Category: Uncategorized

Outrageous

I was really blown away by this movie
when I saw it at the Orson Welles Theater in the late ’70’s.

It doesn’t hold up quite as well as I was hoping it would when
I put it in my Netflix queue. The schizophrenia story seems to
have been done many times, and although the acting is good, Liza’s
movie-star good looks aren’t really credible based on what I
know about schizophrenics in drug treatment.

But the female impersonator turns are still really fun to
watch. The scene where Craig Russell as Robin Turner impersonates Marilyn Monroe imitating numerous other
stars of the era auditioning to sing Diamonds are a Girl’s Best
Friend is worth watching even if you don’t feel like the
drama about a gay hairdresser and his schizophrenic female
roommate.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B0002OXV0K&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Thanksgiving report

I think people enjoyed themselves. The two women who live with
their daughters seemed to like talking to each other. The food
was unusually good. The wine was good — one of the guests
brought a bottle that I’d intended to try the next time I was
buying wine. The singing after supper was very good.

I didn’t manage to get major housecleaning energy until just
before lunchtime, so not quite everything got done. The major
problem this caused was that I was just getting ready to
recombobulate the kitchen when the first guests showed up, so we
had to run the meal with the counters more cluttered than they
should be. But I had emptied the dishwasher, so cleaning up
went pretty smoothly.

The living room and dining room are now back in their non-party
configuration and much cleaner and less cluttered than they were
yesterday morning. The kitchen still has a ways to go, but
since I don’t have to cook for several days, I can take my time
with it.

I hope your Thanksgiving was at least as good as mine.

Three Quarters Done, and Happy Thanksgiving

Yesterday was the three quarter mark on this year of blogging
every day. I’ve been meditating on how I’ll blog when I don’t
have to do it every day.

There will be fewer junk posts because it’s almost lunch time
and I have to write something.

There will also be no posts at all on days I don’t have time to
write one.

But I believe I read books and watch movies with more
concentration because I know I’ll want to write about it later,
and I’ll keep doing that. And I’ll keep writing about the toys
I want to complain about.

This is a short, easy one because I still have housecleaning to
do before I make the turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce and
organize the drinks and appetizers. My guests are making most
of the side dishes, but there’s still a lot of work.

So Happy Thanksgiving, if you’re one of the people who
celebrates it today.

So I lied…

When I said it was the last
post about setting up the new home theater system.

I didn’t know how big of a pain setting up an entry-level
audiophile turntable was going to be.

tonearm with tracking weight and anti-skate mechanism

The directions were both badly written (e.g., referring to the
same piece of hardware as a “scale”, a “stub”, and a “prong”)
and badly illustrated (the only picture was a top view, so
identifying anything sticking up from the turntable was
difficult). They started from the point of view that you knew
what you were trying to do, which in my case was true only in a
very general sense. And there was at least one place where they
were actively wrong (telling you to turn the counterweight
counterclockwise when it should have been clockwise).

I found two things that helped a lot:

  • Putting a strong light on the area made it a lot easier to
    put the small loop in the very thin monofilament nylon thread
    that held the antiskating weight over the stub.
  • Reading this
    advice     was helpful in figuring out what the adjustments were
    doing.

In any case, once I finally got the Cartridge Downforce
Adjustment correct, the antiskating part worked much better than
I would have guessed from what that tonearm was trying to do
when it was flying all over the place with the wrong weight on
the end.

I’m writing this in the hope that if someone else tries to set
up a Pro-Ject Debut III turntable and gets as frustrated as I
was, google will show them this page and they will see that there is hope.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001FUIQN2&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

I said when I reviewed
The
Year of the Flood that reading it made me want to
reread Oryx
and Crake. I have now done that. I enjoyed it more
this time. I suspect it might make sense to read The
Year of the Flood first if you haven’t read either of them
yet. They take place in the same time frame — two or three of the major
characters in Flood are minor characters in
Crake. But you really are more interested in Jimmy,
the narrator and main character in Crake, after
you’ve seen him (and Crake) throught the eyes of Ren, one of the
point of view characters in Flood.

The argument for reading Crake first is that
Flood takes the narrative one scene later, so if you
read Flood first, you know one piece more about how
Jimmy’s story resolves itself. I can really imagine a third (at least) book
in this world — I hope it happens.

Here’s an example of the same story told from two different
points of view in the two books. The characters are college roommates.

As Jimmy sees it in Oryx and Crake:

Bernice let him know how much she disapproved of his carnivorous ways by kidnapping his leather sandals and incinerating them on the lawn. When he protested that they hadn’t been real leather, she said they’d been posing as it, and as such deserved their fate. After he’d had a few girls up to his room — none of Bernice’s business, and they’d been quiet enough, apart from some pharmaceutically induced giggling and a lot of understandable moans — she’d manifested her views on consensual sex by making a bonfire of all Jimmy’s jockey shorts.

As Bernice tells the story in The Year of the Flood:

She’d had a roommate like that at first, plus he’d been an
animal-murderer because he’d worn leather sandals. Though
they’d been fleather. But they’d looked like leather. So she’d
burnt them. And thank God she didn’t have to share a bathroom
with him any more, because she could hear him doing sexual
things with girls practically every night, like some
degenerate bonobo/rabbit splice.

‘Jimmy,’ she said. ‘What a meat-breath!’

This is real science fiction written by a real novelist, who is
also a fine poet. I didn’t think Oryx and Crake
was among her best work when I read it 6 years ago, but I think
the two novels together are at least equal to The
Handmaid’s Tale, and certainly better in terms of
richness of the imagined future.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0385528779&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0385721676&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Agent to the Stars, by John Scalzi

I was reminded that I hadn’t told you about Agent to the
Stars, which I read a few weeks ago, when I read John
Scalzi’s blog entry this morning.

