Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
Have you ever met a really happy kid who is an atheist? I mean, give me a break.
{blink}
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10:31:32 AM,Thursday 11 October 2007
K. and my begoggled self at the wedding on Sunday:
(She gets the privilege of posting herself with the viking horns, 'cause it's just too kickass.)
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08:50:27 AM,Wednesday 10 October 2007
Wonderful weekend in Boston. Home now. Water, shower, sleep.
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01:16:20 AM,Monday 8 October 2007
This is an LJ meme, but I'm doing it here, 'cause here is where it's at.
Sola asked me to elaborate on seven of my interests. After the fashion of memes, if you have an LJ and you want me to list seven of your interests that I'd like to hear more about, just say the word.
She picked:
"bifurcated girls
Brigitte Fassbaender
Donne
Edward Jenner
Gluck
Rabelais
Rosenberg 7
Just a term for girls in trousers, and it's no secret I'm an admirer of that sort. I have an amusing story about another of my LJ interests, also an archaic phrase for what I fancy, and the consequences of a new acquaintance misapprehending its meaning, but I'm not sure that I'm allowed to tell it. So we'll just say that one means I like things topsy turvy, and this one means I'm not into mermaids, dig?
Okay, just watch this ridiculous thing. She ain't my top mezzo ever (not counting K., that would probably be Janet Baker) but damn, the dame's got something.
Who doesn't love Donne? He's bawdy, kinky, infuriating, and he's got a thing for mandrakes. ("If you go intercepting a falling asterisk receive with mandrakewurzel the child one!") I am able to talk about Donne without being flippant, but probably not in a blog post. Not this one, at least. Watch Wit.
My first childhood hero. I had a book called Magic in a Bottle, all fictionalized retellings of great medical discoveries from morphine to quinine. But my favorite was the one on Jenner. It thrilled me to think that taking a bit of filth from a barnyard and putting it in your arm could save you from death or disfigurement. Jenner wasn't the first to notice that people who'd survived smallpox didn't get it again, or even that selective inoculation with a very small amount of infectious material could give you a milder form of the disease that still conferred immunity -- but he noticed the truth of the old wives' tale that milkmaids didn't get it, and he deigned to figure out how. This is what a country boy can do when he's paying attention. And now, a few hundred years later, it's dead -- or at least sleeping, and I doubt that barring apocalypse it'll ever get a foothold again, even if it's re-released from whatever vials it's lurking in. What a thing vaccination is. What a man Edward Jenner was. What could a gobsmacked eight-year-old do but name her pet frog after him?
Old King Plague is dead.
The Smallpox plague is dead.
No more children dying hard,
no more cripples living scarred
with the marks of the Devil's kiss.
We still may die of other things,
but we will not die of this.
I don't have nearly as much Gluck as I'd like. I'm crazy about Orfeo ed Euridice, but I haven't really gotten into many of his other operas -- partly, I admit, because I'm not a big fan of operatic French, and his Italian stuff is harder to get ahold of. But he's so damn good. He's emotionally intelligent in a way very few composers are. (If you've read my blog for a while, you'll have heard this all before; forgive me.) There's a story in Ethan Mordden's Opera Anecdotes about Iphigenia en Tauride: when Oreste sings the words "my heart is calm again", the violas start up with these furious, manic arpeggios. At the first rehearsal, the orchestra breaks off, thinking there was some mistake in the libretto. Gluck leaps up and yells, "He's lying! He killed his mother! Keep playing!" His characters aren't types; they're human hearts, and his music reconciles their contradictions into a thrumming, transparent whole. I love the languor of his melodies and the heat of his orchestration. He kickstarted opera out of bravura and decadence (not that I don't love Baroque opera, but you don't watch it for the plot) into something richer and stranger, something very close to what Vincenzo Galilei and his group had been dreaming of a century earlier. Also, he wins big points for having the second silliest middle name in Classical Music: Willibald. (first, of course, going to Johann Nepomuk Hummell.)
I feel like a bit of a poser for putting this one on there, 'cause Rabelais is someone I keep meaning to get back to. I read Gargantua and Pantagruel once in college and enjoyed them enormously, but now I've forgotten all but the highlights. I'm a fan of all things bawdy, but I think the adjective "Rabelasian", though it applies to a lot of delightful raunch, does him sort of a disservice. He used farce and grotesquerie to get at some pretty deep stuff, and I think I'm gonna need to go back and pay attention to what's happening underneath the goosefeather-bumwipe jokes before I can say anything smart about him.
