Leave it to my dad to cut everyone off at the pass by sending an e-mail out pre-thanking us for our birthday well-wishing. It's definitely the efficient way to go. Happy Birthday!

In the 2003 budget at Virginia Tech, it's been decided to cut the Arts budget by 10-14% across the board. Among the changes initiated by the VT Music Department in response to this was the firing of two new professors, the jazz professor who replaced Chip McNeill this year and the choral director who replaced Kevin Fenton two years ago (Fenton, by the way is now a professor here at FSU). The jazz program was essential kaput last year when Chip left to head the department at Florida International University and took his wife, jazz vocalist Lysanne Lyons, with him, but the choral department was just getting off the ground. Under the new director's supervision, the two original choirs were expanded into three of varying sizes and focuses, with constant tours on the East Coast and Europe, as well as lots of recognition on-campus. By firing this director, the school loses recruits that apply specifically to study with him, destroy the chance of having a choral education or choral conducting program, kill the third choir, and leave the other two in the hands of a performance professor with no specific study in choral conducting. The reason for firing these two? They had the least amount of tenure.

This is one great argument for doing away with the tenure system. Like any respectable university, Tech has its cavalcade of tenured professors past their prime who still sport impressive resumés. They get paid high salaries (sometimes three and four times higher than an associate professor) to lend prestige to the program through their name, and have minimal teaching responsibilities. With smart use of those wasted dollars, I bet the department could not only keep the professors it needs, but also hire another one. Professors who no longer put the interests of their teaching to the fore should not be able to hide behind the protection of tenure -- the reason you save money all your life is so you can retire in peace when you've become useless.

Harsh words, yes, but I bet everyone can name at least one tenured professor from their college careers that no longer gave a damn about teaching, but kept on getting paid until they were gently nudged into retirement. With this one move, Tech's gone from one of the best well-rounded music programs in Virginia to one that's not bad for instrumental education, and all because of tenure.

It's like the Serial approach to Arts Administration -- do evertyhing in accordance with the established rules without caring about the appeal of the outcome.

Happy Birthday Dad and/or Jim Barry!

Yesterday I met with the final member of my committee and emerged unscathed. It looks like everything is order for my defense on Monday, and thankfully I won't have to change a whole lot between now and then. I also have a string quartet sitting on my desk just waiting to be submitted to the string quartet competition which doesn't quite exist.

Kathy is presenting her paper on Metrical Ambiguities in New Wave Music today at 2:30 PM in KMU 204. Stop by for the free food and good times so she can successfully give it at New York University this weekend. Kathy is a child of the eighties and will be thrilled to be back up north participating in "That Eighties Conference" .

The basketballers lost to Happy Hour 62-22 last night. The game was notable because we started with only four members, and all but one had at least one foul before the endgame. Would you believe that I got in a shouting match with stereotypical frat boy who fouled me? It's too bad it didn't come to blows; then I could have tested the presumption that all Asians instinctively know kung fu.

The Oscars, Part III of VI

The Nominees:
Big Fish
Cold Mountain
• Finding Nemo
  House of Sand and Fog
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
  
  What will happen?
  I'll be happy if I never have to hear LotR's minor second motive ever again, and the music in general was good but expected (there's really not much you can do with so many expectations and preconceptions in the genre). Big Fish and Finding Nemo will split the vote in a Nader-Goresque manner, but not on porpoise. Since James Horner has already received eight Oscar nominations, the award will go to Gabriel Yared (who also wrote the music for The Talented Mr. Ripley) and Cold Mountain.

The Nominees:
"Belleville Rendez-vous" in The Triplets of Belleville
• "Into the West" in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
  "A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow" in A Mighty Wind
  "Scarlet Tide" in Cold Mountain
  "You Will Be My Ain True Love" in Cold Mountain
  
  What will happen?
  In the New Zealand travelogue, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, most of the documentary is spent runnning, riding, or hiking east, so I'm not sure why this song is called "Into the West". Voters will no doubt be equally confused and think the song tells about Will Smith fighting a giant spider on a railroad train. A Mighty Wind is not mainstream enough to get voters, and "Belleville Rendez-vous" comes from a cartoon composed of rejected art from The Curse of Monkey Island. The Oscar will go to "Scarlet Tide" because the other song from Cold Mountain can't decide whether it's in Ebonics or Olde English. Ain ain a word!

