Still going after all these years.
First UVA score of the game with just a few minutes left to go in the first quarter. Here’s another track from that 1947 album in honor of UVA getting on the board: “Hike, Virginia” is another fight song, and it looks like Virginia could use the encouragement.
Hike, Virginia, Virginia Glee Club and UVA Band (1947) – Download 1.5 MB MP3
I need to watch the UVA–Virginia Tech game. Nice that ESPN is already giving the Cavs no respect; we’ll see how it goes. I’m afraid to make a prediction, though; I’ve been wrong too many times before this season.
In honor of the game, here’s a little team spirit from 1947. This is ripped from that LP reissue of the 1947 Virginia Glee Club/University of Virginia Band album, and it’s an MP3 of the 1912 fight song that the Glee Club was still performing when I was there. I’ll post another song each time we get some points on the board.
Yell Song, Virginia Glee Club and UVA Band (1947) – Download 1.8 MB MP3
Update: The downloads have been temporarily pulled to reduce my bandwidth consumption. Sorry, folks.
I’d love to be able to blame a caloric coma on my posting drought, but of course that would only explain yesterday and today, and not Tuesday or Wednesday. What can I say: work, like sand, piles up against the breakwater of a vacation as though it is determined to fit the same volume of labor in half the time.
We have had a nice holiday with Lisa’s folks. The meal (turkey a la Alton with brown gravy, sausage and apple stuffing, mashed potatoes, Swiss chard smothered with onion and bacon, green beans with a little olive oil and sea salt, and the requisite cranberry sauce) is by now approaching familiarity, which is by no means bad. For instance: this year the stuffing wasn’t bone dry!
So, what am I thankful for? Many things which I will not list in this space, and some I will:
There are more things, but that will do for now.
And no, not that Beowulf, though I confess the release of the movie got me off my duff to start this project. And not even the Seamus Heaney translation. No, I’m talking about the real thing—the original Old English poem, as it was meant to be experienced—read aloud, in this case, by the great Old English scholar Kemp Malone.
I found a four-record set of Malone reading the whole bloody poem about seven years ago, in a now-vanished record shop in Central Square in Cambridge. The recording, on the once great Caedmon label (now an audiobook label for Harper Collins, with no sign of its back catalog reappearing anytime soon), was made in 1967 and, if the first side is anything to go by, probably drove every undergrad who listened to it completely nuts. Malone’s delivery is even-keeled, and he doesn’t attempt to sell the text, so little moments like the description of Scyld Scefing as a “good king” for his giving of gifts don’t get the reinforcement that the rhythm of the text would seem to indicate. But it’s still a great window onto the roots of the language.
I have a little bonus for this post: a clip from the recording, constituting the Prologue of Beowulf as read by Malone. I digitized the clip from my copy of the record; to date, I’ve only digitized one side of one LP, owing to the time required to do it properly (unlike CDs, vinyl has to be ripped in real time!) Hopefully it’s interesting to at least one person out there.
Prologue to Beowulf, read by Kemp Malone (Caedmon) – Download 2.6MB MP3
An article in yesterday’s Globe triggered one of my fortunately rare moments of anger at the greater Boston metropolitan area where I live. The anger came toward the end of an article about poor, confusing, and absent road signs throughout the area:
Since 2001, state Senator Patricia D. Jehlen has been sponsoring legislation that would force communities to post signs at intersections, but the bill has gone nowhere. The Massachusetts Municipal Association opposes it as a costly burden that takes the decision away from communities.
Um. Excuse me? What decision are you taking away from communities? Is it the decision to do their jobs? Because really, if you build the roads but don’t put up the signs, why did you bother?
Clue for you, folks. Massachusetts has a high per capita income ($44,289) and a high rate of taxation (5.3%), while Washington State is lower on both fronts ($35,409 and no state income tax). But Washington State manages to actually post signs on all its streets! So does Virginia ($38,390/2% to 5.75%); so does North Carolina ($30,553/6%-8%). What is the state doing with the money it takes in income tax that it can’t afford to put up the damned signs itself, or grant money to the local communities?
Actually, this puts another question to my mind. If a local community can’t afford to put up street signs, and can’t keep residential streets paved or maintain storm sewers, then the system is broken. Either the towns need to build up their tax bases or small towns need to combine and consolidate services so they aren’t trying to each maintain their own systems. Or the state could get off its ass and make sure the municipalities have what they need to serve their people.
Two unrelated beverage news items in my browser this morning. I was just thinking the other day about how you never see Dixie Blackened Voodoo anymore, when I saw this article about the devastation at the original Dixie plant as a result of Katrina. The brand is being brewed in Wisconsin on a contract basis, but I hope they can bring the original brewery back around. Blackened Voodoo and the original Dixie are too good with Cajun food to continue to be brewed that far north.
And Ardbeg, which I enjoy as a fallback when I am drinking Scotch away from home if Laphroaig is unavailable, has been crowned the World Whiskey of the Year and the best Scotch Single Malt. I like Ardbeg for combining the peatiness of Laphroaig and other Islay malts with the smoothness of a blend.
