It’s only one party, but I put the invitation into two
different forms.
This
one is my regular version that can be folded into 4 and put
in your pocket. I usually use it as my Christmas card.
This
one is a one-page flyer, with the December
17 concert flyer on the back.
Please come if you’re someone who’d enjoy a party with good food, drink, conversation, and music.
I reported on my
experience with the October release (9.10, Karmic Koala)
of ubuntu linux. The
respected hardware site Tom’s Hardware has
benchmarks
relative to 9.04.
If you don’t have time to read the whole article, the
conclusion is that this time the Ubuntu developers bit off more
than they could chew in 6 months, and while most of the
innovations they attempted would have been good if they’d come
through, the release is too buggy to be recommended either as an
upgrade or to a new user.
The reviewer rolled back his production system to 9.04. I was
concerned enough about the problems I found on the laptop that I
never upgraded my desktop. I haven’t rolled back the laptop,
but if I were doing anything more critical than browsing or
reading PDF’s on it I probably would.
I was interested that he didn’t
seem to find the same problems I’ve hit, unless his experience with
the system hanging was the same bug I found with the
screensavers. I haven’t had hangs since I told the screensaver
not to run. But of course, the screensaver is the most
sophisticated graphics I ever do, and that might not be the case
for him.
So if you’re thinking you should try Linux, I agree with the
recommendation in this review that you use Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope).
When I ran through the program I had drafted for the December
17 concert, I found it took me 55 minutes to play. That’s
with playing everything roughly the right number of times
through, but without the 2 pieces I wasn’t playing, and without
doing any patter between pieces. Since we’d like the actual
performance to run about 50 minutes, and absolutely can’t go
over an hour, this meant it was too long.
We postponed making a decision about what to cut until last
night, but since there will be at most two more full rehearsals, and
possibly only one, it’s time to make the cuts.
There was one obvious piece (Susanna
Fair by William
Byrd) that I hoped we’d have time to learn, but we were
still fumbling for notes last night. So doing that will take
time away from doing ensemble work, so that one’s out. Another
piece (Judith
and Holofernes) was put in to go with
Susanna, so it’s out, too.
About half the program is going to be Morley Canzonets of two
and three voices. I’d love to do a whole program of
these, but I was a little worried that the set was too long for
people who don’t listen to this kind of music all the time. The
other sets are broken up with catchy dance tunes, but this one is
all 16th century polyphony, all the time. So I cut a couple of
those, too.
There’s still one more piece that’s pitched a bit high for my
current vocal
difficulties, and last night when we sang it our pitch
drifted sharp, so the high D’s that sounded a bit
strained in the first verse, I couldn’t even hit in the second
verse. We’re going to try singing it a step down, which will
make it on the low side for our tenor, so if we turn out not to
like it at either pitch, we’ll cut that one too.
If you’re recording and don’t feel like using a stop watch to
time things, the program exiftool will tell you all kinds of
things about a number of file formats, including MP3 files.
I mentioned having been intrigued by this
article a couple
of weeks ago. I decided that buying this
book by Patrick McKeown would make sense if I were really serious about doing
breathing exercises.
Like a lot of these self-help books, the “science” is probably
completely bogus, but the anecdotal evidence that the advice
helps is interesting if it’s advice about a problem you really
need to solve.
I had independently figured out that breathing through the nose
actually helped during an asthma attack. So I believe some of
the rest of the stuff about practicing breathing through the
nose and I have been doing some of the recommendations. I’m not
going as far as figuring out how to laugh with my mouth closed,
but I did order some surgical tape to try taping my mouth shut
while I’m sleeping. Instead of his nose unblocking exercise for
nasal congestion, which sounds uncomfortable, I’m continuing to
do the alternate nostril breathing I learned in Yoga class.
The advice about diet and exercise is fairly standard, and not
particularly well-written. For example, here’s the paragraph
about meat:
Fruit and vegetables are of primary importance. A
little meat is essential for good health, but for some people in
the Western world it has become an obsession.
I don’t know how many vegetarians the author would have known
in Ireland in 2008, but you certainly can’t talk to the population
of Cambridge, Massachusetts that way.
