Look! Up in the Sky!

...it's a bird; it's a plane; it's...rain?? That's right--the wet stuff has been in the area for two days in a row now. It's not like this will make even the mildest dent in the drought that we've had here in Texas for the past several months, but at least it will provide a bit of relief for everyone's beleaguered lawns and landscaping. Of course, that meant that, from what I heard on the radio, rush hour yesterday afternoon was evidently a nightmare; couple that with last weekend's icy conditions, and I'm sure that means that plenty of insurance adjusters and car-rental execs will be fat and happy this week.

It'll be a good weekend, even if it's busy; my high-schoolers have solo and ensemble as we speak, I'll be catching the Two O'Clock later on today in Frisco (opening act: the Frisco Community Jazz Band, directed by frequent commenter Gary P.), and the Cool Concert Tour kicks off tomorrow with a trip to Keller to see Maynard Ferguson. In between all that, I might well finish all the posts that have been half-completed since earlier in the week.

Keys on the kitten: I hadn't seen this in years, but Gizmodo recently posted the famous picture of the cat piano. Note to PETA: No actual felines were harmed in the making of this drawing. (Hat tip: Instapundit)

It took a lot of "stones" to do this: Streakers have been an unwelcome, if amusing, part of various big events for over three decades now; one even interrupted our marching band in college when we were putting on an exhibition (heh) show at a high school marching contest. But the last place I ever expected to hear about a streaker was at an Olympic curling match. Brrrrr....

No, I Haven't Fallen Off the Face of the Earth...

...it's just been a rather busy past few days, getting everyone ready for solo and ensemble and things like that. But don't worry, I have two new posts in the pipe, and I'll try to get them completed tomorrow. But in the meantime, here's some weirdness for the week...

I'm not sure about hopping or jumping, but these kids have skipping down: A middle school gym teacher in Pensacola, Florida was busted recently for accepting bribes from his students to skip class. He allegedly made over $200 in the scam, but the actual total may have been much higher.

Headline of the day: Homeless Man Tries to Steal Sheep. Somehow he didn't think he'd arouse any suspicion when he walked out of the Little Rock Zoo carrying the sheep in a trash can.

Gross story of the day: A Bavarian village was flooded by liquid pig manure when a tank containing the sewage burst.

A Slightly Unconventional Week

This was definitely a good week at TMEA...but then, I don't know that I've ever had a bad week down there. Each convention takes on its own identity after a while, although there are many things that are exactly the same from year to year. So here's my collection of random thoughts and observations from this year's event:

• I don't know the exact head-count from the convention, but suffice it to say, it's massive. Freakin' huge. Ginormous, even. The wall of people passing through the convention center at the top and bottom of the hour is like a mini-New York transplanted to the heart of the Alamo City. I think it's especially energizing to me because 1) I know so many of the people, and 2) because everyone there is involved in some way in the teaching of music, which is a very good thing. Sometimes, as a music teacher, it's easy to feel isolated amidst a sea of colleagues whose only concern seems to be this year's standardized test scores, so it's great to experience that certain unity of so many kindred spirits in the same place. It's always a little sad on Saturday night when things are winding down, but it's great to be able to repeat the whole thing every February.


• It's always interesting to see someone's face the first time they walk into the exhibit hall. Imagine a couple of football fields' worth of space (spread out over two halls this year) filled with everything that has even the smallest connection to music or music education: Instrument manufacturers, music stores, and music publishers, all the way down to niche marketers like marching drill designers, oboe supply shops and fundraising specilalists (thanks for the free giant lollipop, by the way). No one person would be interested in everything in there, but each booth meant something to somebody.


• Incidentally, I managed to only drop a little over 60 bucks at this booth this year; my acquisitions included an Eric Alexander CD, a classic Thad/Mel recording, Mintzer's Art of the Big Band and a CD with three (!) bari players playing Mulligan tunes.


• As I said, I know a lot of people down here every year; more than a few of them are people I went to college with, and TMEA is the only time we ever get to see each other. My encounters with some of them even take place at the same location (the exhibit hall, the UNT reunion, the Sinfonia sing) every year.
  
  One of my old friends noted that everyone always says "it's going well" when they're asked how things are, and that such a stock response would probably be offered even if things were going badly. But, generally speaking, everyone did seem to be sincerely having a good life. Perhaps that's related to being able to do something you really, really love and make a living out of it.


• I was very impressed by the VIA streetcar system that runs downtown. I had been a little concerned about being so far away from the convention center and the Riverwalk, but the system pretty much ran like clockwork, for eighty cents a pop. As a result, we were able to leave the van parked in the hotel garage until it was time to take the guys and their gear to the concert, and we just came and went as we pleased. The service stopped a little early on weeknights, but the good thing about knowing so many people down there was that there was always a fraternity brother with a car to take me back if a social gathering ran late.


• Tha Gud Spelr Awarred goes to a little shop that I passed every day on the streetcar ride: a CONVENIENT STORE that sold WATERS. (I didn't stop in, so I don't know if it sold COAKS as well.)


• Since I had no computer access at the hotel (note to self: the laptop goes waaaaay up on the list of priorities), I watched the Olympics every night before bed. I'm not one for things like ice dancing, but snowboard cross in particular was a whole lot of fun to watch. I'd never seen it before, but I found myself enraptured every time it came on. (Althouse liked it too, though not all of her commenters agreed.)


• The guys from my school did very well at their concert. I thought that the community college all-state jazz band as a whole sounded better than last year's group, and clinician Alex Parker (from Baylor) was knowledgeable, effective and full of energy. It's too bad that the crowd wasn't bigger, though "front and center" was mostly full. I bet that, with all the things going on, some people aren't even aware of the community college groups...but, as one of my friends who sat with me at the concert said, it was nice to come to an all-state concert where it was actually easy to get a seat.


• Speaking of that, it was the first time in recent memory that I didn't get to attend one of the "regular" all-state band concerts, mostly because they happened when I was running the guys back and forth with their equipment. I'm sure they did well, and it's always impressive to see a band that fills the entire stage of the Lila Cockrell. I still hope to have someone in one of those bands before too long (it's been all jazz for me so far); the competition is massive, but someone's gonna do it in the near future, I think.

All in all, it was one of the most relaxing TMEA weeks I've ever had, even though I had official duties this time. There ended up being plenty of things to see but plenty of chill time in the middle. And with a state test giving me a "holiday" from public school teaching tomorrow, I should get all caught up on both work and sleep.

Thanks for Coming, Have an Ice Day

We made it back in one piece from TMEA today (OK, technically three pieces, since it's not like we fused together or anything) despite the nasty, frozen, drizzly weather that followed us for most of our trip. The worst of it was actually in San Antonio and Dallas, with all the parts in between being rather dry. In fact, the iciest thing we encountered was the parking garage at our own hotel; we had been relegated to the uncovered roof level due to a big wedding in one of the hotel ballrooms last night. Once we made it out of there--and through the big elevated freeways around downtown San Antonio, it was pretty much smooth sailing for the rest of the trip.

Sure, we saw plenty of other people who weren't having such a good time of it; for the first half-hour or so, the freeway would be closed down around every five exits because of a wreck (thank goodness for almost constant service roads in Texas). As for me, I just decided early on that safety was the only factor in play today, so I never went any faster than I felt comfortable going, and I tried really hard to leave a big "bubble" on all sides of me as much as possible. We did run into quite a bit of traffic (especially trucks) when we got back to Dallas, but, although Eric and his traffic-reporter counterparts had a busy day at the office today, I didn't see much rough stuff the whole way back. I hope everybody else's trip back was equally uneventful; it's really weird that, just like two years ago, winter weather has been more of a factor on the San Antonio side during TMEA week than it has been up here.