The Nominees:
The Last Samurai
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
  Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
• Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
  Seabiscuit
  
  What will happen?
  Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World will get a pity Oscar in this category because Russell Crowe might get pissed off and try reciting some more poetry. The Academy fears a pissed off Crowe more than a pissed off Cruise. Seabiscuit will go home with a special award for noun mixing.

The Nominees:

• Finding Nemo
  Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
• Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
  
  What will happen?
  These movies have the ocean and boats in common, though luckily none of them star Kevin Costner with gills. By this point in the broadcast, ABC will be running low on time because they have to say The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World in every category, so they will shave off precious seconds here by awarding the Oscar to Finding Nemo.

Yesterday's notable search terms:

pictures of nickelpedes, the texture and hardness of radium, pictures of the brain working your short-term memory, shumps, how do i get fox jumped over the lazy fog, chicken stand

Happy Birthday Dad and Jim Barry!

Sign Day

After many years of loyal service, the ubiquitous Radiation Warning Sign (seen on everything from Doc Brown's stolen Plutonium to the small print on Hot Pockets sleeves) has been updated. Five years of focus groups in eleven different countries led the International Atomic Energy Agency to the underwhelming design shown below. Of particular note was their preschooler focus group that said yellow was for caution and red was for dead .

Apparently, people thought the original sign just meant "radiation is here", much like the "George Washington slept here" signs that dot the Virginia landscape. Scientists really felt that they needed a more intimidating sign so people would take the tooth-losing, gonad-shriveling effects of radioactivity seriously. However, the problem with making signs more complex is that they are also more likely to be misinterpreted or confusing. For a native stumbling upon an illicit nuclear power plant erected in an unregulated third-world country, it is not necessarily apparent which of the following is the actual message of the sign:

1. Radiation will kill you, so run away as fast as you can.
2. Thibi, the Red Jack-o-Lantern God, decrees that death is inevitable so don't try and run away.
3. Radiation will remove all the skin from your head.
4. Radiation will impregnate you if you are a pirate.

(Obviously, #4 is the intended message of the IAEA).

The more general problem here is that you cannot trust focus groups and the public to offer good feedback on design issues, as seen from last month's public contest for a warning sign for nanotechnology labs . Here are some of the entries that will definitely be among the finalists, if only becauses they are so obviously related to nanotechnology:

Warning! Sesame Street airing soon	Watch for X-treme Croquet Players	Warning! Spirograph users out of control
Beware Volkswagen Mechanics	Jewish Travel Agency	Warning! Very Small Baseballs
Elderly Nanoparticle X-ing	Keep Hands Away from Ray Gun	Not All Puzzle Pieces Will Be Used
BLAME THE COOTIE CATCHER	Warning! Chicken Wire Not an Effective Bong Material	Warning! Very Small Genitalia
Warning! Fat People in Greenland, Peru, and New Zealand are Breaking the Earth	Watch for Falling Triforce	Short People Are More Dangerous Than They Appear
	Beware of, you know, things. And stuff.

Happy Birthday Dad and Jim Barry!

Newsday Tuesday

Plan for Telescopes on Moon's Far Side Is Revived

With NASA planning to send astronauts back to the moon sometime after 2019, those dreams of a radio telescope looking out through the galaxies from the protected side of the moon have been revived. The agency recently awarded two planning grants for research on the necessary technologies and on how to put them in place.

Long time readers of the URI! Zone will recall that I'm not a big fan of my taxes going to fund NASA , because I'm all about cost-effective ventures. I personally believe that it would be more cost-effective to purchase twelve tons of pure Columbian cocaine and dump it all on the Donglingshan Mountains as fake snow to make people believe that Beijing is an environmental paradise without a hint of pollution for the Summer Olympics, than it would be to fund space exploration. Unless there are an alien collection of talking cows and other strangely anthropomorphic barnyard animals living on the far side of the moon, it's not worth our time (especially since the official illustration looks like we're going to impregnate the Moon and make a bunch of little baby moons. Ew. Did I say ew? I meant Io).

The early prototypes would not be able to gaze far into the past but could be useful for studying space weather, especially the enormous and powerful solar eruptions called coronal mass ejections.

In 1993, the US Government also gave $3 million to a research team to discover if rabbits that smoked pot were more susceptible to syphillis. We might as well throw away the telescope grant in a similar fashion -- perhaps a study of Coronal mass erections (which is, of course, impotence caused by too much alcohol in college-age fraternity brothers).

"One of the issues at the meeting was that if NASA is going back to the moon, what would we like to do there?" Smith said. "The astrophysicist group made their proposal to look at the very early universe, and that got a lot of support."