Item: BoingBoing pointed to an R Sikoryak adaptation of Crime and Punishment a la a Dick Sprang Batman comic book. In turn, the Again with the Comics blog post that reprinted the adaption linked to the Masterpiece Comics on R Sikoryak’s site, including a tiny reproduction of my favorite comics adaptation of a literary masterpiece: “Good Ol’ Gregor Brown.” One morning Charlie Brown awoke to find himself transformed into an enormous insect… I actually own that issue of Raw and shared the strip with my English professor in a class on modernity where we were reading the original “Metamorphosis.” Good stuff.
Item: Wired’s profile of xkcd creator Randall Munroe contains exactly one item about Munroe that hasn’t already been linked on BoingBoing: that he used to be a roboticist for NASA.
Item: So Penny and Aggie has been hawking free downloadable reprints in PDF form for a while now. I checked them out, and I was pretty impressed—Wowio’s a nice service and the quality is good, even if it limits you to three downloads per day. But it got me thinking: how much money is in the business model? And who else is on the service? So I started poking around, and all these indie comic books that I remember from when I was in middle school are in there. Like, stuff that was trying to cash in on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, before TMNT was a movie or even a TV show. Like Dragon (terrible, and terribly I owned the first few issues of it!). And, of course, like Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters. And there’s better stuff too: Steve Canyon, Flash Gordon, the Star Trek Key Comics from the late 1960s; and more. Of course they also do ebooks; I just added Civil Disobedience to my queue.
The Old House My House blog on the This Old House site broke the news of lead tile contractor Joe Ferrante’s death. Obviously any death from heart failure is tragic, but this one hits me for a variety of reasons. The tile work always seemed to me to be closest to a black art of any of the trades on the show, and I always enjoyed watching Joe demystify the work while still making clear how much effort and intelligence was really needed to do it right. My heart goes out to his family and the TOH crew.
Thinking about John reminded me to look up some of my other authors from the first three issues.
My good college friend John “G-Money” McLaughlin has finally published his award winning novel, Run in the Fam’ly, and it’s available for purchase. I’ll be stopping by the Harvard Bookstore to pick up my copy.
I wish I could say that I published him first, in Rag & Bone, a long time ago. But John was my fiction editor at the magazine, and we had a rule (after a fairly disastrous first issue) that we didn’t sh*t where we eat—in other words, there would be no submissions from editors published in the magazine.
As mentioned last week, I survived a hike down the Billy Goat Trail (not a surprise given the difficulty of the trail, which was moderate, but more given my general state of fitness).
It was a great hike, made better by the brisk fall air. My calves were really sore by the end thanks to the rocky terrain—even in the “flat” sections, we were walking on the edges of boulders. But there were also points of concern, primarily with the very low level of the river. If there was any question that water is a universal concern this fall, they were erased by my stroll up the Potomac that Saturday morning.
The group as a whole was much more fit than myself, including Jim’s high school friend John Hollinger. (Of Jim’s fitness no doubt is possible.)
I also got a lot of good photos at Jim’s wedding party itself. And by “good” I mean: everyone was presentable, only a few were blurred beyond recognition, and you can’t really tell how much fun we were actually having.
Thanks to Pete Cashmore from Mashable, who alerts me to the “launch” of NBC’s “download” “service.” The “service” will “allow” “you” to “download” and “watch” NBC’s “content.”
Okay, enough sarcasm. Let’s expand a few of the quotes:
Wake me up when NBC decides to stop hating on its customers.
Via Daring Fireball, an easy solution to the stack icon problem. What stack icon problem? The one where the stack, when collapsed into the dock, takes on the icon of the first item in the folder so you have no stable reference point for what it actually is—that stack icon problem.
Looks nice in my Dock:
Interesting debate going on between ComScore and Radiohead regarding the Comscore report that alleges that 62% of worldwide Radiohead downloaders paid nothing.
My thought: this is where selection bias potentially becomes a real problem for Comscore.
Comscore gets their metrics from a panel of Internet users who are recruited with a package of incentives—in the past, it was browsing acceleration and download monitoring. The user’s traffic is passed through a Comscore proxy server, monitored, and warehoused. Traffic is anonymized but indexed against demographic variables.
So the issue of how the data is collected is pretty unremarkable. If Comscore sees a transaction, it really happened. The larger question is: do people who volunteer to have their traffic sniffed represent the whole Internet? It seems pretty clear to me that they don’t, and in fact Comscore regularly adjusts the metrics they report from the panel to account for overall demographics (percentage of women, percentage of users from different geographic areas). But you can’t a priori adjust the numbers based on a worldwide count of Radiohead fans, or Radiohead fans who are comfortable downloading music. And that’s where I think there is a potential problem with the numbers. Comscore’s Andrew Lipsman says that their sample, 1000 people of whom several hundred downloaded the data, is representative. I say that’s true only if there was no selection bias in the sample to begin with, and Comscore hasn’t proven that.
Forget the hack that I posted earlier. A quick review of various threads about Tiger on the 800MHz iMac seems to indicate that the video card in that model has problems keeping up with demand, and that iChat in particular may have some real problems in the upgraded system. Since iChat is the main reason that my inlaws use their Mac (along with Mail), I think we’ll hold off.
Details: MacOSXHints on experiences with hacked Tiger installs; sleep problems; sleep problems 2.