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…
Author Archives: Anand Sarwate
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.
catch-up on Darfur
No, Plamegate, the Michael Jackson trial, and other domestic fun and games were not being given so much attention because things in Darfur got better. Instead, it was just too depressing to keep going on about it, so the MSM wanted something else to talk about. Here is a piece encapsulating the situation in Darfur and its antecedents. Catch up and become alarmed. Something needed to be done a while ago. What is happening now?
and then there were two
This morning I saw two of the three characters that often haunt the North Side. Allison wasn’t around yet, but the Conversationalist was having a conversation with himself about the Berkeley Daily Planet, or maybe it was a conversation with the Berkeley Daily Planet. It’s kind of hard to tell with him. The nice thing is that the one side of his conversations are way more interesting than any overheard cellphone call.
Outside Soda Hall, however, I saw three cops arresting Angry Man — he was handcuffed and being pushed towards one of the three cop cars that the UC Police decided were necessary for apprehending him. The campus police here take their role as The Man quite seriously here, so I wasn’t entirely surprised, but even to me it seemed a bit excessive. Angry Man was pretty passive the whole time, although he wasn’t willing to walk to the car and had to be dragged. The whole thing was a little surreal to me, considering my lack of sleep. I wonder how long it will be before he comes back.
a mountain climber’s axe
“… a mountain climber’s axe! Can’t you get that through your skull?” — Trotsky’s Wife in David Ives’ Variations on the Death of Trotsky
I’m a blogging machine this morning.
An Ergodic Walk 