Author: Laura Conrad

Before Midnight

One of my reactions to this
movie was, “They’re 41 and they think that’s
midnight?” But maybe there will be another one, when
they’re really old, like 61, that will be After Midnight.

If you liked Before
Sunset and Before
Sunrise, you’ll like this one, too. It might even be a little
bit better than the others, as the actors and maybe other crew
members have learned things.

They’re all the story of a couple who meet on a train when
they’re in their early twenties in the first movie, meet again in
their thirties in the second movie, and have an emotional day
together as a married couple in their forties. They’re all very
conversational, like some of the Eric Rohmer ones from the 60’s.
(Ma nuit chez Maude was the one I discovered.)

There are three major scenes — one between Ethan Hawkes and
his son by his first marriage, whom he’s putting on a plane to
go back to his mother; one at the dinner table among the writers
and their wives and children who’ve been spending the summer
together in Greece; and a very long one between the couple, who
have been given a night together in a hotel without the
children, and with a bottle of good wine. They’re all really
pretty interesting, and the couple manage to be both very angry
and very attractive in the way we want romantic movies to show us.


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Wave for Android

[tenor serpent mouthpiece]
Tenor serpent mouthpiece by Sam Goble.

Yesterday, I got a new
mouthpiece for my tenor serpent.

The website says, “My mouthpiece dramatically improves the
tuning and makes the sound more direct and precise.” After a
day of fiddling with it, I agree about the sound, but I’m not
yet sure about the tuning. Sam warned me when he shipped it
that I would have to add some dental floss. Sure enough, as it
came from the box, it’s quite sharp, so I added dental floss so
that it wouldn’t go as far into the bocal, and then it was
flat.

So one of the things I spent a lot of time doing today was
playing tenor serpent notes into a tuner. I was originally
using the gstrings
tuner on my android phone. But it’s been telling me from time to
time that it has been superceded by something newer and better,
so I decided to look into that. The reviews complained a lot
about some features that were missing in the new version, called
waves,
but enough people thought there were improvements, that I
decided to try it.

Sure enough, the tuning is much better. Gstrings was
occasionally picking up the wrong overtone, so I would be
playing a possibly out of tune E, and it would be telling me I
was playing A. It doesn’t look like Waves ever does that.

The missing feature is that if you’re asking it to play a note
for you, you can’t at the moment specify the
octave that the note comes out in. Gstrings would let you do
that, but if you didn’t have a speaker plugged in, the bass
notes were practically inaudible, so you were better off with
the octave it picked anyway. I did think about plugging the
phone into a speaker, but didn’t get around to it.

In any case, getting Waves doesn’t remove Gstrings, so if you
really want to do that, you still can.

One of the reasons to get a smartphone is to replace all the
little standalone electronic gadgets. I’ve had some problems
with things like a pedometer, which works, but drains the
battery too much to be usable. I’d say the phone does replace a standalone tuner pretty well.

Maddaddam

This
book is billed as book three of a trilogy, but I understand
book four is already out in the UK.

LIke the first two books, it takes place in a near-future
dystopia where most of the human race has been wiped out by a
genetically engineered plague. I found it a little easier reading
than the others, partly because we’ve already met most
of the main characters. Also because the point of view stays
pretty focused on Toby, who is one of the easier characters to
identify with.

The descriptions of post-apocalyptic survival strategies are
quite interesting. For instance, figuring out what to do with
kudzu is one of their problems. There’s also a long discussion of
what you can and can’t still find in drugstores.

I wouldn’t say to start with this one, but if you’ve tried the
others and found them heavy going, you may like this one better.


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Ancient Greek Music

[Greek Musicians]
The instruments used – such as lyre and reed-pipes – are known from, paintings and archaeological remains, such as this illustration from The Odyssey by Homer.

This
article is about a scholar who claims to be able to decode an
ancient greek music notation. I can’t tell from the article what
he really did, but you will enjoy listening to the recreation of
the music.

My man won!

I was at the polls all day, so that’s why I haven’t posted yet,
but this gives me a chance to tell you what happened.

The results are preliminary, which means they don’t include
anything that has to be hand counted. In the case of the precinct
I worked at, that’s about 50 out of about 600 total ballots.

But preliminary
results are that four challengers have been elected, including
Dennis Carlone, whom I supported.

The Affordable Care Act and me

I tested healthcare.gov on the morning of October 1, before
I’d read any news stories about the problems,
and it worked fine for my purposes. This is because I live in
Massachusetts, so all I needed was a pointer to the Mass site,
where I wasn’t at that time able to find out my options, but I was
able to read a couple of articles about what was likely to change
for me.

Since then I’ve gotten two communications from my insurance
company. One was a “magazine” with an article stating that
everyone would have to go on the health care exchange because all
the current policies were ending on December 31. This was a
little alarming, but I decided to ignore it until the deadline was
closer.

A week or so later, I got a letter addressed to me personally,
informing me that I did not have to do anything to keep
my current coverage — that if I did nothing my current plan would
be replaced by one with a different name, which would be no more
expensive and might have better coverage. So I only needed to
shop for a new plan if I didn’t like the current one.

I still don’t have the details about the new plan, but since
I’m quite happy with the old plan, I’m not worried about it.

But I’m glad I’m not in a state where I have to depend on
healthcare.gov to find out my options. Apparently the decision to
make shopping impossible without registration was made about a
week before the site went live, and it was known before October 1
that registration didn’t work in major ways.

Daylight Savings leaves again

[map of time zone proposal]
Proposed time zones.

I live in the eastern part of my time zone, so the end of
daylight savings always means that it’s dark when people leave work.
This
article wins this year’s prize for best complaint about
daylight savings time.

