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Omen
Posted 11:39 AM, Dec 31, 2006 |
And so a nasty cold has descended on me, helping me to ring in the new year with a headache, congestion, and chills. This seems a particularly bad omen for 2007.
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Ray
Posted 11:22 PM, Dec 28, 2006 |
(inspired by Hayden Carruth’s “Ray”)
How many people are dressed in
mid-afternoon pajamas, throwing darts,
thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk
and listening to Hayden’s poem
about reading Ray’s book? - that’s what I wondered.
Throwing darts, the flights hanging in the air
from fingertips to cork, the lead sinking
into the soft sponge of board. And how many
were thinking about Ray’s story “Fat,”
the first of Ray’s stories they read,
simply because it was the shortest,
and, after reading more and getting to know
Ray through his stories, the way most people did,
how many had since decided that was a reason
he would have appreciated? I can just imagine
him paging through his own stories and starting
with “Fat,” the same way I had,
and shaking his head and sighing
as if he had just come in from chopping down
a tree that would be used to make
the paper for his next book.
I can just imagine him looking up from “Fat,”
his eyes on my young features,
knowing he was writing
his last few pages, his heart pumping the last
gallons of furious blood in the cold fall
air, the feeling of the ax handle like a ghost
in his fingers, like an infant using his entire
hand to hold his mother’s finger,
and I reread that goddamn story
and it was still good.
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Wine and Chocolates
Posted 9:38 AM, Dec 28, 2006 |
Here’s Wine Spectator’s Top 100 Wines of 2006, for the wine aficionados out there.
Also, here’s a great piece from Dallas Food, some sort of food publication, about Noka chocolate, which sells for anywhere between $309 and $2,080 per pound, depending on the amount and style purchased. Basically, Noka is selling repackaged and remolded chocolate, which isn’t a crime, but something they go to great lengths to obscure and thus justify their incredible markup (equivalent to paying about $40 for a gallon of milk or $300,000 for a Civic Hybrid). I didn’t know anything about Noka chocolate, and prefer Kit Kat bars, anyway, but it still made an excellent read.
I should be working.
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Safe Return
Posted 4:30 PM, Dec 27, 2006 |
I’ve returned to sunny rainy (?!) Los Angeles from snowy Duluth, MN. It was a nice vacation, but I’m glad to be back. I was able to read a couple books on the vacation, which is always good, and enjoyed some fine music as well. Didn’t take more than two photos, and haven’t gotten those off the old camera yet.
There really isn’t much to report right now, other than that I’m back, safe and sound, and just plugging away, trying to get any of various jobs while maintaining some semblance of sanity with my current ones.
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Be Back Later
Posted 11:23 AM, Dec 20, 2006 |
The holiday season is upon us. I’ll be leaving for Duluth tomorrow, and won’t return to Los Angeles and the world of computers until Monday, Christmas Day. Any emails you send me will probably go unread and unanswered until then. This website will probably be dormant until then.
One thing I’m going to work on is a contest from McSweeney’s, which has posted a list of ideas from F. Scott Fitzgerald that he never got around to using. The ideas were culled from a notebook of his, apparently, that he kept while at Princeton.
I’ve got my eye on at least one of the ideas, so maybe I’ll think about that.
I hope you have a good holiday season, you.
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What Do You Do?
Posted 5:12 PM, Dec 18, 2006 |
Q. What do you do when you go to college for 5 years, get the job you thought you wanted, and then find out it isn’t the job you thought it was?
A. Easy. You quit, move to Minneapolis, and stumble into a pretty decent job but one that forced you, daily, to remember that it isn’t what you want to do either.
Q. So then what?
A. I don’t know, you move to California for a lot of reasons, all of them excellent, and that being one of them?
Q. That sounds more like a question. I’ll do the questioning around here, okay?
A. Okay. So you move to California.
Q. Great. But now you’re unemployed, see?
A. I’ll get a part-time job, doing things like the jobs I didn’t really want to do before…
Q. Okay, and then what?
A. …
A mathematics degree seems useful if you want to:
a) teach mathematics, or
b) work for the National Security Agency.
I don’t have any other answers.
I remember being told in college, after asking, “What do math majors do, besides, you know, wear thick glasses and look at their shoes?” (Tangent: Q: How can you tell a mathematician is an extrovert? A: He looks at your shoes when he talks to you.) I was told that, for a lot of employers, just seeing that you’re a math major means that you’re pretty intelligent, that you’re organized, that you’re a logical thinker, a problem solver, etc.
I agree, I have those qualities, and most math majors do. The problem is still twofold:
1) Potential employers don’t seem really interested that those are my personal qualities (or else there are an abundance of math majors here in LA), and
2) I don’t even know who my potential employers are.
If my math degree truly speaks to those wide, varied skills that would arguably be useful in thousands of different jobs, then it seems I have the pick of the litter. I should find companies I want to work for, rather than jobs I want to work at, and find some way to fit into those companies. So who do I want to work for is really the question.
If you’ve got ideas, or, better yet, a job to offer me, please don’t hesitate to let me know.
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Minuetto Op 21, No 12
(3 Note-Misstep Version)
Posted 2:23 PM, Dec 17, 2006 |
Mateo Carcassi makes his return to the charts with this selection, presented here in an exclusive studio outtake.
Minuetto Op 21, No 12 (3 Note-Misstep Version)
Again, I think my skills using Sound Forge are getting a little better, but I still haven’t figured out how to get it to fix wrong notes.
