Category: Uncategorized

Tuscan kale salad with honey mustard vinaigrette

The item in the farm share I picked up last Saturday that
seemed most seductive (even more so than the two giant stalks of
brussel sprouts) was the bunch of dark green pebbly textured
tuscan kale.

The recipe I read before making the salad was this one.

Then I chopped up the kale in thin ribbons, made a vinaigrette,
using my usual oil, balsamic vinegar, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and mustard.
I increased the mustard from half a teaspoon to a full teaspoon,
and added some honey and a couple of cloves of garlic.

Then I added walnuts and grated parmesan cheese. I dressed the
salad before the band rehearsal — this was a good idea. Even
doing it earlier in the day wouldn’t have wilted the kale.

The eight people at the rehearsal demolished the salad from the
quite large bunch of kale very speedily. Everybody said it was
good, and there weren’t any plates that had remnants on them.

Instruments and Music for sale

Please reply directly to Natalie Palme at (617) 731-1560; my only connection to
these items is that I promised to put the information online for her.

Instruments

  1. Harpsichord, Zuckerman, made from kit by Thomas Todd, 1964,
    using cherry wood, SOLD
  2. Vielle, Westover, with wooden case and bow, SOLD
  3. Porka psaltery by A.M.+H.W. Westover, 1984, $250.00
  4. Cornetto, Christopher Monk, SOLD

Music

Bärenreiter new clothbound volumes of full scores: Bach, Handel,
Mozart, Schubert, Telemann. Includes opera, choral, orchestral,
concerti, etc. List available on request.

Statistics Education

Ask anyone who deals with mathematics and the general
population, and they will tell you the general level of
understanding is low. But I was still surprised to read an
editorial
in this morning’s New York Times, which said:

Whereas native-born children’s language skills follow a bell curve, immigrants’ children were crowded in the lower ranks: More than three-quarters of the sample scored below the 85th percentile in English proficiency.

I believe that the general point is true, but the statement as
written makes the opposite point. In the general population, by definition 85
percent are below the 85th percentile. So if only three
quarters (75%) of immigrants’ children are below the 85th
percentile, that means that 25% of them are above the 85th
percentile, which is better than in the general population.

I suspect that it’s a typo of some kind, and maybe it’s that
three quarters of the immigrants’ children are below the 65th
percentile or some such. But the Times proofreader would have
caught it as fast as I did if he or she really understood the meaning of “percentile”. Or maybe it was the translation of three quarters into 75% that the proofreader was weak on.

Why is there more street cleaning in Cambridge than there used to be?

Cambridge used to clean the streets once a month from April to
November. A couple of years ago, they extended that, and now
they clean in December as well.

I was chatting about that with a group of longtime Cambridge
residents, and one of them stated as an absolute fact that this
was because of global warming — that the leaves used to be
finished falling by November, but now they’re still falling so
they need to do the last streetcleaning later. She might have
expanded this theory to include that another reason they don’t
clean in the winter months is that it can’t be done with deep
piles of snow in at the sides of the streets, and global warming
might have led to fewer large snowstorms in December.

Someone who was on the City Council or in the Department of
Public Works might be able to answer this question
definitively. My impression is that the streets always had
leaves in them all through the winter because of the ones that
fell or blew after the November cleaning, and what’s changed is
the demographics of Cambridge residents, who are now more likely
to complain about leaves in the gutters.

New England weather is so erratic that I don’t think a
climatologist would really care to predict the effect of global
warming on the amount of snow in December. It wouldn’t surprise
me at all if it went up instead of down.

Julie and Julia (the book)

So far I’ve only read the book;
I’ll probably tell you more when the movie comes out on DVD and I
see it next month or so.

I enjoyed it. When I realized how big a pain reading the PDF
from the library was, I decided that if it wasn’t finished
by the time it expired, with just reading it on the laptop at
lunchtime, I would take the hardcover out of the library. But
then I saw that Fictionwise had a 100%
rebate on it, so I bought it from there.

100% rebates aren’t quite the same thing as getting something
for free. It’s their way of getting people to sometimes send
them money even if they’re mostly shopping on micropay rebates.
So you shouldn’t get the 100% rebate if you aren’t going to use
it to buy something you really want, but if there are several books on your wishlist that
you’re intending to give them money for, you might as well give
them money for something else, and then get the books you really
want for free. So I finished Julie and Julia in the comfort of my normal
reading device.

I discussed it with a friend who
said she’d enjoyed it, but she had several friends who hadn’t
because of the liberal use of the f-word. This could be another
post, but the conclusion of the other post would be that I don’t believe in judging people because of
their use of that diction, but I don’t use it because I’m aware
that there are a lot of people who do.

In any case, it was fun to read about someone tackling all
those recipes hardly anyone does these days. She finishes with
the Pâté de Canard en Croûte,
where you bone the duck and stuff it with pâté and
then bake it inside of a pastry shell. Most food writers
wouldn’t describe their hysterical weeping fits when the pastry
went straight from a too-dry heap to a buttery puddle.

The other impressive thing was actually doing it at all. I’ve
been feeling heroic for just getting a blog entry out there
every day, when I don’t even have a job or a commute. She not
only did a blog post in the morning before work, but put
together a shopping list, then shopped on the way home and
cooked after that. She got some help on the shopping and
cooking from her husband and friends, but really it was a pretty
heroic effort.

I thought that the book was a little long for the
material, but of course that may well make it a better
movie.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=031604251X&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Shakespeare’s Kings

An
Age of Kings
was originally live broadcasts on the BBC in the
early 60’s of the sequence of Shakespeare’s history plays from
Richard II (which I’d never seen before) through Henry IV, Henry
V, Henry VI (which I’d also never seen) and Richard III. They’re
now being sold as 5 DVD’s.