I'll post some random thoughts about the week, and finish Friday's post, in the next day or so.

Wowed by Wycliffe, Stunned by Shelly

SAN ANTONIO--All is well here at TMEA, though the weather has gotten sharply colder since last night. By far, the two best things I've seen here up to this point have been trombonist Wycliffe Gordon (with the Baylor Jazz Ensemble) and pianist Shelly Berg (with the Dallas Wind Symphony). Amazing musicians, they are.

(I have limited time here at the internet court, so I'll finish this post later; just checking in for now.)

It's That Time of Year Again...

...when I hit the road for San Antonio and the TMEA convention. I'm going a day earlier than usual this year, since I'm the sponsor for a couple of community college all-state jazz band members; it's the first time in my history that a school is paying my way for this trip.

There's not a ton of jazz at this convention this year, but I will get to see Wycilffe Gordon with the Baylor Jazz Ensemble, as well as the UNT Jazz Singers, tomorrow night. Other guests will include the pianist and educator Shelly Berg, as well as my camp colleague, Glenn Kostur (also known as one-fourth of THRASCHER), who'll be directing the All-State Jazz Band (the high school one).

As always, it'll be fun to play the new horns, experience the Riverwalk cuisine and see practically everyone I ever went to college with in the same weekend. Needless to say, blogging will be light and sporadic, depending on the size of the lines at the "Internet cafe" in the exhibit hall. This would be a great time to have a laptop, but I hope to do that by this time next year. I'm back on Sunday around noon; everyone have a great week.

The Three P's

I'm in a frenzy tonight getting ready for my trip to TMEA on Wednesday. You've heard of the "three R's," of course; this trip involves the "three P's," which are packing, paperwork and preparation. This means I don't have time for a post of substance today, but I thought I'd keep you occupied (as if The Musings were your only source of online entertainment!) with the weird stories of today:

• You certainly heard about the incident over the weekend where Vice President Dick Cheney mistook his lawyer hunting buddy for a quail. But getting considerably less coverage was the man in Michigan who accidentally shot his own hunting buddy when he mistook the guy's elbow for a squirrel.


• Want to surprise your sweeties tomorrow for Valentine's Day? Why don't you go for "his and hers" nose jobs, like this Chinese couple did?


• And the tour de force of the day: A North Dakota college student wanted to buy some marijuana, so she called the police station to find out where she could get some.

Blowing out the candles: Happy Birthday Eric!

On a Mission with Music

Today, our Sinfonia alumni association gave a performance at a local retirement center, and I think everyone was pleased with how it turned out. Every fraternity has songs, but one of the advantages of being a music fraternity is that we can actually sing our songs, even in a group like ourselves that consists mostly of instrumentalists. This performance was part of a weeklong celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of our founder, Ossian E. Mills, in which every chapter, colony and alumni association in the nation was asked to do a "Mills Music MIssion" (described in detail here). We chose a retirement community close to where we usually meet, and it was rewarding to see the looks on the faces of the residents as they heard a song they recognized, as well as when each received a long-stemmed carnation upon entering the common room.

We did about a twenty-minute program, including the version of the National Anthem that we sang at the Rangers game last year, as well as other patriotic songs and some timeless old chestnuts. We mingled with the residents for a while afterwards, and everyone was very appreciative; one lady made it a point to tell me that the saxophone was her favorite instrument (we weren't playing, just singing, but we all introduced ourselves during the program and described what we did at this point in our lives). While everyone here seemed to be in pretty good health, we still felt evidence of music's special power to uplift mankind. While none of us is a trained singer, we combined our voices to make something enjoyable, and I think there's a metaphor for life in there somewhere. All in all, it was a great way to spend part of a Sunday afternoon.

Getting my head in the Games: I had the chance to catch a little bit of the Winter Games tonight; I saw some of the fun stuff: luge, downhill skiing, short-track speedskating and halfpipe snowboarding. Snowboarding looks like fun, though I guess I'd better try skiing first. Oh, and Dave Barry emerges from his pseudo-retirement to file a great column on the Games.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "I just don't think I could stand it without music in my life."--the lady whose favorite instrument was the saxophone (yes, I did find out her name, but, ya know, privacy, yada yada). I replied that I definitely couldn't either...

Talk About the Boss from Hell...

You may have read about this elsewhere in the news or in the blogosphere: New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who's also a billionaire and an extremely successful former businessman, stopped by the city's legislative office in the state capital of Albany recently while he was in town to hear the governor's State of the State address. While wandering around the office, he stopped to greet a city worker, Edward Greenwood IX. A photo-op took place and all that. But Bloomberg took a quick glance at Greenwood's computer screen and noticed a game of solitaire in the background. He didn't say anything about it to Greenwood at the time, but later, he told an aide to fire him.

Was this an overreaction on Bloomberg's part? Shouldn't Greenwood have at least gotten a reprimand or a warning first?

"The workplace is not an appropriate place for games," Bloomberg said. "It's a place where you've got to do the job that you're getting paid for."

The mayor states his philosophy of the workplace in further detail:

"I expect all city workers, including myself, to work hard," the mayor said. "There's nothing wrong with taking a break, but during the business day, at your desk, that's not appropriate behavior."

For his part, Greenwood believes the punishment was too harsh for what he calls a first offense:

Greenwood, who earned $27,000 a year and had worked in the office for six years, said in a telephone interview that he limited his play time to his one-hour lunch or during quick breaks when he needed a moment of distraction.

"It wasn't like I spent hours and hours a day playing, because I had plenty to do," Greenwood said. "If I had been working at something exhaustively for two hours, I might get a cup of coffee and play for a minute but then go right back to my work."

There's a lot more on this subject over at Althouse, where one of the commenters notes that Bloomberg's method may not be the best way to deal with certain types of workers:

Knowledge workers need to be cut slack, because we spend a lot of time using our heads to solve problems. Sometimes you just need to turn your brain off for a few minutes and have some time to yourself. It's recharging, and lets you move onto the next problem fresh. Smart employers know this, and create flexible and comfortable environments. Small minded ones like to apply one size fits all solutions that tend to demoralize their employees by treating them like children or slackers...People should be accountable for results. If an employee is doing the work their employer expects of them, who gives a crap what they are doing at their workstations or how they are spending their time?

(Another commenter marvels at how Greenwood's name could be carried on through nine generations; that amazes me too.)

So did the mayor go overboard here? Speaking from personal experience, I'm never in a situation where that could happen, since I'm teaching individual lessons or small classes, but things like this remind my why I'm so happy that I work for myself most of the time.

...And a sitcom extra to be named later: You probably heard by now that ABC/ESPN's Al Michaels is going to NBC to join his fellow former Monday Night Football boothmate John Madden...but did you know that NBC had to trade away the rights to an obscure cartoon rabbit (as well as the next four Ryder Cups) in order to seal the deal?

Blowing Out a Whole Hand's Worth of Candles

Happy birthday to Noah, the oldest of my two nephews; he's five today. Ever since he could talk, he's been a great conversationalist, and he's a sweet kid who's a lot of fun. Since we live about three hours apart (and since my sister and her family are getting back from a ski trip today), I won't get to see them all, but I'm hoping to sneak in a quick lunch with them on my way back from TMEA, if the two all-staters I'm "chaperoning" don't object (they're community college all-staters, so they obviously don't need actual chaperoning, but I'm going down as their sponsor from the school). That's the only thing I'm going to miss this year is the nice long visit that we usually have on my way back.

In case you missed it two years ago, here's an account of how I found out about Noah's birth while I was at TMEA; I had jokingly requested that my sister not have him while I was out of town, but babies operate on nobody's schedule but their own.

Not so fortunate: I eat a lot of Chinese food, but I've never gotten an obscene fortune cookie like these guests at a Brooklyn political fundraiser accidentally received.

