Category: Uncategorized

Where I was…

September 11, 2001 is one of those dates that everybody who was
around remembers where they were and what they were doing. In my
case, it wasn’t anything very interesting, so instead of telling
you about that day, I’ll tell you about September 10, 2002.

Dog Walking

The first interaction I had with a human being that day was
when I was walking the dog on a public sidewalk and the owner of
a pit bull snarled at me for walking my dog on his sidewalk.
(Note that pit bulls never scare me personally, but pit bull
owners frequently do.)

Recorder Society

Then I was working on my responsibilities as administrator of
the Boston
Recorder Society (I’m no longer involved, but at that
point they were paying me some money to keep things going.) I
received the news that the prominent coach who had wanted to be
named music director had decided that she needed to completely
break with the Boston group because of my completely
unreasonable request that other webmasters should link to the
up-to-date information on the official BRS website instead of
the out-of-date stuff she had on her site.

This sounds like something that should just be laughed off, but
in fact, at that time in the Boston early music world, if this
person blew up at you because you said “Good morning” (or “Please
link to the correct information”), a whole bunch of people would
tell you that you were being tactless.

Homebrew Club

Then the homebrew club blew
up, because someone decided to quit because the October picnic
organzers hadn’t taken his recommendation for what kind of
Octoberfest beer to buy a keg of.

Condo Association

Then I was going out to walk the dog for the afternoon and
there was a packet of papers from the condo association. At
this point I was serving as president, and was scheduled to
chair a meeting that evening.

One item in the packet was labeled “Action by the Association’s
Trustees without a meeting”, and contained statements about a dispute
I was having with my then next-door neighbor about how noisy the
Cantabile Band
rehearsals were. None of the other three trustees had ever
spoken to me about the issue, but all three of them had signed
this “action”. There was also a letter that one of the other
trustees had written independantly to a lawyer the association
was consulting, officially through me.

So I decided that if all
three of the other trustees didn’t want to work with me, I would
resign and go to a bar instead of to that meeting.

Bar

This was the one good part of the day. Several of my
friends from the homebrew club were there, the beer was good, we
spent part of the evening at the tables outside, and I was able to
tell them all about my terrible day.

One theory my friends proposed about why everything blew up in one day was that
people were unconsciously stressed about the one year anniversary
of 9/11. I’m not sure I believe that theory, but it’s certainly
the most blowups in one day I’ve ever had to deal with, in a long
life of organizing.

Must Carry law in Southern New England in the digital age

It doesn’t seem to be working. I know several people who have
recently gotten or looked into getting basic cable because the
new digital broadcast system isn’t getting them as good
reception as
they used to get under the old analog broadcast system.

They have all found that there are stations they watch
regularly in broadcast that they don’t get in basic cable.

One household is in Fall River, which gets broadcast television
from both Boston and Providence. Comcast seems to have decided
that Must Carry doesn’t obligate them to carry both the
Providence and Boston PBS affiliates, and they’re carrying only
the Boston ones on Basic Cable, although Digital Starter Cable
does include the Providence PBS station.

Another household is here in Cambridge, where the local NBC
affiliate broadcasts a second digital channel with a lot of
movies on it, but Comcast Basic cable doesn’t carry that.

Does anyone know what the Must Carry Law actually says Comcast
must carry?

Read the other stuff I’ve written this morning

Once again, it’s almost lunchtime on Wednesday, and I’ve been
writing all morning, and I don’t feel the necessity of writing a
blog post to keep my hand in as a writer, so you can read the
other stuff I’ve written.

Not the emails

I will spare you the emails I wrote to the person I’m trying to
schedule a December concert with, and to the condo association about
the time and date of the proposed meeting, although there was a
lot of thought that went into how to word those.

Comment on another blog

Reading my RSS feeds before breakfast, I found that Phil
Greenspun has been writing a long article about health care
reform, which expresses a lot of the same frustrations I feel
about the current discussion, but missed a couple of points I’m
frustrated about, so I
wrote him a comment. Actually, the page that comes up when you
say you want to comment strongly suggests that you might rather
write an email if you aren’t sure your ideas will still be
interesting in two years, so I originally wrote him an email, but
he emailed me back suggesting I post it as a comment, so I did.
When you read the article,
mine might still be the second comment, or if you only want to
read the comment, you can go to my
comment space and see the health care comment, plus an
anti-Verizon diatribe I wrote last winter.

Posts on my own blogs

I wrote a report
on last night’s band meeting.

For the meeting, I had as usual transcribed a new piece, and we
found a bad mistake in a previous transcription, so there’s a post
on the Serpent
Publications blog about those things.