The blog says that if you’re going to self-publish, please
don’t pay anyone to do it. You can get it online for free, and if
you need hardcopy, he recommends lulu.com, as do I.

As someone to get advice about self-publishing from, he’s one
of the obvious successes. He wrote Agent to the
Stars when he was a struggling young writer, and published
it online, suggesting that people send him a dollar if they liked
it. He wasn’t expecting to make much money that way, but he
stopped counting when he had $4,000, and the interest in the free
online book made it easier for him to sell his subsequent books to
“real” publishers.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a funny, lightweight science
fiction novel to read, I recommend this one. I can’t tell you
much about the plot, since there would be spoilers, but it’s very
well done. And you can download it for free if you have a way to
read books in html form that you enjoy.

Thanksgiving Planning

I’m expecting 8 or 9 people at my place for Thanksgiving
dinner. I do Thanksgiving every year for my family and whatever friends
don’t get to their families and want to come.

I have a schedule worked out where I go buy the turkey on Wednesday
afternoon so it only has to take up refrigerator space for less
than 24 hours, until it goes in the oven on Thursday.

I was freaking out a little when I realized yesterday that the
farm share vegetables are right now taking up the space that I
would normally put the turkey in.

I evolved a plan while walking the dog this morning where the people who are coming on Tuesday for the Cantabile Band
rehearsal would all take some of the vegetables home and
come back on Thursday afternoon with side dishes.

I may still do that, but when I looked at the vegetables I
realized that a lot of them are beets, which I’ve been getting
all summer and fall, but not using because they’ll still be good
for Borscht in the winter. They’re going to last until winter
because they’re in the refrigerator, but it won’t hurt them to
be out of the refrigerator for a day or two. But if you want to
come to Thanksgiving dinner and cook a beet side dish, you’re welcome.

Corporate bureaucracy

A dog park friend works as a web developer at some corporation
that believes a computer is a computer is a computer.

So the computer they buy for everyone works quite well for the
people who use one browser and a wordprocessor and maybe
a spreadsheet and maybe a mail client.

But if you do web development, you have to test on lots of
browsers, and often have lots of windows open in each, and an
editor with numerous windows open.

So the way he tells the story, he had requested numerous times
that he get more memory on his computer. And then one day he
realized that he could double the amount of memory for $10, and
he had that much in his pocket, so he did it. And then they
yelled at him for not following the proper procedure.

Steroid inhalers and voice range


[vocal chords with fungal infection]

Like many people with asthma, I use a steroid inhaler
regularly. But the cold I had in early October led to a very
bad flare-up of the asthma, and I’ve been taking the maximum number of puffs a day
ever since, which is quite a lot longer than I’ve ever taken
that much before.

I was wondering when I was going to be able to stop, but not
thinking very much about it. But then I started practicing the
pieces I’m going to be singing on the
December 17 concert, making a point of starting on the
correct pitch, and I found that my range was down by quite a bit
from what it normally is, and I was having troubly hitting the D
2 D’s above middle C, and even feeling uncomfortable with the B
above middle C.

It occurred to me that I had heard about there being side
effects from prolonged use of the inhalers, so I googled
it, and sure enough, there was not only scholarly writing,
but pictures like the one above.

The writing was reassuring about the problems going away if you
stop the inhaler, although a little vague about the time
frame.

So I’m not taking the inhaler any more, and hoping for the
best, and vocalizing very carefully before I practice. It’s not
really quite time to stop, so I’m having some trouble sleeping
at night.

I’m wondering if my regular steroid use is part of why my voice
in general
is so much lower than it was when I was younger. In college I
started out on Second Soprano, and then switched to First Alto.
Now I’m definitely a Second Alto, and lots of choirs would
probably be better off with me on First Tenor, if they weren’t
so prejudiced about female tenors.

I hope I get the alto range back in time to sing the D’s and
E’s on the concert. If not, we need to cut a couple of things
to make the program the right lenghth, and if those pieces
aren’t the right ones to cut, I can play them on recorder. I
will discuss this with my doctor, but it sounds from the google
search like switching from one kind of inhaler to another
doesn’t help.

I also read this
article in the New York Times, about people who have learned
a breathing technique that lets them use less of no steroid
inhalers. I’ve been trying it informally, but haven’t sent the
Buteyko Center
any money for real instruction.

Ordered the turntable

I wrote about wanting
to digitize all my LP’s, and what I was thinking of buying
to do it.

When I actually went to order a turntable, I was somewhat
surprised to realize that there was a wide gap between what was
being marketed to the teenage “let’s go over to your mom’s
basement and listen to some records” market and the audiophile
“lets compare these three cartridges with different weighted
tone arms” market, with very little in between. And looking at
what was in between reminded me very strongly that I’ve bought
two turntables in my life, and both of them are dead.

I realized that I don’t need to pay for more hardware that
knows how to digitize sound, because I already have soundcards
of a sort in all my computers, and a very good, special purpose
but quite usable for this application, soundcard in my Zoom
H2. (I should tell you about it, but that’s another
post.)

The item I was expecting to order in the post referenced above
includes speakers, which means it would take up too much space
on my bookshelves which already have lots of much better
speakers on them.

So in the end, I went for a low-end audiophile
system. I pored over the needledoctor site, and
ended up ordering the Pro-Ject
Debut III Turntable in Basic Black. It will be
upgradeable if I decide I want to be more audiophile, and
probably won’t break in quite the same way as my two consumer
turntables did. Another connector tax on the new audio system
was that I had to buy a preamp.
I’ll have to spend some more money if I decide I like digitizing
vinyl enough to get into 78’s, but I won’t need more space on my
bookshelves.

I’ll let you know how much I end up using it.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000VBH2IG&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001FUIQN2&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr