Over at Pharyngula, there is a summary of a paper on the phylogeny of American horse species. The amusing thing to me about it is the chart which has a scatter plot of metatarsal dimensions and an oval with the label New World stilt-legged and Asian asses. I feel inspired to write something with that phrase it in now…
Monthly Archives: August 2005
Ives has been cancelled
The Ives concert that I posted earlier has been cancelled. While that gives me some more free time in the spring, I’m a little sad, since I really like Ives.
However, today I bought a CD of Cox and Box and Trial by Jury as well as the Hilliard Ensemble doing Machaut’s Messe de Notre Dame, which I will hopefully be singing this fall.
now that’s leveraging your base
Or fandom, in any case. Neil Gaiman announced on his blog that the following authors are auctioning “cameos,” if you will, in their forthcoming works. The proceeds will go to the First Amendment Project (which really needs a new color scheme). You can name a victim in a Stephen King novel, an utterance by Sunny in a Lemony Snicket book, a character in a Jonathan Lethem comic… and many more.
I’m sure you can write a nice little article about how postmodern a phenomenon this is, but it’s cool to see creative ways of leveraging fans for chartiable causes. It’s first amendment, internet-based, pop-culture… all we need is for some video-game designers to auction off cameos too. Then the academy would go crazy-go-nuts.
noun poetry
Despite it’s off-on humor value, Noun Poetry was one of the few reasons to glance at The Tech my freshman year.
mark your calendars now…
… for Spring 2006. The fact that I have events planned that far in advance is astonishing to me. My audition went well enough, all things considered, and I received the following concert assignments from the San Francisco Symphony Chorus:
- Rostropovich conducts All-Shostakovich : featuring the Suite No. 1 for Jazz Band, Violin Concerto No. 2, and Symphony No. 13 “Babi Yar” (with chorus) — 3/30, 3/31, and 4/1, all at 8 PM
- Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sings Mahler : featuring Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra, Mahler’s Rückert Lieder, and Ives’ New England Holidays (with chorus) — 4/13, 4/14, and 4/15, all at 8 PM
- MTT conducts Mahlers Symphony of a Thousand : Symphony No. 8 (with chorus) — 5/31, 6/1, 6/2, and 6/3, all at 8 PM
- Verdis Requiem — 6/15, 6/16, 6/17, 6/21, and 6/24 at 8 PM, 6/25 at 5 PM
one slow step at a time
(via Kevin Drum) California is lumbering towards equity for same-sex couples:
Businesses that provide discounts, special services or other privileges to married couples must extend the same rights and benefits to same-sex couples registered as state domestic partners, the California Supreme Court decided 6-0 on Monday.
The ruling was based on a case involving a lesbian couple’s use of country club facilities. Spouses were allowed to play for free, as well as “the live-in girlfriends and boyfriends, and grandchildren, of heterosexual members from the extra fees, while denying the same benefits to same-sex couples.” It seems pretty clear that the club didn’t have a leg to stand on, given those kinds of standards, since the only pragmatic reason they could give was “that extending membership benefits to unrelated friends might lead to overuse of the facilities and discourage the friends from purchasing their own memberships.”
Because, you know, I’d be totally willing to enter into a domestic partnership with someone solely for the perks of free golf at their country club.
But in any case, hooray for California, and let’s hope the marriage thing goes through as well.
new seminar page
I finally revamped the Net/Comm/DSP Seminar page, including the archives, introducing a brave new world of slightly less obfuscated storage formats. There are still a few little artifacts here and there, but it more or less works — now all I have to do it find speakers to fill up the slots.
An Ergodic Walk 