I tried to work, with this piece, on dynamics a little bit, so if things get a little quiet here and there and a little loud here and there, it’s not due to my inelegant sound engineering; rather, it’s music.
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Catch-All
Posted 12:34 AM, Dec 13, 2006 |
Some things I’ve been meaning to catch you up on:
1) Here’s an email from Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak about library funding, something I originally posted (i.e., complained) about here.
2) Because I like to pick on CNN (and they deserve it), the headline to this article is, “Judge to ‘Borat’ frat boys: No suit for you.” The article concerns two fraternity brothers who appeared in Borat making fools of themselves. The brothers requested a block of the DVD release of Borat, and were denied. However, according to the very same article, “A trial date for the lawsuit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages, has not been set.” So they do still have a suit, despite the headline.
2a) Also, (same article), CNN has started featuring “Story Highlights,” which are basically three or four bullet points at the beginning of some “news” stories, in case you’re too busy to read the whole thing. The third bullet in this particular story says, “Hugely successful “Borat” has made more than $120 million.” However, this fact is not even mentioned in the story - highlight indeed.
3) Here’s a little YouTube love: a video made by recutting A Charlie Brown Christmas so all the kids, instead of dancing to whatever they dance to in that holiday program, are instead dancing to Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” It isn’t the best thing I’ve ever seen, and probably won’t be the best thing you’ve ever seen, either.
4) And some more YouTube love: A pretty good acoustic cover of Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” that reveals the boys from Outkast as touchy-feely lyricists. Also instrumental, ha ha, in terms of answering the question of why people post guitar tabs and chord progressions for songs that aren’t played on the guitar; of course, anyone that is talented enough to pull off this kind of cover can probably figure out the chord progression on his or her own.
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Gallery: Lawn Bowling
Posted 12:18 AM, Dec 10, 2006 |
The EC and I have joined the Santa Monica Lawn Bowling Club. On Sunday, the day we’ve been going to bowl, they were hosting a tournament; we aren’t skillful enough to participate, in our estimation, but we did stop by so I could snap some photos of the bowling environment, as well as photos of some ducks that live in the park.
Lawn Bowling
Hopefully we’ll be back at lawn bowling next Sunday, if it ever stops raining in this town.
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The Schmidt Sting Pain Index
Posted 12:24 AM, Dec 8, 2006 |
A trail led me from a recent Straight Dope article attempting to answer the question, “Just how often do bumblebees sting, anyway,” to the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, created by the wasp’s favorite entomologist, Justin O. Schmidt, who intentionally allowed himself to be stung by a wide variety of Hymenopterans just to see how bad it hurt. His Index reads a bit like a description of wines, including phrases like “Light, ephemeral, almost fruity” and “rich and hearty.”
The bullet ant (pictures here and here, not for the insect-fearing reader) busts the scale at 4.0+, and the ant is apparently used in some manhood rituals, in which the ants are knocked unconscious, woven into a sleeve, and then wake up while a teenage boy is wearing the sleeve. The resulting stings temporarily paralyze the youth’s arm, cause it to shake uncontrollably for days, and also make the youth wonder if puberty is really worth it.
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Wordie
Posted 12:31 AM, Dec 6, 2006 |
I’m not much for all those community sites. I have a MySpace page but have never done anything with it, and would delete it if I could remember how to get to it. I don’t have a flickr account. I don’t even like linking to those sites.
But wordie, ah, there’s a site for me. You can make a list of your favorite words. I’m serious. And then other people can look at your list, and you can see people who have the same list as you. You can also make theme lists, like this list of words from songs by The Decemberists.
This may be the dorkiest link I’ve ever posted, and I may get tired of it in a week or so, or maybe not.
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Gallery: Library Trip
Posted 8:56 PM, Dec 4, 2006 |
On a recent (long) walk to the local library, I took some photos. They’re hit or miss, and some of the best ones didn’t turn out, so this is what I came away with. I took a bunch of pictures of doors and gates, and some other things. To wit:
Library Trip
More to come later in the next couple of weeks, hopefully.
I hope you’re enjoying your day, by the way.
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Valse + Trio in E Minor
Posted 9:58 PM, Dec 1, 2006 |
Another classical piece, this one by chart-topper Ferdinando Maria Meinrado Francesco Pascale Rosario Carulli (1770-1841), one of the premier classical guitar composers (along with Mateo Carcassi, whom you’ll remember from this smash single), of the early 1800s. You can find the sheet music for this little waltz here, and a slightly-better engineered audio recording, guitar squeaks and all, right here:
Valse + Trio in E Minor
I managed to remove most of the background hissing noises from this one, including the hissing of the crowd. (Just kidding, there was no crowd.) I also was unable to magically remove any wrong notes. However, I did play this one all the way through without stopping, and this one is not a pastiche of various performances I’ve given over the years. This one runs straight through.
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50 Books
Posted 12:13 PM, Dec 1, 2006 |
Well, despite the fact that I didn’t think I’d make it, after finishing The Nonexistent Night and the Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino, I’ve reached my pseudo-goal of reading 50 books this year. I’ve also read a ton of magazines, from Harper’s to The Atlantic to The New Yorker, and a ton of stuff online. I have never read more material in a single year in my life.
It turns out that being unemployed for a couple months and only half-employed for another couple months leaves one with a lot of free time.
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