Some of the recent pieces on the Listening Exam list I've enjoyed so far: Josquin's Pange lingua mass, Franck's Piece heroique, Smetana's Die Moldau, Debussy's Preludes (Book I), Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini, Ravel's String Quartet, Prokofiev's Piano Concerto 3 and Sonata 7

"Not so much...": Ligeti's Continuum, Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children, Berg's _____, Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, Monteverdi's Coronation of Poppaea

We played a Sochinski arrangement of Moldau on the marching band field in 1997. It's amazing how effective that arrangement was, when the original is such a lyrical and romantic tone poem.

I finally got around to trying out Kazaa, one of the many peer-to-peer network clients floating around since the demise of Napster. I never used Kazaa originally since the real version is loaded down with spyware, and since then, I haven't had a stable enough connection to download anything. Kazaa Lite is crazily effective, and a five year old could probably figure out how to run it. If I didn't already own seven thousand CDs, I'd probably use it all the time.

Poll Results

www.urirealm.com:	4
www.uricountry.com:	0
www.urijungle.com:	2
www.uriuriuri.com:	11
www.urizoo.net:	9
www.urizone.net:	12

www.jungleuri.com (duddle-a duddut, duddle-a duddut):	2
www.superuri.net:	2

Each primary vote was given two points, and each second choice was given one point. At this point, I'm leaning towards www.urizone.net. urirealm is odd-sounding, uricountry sounds like a Disney theme park set in Texas, urijungle and urizoo are odd-looking, and uriuriuri is long and hard to type fluently. I will probably be purchasing the domain name sometime this week, so feel free to write in if you want to try and sway my vote to another domain name.

When I've purchased a domain name and a web host, this site will finally move off of the Virginia Tech servers and you won't have to remember the extended web address anymore. There will also be bonus features like a forum, news comments, and online polls.

The trip to Tech was fun and exciting. I'll probably post a travelogue tomorrow, to compel me to update more regularly.

I was cleaning out a file cabinet yesterday and noticed that since 2000, I've ordered from Amazon.com 43 times and from EBGames.com 15 times. Probably all useless crap that I don't really need.

Every Entry Gets a Title This Week

Last weekend, I got the first e-mail about my ten-year high-school reunion from our slacker-assed Class President, Mike Sharp. If I recall correctly, we actually had co-Presidents, the black girl (Tori) and the white guy (see above), so as to make sure that no one felt underrepresented. This was because we came from a high school that was ever so equal opportunity (a euphemism for "70% Black, 20% Hispanic, 9% White, with special guest star, BU, as the Token Asian #1"). So, Mike got to be the white President and dance with hot chicks (as seen in Figure A) and everyone in the world was complacent¹.

I have mixed feelings about attending a reunion and mingling with people I haven't seen in ten years, who are definitely not the same people they were back then. Everyone changes, and usually for the better, but after the standard "How are you? It's been a long time. What have you been up to since high school?" part, there's really nothing else to do but fall back on the old "Remember that time when...?" trick. This is great if, to you, high school was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but otherwise, not so much. I never find myself yearning to be back in high school, because most of the years were not particularly memorable or enjoyable. Though senior year was tons o' fun, with Mrs. Buckbee's English class , Mr. Esformes' passionate diatribes about the state of the government to disinterested kids who probably weren't planning on graduating, and that Carl Halmo guy running around saying "Fish Fingers" for some strange reason only he knows, I don't really need to relive the rest of it.

They say you should go if only to laugh at the former rising stars who ended up crashing and burning, doomed to spend the rest of their days working the fry station as a double amputee after a particularly harrowing college accident involving Forty Friday and a wheat thresher. Honestly though, I don't think that any of the people I once knew would have fallen so far. I also never had any grudges or nemeses back then, so the news that anyone's fallen on hard times today would just be a disappointment, lacking in the vengeful glee department. I fully expect to go back and just see that people have moved farther along their timelines with no drastic surprises like sex changes or public offices, and as far as I know, no one has died (besides the girl I knew in junior high who was murdered a couple years ago).