Here’s part of the argument:

Daylight saving time ends Nov. 3, setting off an annual ritual where Americans (who don’t live in Arizona or Hawaii) and residents of 78 other countries including Canada (but not Saskatchewan), most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand turn their clocks back one hour. It’s a controversial practice that became popular in the 1970s with the intent of conserving energy. The fall time change feels particularly hard because we lose another hour of evening daylight, just as the days grow shorter. It also creates confusion because countries that observe daylight saving change their clocks on different days.

I missed a Sunday afternoon train in Brussels once because it
didn’t occur to me to think about whether they changed time. But
the real point of the article is that not only should a given
place not change time twice a year, but that there should be fewer
time zones. Specifically, the continental US should have only
two — Eastern and Western.

In reality, America already functions on fewer than four time zones. I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8 am instead of 9 am, restaurants were packed at 6 pm instead of 7 pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. But for the last three years I lived in a state of constant confusion, I rarely knew the time and was perpetually an hour late or early.

It makes one wonder whether the world needs time zones at all
— maybe it should just be like the northern and southern
hemisphere — in some countries, Christmas is in summer and in
some it’s in winter. In some countries, you could go to bed at
midnight and wake up at 7am; in others, you might go to bed at
noon and wake up at 7pm.

Waiting for Godot

[Estragon and Vladimir]
Gary Lydon and Conor Lovett as Estragon and Vladimir in the Arts Emerson/Gare Saint Lazare production of “Waiting for Godot”

It’s apparently “GAH – doh”, not “goh – DOH”. I had always
pronounced it in the French way, but the Irish troupe I saw play
it last night englished it.

It was the Arts
Emerson presentation of the Gare Saint Lazare players doing
it. It was riveting, although I can’t explain exactly why.
Peter Hall, who directed the first London production in 1955,
apparently wasn’t sure it would be until it opened.

One critic (Vivian Mercier) said “Waiting for
Godot is a play in which nothing happens, twice.” With
good players, it turns out that that can be really funny,
especially the second time.

It looks from the audience I saw last night that theater is
doing better with young audiences than early music.

How hard it is to get prescription drugs

I have a friend who takes a prescription for a seizure
disorder, that if she doesn’t take it every day she could well
die, if she has a seizure at the wrong time. She has a rant about
how any drug without major public health consequences should be
available over-the-counter to anyone who thinks they need it. She
is unusually good at dealing with complex systems, and she still
has problems if she goes on vacation or changes insurance
companies or whatever.

The insulin I take for my diabetes isn’t in quite that life-sustaining
category, but the health care providers I talk to do claim that
it’s pretty important to take it every day. But that’s not what
the people who work in the system for getting me refills when I’m
out seem to think.

Here’s the system.

  1. When I go to the pharmacy, I get a vial with 1000 units of
    insulin.
  2. I inject myself with, currently 45 units of insulin, every
    day. I’m supposed to modify this if necessary, going up if my
    blood sugars are running high, or down if I’m getting low blood
    sugar reactions. The last time I talked to my doctor, I was
    taking only 40 units, but I upped that after getting my
    haemoglobin A1C result from that visit.
  3. When I point out to the pharmacy that 1000 units is not a 30
    day supply, they explain that the shelf life of the insulin is
    only 28 days, so they don’t want to give me 2 of them, so
    they’ll just give me another one a little sooner. Usually this
    works.
  4. However, the prescription is written for 1 year or 12
    refills. 12 refills takes noticeably less than a year.
  5. So last Monday, I called to get a refill and the computer
    told me that I didn’t have any refills left, and it would notify
    my doctor that I needed a new prescription.
  6. This usually works, but this time, whoever processes these
    requests (I think not either a doctor or a nurse, so it’s quite
    possible that this person didn’t even know that Lantus is a form
    of insulin) decided that they couldn’t really need a new
    prescription, because it was under a year since I got the old
    one. This seems to be the real breakdown in the system — if I
    say I need insulin, and the pharmacy says they need a new
    prescription, the system maybe should allow this person to argue
    with the pharmacy, but certainly shouldn’t allow them to just
    ignore the request.
  7. Three days, and about a dozen phone calls later, I talked to
    a nurse, and finally got her to agree to get the doctor to write
    a new prescription.

This has nothing to do with Obamacare, because this problem has
existed in some form for at least a decade. It probably isn’t
really related to government health care, although the Cambridge
Hospital Association, which operates both the pharmacy and the
clinic in this story, is funded in a major way by the city of
Cambridge. My friend with the seizure disorder isn’t using
government-operated healthcare any more than anyone else in this
country.

But I have been hitting this problem for a decade, and every
time I hit it, I mention to my health care provider that the
system seems to be screwed up. Most recently, I told the nurse
who finally got me the prescription, and she said she understood
my concerns, but not that she knew of any way to address them.

So it’s probably time to call or write someone else. You can
consider this a rough draft of that letter.

How I use the library

Since I’m posting quite a lot here about what I’m reading, I
thought I should mention how I go about acquiring it. By far the
largest set of books I read these days come from the ebook lending
system of the Middlesex Library Network. The next largest set
come from Project Gutenberg and other online free books source.
And I do buy some books, both ebooks and dead tree books, of which
maybe more later.

The ebook site is pretty complicated, so I thought I’d mention
the way I’ve eventually settled on how to use it.

  1. Whenever I get an email notice that
    a book I have on hold is available, I log in and take that book
    out.
  2. I then look at all the books on my wish list, and take out
    any of those that are currently available I want to have.
  3. Then I look at the new
    ebooks     menu item, which lists all the ebooks they have in
    reverse order of acquisition. I put anything I might want to
    read on my wish list, and anything I’m sure I want to read as soon
    as possible on my hold list.

If I’m feeling insecure about where the next book I read is
coming from, I do steps 2 and 3 even if I can’t do step 1.