Anyone Taking Bets...

...on whether or not the weather forecast is right this time? They've invoked one of the S-words (this time, it's "sleet") in their projections for tomorrow, but we in North Texas have been teased by meteorologists more than a few times before. It's not expected to stick, but it could make for a messy commute tomorrow afternoon and maybe scuttle a lot of people's social plans.

NEXT DAY UPDATE: Naah; by this morning, there wasn't anything wintry at all in the forecast, save for some really cold temperatures at night.

I really can pick 'em: Last night was, of course, the Grammy Awards. I didn't watch, but I did find the jazz winners list, and several of the winners were CD's that I own and/or have blogged about supporting concerts: Wayne Shorter Quartet's Beyond the Sound Barrier, Pat Metheny Group's The Way Up, and the Dave Holland Big Band's Overtime (links later; I'm racing a Blogger outage here).

Someone else is thinking like me: A few days ago, I posted about the oddball idea of a car engine that ran on urine. Now a guy in New Jersey says he's invented an engine that runs on almost any liquid, including pickle juice or Listerine. But attorneys general in several states say that he's a fraud.

Keeping the Beast at Bay

It seems like a whole bunch of my students, as well as several of my good friends, have been sick lately. I had heard on the radio a few weeks ago that flu season had already hit its peak, although I'm not sure if everyone who's been out has actually had the flu. All I know is that a lot of people have been out from lessons and ensembles, and a couple of my friends were sick for a week apiece (and on top of all that, poor Coop got food poisoning from his dorm cafeteria and subsequently blogged about it). So far, at least *knocks wood*, I've managed to avoid whatever is going around, and the twice-a-year sickness/allergy troubles (which I've nicknamed the Beast) have yet to make an appearance either.

I thought that the good streak almost ended last night. I was exhausted during big band, and, although I made it through The Walk™ after dinner with no problems, I was pretty much toast by bedtime, which happened a bit earlier than usual. I felt the blah's coming on, so I hoped for the best.

Sure enough, when I woke up (squeezing out the maximum amount of snooze alarms out of the morning), I felt...normal. Crisis averted, for now. Although I can never really afford to be sick, since I only get paid when I work, that goes double for this week with several big events this weekend and next week's San Antonio trip on the horizon. Thanks to a few more students being out sick, this day wasn't the beating that it could have been; I even got a real lunch break today. (That's right--their being sick helped me stay well...weird.) Sure, I'm pretty drained now and am in fact headed to bed before eleven (anyone who knows me, especially my AIM buddies, is aware that this is a hell-freezes-over moment most of the time), but the hardest part of the week is over.

And to the rest of my friends who've avoided the Beast so far: Good luck, and keep up the good fight.

Reviews you can use: As of last night, I've now eaten at every restaurant in Firewheel Center and Firewheel Market except for Cybertown Pizza, which I'll get to soon enough (air hockey, anyone?). I think I'll give each place a second visit before posting a set of review-blurbs, but that will be on its way pretty soon. I was starting to get burned out on the same three places to eat every week, so the variety offered by all the new stuff has been very nice.

Cool gadget of the day: The Inflatable Home Cinema System. Turn your backyard--yes, yours, since mine's too small--into a drive-in at the push of a button.

This Car Would Really "Whiz" Along

(GROSS ALERT: Maybe you shouldn't read this while eating...or especially while drinking lemonade. Heh.)

OK, this is the whimsical follow-up to yesterday's post about the potential use of alcohol/gasoline mixtures as automotive fuel. I waited till today to add this part because I didn't want to dilute the serious message of the previous post.

Anyway, several months ago I read on Dave Barry's Blog about some people who had developed a motor that ran on urine (go ahead--get the obligatory "ewwwww!" out of the way, and then ponder this with me for a moment). I can't find the link for it, and Dave's blog doesn't have a self-search function, but I'll post it later if I can find it. At any rate, talk about the ultimate renewable resource. The mind reels at the possibilities...

For one thing, a car powered by such a fuel would totally transform the gas station as we know it today. Rather than having big, open fueling areas, they would instead have little private bays where customers could fill their tanks (or empty one tank into another, as it were) in privacy. The convenience store would still be attached, but it would serve even larger drinks, just in case the driver was going on a long trip. Imagine the Triple Super Big Gulp or the gallon bottle of Dasani, just to name two.

Over Starbucks before the Super Bowl the other day, a buddy and I were discussing this theory, and we actually worked out most of the details. I won't go into everything here, since some of it was pretty off the wall, but in about fifteen minutes, we solved the problems of 1) how women would fill their cars this way, 2) how NASCAR and Indy drivers would keep their tanks full (think either a really bizarre pit crew, or an even odder self-fueling option), 3) the partial merging of the restroom and the gas tank on airplanes and buses. We also wondered if the user's having consumed different substances would increase or decrease the potency of the fuel--i.e. would someone fresh off a caffeinated venti latte produce a higher "octane" or not. (We also decided that, if this ever happened, Starbucks' profit might match that of ExxonMobil of late. Of course, Exxon could stay in the game as well; On the Runs and Tigermarkets do serve most excellent coffee.)

At any rate, there are probably plenty of things (besides the "eww" factor) that would keep this from ever happening, but I bet there will be some sort of alternative fuel in widespread distribution before long. Read yesterday's post if you haven't already.

OK, that idea is over. I promise to return to more mature/refined posts again tomorrow.

Here comes Peter Cottontail, hopping mowing down the bunny trail: Everything may be big in Texas, but we have to go to England to find Herman the giant bunny. His ears alone are as long as most pet rabbits are altogether.

Weird animal news, part 2: Lady gives mouth-to-mouth to an exotic chicken.

Coolest new sport of the year so far: The Rocket Racing League.

I Never Want to Be an Alcoholic, but Maybe Our Cars Should Consider It

Last week, in his State of the Union address, President Bush said that America is addicted to oil. With gas prices rising as they have lately, and most of the world's oil located in areas of the world that are unfriendly or downright hostile to us (but who will happily take our petro-dollars), perhaps it is time to get serious about pursuing alternate fuel sources.

Hybrids are a step in the right direction, but they still rely in part on an engine that's totally powered by gasoline. Perhaps, as this article notes, the answer comes from engines that use a mixture consisting of a little bit of gasoline and the rest either methanol or ethanol.

Flexible-fuel vehicles (FFVs) offer consumers little advantage right now, because the high-alcohol fuels which they could employ are not generally available for purchase. This is because there are so few such vehicles that it doesn't pay gas station owners to dedicate a pump to cater to them. Were FFVs made the standard, however, the fuel they need would quickly be made available everywhere.

If all cars sold in the U.S. had to be flexible-fueled, foreign manufacturers would also mass-produce such units, creating a large market in Europe and Asia as well as the U.S. for methanol and ethanol, much of which would be produced in America. Instead of being the world's largest fuel importer, the United States could become the world's largest fuel exporter. A large portion of the money now going to Arabs and Iranians would instead go to the U.S.A. and Canada, with much of the rest going to Brazil and other tropical agricultural nations. This would reverse our trade deficit, improve conditions in the Third World, and cause a global shift in world economic power in favor of the West.

The article also notes that a switch to an alcohol standard would reduce air pollution and provide jobs both for farmers (both here and abroad) who grew the crops from which ethanol would be distilled and for those involved in the distilling of methanol from a variety of materials such as coal and natural gas.

Read the whole thing. It would certainly involve a big leap of faith on the part of Congress to mandate the manufacture of these new engines, and the oil-rich Arab countries wouldn't like it too much (note the Saudi ambassador's shocked response to Bush's "addiction" quote) but it sure seems like a win-win for the West. And if the oil companies are smart, they'll start devoting a portion of their profits to research and development in this area, so that they won't be left out in the cold if and when this conversion takes place.

