February 2012
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Yesterday, doing one of my frequent scans of Google News, I saw a headline Anatomy of a Tearjerker. I thought that sounded intriguing and clicked on it, which took me to this analysis of why Adele's song "Someone Like You" makes people cry, or at least get tears in their eyes. I have not heard much of…
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In one of the first episodes I saw, O'Brien looked in the mirror and said to herself This is not who you are. That struck me as very much out of place for the time, ca. 1914. It's definitely a contemporary American thing, and I suppose a British one, too. I kept noticing things like…
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And yours, too, though you may not know it, every time you read a blog, log on to Facebook, or use a service like Gmail or Hotmail. From an IT trade publication: Cloud computing builds on automated virtualized infrastructures by using extended management software to deliver environments where users can define, provision, and operate their…
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…that this is not real.
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There But For Fortune I watched, in snippets over a week or so, the above-named documentary about Phil Ochs. Once considered along with Dylan a major "protest singer," Ochs had a considerably lesser artistic gift, and stuck with left-wing activism long after Dylan had withdrawn from it. I never listened to him very much, because…
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I posted these on Facebook, sharing them from other people's posts. I'm putting them here on the assumption that most people who read this blog aren't Facebook "friends" with me (sorry, I can't use "friend" in that context without the quotes.) This one was from Janet: a truly mind-boggling miniature Bag End. I simply can't…
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Weekend Music As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have finally been exploring the set of Beethoven piano sonatas I received for Christmas several years ago and which have mostly sat unheard since then, for lack of convenient opportunity. I've finally resorted to listening to them in the car, which is unsatisfactory–the very quiet…
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As far as I can remember this is the first Greta Garbo movie I've ever seen, and it's completely delightful. It's a sort of romantic comedy, made just before World War II in which Garbo plays a grim Soviet emmisary sent to Paris to find out what's become of three men who had been sent…
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Every Way We Ever Looked It's been…let me check…four weeks now since one of my daughters, the only one of our children who lives nearby, gave birth to her second child. Though it's been a month now, and though this was not the first such experience, I still find myself thinking often of the strangeness…
Light On Dark Water 