Your tax dollars at work

Phil Greenspun
has a post
about yet another example of your tax dollars at work harrassing
law-abiding citizens.

Maybe it’s always been dog-bites-man, and I’m just running into
it more often this summer. (See my posts about the
Gates arrest and the
arrest of my next door neighbor.)

There is definitely a generic problem with throwing money at
problems people think are important. When I was working in
scientific research, I got earthquake prediction money and
cancer research money for projects that were very loosely
related to earthquake prediction and cancer research. (In this
case, I’m not saying they were bad projects.)

So I think all this money people are giving the police because
they’re concerned about the public safety may need some more
thinking about. Having too many police with too little idea of
how to contribute to the public safety may well be making the
public less safe rather than more so.

Farm Share for One

I went to visit my family yesterday, and I think my sister was
a little disappointed that all I brought them were two melons
and a bunch of collard greens.

I got the share on the assumption that I wouldn’t cook that
much, but there wouldn’t be any trouble giving some away to
people who would, and it isn’t so expensive that if a few things
end up in the compost bin it isn’t a tragedy.

In general, it has been working out that way. The melons are a
problem because I don’t like them at all, and apparently neither
do some of the people I give things to. This week I had an
unusually large number of events to cook for, which accounts for
not having brought lettuce or beans to the family.

I did dither about what to do with the excess zucchini long
enough that they developed unsightly spots, so I think I’ll put
them in the compost bin, although probably the starving children
in India would be glad to have them.

If they eat zucchini in
India. If they don’t, the children would probably insist on
starving even if someone gave them lots of zucchini. My Polish
relatives tell the story of some well-intentioned food-relief
efforts from the US after World War II, where anyone in Poland
could get all the peanut butter they could eat, and it sat there
in the warehouse while starving people who’d never touched peanut
butter in their lives and weren’t going to start now died in
the streets.

In any case, my zucchini would have worse than unsightly spots
by the time it got to India, even if it weren’t more efficient
to send money to OXFAM or
somewhere than to mail zucchini to India. And I haven’t put
very much stuff in the compost bin.

I’ll be playing on September 20

Here’s part of the draft press release my sister sent me
yesterday. I’d show you the whole thing, except that she sent
it for editing to the participants, and they may want something
edited in or out. But there will be lots of music and some poetry reading and probably opportunities to join in.

Arts Around the Block
Church of the Holy Spirit, 190 Rock Street, Fall River
Sunday September 20, 2000 12:30 -4
THE CLASSICAL VENUE

Chapel:

1:30: Laura Conrad, Two ornamented renaissance standards by Diego
Ortiz, G-alto Recorder accompanied on Italian
Virginals: Douce Memoire, O Felici Occhi Miei

Sanctuary – Classical music:
3: Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev. Led at the keyboard by
Judith Conrad, Jagan Nath Singh Khalsa, Violin as Peter, Ruth Shand,
Bassoon as Grandfather, Mike Shand, Baroque Flute as the bird, Dan
Moniz, clarinet as the cat, Carroll Grillo, soprano and alto saxophone
as the duck, Alan Powers as narrator.

Outside by the wall behind the cemetery (weather and noise level
permitting):

12:30 Laura Conrad, solo recorder music by Jacob Van Eyck, music to
stroll through the park to, in 17th century Holland

3:30 The Fall River Fipple Fluters:
The Night Watch by Anthony Holborne
Mozart Trio
Folk Songs from the British Isles (The Banks of Allen Waters,
Flow Gently Sweet Afton, Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron, All
Through the Night, Londonderry Air)
Dowland Now O Now I Needs Must Part

further information Judith Conrad 508-674-6128, Judithconrad@mindspring.com

Laura Conrad, also a Durfee high graduate, now lives in Cambridge MA
where she directs the Cantabile Renaissance band and studies recorder
with John Tyson. She is playing recorder today; she also plays
serpent, an ancestor of the tuba which was widely used as the loudest
bass
instrument available between 1600 and 1850.

The Fall River Fipple Fluters are an amateur recorder-playing group
founded in 1991 by Judith Conrad. They play together for fun every
Friday at Four-thirty in Fall River. New members are always welcome,
willingness to try to learn recorder is the only requirement. They
play all sizes of recorder and many different styles of music, the
core repertoire being Western classical music from the 16th to the
18th centuries, the heyday of the recorder.. For further information
call Judith Conrad, 508-674-6128

I’m not listed in the Peter and the Wolf program, but
apparently everyone who comes will be invited to participate in
the finale, so I may bring a tuba or serpent or something, or just twitter on a recorder. I will definitely be playing with the Fipple Fluters.