Gee, your hair smells car runs terrific: While researching this post, I came across an article that touts jojoba oil (found in many shampoos) as an alternative fuel source.

Boys (and Girls) Meet Horns

Today, I call your attention to the rare serious post on Dave Barry's Blog--not because it's serious, but because it's for a great cause that's close to my heart. A guy in Colorado, Jordan Graham is spearheading an instrument drive for an underfunded school in the South Side of Chicago; before the drive, the school's band program had 220 band members but only 48 instruments. The school, Harper High, is only a few miles away from where Graham himself grew up with the good fortune of his parents being able to buy him a trumpet as a kid, and now, as a successful mortgage broker, he's looking to give back (in fact, that now-unused trumpet of his own is going to Harper). Since Dave posted the story, they've gathered 15 instruments (as of this afternoon).

So if you have any old instruments lying around, here's a great opportunity to put them to good use. If the instrument you have would be cost-prohibitive to ship (like the piano that one of Dave's readers wants to donate), or if you'd like to act more locally, I'm sure there's a school in your area that fits the bill. (This group seems worthy as well, and it's got the muscle of Sir Paul behind it.)

I posted a few months ago about kids getting stuck with cruddy horns, but imagine these folks in Chicago and elsewhere who don't even have it that good. Music is a very important part of the educational process, and the opportunity to play should be available to every kid who wants to participate.

Cat-napping, of a sort: I've been to Burlington, Vermont for their jazz festival several times now, and I always enjoy it; last summer, I even got to take a walk around the University of Vermont campus. Now that campus is all abuzz because someone stole their Catamount mascot while it was being repaired at a sign shop in South Burlington. This cat weights 200 pounds, which (like the time last fall when someone stole a Chick-Fil-A cow off a billboard) begs the question: How in the world do you transport something like that without getting caught, and where the heck do you hide it? (UVM is offering a reward for its safe return.)

We Interrupt This Commercial Message for a Little Football

Now that the big game is over, what was your favorite commercial that aired tonight? My vote goes to the FedEx spot with the cavemen and the dinosaurs.

Oh, and did anyone get to see the pregame music? I got back too late to see Stevie, and I was just "wondering" how it went (heh).

Pop (up) Go the Weasels

I'm not one for putting very many restrictions on the Internet; the unfettered displaying and exchanging of information (except maybe in places like China) is one of the Net's finest attributes. But if I were the Grand Poo-bah of the online world, I might well try to stop one particular behavior: Disobedient popup windows. You've probably had them too--the kind that come up when you close a certain browser window, saying "Wait! Don't Go!" or something like that. This is fairly annoying; it's as if they think I couldn't possibly have wanted to leave their site on purpose. But when you get down to it, that's all they are is an annoyance, though the people responsible should be taken out back and roughed up a bit on general principle. (And in case you're inclined to say, "Kev, just get a popup blocker and be done with it," I can't find one for my platform and browser--Mac OS 9 and Mozilla 1.2.1--that allows specificity, because I can't block all popups, or things I need to use, like my online banking, won't work properly.)

But in the past week, something has happened three different times that has me concerned. I play a few online lotteries and what-not (they're free, so the only thing I'm "gambling" is the few minutes it takes to enter my numbers), and sometimes those sites have popups from third parties. Usually, the solution is easy: Close 'em, and they're outta there. But in these three instances, if I closed the popup, it came right back again. And again. And again, and again, ad nauseam. One time, quitting the browser solved the problem; another time, I had to restart the computer. But the second time it happened, it wouldn't even let me quit the browser or restart the computer; I finally had to switch it off (improperly) at the power strip. That annoyed me, because I realized that whatever was causing that window to keep reappearing could also be trying to damage my computer.

Needless to say, I sent a scathing email off to the host of each of the host sites, naming the popup site by name and suggesting (rather strongly) that they might not want to do business with advertisers who might be trying to harm their customers. I haven't heard back from anyone yet, but I also haven't had a repeat appearance of the malevolent window at any one given site.

Has anybody else run into The Popup That Just Won't Leave? (That sounds like a bad horror flick, doesn't it?) As a Mac user, I'm usually immune to viruses, so I'm wondering if this is the new wave of hacker work or something. At any rate, whoever's doing this is pure scum in my book, especially if people's computers are actually being damaged. I'll update if it happens again.

Wildlife getting your goat? How stunning: In South Carolina, a goat gets loose and charges one of its owner's neighbors; a deputy sheriff subdues the animal by using a Taser.

I'd like my eggs Samsung-side-up, please: Today's Fun with Science project involves cooking eggs using a pair of cell phones.

You Oughta Be in Pictures (in the Paper)

I was reading my Dallas Observer tonight, when, all of a sudden, the smiling mug of my buddy Eric was staring back at me. He's the subject of an article about the book he's writing: Post: An Anthology of American Post-Hardcore /Whatever-You-Call-It-Core: 1985-2005. The book is still a few chapters away from completion (as the article notes, and I knew already, Eric juggles his writing with both playing in a band and his day gig as a traffic reporter), but he posts regular progress reports on his blog.

Congratulations, Eric! I look forward to reading the book. Oh, and how cool would it be if the book had an accompanying CD featuring, say, a track from each band that's featured in there. (I realize that might be difficult for those bands who aren't on indie labels anymore, but maybe they still have some material in the vaults.)

Speaking of bypassing the Machine, here's my favorite quote from the article: "I don't want to bother getting an agent and beg publishers to get it out," Grubbs says. "There was no middle man when people started their own records. Why should there be a middle man when publishing a book?"

I say amen, brotha.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "My next class is a nap."--Me, to my last student of the day, as I was encouraging him to pack up quickly and get to his next class on time. It's been quite an activity-filled last two weeks, and that Friday afternoon nap felt quite good today...now, a three-day weekend awaits.

OK, I'm Confused Now

Almost a year ago, I posted about the confusion which ensued when all kinds of companies started changing names: Many of the major oil companies started buying and selling each other, re-branding many of the local gas stations in the process (if I recall correctly, many Texacos became Shells, many Mobils became Chevrons and the rest of the Mobils became Texacos. It was enough to make your head spin...); Macy's announced a takeover of many regional department-store nameplates; my cell phone service also changed names at the same time. But the latest makeover in the telecom industry is really unusual.

My cell phone service had been with AT&T Wireless for a really long time, until a year ago, when it was acquired by Cingular. I didn't really notice any difference in my service or anything; my bill just got printed in a different color. I knew that, eventually, I'd have to switch completely over to the Cingular system, which would mean trading in my cool texting phone, since it was incompatible with the new system. I was planning on waiting until this coming fall to do that, because that's when I'd qualify for a free phone again. But wait, hold everything (or maybe that should be "hold the phone"--heh). When SBC bought AT&T recently (keeping the venerable AT&T name), more changes were announced, and this one really surprised me: Cingular will become AT&T again. Huh? That's right, my phone service is being re-rebranded, you could say. SBC-now-AT&T owns 60 percent of the Cingular brand (BellSouth owns the rest), and evidently the new brand will have more clout and more options for business customers.

At any rate, I guess it doesn't really affect me too much; since I pay all my bills online, it's not like I'd write the wrong name on a check or anything. Still, it's ironic that so soon after I've finally gotten used to saying that I have Cingular and not AT&T, it's about to be time to say that I have AT&T again. And I wonder if I'll be able to keep my cool phone now...

Jammin' jingle: The new AT&T commercials are all over TV and radio (as you know, unless you've lived in a cave since New Year's), but that's OK with me, since they all feature a really cool song, "All Around the World" by Oasis (it's on this CD). I've always been a sucker for anything that sounds like the Beatles (as well as the real thing), and I think that this 9-minute opus is one of the Gallagher brothers' best; in fact, I just popped it in the CD player as we speak.

Milestone: This is my 800th post. Yay!

Dissension Is Taking Its Toll

There's been a lot of talk lately about the proposed toll roads in the Metroplex. One of them, the eastern extension of the President George Bush Turnpike, will run very close to my neighborhood. Another one, Highway 121 through Collin and Denton counties, doesn't usually affect me directly, but it definitely needs to be done; it outgrew its old incarnation as a two-lane farm road about a decade ago. The third one, Southwest Parkway in Ft. Worth, would probably be used even less by me, but I don't begrudge them a toll road at all. If only everyone shared those sentiments, the 121 project wouldn't be in such a snag right now.

The group who builds and maintains all of the current toll projects in our area, the North Texas Tollway Authority (NTTA), recently announced a plan to use portions of tolls collected on Dallas and Collin County roads to build the Ft. Worth project, but officials over here don't like that idea: Dallas County commissioners raised the idea of pulling out of the NTTA, and Collin and Denton officials were toying with the idea of making sure that all the tolls collected on a future 121 toll road in their counties would stay in their counties:

Last month, the tollway authority board voted 4-3 to adopt its toll policy for Southwest Parkway and other projects. Representatives of Denton, Tarrant and Johnson counties supported the vote.

Representatives of Dallas and Collin counties unsuccessfully pushed for a policy that could set higher tolls for projects, such as Southwest Parkway, that don't initially generate as much revenue.

"The fuse has been lit," Paul Wageman, the Collin County representative of the tollway authority board, said at an agency retreat this week where board members spent an hour discussing last month's vote. "Our own actions have helped to create dissension." (source)

And there's also been a lot of griping from lots of people in the area about having to pay tolls at all. But let me throw in my two cent's worth (a small toll?) here:

• We have to think regionally. It's just not very neighborly to worry about tolls on one road going towards the consruction of other roads in the system, so long as each road is well-maintained. It's not so much that roads in one county exist in a vacuum; does anyone around here really think about what county they live in, with the exception of paying property taxes or going to jury duty? You're not paying just to use that road; you're paying to use the system, and if the system does a good job of facilitating mobility throughout the area, then I'm happy to contribute.


• We need to have a single toll-collecting authority. I never cared for the notion that the 121 toll road might be run by some private company that wasn't the NTTA, and I was really bothered by the notion of Dallas County creating its own separate authority. Why? In a word, TollTags. This little piece of plastic is one of the best inventions of the past two decades; being able to cruise through a tollbooth at a just-barely-reduced speed and getting your account automatically replenished by a credit card (instead of sitting in a long line, coming to a complete stop, and fishing for quarters, or tokens, or whatever) is the reason the system works as well as it does. Sure, I bet that multiple collection agents would eventually use the same piece of plastic, but you know there'd be a long lag before everything was configured to "talk" to each other (you can only imagine my frustration when I went to visit my parents in Houston before those two systems got integrated). And if they weren't, a lot of people's windshields would be covered with the stupid things, with each tag activating depending on whether the road you were currently driving was maintained by Tollway Authority A, B, or C. Aargh, what a mess that would be.


• Toll roads are here to stay. Sure, we were used to all the highways being built with our gasoline taxes. But lately, the Legislature has been raiding the gas tax revenues on a regular basis to pay for other stuff. While we might eventually be able to elect people who won't do that anymore, I'm not holding my breath. The fact is, without tolls, a lot of the projects in this area wouldn't have even started to be built, including the George Bush, just a stone's throw from my house. Imagine how bad the mobility would be in this area if the Bush were still just access roads with stoplights. And also, without the Bush finished as far as it has been, Firewheel would still be nothing more than a lonely "Future home of AMC Theatres" sign on the prairie, and we'd still be driving to Plano (on the aforementioned service roads) for everything. Sure, I probably don't appreciate how much I actually pay in tolls, since the TollTag is charged to a card, but it's totally worth it to me to have roads done now instead of 25 years from now.
  
  Granted, if the subject turned to tolling existing roads (like, say, 35E from LBJ to Denton, which has been discussed before), I'd be singing a completely different tune. But that's another post for another time...

After all this, I was really happy to read an op-ed from the mayor of Frisco advocating having the NTTA build and maintain the future 121 tollway. As he pointed out, at least they'd have a local representative on the NTTA board, a luxury that they wouldn't have with a private company.

I'm sure there'll be more on this story as it develops.

We remember: A few days ago, we remembered the Challenger Seven; today, it's Columbia's turn. I actually saw the shuttle fly through the air as it came down and broke apart, though I had no idea what I was seeing at the time. A year later, having started The Musings, I blogged about it from the vantage point of one year earlier.

Blowing out the candles: Happy birthday to my fraternity brother James (no, not the Australian one; I don't think the Prawn dons Greek letters on a regular basis).

The iDeaf Generation?

Yes, I'm posting during the day. Hell has frozen over, no doubt (look over there--Lucifer is adjusting his parka!). But no, actually, it's the end result of two students being out sick (that's a safe guess, since they usually don't skip school in middle school). That launched the lunch hour early: Free Potbelly, as mentioned yesterday, during the heart of the busy hour, yet the line wasn't bad at all. Got to take The Walk™ during daylight--it was an unexpected treat.

So I guess that I'm one of the only people left on the planet who doesn't own an iPod (or an iRiver, an iDontcarewhatbranditis, a uCanhearmymusicinthenextcounty, or anything of that ilk). Though I do have an iPod on my Amazon Wish List, it's actually way down on the list of "must-have" gadgets, far behind the new TV, the entertainment center in which to put said TV, and of course the eventual replacement for the Ancient and Venerable iMac, which I plan on "driving until the wheels fall off." Admittedly, an iPod would be cool for things like long plane trips, since I wouldn't have to carry my Discman and all those CD's anymore, but it's not like I have to have one tomorrow.

And maybe that's a good thing. An article in today's DMN talks about what many people have been suspecting all along: Improper use of personal stereos can cause excessive hearing damage, especially in young people:

Audiology experts agree that hearing loss is increasing in the United States. According to widely cited figures from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the number of Americans age 3 and older with some form of auditory disorder has more than doubled since 1971, from 13.2 million to about 30 million today. Of those, one-third are said to be people with noise-induced hearing loss.

The trend clearly predates the iPod; in fact, it traces its roots to the dawn of the industrial age, according to Pam Mason, ASHA's director of audiology professional practices. These new devices merely add to a daily din of environmental noise that includes traffic, construction, jets and leaf blowers.

The experts admit that iPods themselves are too new to have made an appearance in the testing done on personal stereo users, especially since noise-related hearing loss develops over an extended period of time. Still, if tests done on Walkman and Discman users are any indication, the headphones can certainly pack a wallop if used to extremes:

In the case of one brand of player matched with a particular brand of earphone, he found that listeners could get a sound dose as high as 120 decibels. This is comparable to the sound level at a loud rock concert or sandblasting; it could lead to risk of hearing damage after 7.5 minutes of exposure.

Preliminary data on iPods and similar devices have found lower maximum levels – above 100 decibels (the noise volume of a chainsaw; risk of hearing damage after two hours), but not higher than 115 decibels (a football game in a loud stadium; risk of hearing damage after 15 minutes), Dr. {Brian] Fligor [director of diagnostic audiology at Children's Hospital in Boston] said. To fully understand the potential impact of these devices, it is important to know that the sound travels a tiny distance from earbud to eardrum rather than being diffused in a football stadium or concert arena.

The article also notes that regular headphones are less likely to do damage than earbuds (all other things being equal), and that a good way to tell if your music is too loud is if someone three feet away from you in an elevator can hear your music, or if you have to turn the music down to understand someone who's speaking to you--that makes sense to me.

Besides the obvious fact that, as a musician, I need my hearing for my livelihood, I have another reason to be careful in this area: I'm pretty sure I've had some hearing loss already. One semester at the college, while filling in for my colleague on sabbatical, we were moved to a new rehearsal hall before the soundproofing had been completed (it used to be an art studio before it was given to us). That meant that the room was LOUD, and on one day of the week, I had to direct two big bands and two combos in that room. I've had a slight ringing in my ears ever since, but even though I don't think my hearing loss was excessive (in other words, I don't have to have people speak up in order to understand them, nor do I have to turn my TV up to a ridiculous volume), I still feel like I "took one for the team" that semester. I suppose that, if the damage had been profound, I would have gone after the company doing the soundproofing, since the work they promised would be done in August wasn't actually done until April. Still, I really need to get up to that musician's health clinic at UNT and get fitted for some custom earplugs before long; they let you hear the good stuff and keep out the bad stuff. (John Murphy and others discuss this topic recently (scroll down a few posts) at the new Green Room site.)

At any rate...the jury's still out on what iPods might do, but the potential for damage is there, so--like most everything else--let's use a little common sense, OK?

QUOTE OF THE DAY (added later): This one could go lots of bad places, so I'm just posting it as is...ROOMMATE NEEDED
$300 A MOUTH
At least he spelled ROOMMATE correctly; I've seen lots of signs looking for a ROOMATE. On one of them when I was in college, a wiseguy wrote in, "To share a ROO?" But I guess that only happens in Australia, after said Roo is finished grilling on the barbie. (Sorry, James, I couldn't resist. Feel free to post a Texan joke on your site or something.)

Free Food Tomorrow!

With a headline like that, I could probably post about anything, since I almost certainly have your attention now. Except that the subject actually is free food tomorrow, assuming you're in my part of town. The new Potbelly in Firewheel Market is giving out free sandwiches tomorrow to anyone who makes a donation to Habitat for Humanity. The promotion runs between 11 and 3, but if you're reading this, please try to avoid being in line around 1:20, so I won't have to wait too long (kidding). I'm not sure how much the donation is required to be, but I'm assuming it's somewhat more than a penny and somewhat less than the actual price of the sandwich. At any rate, it's good food for a good cause.

And I thought Bruce Hall was bad back in the day: Hard to believe, but over at Yale, the university with a $15.7 billion endowment, they're finally supplying soap in the dormitory bathrooms. Hopefully, nobody will post urinal signs telling people to use the soap.

While I Was Out...

All the news that's been fit to blog about for the past few days, except I haven't had time yet:

• I couldn't let this week go by without saying Happy Birthday, Mozart! It's no accident that his music has survived the test of time.


• As noted in many places yesterday: America won't forget you, Challenger Seven. Also on the subject: 7 Myths of the Challenger Disaster.


• Now this is just cool: iTunes U, also known as professors' lectures via podcast.


• Believe it or not, Waco is getting a Hooters this week. The local Baptists may not like it, but a local Catholic priest is giving the place an official blessing. (Key quote: " I think Hooters is just one of those commodities people should use in moderation.”--another local priest, now retired)

I had more stuff to blog about, but it's escaping me at the moment, so I'll try and catch up some more in the week ahead.

Notes from the Road (Stephenville Edition, Part 3)

For some reason, this particular trip always generates some blogworthy material; here's the latest collection:

• While passing through the town of Tolar on the way there, I saw a place called "Aloha Donuts." That made me laugh, because the first place everyone thinks of when buying donuts is Hawaii, right?


• In that same town, there was a closed gas station that still had its prices posted. The price for regular unleaded was listed at $1.08 a gallon. I wondered how long it had been since gas was that cheap...


• In the nearby town of Bluff Dale, the sign at the entrance to town read:
  PRAY FOR RAIN
  BURN BAN ON
  PLEASE NO HOT PANTSI wonder if the younger citizens even know what "hot pants" are...


• Evidently, a lot of local elections are coming up, and I saw some campaign signs for people named "Tonna," "Donlita" and "Chili." I think Chili (which was a nickname, but I've forgotten his real name) was running for district attorney, and I was wondering if that name made him any less threatening to potential criminals.


• Bumper sticker of the day:
  YES, THIS IS MY PICKUP
  NO, I WON'T HELP YOU MOVE(Seen on--of course--a pickup truck that also had a Domino's sign on it. No wonder he didn't want to help anyone move; he drives enough as it is.)

This continues to be my favorite roadtrip, driving-wise, of all my chapters, probably because it's the only one that's not almost all freeway. It's nice to stop and smell the proverbial roses for a while, especially when some of them are so colorful.

Previous Notes from the Road (Stephenville Edition):
Part I
Part 2

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "You can't catch old."--One of the guys at the workshop, when we were discussing performing at nursing homes and how some college students seem reluctant to interact with the residents, as if they were contagious or something.

Travel Advisory

I'm off to Stephenville again, this time for a fraternity workshop; I'll leave after school tomorrow and get back by around dinnertime on Saturday. I'll do the usual stuff, partake of the local delectables (Dublin DP, Hard Eight BBQ, etc.) and enjoy the trip; it's always a nice drive, as I've noted before. Sure, this time is expected to have rain for most of the weekend, but that's OK--we need it, badly. I've allowed myself plenty of time to get there as well. (Oh, and hopefully there won't be a barking dog in the next room at the hotel like there was last time. You might finally get to read that elusive MAN BITES DOG headline if that were the case again.)

There should be multiple posts (or one gigantic one) when I get back; there's been lots to talk about and no time to commit it to the keyboard. Everyone be safe and have a relaxing weekend till then.

The Thai's that bind: To most teenagers, getting braces is a sign of impending uncoolness; in Thailand, it's a popular fad, so much so that kids are even getting fake ones. Now the government is threatening people who make or sell fake braces with fines and prison time.

You gotta fight for your right to...wear a skirt to school? This guy in New Jersey did, and he won his case.

Mr. Clean Goes Overboard?

(Sorry that this is a day late; Blogger was down for most of last night and this morning...)

Not much time for a post today, but I had to pass along this quick anecdote from one of my schools. It seems that someone at this school started a campaign to get people to wash their hands after using the bathroom. (This is a good thing, as far as I'm concerned; watching someone leave the bathroom--especially the stalls--without washing always triggers the "eww" reflex in me, and I'd never skip this task myself, especially at school, since I may have to adjust someone's reed during a lesson. I've even been known to carry around those little towelettes that you get from chicken-wing restaurants if I know that a certain school won't have soap in its facilities.)

As part of this campaign, signs were posted everywhere: on the walls, above the sinks, on the paper towel dispenser....in the urinals. That's right, there were signs in the urinals, practically blocking the bowl in one case. I guess that's one way to get people to be sure and wash up--rig it so they actually pee on their hands in the course of doing business. Again I say, "eww."

(And I'd hate to be the custodian who had to remove those signs at campaign's end...)

Pa-Rant

I've been meaning to write this post for quite a while, but this morning was the deciding factor. Here's the situation: I teach a couple of before-school lessons at a middle school a couple of mornings a week. The Wednesday ones end before the 8:40 go-to-class bell rings, so I miss the crowds in the hallways, but I do run into (not literally, of course) some parents dropping their kids off in front of the school, since the only exit from the faculty parking lot funnels through that way. The Tuesday lessons, however, end right at that bell, so I do catch the hall crowds. But by the time I get to my car, there are maybe five minutes before the first-period tardy bell rings, so one would think that all the kids would have been dropped off by then, and I would have the front drive all to myself, correct?

Umm, no. Not by a long shot.

I can't remember a Tuesday morning all year where there weren't at least ten cars dropping kids off with less than five minutes before class. Even today, when they were giving a state "benchmark" test all day (and, no doubt, emphasizing the importance of being on time today for the past week or so), I saw the same number of late kids being dropped off. What gives?

It's one thing if a kid is late to high school, because he may have driven him/herself there. But these kids are late because their parents made them late. That's just so wrong, I don't even know where to begin.

Granted, it's not like I'm memorizing license plate numbers or anything; it could be the same ten parents who are late every week, or it could be different people each time who are having their one bad morning of the year. My "statistics" are anything but scientific. But it still blows my mind that more than one or two parents would allow this to happen. If they're the ones who are supposed to set the example for their kids, what kind of a chance do the kids have in this case?

I guess I hold parents to a really high standard. My own parents, whatever their shortcomings, set the bar pretty far up there. They did what they were supposed to do, when they were supposed to do it. I was never late to, or unprepared for, anything on their account. (Ironically, the one time my dad forgot to turn in a piece of paperwork on time, it was the application for a college scholarship through his work. But hey, that penalized him more than it did me, because he was paying for my undergrad school as it was.) They never cursed in front of me, except for the time or two when they were doing so at me, and on those occasions, I deserved a tongue-lashing, trust me. Even if I disagreed with them on something, I always respected the way they conducted themselves when they were raising me.

Sure, the standards had their downside: Mom and Dad weren't (aren't?) always easy to please. I'll admit to some self-esteem issues over the years because of that. But again, they always had my respect, and not because they demanded it (a futile undertaking, in my opinion, unless one is in the military), but because they earned it. I just can't see these slacker parents earning too much respect from their kids; they may well set high standards, but those requests will fall on deaf ears if the parents don't live up to the standards themselves. "Do as I say, not as I do" doesn't fly once a kid hits adolescence.

Am I being unreasonable here? I have always thought that being a parent is a special calling (and by this, I mean a true parent, not just someone who's a sperm-donor or birth giver and isn't living up to the title of parent). I've said on occasion that it would be nice to have some sort of test that couples had to take before being allowed to conceive, but 1) several of my friends would never have been born if that were the case, and 2) naaah, too Third Reich, methinks. I'm also sure that plenty of parents got off to a rough start but eventually "got it" as time went on.

And sure, some people would bash me for even talking about this, because I'm not a parent yet. They'd say, "You don't know how hard this is, Kev." My reply would be, no, not first-hand, but then nobody ever said it was going to be easy...and besides, maybe one of the reasons I'm not a parent yet is precisely because I didn't think I was ready. (The other reason, I guess, would be a lack of dates. D'oh.)

So maybe it is just the same ten bad parents every week who drop their kids off late. And maybe this one thing isn't indicative of a larger problem, but the sad truth is that it probably is. Anyway, I've gone on way too long with this post, so I'd like to hear from you, especially my fellow educators. Do parents today seem to live up to the standards set by our own parents, or have you seen a drop in this area? The comments are open...

"Kev vs. the Cold" Update: So Far, I'm Winning

A few months ago, I noted that, even though I'm no fan of cold mornings (and, true to form, I've been pushing waaaay too many snooze alarms lately), I still felt that it was necessary to try keeping the thermostat at 68 degrees this winter due to the prospect of high heating bills. Even though we've pretty much had a warmer-than-usual winter thus far, there were still a lot of people suffering from "sticker shock" from their December bills, which included that little icy snap a few weeks before Christmas. So even though the gas company is saying that any spike would be short-lived, I was still uneasy when I opened my latest gas bill today. But while several people (with around the same size house as mine) were quoted in the paper as saying that their bills were in the hundreds of dollars, mine was a very palatable $69.62--not much more than during the height of winter last year. I breathed a sigh of relief.

So one thing's for sure: The 68-degree thing evidently works. The little adjustments I've had to make to keep warm inside--wearing a hoodie, wearing socks more often, sleeping under a comforter--have been totally worth it. And I'm sure that the new heating and cooling system that I got this past spring has been a big help too. I shudder to think how much energy my tired old system and its tattered ductwork would have been wasting this year. So it may not have been the most exciting birthday present, but it's turning out to be the gift that keeps on giving.

Grandma didn't really get run over by a reindeer...but in Australia, she got bitten by a snake while watching TV. (The venom didn't actually enter her bloodstream, so she was OK.)

What is it, girl? Grandpa Timmy fell down a well?: Also in Australia, a 90-year-old farmer was rescued by a cattle dog whose name actually is Lassie.

A Little Relief

That mysterious wet stuff was coming down from the sky on my trip home last night, and it continued on throughout most of today (in fact, at one point, they gave a most unusual weather forecast on the radio: 100% chance of rain). It won't be nearly enough to even put a dent in the drought conditions around here, but every little bit helps; maybe we can go a day or two without having a grass fire warning for once.

I would have actually had a post of substance this weekend, but I got caught up in two very interesting discussions of the Venus-vs.-Mars variety:

• Over at Althouse, the subject was the "gender gap" in education, which now appears to be swinging in favor of girls, since schools today tend to favor the sit-down-and-listen approach that doesn't work so well for boys...who then tend to get over-diagnosed with ADD and ADHD and medicated into submission (I'll elaborate more on this subject in a later post).


• And over at Dr. Helen (a.k.a. the InstaWife), the discussion is about why some men are reluctant to marry; one of the big reasons is that the divorce laws are often stacked against them, no matter what their personal situation.

I'm doing a lot of planning for my fraternity workshop this coming weekend, so posting may be sparse for the next few days, but I'll try to pop on with at least a little something here and there.

Jazz has a sense of humor: Yesterday's comics pages contained not one, but two references to jazz artists: B.C. included Maynard Ferguson in its punchline, while Pearls Before Swine touted Chick Corea and included a very funny misunderstanding of his last name. (I'll admit that, as a kid, I used to think his first name was "Chuck.")

Strike Up the Bands

I attended the local All-Region band marathon tonight; it's five bands (freshman band, 4A band, and three 5A bands) back-to-back in four hours. Since getting there required a trip north on Central Expressway during afternoon rush hour (and since my nap lasted longer than I'd anticipated...d'oh!), I didn't quite make the entire freshman portion, but I did hear their last number in its entirety. So today's post is just a collection of some random thoughts that occurred to me during the concert:

• Once I arrived, I was there for nearly the entire thing, as I had students in every band except the 4A one (since all my schools are 5A now). During that time, I took a dinner break; if nothing else, I felt like I was opening up a seat for some 4A kid's Aunt Edna who might not have gotten a place to sit if I'd stayed.


• The concert ran extremely efficiently, with no band starting more than a minute or two after its posted time. I've seen this concert run as much as thirty minutes behind in the past, and it makes for a long night for the directors and everyone else involved. This one was obviously set up very well, and the auditorium was big enough that nobody who went in the side entrances was left without a seat (though it did bunch up a bit in the middle).


• Perhaps this was a direct by-product of the need to keep things on time, but one of the only negatives of the concert was that none of the conductors spoke a word until right before their band's final number. I thought at first that perhaps it was just each director's individual personality, but after three bands did that in a row, I decided that it must have been by design. I'm not saying that everyone needs to be as big of a chatterbox as I am onstage (a holdover, no doubt, from my college radio days), but when the program says "to be selected from the following," I always want to know what I'm hearing as I hear it.


• Going to a band concert always reminds me why I'm not a band director. This isn't as negative as it might sound: I enjoy listening to the concerts, and I enjoy working with students one-on-one, as well as with jazz players in groups, but conducting a large classical ensemble really isn't my thing (though, if a college job came up that involved directing one classical ensemble along with several jazz ones, I know I'd have the wherewithal to make it "my thing" in short order). Even with the exciting new music being written for that medium today (more on that in a moment), I still heard some pieces that I had played in high school. and they were done pretty much the same way as they were when I played them. I like the freshness and unpredictability of jazz; even when I'm programming a tune that I've done before (and veterans of my combos--especially the afternoon one--will tell you that there are certainly plenty of "Kev Classics" out there), it's a completely different rendition each time because of the elements of interplay and improvisation.
  