I have completely stopped taking my steroid inhaler, and am
controlling attacks by a combination of breathing exercises and
the albuterol (rescue) inhaler. I’m not saying it’s a complete
solution, and when I get over the undesirable side effects of
taking the maximum dose of steroid inhaler for so long after
that cold in October, I may well go back to using it a bit. But
it’s possible that these exercises will help reduce the need for
it.
So I’m making a qualified recommendation of this book. I don’t
really believe the thesis that asthma is a result of a shortage of
CO2, or that asthmatics take in 4-6 times as much air
as normal breathers. But some of the recommendations probably
help some people, and if you’re having trouble with your asthma,
it’s worth thinking about.
This is simple enough to be more of a procedure than a recipe,
but since I’ve seen people spend a lot more time and money for
less good results, I’m going to tell you about it anyway.
I do this pretty much any time in the winter that I’m having
people over. You have to be able to buy cider without
preservatives. For this purpose, pasteurization doesn’t matter,
but I’m sure the preservatives make a difference in the flavor,
and they aren’t at all necessary.
I always use the crock pot, because having the drinks out of my
(small) kitchen is a good idea if I’m also doing any kind of
cooking. But if you have the right traffic path, you can
certainly use a large pot on the stove.
Then you need something like a tea ball or a small cloth bag or
just a handkerchief or other cloth. Put all the whole
spices in your cabinet into the center of the handkerchief or
other receptacle and close it. (In the case of the
handkerchief, you tie the opposite corners together.)
I think you should buy cinnamon sticks for this purpose if you
don’t have them. Otherwise, use whatever you have. Some possibilities:
Put the cider and the spice ball or bag into your chosen pot.
Bring to a boil and turn down to a very low simmer. If you do
this before the guests arrive, you can offer them hot cider when
they get there. They will appreciate this if it’s a cold day.
Otherwise, have it with dessert.
There are people who will sell you official cider mulling
spices, and if you don’t have any of the above items in your
cupboard and can’t think of anything you want to do with them
except make mulled cider, that makes sense. But if you put
cloves in ham or star anise in pork or fresh ground nutmeg in
anything, you don’t need the mulling spices too.
For some reason most of the recipes add sweetener, but I’ve
never seen any necessity for it. Maybe they used to make cider
with less sweet apples, and the recipe writer haven’t noticed
that plain cider is plenty sweet enough now.
If you’re thinking about one-ingredient hard cider, this is the
wrong way to go about it. After the boil and simmer, the cider
doesn’t ferment anything like as fast as the stuff straight from
the store does.
There’s a long
article on the front page of the New York Times this morning
about the increasing use of food stamps.
It does mention that it’s been government policy over the last
three administrations to encourage the use of the program, but
completely leaves out (or maybe postpones for another article) the
changes in eligibility requirements that have enabled the
increased numbers of people to use it.
I think the article would lead a casual reader to believe that the
people in Orange County who are getting the food stamps now
could just as well have gotten them ten years ago, except that
they’d have been embarrassed to have their neighbors see them
using the stamps in the checkout line.
I don’t know anything about eligibility requirements in
California, but I looked at the Massachusetts ones 8 years ago
when I ran out of unemployment compensation and was going to
have to start dipping into savings.
At that time, in Massachusetts, you couldn’t get food stamps if
you had more than $600 in a bank account (including an IRA with
penalties for accessing it before you were 59 1/2), or a car
worth more than $2000. $600 is less than a month’s rent for
most people in Massachusetts, and a car worth less than $2000 is
probably going to lead you to miss work several days a year. The combination of the car worth less than $2000 and the less than a month’s rent in the bank is likely to tempt you to put off fixing your brakes when they break.
I was becoming increasingly alarmed as I read the article about
all the counties where nearly half the residents are eligible for
food stamps, so I googled for the current requirements in
Massachusetts.
It turns out that some time in the last eight years, they’ve
stopped asking you about assets at all unless you’re also
getting certain other means-tested benefits. So I would
probably have been eligible 8 years ago, and all those people getting the food stamps
may well have enough money to pay their rent and fix their brakes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
LayMusic.org 