The quotation above is factually incorrect since it implies that we actually made it to the Moon at some point in the past , but more damaging is the idea that we're looking for bigger things to do when we can barely keep a space shuttle afloat as it is . We can't even land a probe on the BRIGHT side of Mars without busting it -- how much better luck would we have parallel parking in a place that's permadark and then offloading a cargo of highly fragile and expensive telescopes?

One possible solution would be to fire a probe at a glancing angle to the moon, effectively moving the dark side 180 degrees for long enough to erect some telescopes in the daylight. NASA is pretty good at attacking celestial bodies with probes so the success rate of this operation has immediately gone up by a factor of 1.04.

The bottom line here is that I want my tax money to go towards a useful program, like building bridges in Alaska or corrupting the Diebold machines so McCain loses the election. The only acceptable source of revenue for a project like this would be the tolls from Virginia's forthcoming HOT Lanes which will tax stupid people who don't realize that every single road in the area eventually ends in a teensy tiny congestion-causing bridge that even Tylenol Cold and Flu couldn't cure.

I would even send my tax dollars to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which recently brought in P.R. experts from the Disney corporation to teach doctors and nurses how to improve customer service .

A video montage of Disney-related images, ranging from Mary Poppins to Pirates of the Caribbean to Hannah Montana, followed. It was meant to demonstrate the sheer expanse of the Disney empire.

Not everyone in the crowd looked impressed.

Disney representatives later caveated their inspirational speeches by confirming that if a mermaid suddenly turned into a human, there wouldn't really be clothing that magically appeared over her naughty bits, and that "Fantasia was a crappy mistake that should not be treated as part of the standard Disney mythos and canon".

Happy Birthday Dad and Jim Barry!

Weird Search Day

or "How I Stumbled Upon the URI! Zone"

jennifer garner wearing waders

After retiring from the Hollywood scene several years ago, Jennifer Garner returned to idyllic West Virginia where she taught Ben Affleck how to fly fish.

shadiest muppet

The shadiest muppet is defintely Lew Zealand. The mustache is obviously fake, he's dressed like a dandy and he caught a fish without wearing any waders. He's obviously up to no good.

free sexy female wrestling catfighting spandex pics

blood elf nude with mana wyrm

I'll leave the "nude" part to the imagination, but I would imagine that you'd probably want to be wearing some armor when fighting a mana wyrm.

Happy Birthday to my Dad and Jim Barry!

Friday Fragments

it's the frickin' Wiccan baby

♠ Happy Birthday to my Dad, who turns 65 right today! In one more year he can start draining the social security tanks of imaginary cash, in a similar manner to the way that the IRS taxes poor people.

♠ I haven't counted as a poor person since my $4.80/hr Computer Science internship at PEPCO years ago, and it's especially noticeable now that I get to participate in that whole "joint filing" scam (which could also be a method of torture on 24). Maybe I'll use some of the tax refund for the greater good, like research into richer steak cows or Performing Arts in public schools except for orchestra, choir, drama, and guitar lab.

♠ Everyone on Facebook is constantly in a tizzy about the constant cuts to music programs, but there's at least one upside to cutting funding: if no more musicians are trained, that translates into major job security for musicians of my generation. Maybe those trumpet players will actually get gigs in ten years when all the old first chairs relinquish their thrones. At least they can't get tenure.

♠ It would be fun to introduce the concept of tenure in everyday jobs. I can picture the minimum wage burger flipper secure in the knowledge that he'll always have the job, based on his controversial paper on eating stuff.

♠ Speaking of eating stuff, Rebecca's website, has temporarily surfaced from lack-of-updates land (where the rest of my blogger friends like to hide) with new updates. Unfortunately, "Guys Eating Stuff" doesn't fit into the new smaller width of the Bloglog, so I call it "Guys Eating". Should someone's name appear below it, you can rest assured that it is not a cannibalism site.

♠ Plans for the weekend include periods of work, an Indian Food night, and a dinner to celebrate my dad's birthday. I'll also need to pack a few bags for Puerto Rico and get ready for the mosh pit that will likely form at the Muse concert on Monday.

♠ Have a great weekend!

Weird Habit Day

Last year, I revealed that the "Carnival of Venice" starts playing in my head without fail every night before I go to bed, not unlike an accelerated performance schedule of the Legwarmers at the State Theater. However, it's not the only one. Another such song that pops into my head without hesitation is a pep band song I wrote in 1997 called "Giblets".