When I was in high school I was not popular at all, but I was very well-known. Being well-known opened just enough social doors so I could have a foot in every caste: I was a band geek from being drum major and playing trumpet, I did indoor track which gave me that HARDCORE ATHLETE!! persona, I did Crew which let me hang out with all the rich kids (despite having gone to the wrong junior high), and I made fun little games on my calculator which surrounded me with a bunch of guys who kept telling me I should write MODs, whatever that was. There was also a sect of the drama department that worshipped me for reasons beyond human understanding. They created a "Purple Platypus Club" which idolized me and then gave me a Beanie Baby platypus as a present (That was a little peculiar, but I still have the platypus on a basement shelf). What this means for a reunion is that I'd be able to recognize and chat with tons of people, but really wouldn't have any deep memorable experiences to share with most of them.

When all is said and done, I'll probably end up going, if only to say that I did. That's the reason I do a lot of things!

¹: Apparently the Hispanics were not represented and no one cared, not even them. Vote for Pedro.

Yesterday's search terms:
lionel kiddie city turn frown upside down, ruby tuesday mp3 free download, an essay on persuit of peace in kashmir

Collage Cheese

This is the only collage I ever made as a budding teen artist, and it was made completely under duress. Stemming, perhaps, from the fact that I am far too right-brained for my own good, I always considered collages to be the useless stepchild of the art family, lacking in originality, purpose, or artistic merit.

It's bad enough that making a collage entails taking the detritus of human existence and gluing or stapling it to construction paper with a few strands of wasted macaroni that would be better served up with some Velveeta Cheese. What's worse is that every time a school teacher assigns a collage, there's always some deep psychological mindset instilled upon the students to make it seem more important than it really is. In the case of the above example, the assignment was "make a collage that expresses who you really are".

Most teenagers are incapable of expressing that idea in written or spoken words, so how could they possibly do it with a cutout of a Chanel perfume ad featuring a cowboy, and a low-boobied African tribeswoman from a 1983 edition of National Geographic? The process is only saved by the hilarously painful process at the end where students have to describe their collages to the class. Inevitably, every student says something literal, akin to "this up here is an apple, and I put it in because I like fruit".

I now open the floor up to the future armchair psychiatrists of America. Feel free to analyze me, my thoughts, my wants, and my needs based on this collage!

Museday Tuesday

As part of this feature, which I started in 2007, I compose a very brief work (under 30 seconds) inspired by a randomly generated title from an online word generator. The composition can be for any instrumentation, and could even be a purely synthesized realization that might not be possible to perform in the real world.

I work on the excerpt continuously for an hour and then post whatever I've managed to complete, even if it's a poorly constructed slum of a song supported by a foundation of droning double stops and abused tubas.

Mendacious: (adj.) Dishonest; lying; untruthful

This excerpt is a bass clarinet solo, backed up by guitar and percussion, since the bass clarinet is easily the shadiest of the woodwind instruments.

Memory Day: Snapshots

When I was a child, I never received any Christmas presents. My sister got them all. Life was horribly unfair, as was the creator of that carpet.

Mashup Day: Doogie Howsereen, M.D.

Have you ever been sifting through your extensive music collection in search of Halloween music and stumbled across the theme from the Halloween movies? Did you then lament the fact that no one had ever made a mashup combining it with the theme from Doogie Howser, M.D.? Happens to me all of the time.

• Listen to Doogie Howsereen, M.D. (2:00 MP3)

This is why people with otherwise useless music degrees are an integral slipknot in the weave of today's society.

Weekend Wrap-up

This weekend was the wedding of Carolyn and Luke. Because the wedding was in DC, we embarked on a Silver Line odyssey which took 25 minutes longer than planned once the train started "pausing" at each station because of single-tracking somewhere further down the line. After a brisk nine block walk down F street, we made it to the church with less than 2 minutes to spare and were not the last people to slip inside.

Following the ceremony at 3 PM at Holy Rosary, we dawdled in a Corner Bakery with Annie, Returned Mike, Mar, and her Mike for the gap period until the Cocktail Hour began. The food was plentiful and the bar was open, and everything seemed to go off without a hitch. I had the steak while Rebecca had the salmon, but tragically there was so much that I couldn't even finish.

We left around 10 and got all of the way home just after midnight. The ride back was uneventful although it's always fun to see how many people are still sleeping on the train at Wiehle while the conductor flashes the lights and plays various air raid sirens to get everyone out.

Sunday was a quiet day. Rebecca packed for a trip to Yogaville (which is a real thing) while I hit level 25 in ESO and finished Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn.

How was your weekend?