This basically just refers to a 1999 album that Susanne Rosenberg did with six of her friends. The album was called R7 and the group was ostensibly named the Rosenberg 7, but she hasn't recorded with them since. But I love the album so frikkin' much that I still list the interest, hoping someday she'll put the band back together.
Another topic I don't believe I'm permitted to talk about in detail. Let me just say that a couple of years ago I discovered Fr. Aquinas sending mash notes to a party under my protection, and things got a little out of hand. Grrr. That big, dumb Sicilian ox-- I'll teach him to steal my novice! Um... never mind.
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11:04:37 PM,Thursday 4 October 2007
ADULT RESIDENCE PLAN came out ADULTERESS DENSE PLAN.
Oops.
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(7)
10:02:37 AM,Thursday 4 October 2007
Margaret Cho on Saturday, Medieval Fair yesterday, Haydn tonight, Curtains on Wednesday, Moss and Julia on Saturday, Meg and Ry on Sunday. I'm a lucky, lucky slug.
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(2)
09:09:35 AM,Monday 1 October 2007
The Emergent Task Timer is a useful tool. I'm gonna try to use it consistently every day. Change the default chime, though, 'cause it's godawful.
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03:06:15 PM,Thursday 27 September 2007
The Tea Spot is the best place I've found to study in the city so far. Free wireless, 80 flavors of tea -- all of which can be ordered cold with tapioca pearls (!!), a nice empty space downstairs with a power outlet, and music that's generally either pleasant or ignorable but is kept at a livable volume. And sandwiches and cakes and things to boot! Oh, it's lovely.
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(4)
01:11:38 PM,Wednesday 26 September 2007
Beverages you can chew:
Bubble tea
Coconut Water Orbitz Extra-pulpy orange juice
Astronaut Sangria (tonic water, grenadine, freeze-dried fruit)
All of which, I've recently realized, are among my very favorite things to drink. Am I missing any?
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(6)
01:51:08 PM,Monday 24 September 2007
So I just got Engspchk working. Both Eclipse's spellchecker and its search functions are just terrible, so my transcript editing so far has been a cumbersome process of going through the transcript line by line and globaling everything that strikes my eye as an error, then outputting to .txt and spell checking in (blegh) Word, and, every time it finds an error, alt-tabbing back to Eclipse, going to the beginning of the document ('cause there's no wraparound search), searching for the word (the entire word, mind you; I have to select the "anywhere" option if I want to search for a partial one. And heaven help me if I forgot to turn off my capslock key! It helpfully checks the "case sensitive" option for me if I type any non-lowercase letter, but doesn't seem to have the ability to actually recognize non-lowercase words, so I get a "not found" message unless I take capslock off, uncheck "case sensitive", and then proceed to type the word.), globaling it into the appropriate dictionary, and then alt-tabbing back to Word to fix it in the .txt document. Pain in the tuchus.
I wish there could be a way to do it all within Vim, but I'm not sure how. Obviously the automatic steno tracking (and Global Magic, which I have to admit is really nice -- when it works) wouldn't be immediately feasible, but if I could bring up a dialogue box that assigned a corrected word to a given steno definition and then it got written into a job or global .rtf/cre, that would give me so much less grief than I'm currently getting.
Like, say, engspchk finds the word adistributable. I meant to write "attributable". I fix it, either manually or using its alternative-word option, and then type a command that brings up a dialogue reading: "adistributable - steno?". I type "A-/DR-T/-BL" and it gets written into mkk.rtf as "{\*\cxs A/TKRT/-BL}attributable}". That doesn't sound so impossible, does it? Not that I know how I would do it, but it seems like the sort of thing that it should be feasible to do. It would mean the irksome step of manually incorporating the .rtf file into my (proprietary format) .dix dictionary after every session, but that might not be so horrible. I dunno. The bliss of editing every document in Vim seems like it would override the convenience of Eclipse's instant steno-tracking. Now, if I could only teach Vim to read and synchronize steno notes...
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05:56:46 PM,Saturday 22 September 2007
Um, wut? I am quite sure I have never added that word to my dictionary. How utterly bizarre.
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(4)
01:41:06 PM,Saturday 22 September 2007
Today I am grateful for tax lawyers.
Because I would rather feed my own liver to a horde of rampaging wolverines while hitting myself on the head with a soup tureen and singing the collected works of Andrew Lloyd Webber to an assembled company of arms dealers and vacuum cleaner salesmen than ever have that job.
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11:42:46 AM,Wednesday 19 September 2007
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06:33:57 PM,Sunday 16 September 2007
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists is full of lies. Lies!
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03:30:48 PM,Saturday 15 September 2007
We had a ZOMG! pizza last night. It was delicious. I hereby endorse the ZOMG! pizza.
(We ordered a mushroom and olive pizza and then sauted some zucchini with some garlic and put it on top. The exclamation mark came gratis.)
If we had added eggplant it could have been a GOMEZ pizza, but we didn't have any eggplant.
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(44)
11:04:46 AM,Friday 14 September 2007
Stressed out stressed out stressed out.
Last night, had a teacher who spoke extremely softly and extremely quickly, had a lisp, mumbled, used a bunch of proper nouns that I couldn't identify because I still haven't been granted access to the online server where professors put the majority of their program material, trailed off at the end of every sentence, and had a fluent but fairly obfuscatory Indian accent. Torture. I had been brought in, actually, because the sign language interpreters had been utterly stymied. My student said that I'd gotten more than they had, and decided to keep me on for the duration. Then the second half of class was a lecture by an American woman who spoke slowly and clearly and used lots of little words. I nailed it.
Today, had a teacher who spoke up a bit more than the other one but rattled off his thoughts even more quickly, used an enormous amount of technical words and proper nouns that, again, I couldn't identify 'cause I received the course material about ten minutes before the start of class, and had a thick Austrian accent. Tanked it but fierce. Oy, my poor student. He was forgiving, though, and he knows that with proper preparation (and possibly some kind of amplification system) I'll be able to do much better in the weeks to come. Then, heavenly mercy, the lecture in the second half of class was given by an American man who spoke slowly and clearly and used lots of little words. Well, at least I proved that I can actually do the job if given a chance.
It makes a person understand the Xenophobic impulse -- but that's unworthy. I just gotta do what I can and get quicker in a hurry.
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10:52:10 PM,Wednesday 12 September 2007
I once had a cab driver who text-messaged his girlfriend at every red light, and one who had me call his cell phone so he could feel it vibrating while he groped for it under the seat -- at 60 MPH down the New Jersey Expressway. But today I had one who kept shelling peanuts with both hands while steering with his wrists through the Midtown Tunnel and into Long Island City, and somehow it bothered me more than all the negligent drivers I've had in the last three years put together. I mean, you're operating a ton and a half of steel and rubber, you've got dozens of innocent lives in your hands, you're negotiating the streets of the tenth most congested city in the country, and you can't even fork out the extra 30 cents to buy yourself unshelled peanuts?
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(10)
07:30:09 PM,Sunday 9 September 2007
Apparently I get a look on my face when I steno someone's conversation in my head, and apparently my girlfriend doesn't like it. Upon discovering that it's impossible to stroke any word beginning with "Fn" on the steno keyboard, she's taken to wreaking her terrible revenge by inserting the word "Fnord" into her speech at regular intervals. This provokes me. And just recently she's started interpolating Ns into every F in sight. And, as she says, "One doesn't have to travel too fnar afnield to fnind examples of that fnine phnoneme."
{shakes fist in impotent fury}
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(5)
07:46:12 PM,Saturday 8 September 2007
Not a boundary error; just a misremembered dictionary definition.
THE REALITY IS REALLY EMPATHY FOR THEIR POSITION.
came out
THE REALITY IS REALLY EMPATHY FOR THEIR PIGEON.
My student and I had to stare straight ahead and grind our toes into the floor to keep from cracking up and causing a scene. But then I had a fiendish mash-up of Do the Pigeon and Sympathy for the Devil stuck in my head for the rest of the night.
As K. sang when I told her:
"I stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change.
Perched myself on a statue of the czar
and...
that was pretty much it."_
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10:38:38 AM,Friday 7 September 2007