I've never even actually heard this song performed by a band that wasn't brought to you by the Roland Sound Canvas, so I don't know how it has such lasting power.

When I'm running around a track and my mind starts to wander, inevitably "Little Boy Sweet" from the movie Vacation will creep into my brain. I watched that movie many times before the age of 8, but never again until just last year.

I don't see any connection between the various songs, but maybe if I play them all at the same time, the door to a treasure trove will open up. Or, my brain will explode.

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Treme, Season Four:
This abbreviated final season was well done, but ultimately pointless. Although it gives the characters a nice send-off and wrap-up, it doesn't do much more than the similar wrap-up of Season Three, which could have (and probably should have) functioned as the series finale. Overall, the first season was probably the best, and could be watched in isolation.

Final Grade: C

Guardians of the Galaxy (PG-13):
Although we turned this off after an hour originally, I did go back to finish it on my own, because legitimate Internet reviewers like myself adhere to a high code of reviewing conduct. This movie was not as good as everyone said it would be. Sure, there were a few funny jokes here and there, but the rest of the movie felt like setup for those few jokes. Most of the movie is spent with the main characters running around SHOUTING lines of dialogue like super heroes while chasing random artifacts through realms of poorly acted supporting characters.

Final Grade: C-

Uptown Special by Mark Ronson:
As a longtime fan of Mark Ronson, this album was pretty disappointing. Uptown Funk is Ronson at his best, and it's nice that he's getting a lot new fans from this being played ad nauseum on American radio. Feel Right (not safe for work) is bubbling over with energy and feels like a track from the movie, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. However, the rest of the album is forgettable, with a bunch of minimally exciting B-sides and weak supporting artist performances.

Final Grade: C+

Better Call Saul, Pilot Episode:
I didn't expect this to be anything more than a derivative valentine to Breaking Bad, but was unexpectedly impressed. The pilot manages to have its own style and themes, and while a little Breaking Bad knowledge is nice, this show looks like it'll be enjoyable on its own merits. The pilot is free on Amazon Prime, although we'll be waiting for the whole season to come out before we watch any more.

Final Grade: A-

End-of-the-Month Highlights Day

New photos have been added to the Life, 2016 album.

• Events
  • Finally saw Star Wars on S 2/6.
  
  
  • Rebecca became a yoga teacher while I went to a Wilmer Super Bowl party on S 2/7.
  
  
  • Went to a yoga-friend going away lunch on S 2/13.
  
  
  • Iced in for a couple days on M 2/15 - T 2/16.
  
  
  • Visited friends in Fredericksburg and Colonial Beach on S 2/20, hopefully starting a monthly tradition.
  
  
  • Planning to have a birthday dinner with my parents on S 2/28.


• Projects
  • Had a productive distraction-free month of Python coding at work, free of proposals.
  
  
  • Bounced around between several new personal project ideas, including working with the Amazon Lumberyard game engine and writing a mapping web application using local open source data, before finally settling on a new project related to Apache Spark.


• Consumerism
  • Enjoying the final season of Justified.
  
  
  • Finally burned out on Fallout 4, and am now playing the closed beta for Overwatch.

February's Final Grade: B+, a pleasant month with nice amounts of snow that went by surprisingly fast in spite of the extra leap day.

List Day: 10 Thoughts About Malls

based on highly scientific research from my twice-a-week walk with Maia at the Dulles Town Center

1. I never hung out at the mall when I was a teen. It was always a highly directed visit to Electronic Boutique or Babbages for a specific item and then back home. So, I have no sentimental attachment to the mall.


2. The malls are dying and I see no good way to restore them to commercial viability without gutting them and adding more regularly-used community space or residential space. When I visit during a weekday, there are always more people "working" than shopping.


3. If I were a high school student today and told to get a job, there isn't a more cushy job I can think of than a minimum wage mall job where you can sit on your phone for hours while no one enters your store.


4. I want more people to go to the mall to increase its commercial viability, just not when I'm there at the same time. When I got there last Monday and realized it was a federal holiday, I almost turned around. For some reason, people actually buy things at JC Penney's during a President's Day sale even when the dollar value has not actually changed.


5. I thought malls were boring as a kid because the stores were geared towards the people with money. Now I'm old and have money and the stores are still boring and not intended for me.


