Author: Laura Conrad

Going Postal

We had a movie night last week to watch the film of Going
Postal. The
book is one of the better of Terry
Pratchett’s more recent books. (I like Making
Money even better, but you should read Going
Postal first.)

There were three of us — I’ve been reading everything by
Pratchett that I could get my hands on since about 1998, a friend
who is a big Pratchett fan but also a very busy man, so he’s
probably read about half of the Discworld books, and was only
halfway through Going Postal when we saw the movie, and
another friend who has only vaguely heard of Pratchett. (Also two
dogs — Sammy was sick
and Monte was feeling abandoned by both his mommies (my mother
died and my sister went to Europe), and not yet settling in well
at all.) The food was Taiwanese from the excellent restaurant across
the street. The big hit was the octopus with mustard greens.
The beer was a selection from the Pratchett fan’s refrigerator,
heavily weighted to the barley wines.

We all (except for Monte) enjoyed the show — it’s quite faithful to
the book, so I wasn’t in any suspense. I also wasn’t so riveted I
insisted on pausing it when Monte demanded to go out and look for
his Mommy. I did leave it in my Netflix streaming queue so that I
could go back and catch up, but haven’t yet felt obligated to do
that.

When you finish a streaming movie on Netflix, you get a chance
to rate it from one to 5 stars. I usually give things that turned
out about as well as I would have expected before I watched them
three stars, but I was feeling good enough about the evening as a
whole to suggest four. The Pratchett fan suggested five, but he
hardly ever sees movies at all, so he deferred to my judgement.
The non-fan said she’d enjoyed it but prefers movies to
not have people hanging by their fingernails off of tall
structures. Having clacks towers that people get pushed off of is
pretty integral to the plot of this book, so the rest of us
declined to downgrade the move on this ground.


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Daniel Abraham’s Dagger and Coin Series

Daniel Abraham’s website has A
good synopsis of this series.

It’s projected to be 5 books, of which three have been
published. I finished the third, The Tyrant’s Law last
night.

Each chapter is from the point of view of one of four
characters. I remember finding the first volume, The Dragon’s Path, a
little slow to get into. And then I was muttering that some of
these point-of-view characters are more interesting than others.
In the second book (The
King’s Blood), one of the point-of-view characters (Dawson
Kalliam) has died and been replaced by his wife, Clara. This is
an improvement, in that Clara is more interesting than Dawson.
Also, it removes the security you often feel in a long-running
series that of course they won’t kill off a major character. (At
least without the actor being interview in the newspaper.) George
R. R. Martin did the same thing by killing off Ned Stark, a main
character in The Song of Ice and Fire, at the end of
the first volume.

I (and apparently the Hugo award nominators) have been finding
multi-volume works really interesting these days. I always said I
liked novels better than short stories because you got a lot more
reading for the same work of figuring out who the characters are
and what their problems and relationships are. A multi-volume
series has the same advantage over a novel. Of course, some of
them can become repetitive, but with a good writer like Daniel
Abraham, it hasn’t happened yet in this series. Partly it’s because his gift
for describing places has different places to work on in each
volume. I’m also impressed that he manages to provide both more
character and more plot per page than a lot of writers do.

This series considers a lot of important questions like, “Why
do bankers have power?” and “How do wars get started?” Maybe the
last couple of books will explain how wars get ended, too. I’m
looking forward to the last two volumes.


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Sammy and antibiotics

[Sammy]
Sammy on new sofa, April 26, 2013.

One of the many difficulties I’ve been dealing with this summer
is that my dog got sick.

He’d been drinking and urinating a lot more than usual for a
couple of weeks, and then he started being very restless and
having occasional accidents in the house, which he never does.

So when we were both uncomfortable with the situation, I took
him to the vet, and explained why I thought something was wrong
(beyond him being almost 13 and arthritic), and said I hoped it
was something the vet could fix.

So first there were $450 of tests which were all negative. It
was nice to know that his kidneys were still functioning and he
wasn’t diabetic. The next step was $250 for more tests, one of
which was “not negative”. This was the antibody titre for
leptospirosis.

The next set of tests sounded really expensive, so I
decided we should act on the non-negative result we had, and I
spent $72 on two weeks worth of antibiotic. He started that last
Wednesday, and it does seem to be working. He hasn’t had an
accident since Saturday, and he had been having them almost
daily. He’s also recovered a bit of his energy.

