Lies and lying liars?

I’ve tried to tone down a bit of my rhetoric against the administration recently, mostly because I now know there are people out there who do a far better job of calling them on their fouls than I do. I even winced a little when I saw the title of Al Franken’s book again recently. Lies and the Lying Liars That Tell Them is, shall we say, a little inflammatory.

Then I was strengthened in my resolve by two ads:

  1. As pointed out by Greg Greene, someone who says that his opponent wants to hurt individual soldiers, but who himself sends reservists to Iraq in inadequate body armor, floats the prospect of cutting the pay of soldiers in live combat, and interferes with the health care benefits of veterans, active duty troops, National Guardsmen, and reservists, can hardly be called anything but a liar. Unless it’s two faced hypocrite.
  2. The recent understated ad at MoveOn.org that lets Donald Rumsfeld hang himself with his own words. In a discussion on CBS’s Face the Nation, Rumsfeld claimed that no one in the administration had ever called Iraq an “imminent threat,” that someone in the press had made up the phrase and was floating it to aggravate the WMD issue. Being hoist on a petard made of your own statements before and during the war about the imminentness of the Iraqi threat: priceless. (thanks Josh)

One is tempted to ask, with I.F. Stone, “is it necessary to repeat after 2,000 years all the things you people learned in Sunday school?! How — how absent-minded — how forgetful!”

Raised on radio

Who says local radio is dead? KEXP is now in Arbitron’s Internet broadcast ratings list, ranking in a solid #7 in the list of the top internet broadcasters and sales networks (and the top ranked individual station on the list). Among Internet radio stations, the station ranks #12 (some of the top six properties in the other list operate multiple channels with more listeners than KEXP). Interesting too that the other local public station, the jazz channel KPLU, is close behind KEXP on the list.

Which makes one wonder. I am a firm believer that the content on both stations, particularly KEXP, is superior to just about anything else out there. That said, does the ascendancy of both stations have more to do with geography? Surely the demand from their local listenership, who would likely be early adopters with a strong interest in technology, would be a factor in getting both stations on line to begin with. So why aren’t there any radio stations from Silicon Valley on the list? Or is it just that this is the only ornery corner of the country left where the “local station” isn’t run by a drone at Clear Channel?

When the cigareets and wild women have gone

New York Times: Whiskey’s Kingdom (Pop. 361). Following on the heels of the MeFi discussion of bourbon, the NYT article does a pretty good job of hitting the bases of native American styles of whisk(e)y, including a great discussion of commercially available rye whiskeys. (Who knew there was a Potomac or Maryland style of rye whiskey?)

(Incidentally, it’s whisky if it comes from Scotland, Canada or Japan; whiskey anywhere else.)

Incidentally2, Lisa and I visited Lynchburg, Tennessee on our post-wedding trip (not our honeymoon; that happened six months after the wedding and was to Rome and Florence) (along with other Tennessee destinations). What they say in the article about not being able to sample the product on the premises is true; Lynchburg is indeed a dry county. However, one can buy “souvenir” bottles there thanks to a special waiver from the state.

Incidentally3, the title of this post alludes to a classic folk revival song that I first heard performed by Peter Sellers on the Muppets. I kid you not.

Quick links, head cold edition

I spoke too soon yesterday; my cold has now migrated back up into my sinuses with a vengeance. Bear that in mind as you read this sad abbreviated list of links with minimal commentary and have mercy.

That’s no planetoid. It’s a battle station.

completed diorama of the death star in legos

Am I the only one who thought about this line from the first Star Wars movie when the announcement came out about the tenth planet (or planetoid, as the case may be)?

Of course, I also can’t pass up a chance to point out other battle stations, in this case made of Legos. Here’s the second Death Star as a full size sculpture, and over seventy pictures of an incredibly detailed minifig-scale multi-level diorama of all the scenes that took place in the first Death Star. All I can say is, I thought I was obsessive, but I was wrong.

The RSS feed of everything imaginable

The Shifted Librarian points to RSS feeds from Archive.org. Probably best known as the home of the Wayback Machine, which lets you see web sites as they were during selected points in time in the past, the Archive also houses lots of amazing content, including digital versions of the Prelinger archive, old software, and lots and lots of music.

The RSS feed of their master collection is fascinating. Live performances by Soul Coughing, Gary Jules, Howie Day, From Good Homes, and others are listed right now, and I’m guessing there’s some fascinating other stuff if you dig deeper below the last fifty items.

Coming up

I’ve been a bit under the weather for the last four or five days; a weird kind of cold that started in the throat, with totally clear sinuses, but which has in the last day migrated up into my face. At least I’m on familiar territory.

Our guys have completely recovered from their “tutoring” and are once again making pests of themselves in the garden. We haven’t yet succeeded in training them to only uproot weeds. Maybe with time.

Thanks to my cold, I’m feeling a bit basso profundo. Thankfully I have another two weeks before my first solo at church—if eight notes total are considered a solo. After that, it’s not a full week until our performance of the Brahms Requiem (also known as the German Requiem, but it feels silly calling it that when you’re going to perform it in English).

How did I miss this: PDF viewer browser plugin for Mac OS X

I can’t imagine how I missed the PDF Browser Plug-In for Mac OS X, but thanks to atmasphere for pointing it out. (Background for non-Mac users: while PDF is deeply integrated into Mac OS X, including being the actual print output format, no Mac browser currently displays PDF files in-context—they are all handed off to a second application. Not a big deal, except I can’t count the number of times I’ve clicked on a PDF file and forgotten I downloaded it, and found it days later on my desktop.)

AMS acquired and split up; my memory has just been sold

The Yahoo newswire says that Canadian IT consulting firm CGI is buying American Management Systems (AMS), the consulting firm at which I was a principal before I left for business school. The interesting parts?

  1. CGI is paying a 25% premium ($858 million) over the market cap ($657 million) of the stock (consistent with the feelings of many former and present AMSers that the stock was undervalued).
  2. As part of the deal, the defense and intelligence assets of AMS are being sold, for $415 million… to AMS rival CACI.

I wonder how my old teammates are being affected by this. We beat CACI to win the Standard Procurement System award, but a lot has changed since 1997 and I’m sure there’s a lot of value in combining the joint resources of the two businesses.

Also, what a difference a few years (and the war on terror) make. Four years ago, I don’t think I would have predicted that the defense and intelligence businesses would have a market cap of almost half the total value of AMS.

Open letter to a Glee Club student

glee club after my last lawn concert 1994

I started thinking about my days in the Virginia Glee Club a few weeks back. Probably because of my imminent 10-year reunion. Then out of the blue I got an email from a current Club member and Clubhouse resident who had found my page about my time in the group.

I reprint my reply to him here, for the ten or fifteen other Glee Club members who might see it and remember too.

Sounds like you’re having a great time with Club. I remember my days in the group fondly.

I never lived in the Clubhouse (I was planning to my fourth year but I turned into a damned Lawnie instead), but I have many fond memories of flopping on, sleeping on, and drinking on the couch. And of cleaning the house after parties. Wait, those aren’t fond memories; they’re kind of nauseating. Does the basement still flood every winter?

My fonder memories are of rehearsing in Old Cabell, B-012; of making fun of the bass section; of long bus trips to, um, sing with young women at institutions of higher (or at least more Northern) learning; and of performing some of the best music ever written. There hasn’t been a year since I graduated that I haven’t been singing with one group or another, and none of them have come close to the camaraderie of Club (well, maybe one, but that was a special case; the guys sang at my wedding, and one of them was a fellow Club alum).

The mule, however, is new to me. What’s the story there?

Hope you’re enjoying what the Club web site says is your fifth year. (I see some things haven’t changed at Virginia. 🙂 ) Please give the group my best. If you ever travel as far west as Seattle, drop in; my door is always open.

Yours in VMHLB,
Tim Jarrett
Club 1990-1994

Spem in alium, Part I

I got my score for Spem in Alium in the mail yesterday. Lisa called me at work and said, “You have a very large box.” She wasn’t kidding. I didn’t measure the cardboard flat the score came in, but the score itself is 14 inches by 20 inches. Open, it’s 38 inches by 20 inches.

And 40 staves tall. And 120 measures long.

And it hits me. Where the hell am I going to find the time to multitrack 40 vocal parts? At about 70 bpm, four beats to the measure for 120 measures is about 7 minutes per part. That’s 280 minutes, or more than four hours of recording. And how am I going to find that much quiet time in this house?

Man. This is going to be a harder project than I thought.

The score thing really bugs me, though. The only commercially available vocal part is the full score. There are part books available (one book has Choirs I – IV, the other Choirs V – VIII) but only for rent, not to buy.