They were using the then upcoming young actors, so it’s fun to
see a very young Judi Dench play Katherine flirting with Henry
IV, and a young Sean Connery conspiring against Henry IV.

Another good thing about the series is that characters who
reappear in several plays are played by the same actor in each,
which wouldn’t normally happen on stage, since someone of the
stature to play Richard III in the play of that name, wouldn’t
be asked to do the bit part of Gloucester in Henry VI.

The actor who plays Prince Hal and later Henry V is Robert
Hardy. Every time I see him, (most recently as a hanger on of
Mr. Merdle’s in Little Dorrit) I realize that I know him well, but
can’t quite remember where from. He has quite a long list of
credits, many of which you’ve seen. His Henry V is a very youthful,
athletic, endearing performance.

Another standout performance is by Paul Daneman as
Richard III. He also has a long list of credits, but I mostly
haven’t seen them, but I may look some of them out now. I still
haven’t seen a production of Richard III that really reconciles
the opening monologue, which seems to me to clearly say “I’m
going to get the world because I’m so ugly that no woman will
ever love me”, with the seduction of Lady Anne, where Richard always
seems to be played as a matinée idol who assumes that of
course a grieving widow will just fall into bed with the man who
murdered her husband, her father, and her brother. But Daneman
rolling around on the floor laughing (“Was ever woman in such
humor wooed; was ever woman in such humor won?”) after the
seduction scene is really fascinating.

Finishing watching the plays leaves me wanting to read some of
the history — surely there was gunpowder and not just swordplay
at Bosworth Field? And did the battles really resolve themselves
by the major characters killing each other? None of them ever
got killed by a minor character?

In general, the productions are good for what they were. The
music is what seems most old-fashioned to me, but luckily there
isn’t much of it. Richard III, the last of the plays, seems
more truncated than the others, so one wonders if maybe they ran
out of money.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001LPWGHS&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running


This book is a memoir by the Japanese novelist Hideki Murakami
about the place long-distance running has in his life.

I’ve enjoyed a couple of his novels (
Kafka
on the Shore and Norwegian
Wood) quite a bit, and I enjoyed this memoir too.

He took up running when he stopped running a
bar/restaurant/jazz club so that he could write full time.
Running the bar had been fairly active work, but sitting at the
desk and writing wasn’t. So he needed to do something and he
decided on running. He runs at least one marathon a year, and
has experimented with triathlons and ultra-marathons.

He often discusses the
relationship between running and writing novels:

Right now I’m aiming at increasing the distance I run, so speed is
less of an issue. As long as I can run a certain distance,
that’s all I care about. Sometimes I run fast when I feel like
it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I
run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end
of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of
tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day
right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and
the next day’s work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest
Hemingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to
keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term
projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The
problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed — and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.

He also says things that resonate with me about the importance
of daily practice:

Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running
every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I
push myself? How much rest is appropriate — and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself? I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different. How different? Hard to say. But something would have definitely been different.

This is a bit how I feel about practicing musical instruments
every day.

There’s also a fair amount of discussion about how aging is
affecting his ability to run, and really good descriptions of
what the last couple of miles of a marathon feel like.

I have friends who run as an important part of their life, and
the way they discuss their times and their injuries isn’t
anything like as interesting as this book.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0307389839&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
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A clever way to get a ride

The New York Times obituary
for Gene D. Cohen has a good story in it:

His in-laws had arrived for a visit in Washington in the midst of a snowstorm and emerged from the subway lost. Unable to hail a cab or reach the Cohen family by phone, Dr. Cohen’s father-in-law had an idea. He and his wife walked across the street to a pizza parlor, ordered a pizza for a delivery to the Cohen house, and then insisted that the delivery man take them, too.

Dr. Cohen was a geriatric psychiatrist, and he used this story
as an example of how decades of experience can lead to agile creativity.

Whatever Works

This
movie is a pleasant Woody Allen romp through New York.

If you don’t know Woody Allen, this isn’t where to start. If
you find him irritating, this isn’t going to convince you
that he isn’t. But if you usually enjoy his movies, you will
probably enjoy this one.

The plot is ridiculous, but it is fun to see a family come from
backwoods Mississipi and find fulfillment in academic/artistic/gay
New York.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B002LMV7QG&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Program for the December 17 concert

We’re starting to get settled on the program for the concert
we’re playing at the Boston Public Library at 2 PM on December
17, in the Rabb Lecture Hall. There’s not a lot of time for
rehearsing, so we’re having to limit the amount of new stuff we
play, but these are mostly people who haven’t heard us before,
so it won’t matter to them.

There will be three sections, with me playing Diego Ortiz
Ricercada’s in between sections.

First there will be songs about drinking, dancing, and
smoking. Most of these we’ve performed many times before, and
the one that we haven’t is mostly a vocal solo by a very
experienced performer.

Then there will be a group of “religious” music. When you
first start playing Renaissance music, you tend to think that
everything religious was church music and everything secular was
performed in the home, but in fact there were wide swaths of
Europe where the established church discouraged polyphony in the
church, and people liked it, so they played it in the home. There
are a couple of carols that everybody knows, and a Byrd about
Susanna, and a round about Judith and Holofernes.

The last section will be all Thomas Morley. We’re mixing the
Fantasias from the Two-voyce canzonets with the vocals from both
the two and three voice canzonets.

There’s a flyer, which includes the program
which you should give to all your friends. If you’re someone
who could possibly go to a 2 PM concert in Boston’s Back Bay,
you should come.