So now the problem is convincing him that he needs to go on
taking the pills, which are capsules (three a day) containing a very bitter
powder. You or I would just swallow the capsule, and never taste
the bitter powder, but Sammy doesn’t do that. The first day, I
tried saying, “Here is a nice pill that will make you feel
better,” and he clamped his jaws shut very tight and said,
“No.”

So I put the capsules in some yogurt, and he ate it right up.
So I thought it wasn’t going to be a problem, but the second day,
he said, “That yogurt is going to be bitter. No.”

So I’ve been putting them in a stew, and that mostly works,
expecially if I surround them with a small piece of meat each.
When I finish the stew, I may try the peanut butter trick, but
I’m not sure that’s going to work better than the yogurt.

I keep thinking about my friends who call up their doctors and
get antibiotics whenever they get sick. I don’t approve of this
— I think you should have to have some kind of indication that an
antibiotic will do some good before you unleash it on your
microflora, but I would have expected to be able to get one for a
dog in less time and money than this took.

There’s a real wordpress python library now

I’m going to have to do some more programming to use it, but
it’s letting me set both categories and tags on these posts from
the command line.

Here’s the
documentation, including how to install it.

I have a simple modification of my addpost.py script that
allows a tag as well as a category, but I think I’ll write a more
elaborate one that will allow pages and multiple tags and
categories.

Other plans include a script to go through and turn some of the
tags into categories, and modifying my addmedia script so that
wordpress knows the right mime type.

Then there might be a script that uploads a picture and a post
about it and including it with one command.

Programming is wonderful.

I’m Back

If there’s anyone there who got interested in the blog back in
2010 when I was writing a post a day about whatever interested me
that day, you’re probably bored by the way it’s been lately where
I just barely manage a post a week about what the band is
doing.

My life is in a state where it needs some rearranging, so part
of what I’m going to do is write a post a day about what I’m
interested in then. This might reveal what I’m most interested in
these days, and should be putting more or less energy into.

I don’t promise to keep this up for a whole year, but I’m
calling this set of posts circa63, because I’m starting in August
and my 63rd birthday will be next February.

I may be able to fill in some of the things I should have been
posting about, like BEMF
13, which I would have written a lot more about if I hadn’t
had the flu just before and my mother hadn’t died just after, and
the death of my mother. I’ll also get you caught up on some
things like the chair
seat covers I’ve been knitting, and how I’m cooking from the
farm share these days.

News of the week of July 16, 2013

Meeting report, July 16

We had a plucked string player for the first time in quite a while, so
we did all

Dowland

all the time

Meeting report addendum, July 9

Somebody complained that I didn’t list the specific

Weelkes

pieces
last week, so here they are:

Schedule

We will be meeting regularly on
Tuesday nights at 7:45 PM at

my place

.

News of the week of July 9

Not directly Cantabile news, but my mother died on June 20, which has
affected Cantabile communications somewhat.

Meeting report, June 25, 2013

This was as close to not having a meeting (when one was scheduled) as
we’ve come for several years. I’m told there were some recorder duets
before I got there, but one of the recorder players had turned into a
pumpkin at 9, so when I got there at 9:15, Ishmael, who had opened up
on time, was packing up. We considered playing some more duets, but
we both had early days the next morning, and I still had both writing
and printing to do before my mother’s funeral the next morning, so we
split a beer and called it a night. This doesn’t happen very often,
and I don’t expect it to happen again for another few years.

Meeting report, July 2, 2013

We played:

Meeting report, July 9, 2013

We played:

Schedule

We will be meeting regularly on
Tuesday nights at 7:45 PM at

my place

.

News of the week of June 18

Meeting report, June 4, 2013

We played:

Meeting report, June 18, 2013

We played:

Schedule

We will be meeting regularly on
Tuesday nights at 7:45 PM at

my place

.

New York Times writes about Mozart’s instruments

In this article, the New York Times provides more information about the heavily advertised appearance of Mozart’s violin and viola at the 2013 Boston Early Music Festival. There will be a concert on both the violin and viola (joined by fortepiano and clarinet), and the instruments will be on view at the exhibition on Wednesday morning.

Apparently Mozart never performed publicly on the violin, and this instrument was left behind in Salzburg when he moved to Vienna. He did like playing viola, and this instrument was owned by his widow after his death.