Memory Day: 1985

I continued to kill it in kindergarten in 1985 (at the age of 5) as shown in the progress report below, where I had Mastered everything.

In fact, the only low grade I had was in my first quarter under "Recognizes pennies and nickels", a skill that is no longer necessary in today's societies. I don't put too much weight in this grade anyways, as it's inconsistent with the final category, "Copes with change", which I got an M in.

I continued to play with He-Man and Transformer action figures and my favorite gum was Juicy Fruit. Unfortunately, we only kept Doublemint in the house, and getting some Juicy Fruit was a matter of pleading with my dad in the grocery store (and he rarely caved).

At this time, my dad's hardware store of choice was Hechinger's. He took us regularly to the one on Duke Street and left us in the doorbell aisle while he bought miscellaneous screws and pipes. One time, I knocked over a glass light fixture dome on the bottom shelf while reaching for the doorbells and a customer angrily asked where my parents were and why I wasn't supervised. He ran off to get a store worker while I frantically found my dad and fled the store. I would not return for a year and a half, worried that my picture would be up on the wall by the door and I would get arrested immediately.

In the fall, I turned 6 and started first grade at James K. Polk Elementary school. Since it was right up the street, we switched from our family babysitter to before-school and after-school day care. The day care workers were not particularly skilled -- on the first day, there were two kids crying and the workers split me and my sister up to play with the cryers. The result was four crying kids instead of two. Still, day care was worth it for the wooden floor hockey table that you could play with using a checker and pencils. I enjoyed playing with this so much that I had my dad build one from scratch so we could have one at home.

My first grade teacher was Mrs. McClung, and she had a small board with the numbers 1 to 100 hung on it. I could post all of the numbers in order in record time, so it was my assigned job to reset the board every afternoon if the other kids had knocked the numbers off.

First grade was also the time period I started playing text adventure games, after my parents picked up Zork I at the Seven Corners Mall. This greatly increased my vocabulary (at least with imperative phrases consisting of one verb and one noun) and led me to search for games to play at school, but they only had the weird and pointless Gertrude's Secrets on their Commodore 64s.

Here's a picture of our family at Christmas time, where my yearly loot stash was gradually evolving from action figures to computer games.

Other posts in this series: 1979 | 1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984 | 1985 | 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1990 - 1991 | 1991 - 1992 | 1992 - 1993

Weird Search Day

or "How I Stumbled Upon the URI! Zone"

• rasputin sex tuba
  Let's pretend that the user didn't just misspell the word "tube". More likely, this is some adventurous sex position popularized by Grigori Rasputin involving his apocryphal giant penis.


• vintage rottweiller figurines with signature on bottom
  
  Historians say that the artist went into politics after being rejected from art school twice.


• hole "dig deeply"
  This sounds like the eHow Wiki instructions for digging a hole.
  1. Locate a plot of ground where you suspect there may be a concealed hole.
  2. With your shovel, dig deeply to remove excess dirt until you can see a hole.


• images of woman atacked by syphillis
  


• sexual intercourse illustrated
  I bet this magazine has a killer swimsuit edition.

List Day: 10 Things I Did on Staycation

1. Fall super-cleaning of the whole house.


2. Rearranged two bedrooms.


3. Moved a file cabinet full of 24 years of life's detritus into the basement.


4. Repaired a broken sink pivot bar.


5. Fixed a leaky tub cartridge.


6. Hung new pictures on the walls.


7. Ordered out for dinner 4 times.


8. Solved 19 puzzles in Puzzle Boat 7.


9. Started and finished the book, Long Light.


10. Unraveled 0 new streamers in Paper Mario: Origami King because there are too many random battles slowing down progression.

Memory Day: Snapshots

This picture was taken 8 years ago today, on October 19, 2014.

We were on a weeklong trip to Seattle and Olympic National Park. On this particular day, we opened with a trip to Pike's Market, the Space Needle, and an obligatory Chihuly exhibit. An afternoon nap later, we drove to Fremont to visit with Mollie and Hillel, Rebecca's college friends whose wedding we also attended in 2010. We hit a Seattle brewery, had dinner in a Turkish restaurant, and then went back to Mollie and Hillel's house to hang out with 3 cats and a dog.

This picture was taken across from the brewery under the Aurora Bridge. I still have the scar from my Outer Banks pool accident the month before, and it thankfully faded permanently after another year or so.