning, to introduce a new concept to my fellow Massholes Boston-area motorists:
al-ter-nate merge
(n.) A method of bringing two lanes of traffic together into one lane [...]
We are ALL not consumers.
I’ve been getting an unusually high level of linkage to a post I wrote in July, called “I am not a consumer. I am a human being,” after Doc Searls linked it (and my recent rant about the crippling effects of the c-word) on Saturday. The attention is flattering, but I’m not the [...]
