This Day In History: 04/14
Yesterday I read Grisham's The Brethren, so I'm now caught up on all the Grisham books I missed from my years as an undergrad. The book was surprisingly good, and a little deeper than most of his recent work has been. Grisham uses the device of two disparate stories eventually joining together, which is a nice change of pace from his usual narrative style. This one's definitely worth a read.
There's a Composers' Concert tonight, on which I'll be performing the third edition of Badinage with Rob. It's not really a "new" work per se, but it's always good to have the opportunity for quality recordings of older works. I'm considering putting my other trumpet work, Scarabus on a concert next year. The concert itself is going to be a bloated behemoth, with fifteen composers (seven of which are undergrads, I believe). One composer even has a five movement work on the program. It'll be like watching a double-feature of Ben-Hur and Spartacus but with fewer props.
The power was out in the building this morning, so hopefully that will get taken care of before the concert. I gamely waded into the pitch black confines of the downstairs locker bay and got my trumpet by the wan glow of my trusty watch light for a rehearsal this morning.
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I started working on the new layout for the next edition of the URI! Domain (hereafter called URI-8, because I'm a lazy bastard). It will be much more compact and easier to navigate, and some sections may get the heave-ho. If you visit a particular section of this site frequently, please let me know using the Comments button, and I'll do what I can to keep that particular page around.
The finale of Married by America airs tonight. The front-running wife-to-be is obviously milking the show for all the publicity possible since she's a struggling actress. Taking a look at her web site brings up some nice gems such as:
It's a little old place where he could get together.
Saddam in the house. Everybody in the house say we hate you.
The weekly sex column was written in Ebonics and phony advertisements included a spray that "Kills townies dead"
Yesterday, I found a hair salon/barber shop that does decent cuts for $10 after coupon ($13 for women). It's in the Clock Tower shopping center of Sterling, a ghetto version of the more high class Clock Towers in other cities, so it doesn't get much foot traffic.
I got all the USPS and FedEx components of the new computer yesterday, and I have to go home early again to watch for the UPS guy with the actual computer. It's so hard to drive seven miles home, but I'll grin and bear it.
Yesterday's notable search terms:
naked medic in starcraft, diablo 2 skill chooser, drum majors learning how to conduct, covert pine worm
I bought 28 square yards of red carpet for the guest room yesterday and will be prepping the room for painting tonight. I've also started working on a series of four lunchtime seminars I'll be giving at work on various music topics in August. When not cleaning or working or planning, I'm accumulating over 800 gold in World of Warcraft with a Level 48 character.
Alias is slowly getting better. The first half of the season was too self-contained without enough addictive storylines to keep viewers coming back, but now they're starting to explore some meaty stories which could bring the show back up to its former glory.
Because bullets and stream of consciousness make everything better
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Obama looking at cooling air to fight warming
Tinkering with Earth's climate to chill runaway global warming ? a radical idea once dismissed out of hand ? is being discussed by the White House as a potential emergency option, the president's new science adviser said Wednesday. That's because global warming is happening so rapidly, John Holdren told The Associated Press.
In fact, global warming is occurring so rapidly that the current administration is also investigating its use as a distribution mechanism for the federal stimulus package, as many states are complaining that the money is not arriving fast enough. "We have a very fortuitous overlap," said Holdren, "since the states that do not believe in global warming, like Alaska, are also the states that are refusing to accept the stimulus money." Holdren also mentioned that successful attempts to harness the speed of global warming could ultimately lead to improved response times in clearance background checks, passports, and the time it takes to get from the end of the Blue Line to Metro Center.
His concern is that the United States and other nations won't slow global warming fast enough and that several "tipping points" could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached, such as complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it increases chances of "really intolerable consequences," he said.
To promote consumer awareness, the Nantucket Nectars corporation has trademarked "Summer Sea Ice" and is donating 5% of the profits from their new drink to geoengineering research. They will also be sponsoring cow tipping (point) competitions on college campuses, since explosions of methane are both hilarious and educational.
Twice in a half-hour interview, Holdren compared global warming to being "in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog."
Like all good politicians using bad analogies, Holdren's description of global warming was open-ended enough to be interpreted multiple ways. He did not specify whether we were driving the car towards the base of a cliff, which would probably result in immediate death and dismemberment, or whether we were driving off the top of the cliff, which would assuredly be scary, but would also give us precious seconds to fashion a makeshift global warming parachute out of seat cushions and safety belts.
The 65-year-old physicist is far from alone in taking geoengineering seriously [. . .] At an international meeting of climate scientists last month in Copenhagen, 15 talks dealt with different aspects of geoengineering.
A closer look at the schedule revealed that 7 other sessions discussed the legitimacy of climate science, with an 8th devoted to bad weather jokes like "How many meteorologists does it take to change a lightbulb?1
Holdren, a 1981 winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, outlined these possible geoengineering options:
Although John Holdren insisted that no approaches were off the table, it was discovered that he had already abandoned less promising approaches:
[E]fforts are racing against three tipping points he cited: Earth could be as close as six years away from the loss of Arctic summer sea ice, he said, and that has the potential of altering the climate in unforeseen ways. Other elements that could dramatically speed up climate change include the release of frozen methane from thawing permafrost in Siberia, and more and bigger wildfires worldwide.
In mentioning these possible catastrophes, Holdren inadvertently revealed the Soviet Union's secret Cold War stash of methane bombs, painstakingly created by feeding the populace lentils and beans for over thirty years. Although Khrushchev had hoped for power on the order of Hiroshima, the research was devalued after the bombs "just made people run out of the room", and permanently discontinued after some test subjects merely reported that "it smelled like popcorn".
1: Three -- two to hold the ladder and one to climate.
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It only took a year for the Department of Defense to mea culpa their stance on online music.
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There are no spoilers in these reviews.
Weeds, Season Six:
The sixth season of Weeds is told in the form of a road trip. This injects some freshness and interesting side characters into the mix, but backfires by showing just how boring and used up the main characters have become. There are occasional moments worth laughing about, but overall, the show has just become an excuse to insert gratuitous nudity and sex. Of course, there's nothing wrong with this, but it's not enough to carry the show.
Final Grade: C-
Designing With the Mind in Mind by Jeff Johnson:
User interface books are a dime a dozen, and many of them, like the one used in my undergraduate Design of Information class are uniformly awful. This book manages to be concise and unrepetitive while also offering basic psychological and physiological reasons for various codified rules, which gives it more depth than your average UI book. None of the information here is new, and the book is a little pricey ($50 list), but it's a good refresher/shelf-reference book for UI design.
Final Grade: B
Have you asked me a question yet?
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There are no major spoilers in these reviews.
Sicario (R):
I really liked the intensity of Denis Villeneuve's last movie, Prisoners, which made me give this one a try. The movie does a great job of building a specific mood of dread and is well acted throughout with good shades of grey in the main characters. The plot and overall resolution is less effectiveness, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
Final Grade: B-
Brothers Grimm by Drapht:
This album from yet another Australian hip-hop artist has a few catchy songs like Jimmy Recard. The problem is that his voice starts to turn into white noise if you listen to more than a couple songs in a row. Better in isolation than as an hour-long playlist.
Final Grade: B-
The Cactus Eaters by Dan White:
Rebecca recommended this book to me because she likes travelogues, depressed middle-aged men with internal monologues, and hiking. I enjoyed the writing style and the descriptions of the Pacific Crest Trail, but often got frustrated by the narrator's penchant for doing stupid things or messing up his relationships.
Final Grade: C+
Bosch, Season Two:
If you liked the first season of this show, you'll like the second as well, as it's cut in the exact same mold. It's generally pleasant, but spends a lot of time on transitional scenes and mundane details that don't do much to further the plot. Not much happens for the first four episodes, but the last six are reasonably compelling. Additionally, the balance between the "case of the season" and the long-term mystery behind the murder of Bosch's mother is handled poorly, and it feels jarring every time the plot changes gears to focus on one or the other. Free on Amazon Prime.
Final Grade: B-
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It's time for another Questions Day! Want to get a second opinion on something? Ask anything you want, be it about myself, deeply philosophical music theory, politics, or something you don't understand. Need some recommendations? I'll answer all of your questions next week!
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Introducing the Official Website of Don Maitz!
Don Maitz is a Hugo-winning artist whose artwork has appeared in hundreds of classic fantasy and science-fiction books, including books by Stephen King, Raymond E. Feist, Gene Wolfe, and Michael Moorcock. He is also married to Janny Wurts, whose website I rewrote last summer.
With this makeover, all of my pandemic website projects come to a successful close, just in time for other kinds of new releases at the end of the month!
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