Kalimac
So here's another one. A few days ago I lost my datebook, a little paper-and-pencil calendar in which I write all my appointments. (I don't like electronics for this purpose.) It occasionally disappears and usually turns up again within a few days, but this time I wasn't so sure: a lot of things have vanished from obvious spots lately and never turned up again, like a bill on the kitchen table. So…
I haven't been posting much, not just because not much is happening, but because I'm not in a position where I can get much writing done, even light writing like this, let alone more serious material. The problem is that, since my return from my trip, I've been suffering from the worst ever attack of a recurrent problem: inability to fall asleep. Along about 10 pm I start feeling sleepy, but lying…
Having returned from my trip with a week yet to run on the Menlo Festival, I was able to attend a few more events. I didn't have tickets to any of the mainstage events, long since sold out and I hadn't wanted to plan far enough in advance to get tickets. But the concerts by the young professionals in their 20s, and by the teenage students, are free and tickets aren't available until 9 AM on the…
A pillar of Bay Area sf fandom died last week. From Dave's husband, Scott Marley, via Sarah Goodman and Rich McAllister, "Dave was just walking down the street when he collapsed and could not be revived." I'm not one to write a proper obituary. But I know from personal knowledge that Dave was one of the three partners of The Other Change of Hobbit bookstore when it opened in 1977. He would have…
We order groceries weekly online via the website of the chain our local store belongs to. We set it for pickup the next morning: I drive in, park in the designated pickup spot, and phone the automated system which informs the staff that I'm there. When this service first started up, during the pandemic, there were a lot of problems at the pickup level, but they've gotten sorted out, and save for…
I've counted myself as an experienced traveler for over 40 years, but even at this point I can still learn tips for how to handle things. I arrived at the airport for my flight home from Mythcon to find that I had no assigned seat for the flight, and that I'd have to get one from the gate agent, the one who arrives at the gate one hour before departure time. This was initially puzzling, as I'd…
Since Mythcon was being held in a slice of territory entirely new to me, I decided to spend a little post-Mythcon time exploring that territory further. What most interested me was the Oklahoma Panhandle. Center of the Dust Bowl long ago (I found Ken Burns's documentary on that subject one of his more successful efforts), it interests me as a geography buff as one of the few places in the US where…
I'm back from my trip to Mythcon, and now's the time to write about the conference part of the trip. Mythcon was held in the unlikely grounds of Weatherford, Oklahoma, because the library of the local college, Southwestern Oklahoma State University, is the home of the Mythopoeic Society archives. Our online records are hosted by their website, and - as I saw when I visited by appointment on Friday…
Thursday I drove north out of Texas into Oklahoma. To avoid getting on the turnpike, I took minor highways and found myself in the town of Duncan. There I visited the Chisholm Trail museum, commemorating the huge cattle drives of the late 19C. A docent showed me around and told me a long anecdote about an early automobile they had on display, so when I saw an exhibit on determining a cow’s age by…
Texas. In july. It’s perishingly hot here; the only mitigation is that indoors, the air conditioning is not equally punishingly cold. It’s comfortable. This may be a rural Texas or specifically Fort Worth thing, because I have found that super air conditioning even in Dallas. I’m in Fort Worth because Mythcon next weekend is in Oklahoma and I took a nonstop flight to DFW. On previous trips here I…
So it's an article about what people who've been "canceled" are doing to make a living. Kevin Spacey is selling stainless-steel rings with the initials of his character Frank Underwood on them. And this is all compared to the movie Tár , at the end of which the once-renowned symphony conductor Lydia Tár, having been immersed in scandals, is reduced to conducting concerts of music from video games.…
1) So Trump gave his speech on election fraud. His real motivating factor here is his belief that he's so wonderful that nobody would vote against him (except his enemies, who hate him for unfathomable Reasons), so if he loses an election it must be rigged. Note his concentration on the presidential election he lost and not at all on the ones he won, though if there were fraud it would be…
As I'm not professionally reviewing any more, I have no required commitments at the Music@Menlo Festival, and I'm going to be away for most of it anyway. It started today; for the brief period before I go, I squeezed in just one item, tonight's free Prelude concert by the young professionals of the International Program. We had a firm and dutiful rendition of Beethoven's rather perky Op. 1 No. 1…
Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin, 2024) I'm not the audience for this book, which is addressed to the parents of tweens and teens and concerns the children's addiction to smartphones and other electronic devices. I read it because it was the topic for my public library's monthly book discussion group, and…
The temperature the last few days has been approaching 100F, which is about as hot as it ever gets here. (We're in the first valley in from the coast; further in, it gets hotter, which is why we're not moving there.) The last couple of days I finally found it too difficult to bear, and I've been spending my whole daytime at air-conditioned public libraries, occupying my time by reading some of the…
So now it's our turn to be terrified of cyclosporiasis. No more green salads for a while - which is a nuisance, as B. often has salads for lunch, and it's my custom to make Asian chicken salad, with romaine lettuce, for dinner on really hot days, to avoid cooking. And we have some really hot days lining up for this week. An informative e-mail prior to Iolanthe yesterday named some restaurants in…
The Lamplighters, San Francisco's Gilbert & Sullivan troupe, is reinventing itself, due to the financial pressures facing local theatrical groups of all kinds now. No more large-scale productions carted around to big regional theaters around the Bay Area; they're commencing small-scale productions in small local theaters in the City. This Iolanthe 's entire run was sold out before the first…
I've mentioned that I had as broken tooth extracted. This leaves a space which has to heal for a period of several months until an implant can be placed. In the meantime, there's a gap, and to keep the neighboring teeth from moving over and filling the gap I've been given a prosthesis. This isn't just an artificial tooth to fill up the hole; the artificial tooth is embedded in a hard plastic…
"I poured root beer into a square glass. Now I have just beer."
Slate has been running a daily quiz of six questions each with four multiple-choice possible answers, which runs the gamut from six questions I know the answers to offhand to six questions I have absolutely no idea of. Occasionally there's a clever question or set of answers, and I liked one of today's in a cultural quiz; the question was, what were the names of the other two members of Josie and…
So I did, Sunday afternoon, attend an Independence Day celebration of a sort. The Terrible Adult Chamber Orchestra, that group of nonprofessional musicians who get together to practice purely for the fun of it, was holding one of its rare public concerts, in the grass-lined amphitheater bowl in the park at the Mountain View civic center. B. plays violin in this orchestra, so I chauffeured her to…
There is no need for me to write about the soul-crushing news that Alex Ross, probably the finest classical music critic of all time, is retiring from his regular job as critic for The New Yorker , where he would occasionally - too rarely - write long and thoughtful articles, far beyond quotidian concert reviews, about the state of music. He'll continue to write, not always about music (as not…
One feature of the early Tolkien fandom days of the 1960s whose import is hard to recapture today is the little cries of bliss that Tolkien fans would emit whenever a major publication dared to acknowledge that Tolkien existed, and maybe was important, by publishing an article about him. One such article appeared in the Saturday Evening Post issue with a cover date (normally the date the issue…
Robert Strauss, Worst. President. Ever.: James Buchanan, the POTUS Rating Game, and the Legacy of the Least of the Lesser Presidents (Lyons Press, 2016) The publication date explains how it was still possible to attribute this superlative to Buchanan, who sat there unmoving as the nation plunged towards civil war, having already endorsed the Dred Scott decision, which essentially negated the free…
There's a new movie that's been getting a lot of enthusiastic recommendations, called The Sheep Detectives. It turned out to be on Amazon Prime, so I could see it for no added cost. I watched the first few minutes. I hated it.