6. Dulles Stores that cater to me: Books a Million (in spite of its deceptive "bargain bins" out front), Mind Games, and Popeyes. Runner-up: Gamespot, except the games are all hidden behind refurbished hardware and ugly collectible dolls so it's really just "Spot".


7. Most frequented Dulles stores by other people: Starbucks and Chick-fil-a.


8. Least frequented Dulles stores by other people: the African store run by the old white hippie and the store where you can repair your cracked phone screen or buy a pastel phone cover. Clearly, they're money laundering fronts.


9. There's not a thing in any of the Dulles anchor stores that interests me. Macy's and Lord & Taylor seem to be the same inventory with different names. Nordstrom's is dead, but its whitewalled entrance provides a quiet non-trafficked corner where I can stand with Maia and not get bumped into while I wait for her nap to end.


10. Sears needs to finish dying already. I remember buying all of my paint in the early days of homeownership from the paint lady at Sears who knew everything about paint until she got yelled at by her boss for taking too long with me and not cycling through the 8 other departments that still had the lights on. Today, the paint department is 4 rows of empty shelves next to an old stand of Christmas trees.

Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

The Witcher, Season One:
I doubt Netflix's claim that this is the most watched show on their network, because it's really not put together very well. The season acts as an extended prologue featuring the origin stories of three main characters with unnecessarily divergent timelines. At least one character is treading water in any given episode, and there's rarely a hint of any overarching reason to bother watching more. The show tightens up by episode 5 (of 8), but most people will have checked out by then. The 7th episode is the strongest while the finale drops the ball by featuring a Game-of-Thrones-esque battle scene with no reason to care about it.

There's also an overwhelming amount of nudity to cover for the lack of plot progression, which is fine -- but if your story's not strong enough to stand on its own, maybe you could improve it instead of distracting the audience. Free on Netflix.

Final Grade: C-

Good Girls, Season Two:
There's a nice arc to this second season about suburban moms turned criminals but it's unevenly paced. A few episodes in the middle had weird time progressions that made me feel like I had missed key scenes of character development somewhere. Some of the same tropes that were already mined in Season One are hit again here. Overall, it remains a fun show to watch and forget about immediately. Free on Netflix.

Final Grade: B-

Bo Burnham: what.:
Bo Burnham's first one-man act / comedy show is mildly funny and over before it reaches the "annoying" point. A few weeks after watching, however, I remember nothing about it -- none of the jokes had any lasting power. Free on Netflix.

Final Grade: C+

InvisiPure Sky Ultrasonic Cool Mist Humidifier:
The problem with humidifiers is that they die on a regular cycle, during which the company making them has changed its name and tweaked one single feature or model number to make it impossible to do any comparison. This humidifier took the place of one that lasted an unusually long time -- 3 winters. It's fine and it works, but is very cumbersome to refill (especially since the rectangular shape prevents it from being filled in a normal bathroom sink). It also loses points for using blue LEDs as a nightlight (with two settings: BLUE and BLUUUUUUEEEEE).

Final Grade: B-

End-of-the-Month Highlights Day

New photos have been added to the Life, 2021 album.

• Events
  • Snow continued to fall gently through T 2/2.
  
  
  • Got rid of our pool table on H 2/4.
  
  
  • Mask visit to the Smiths on S 2/6.
  
  
  • More snow on S 2/7.
  
  
  • Rebecca started working Saturday afternoons at the Inova vaccine clinic on S 2/13 during an ice storm.
  
  
  • Maia switched to the 2.5 hour pre-pre-school class on W 2/17.
  
  
  • My mom got her 2nd vaccine shot on W 2/17.
  
  
  • More snow on H 2/18.
  
  
  • My dad got his 2nd vaccine shot on S 2/20.
  
  
  • Farm visit with the Uri grandparents on T 2/23.
  
  
  • Backyard visit with Rebecca's parents on a warm W 2/24.
  
  
  • Basement visit with the Smiths on S 2/28.


• Projects
  • Finished a rewrite of the Interactive Map of Paravia on T 2/2.
  
  
  • Launched the new Janny Wurts Official Forum on S 2/6.


• Consumerism
  • Enjoyed watching Vice Principals, Truth Seekers, and Lupin this month.
  
  
  • No new music or games this month.

February's Final Grade: B, Cold but moved fast.

Wildlife Cam Day

The 12 best shots from over 2600 captures, November 2023 - February 2024

Most Common Captures:

• Squirrel going up tree
• Squirrel going down tree
• Deer family milling around
• Stark winter shadows moving across the ground
• Our butts