  I totally appreciate the work that band directors put into their craft, even as I totally realize that I'm not the right person for that job. Again, that's not a negative at all; it just means that I know I'm in the right place.


• Tonight also reminded me once again how much more I like "wind ensemble" music than traditional "band" music. Sure, I'm a sucker for a good march (which makes sense, seeing as how my first two widely-performed compositions were marches), but the more orchestral style of wind writing that's employed today just draws me a lot deeper into the music than most of the old band "warhorses" do. (It doesn't hurt that a lot of wind ensemble writing draws heavily from the modern film-scoring sound...which reminds me--sometime soon, I need to write the post about "How Film Scoring 'Saved' Modern Classical Music.") The effective use of the different colors of the winds, along with the expanded percussion section, really heightens the overall appeal of the genre. I wasn't familiar with a lot of the compositions I heard tonight, but I would definitely acquire some of them on CD for when I'm in a classical mood (yes, it happens).


• I was also reminded of the importance of not judging a proverbial book by its cover. One of the bands started out by playing three traditional "band" works; it was well-done, but I was wondering if the director was just old-school and maybe a bit stodgy. Then, for their last number, they did a piece that evoked a New Orleans jazz funeral, complete with a small combo up front, mass singing of "When the Saints Go Marching In," and a finale where everyone busted out party hats and noisemakers and dumped confetti on their fellow bandmembers. It brought down the house, and it was certainly an unexpected finale to their portion of the program.


• This may sound sappy, but it's always cool when they recognize the teachers before every band (by having all the directors and private teachers of the students currently on stage stand up for a moment). Most of the work that my colleagues and I do is behind the scenes, and that's ok; the real reward is watching them progress over the years and develop a love for music that will hopefully last far beyond their public schooling, no matter what their major will be in college. But I'd be a liar if I said it wasn't nice to be among those standing up every year.

A few people are always surprised to see me at this concert, but they shouldn't be; I'm all about supporting the students whenever I can. And while I'm never able to make every concert at all eight schools during the year, the Region concert is one I try never to miss, since the people who made it to this stage have put in even more work than usual to get there. In return, I can certainly sacrifice a Friday or Saturday evening to hear the fruits of their effort.

(I also blogged a Region concert a few years ago; in that one, several of the participants were also in some of our college ensembles, so the post took on a bit more of a personal flavor.)

Before long, they'll be jammin' from the womb: A few days ago, I noted the presence of a 10-year-old trumpet prodigy who was at IAJE last week. Hot on the heels of that story comes the news of another tiny trumpet titan, and he's only four.

Energized

I have a lot of things I want to blog about, but they'll have to wait till the weekend. As you can see from the time stamp, it's pretty late, and I've only been home for slightly more than an hour.

Seeing as how I started teaching at 7:30 this morning, I should certainly be completely exhausted by now, but I'm not. Why? Because this is my long day at the college--two jazz combos, plus a decent-sized dinner break in between. Instead of being spent when it's over, I'm usually energized, because I just love teaching college in general, and I really enjoy working with these two groups (especially the night group, which I only see on Thursdays). I really feel like this is where I need to be, and I'm glad to get to be there twice a week.

Anyone else out there have, or had, a job you totally love?

Unlike Santa Claus, They Made a List Without Checking It Twice

I know that bulk-mailed items can sometimes really miss their targeted demographic, but these two are crazy:

• An 87-year-old Dallas grandmother received a recruiting notice from the Army. (She's of course too old to enlist, but if she did, the phrase "your grandmother wears Army boots" wouldn't always be an insult anymore.)


• On the opposite end of the spectrum, a two-year-old girl in Massachusetts received a summons to jury duty. Upon finding out, the county gracefully decided to give her a "16-year deferral."

Our tax dollars at work...

She'll face the wrath of many for this: Remember that woman in France who had a face transplant a few months ago? Well, now she's used her new lips to take up smoking again, much to the chagrin of her doctors.

The Walk™

Today was the first day of college classes (everything went fine), and I found myself just finishing dinner and errands at around 8:30 tonight. Most normal people would then go home--especially people with syllabi to revise. But anyone who's read the last two years and nine months of The Musings knows that this is no normal person. I had one more stop to make. Why? Because I'm addicted to The Walk™. (Is it possible to "trademark" a physical activity? Sure, why not--especially considering I did the same thing to a social event a few years ago.)

As I said at New Year's, my non-resolution is for there to be a little bit less of Kev within a few months, and what's left of me wants to be a lot more active and fit. The possible deterrent to this is that my schedule will allow me maybe two days at the gym at most (it would be three if it were still open on Sundays), so I decided that, weather and operating hours permitting, I would go to Firewheel and do The Walk™ on as many non-gym days as possible.

For those of you familiar with the layout of the place, I walk the entire "streetscape" portion, adding "bonus sections" if I've been at one of the Market food/drink places up front. I don't do the dorky swingy-arms thing like "power walkers" do, but my pace is faster than it would be if I were just shopping. I've been known to drag friends along on this if we're up there for some reason, but if it's just me, that's cool too. Even if I feel creaky from a day of sitting down in cramped practice rooms, I always feel better after walking. Oh, and I can't imagine doing this at an indoor mall, where I'd be the only one doing so who didn't have grandkids. There's something about a (simulated) small town setup that just makes it eminently...walkable.

Anyway, that's a quick update on progress since New Year's; I also have continued the crunches every morning. I don't weigh myself every day, or even every week, but I'm starting to feel smaller and definitely feel better...and that's what counts, right? So even when part of me is begging to go home for the day, The Walk™ is 20-25 minutes well-spent.

And turning to sports: In college hoops, your final score is Duke 3,688, North Carolina 3,444. But lest you think that both Coach K and Coach Williams completely forgot how to coach defense all of a sudden, you should know that the game was played by regular students from both schools, and they set a new world record after playing for 58 straight hours, raising some money for charity in the process.

Kevmobile 1.2 Dodges a Metaphorical Bullet

(No, nobody shot at my car. That's why it's a metaphorical bullet, ya see.) Anyway, my recent automotive woes have been well-documented, so I was more than a little alarmed when the temperature kept rising and rising on my way home last night. I even had to stop a few blocks shy of my neighborhood just to let it rest for a second, but it shot up again right away upon restarting. I was encouraging it on--"Come on, make it home, you can do it!"--which would have been funny to anyone who had passed me, since the window was open at the time. I got into the garage before anything blew up, waited quite a few minutes and carefully opened the hood. Weird-smelling steam billowed out for quite a few minutes; I was content to let it do so before I checked the contents of the coolant reservoir, which had gotten rather low. The radiator had just been replaced last spring, so I was hoping that, if it was indeed the problem, everything was still under warranty.

So I woke up much earlier this morning than I wanted to on a holiday (8:00), and then hit snooze alarms for the next hour and a half, thus actually getting out of bed at about the time I wanted to in the first place. Upon taking the car in, I found out that it was nothing but a bad radiator hose. Whew! Now all they had to do was get the part in...

That was the only downside to this whole thing--because of the holiday, the parts vendor was understaffed, so it took a while for them to get the hose over there. I lingered at Fuddruckers for a good hour or so, but the part had still not arrived. Seasons changed, empires rose and fell....and there I sat. (I would have gone across the street to Firewheel save for the fact that this unusual wet material was falling out of the sky this morning--I'll have to investigate this further at another time--and the only way across the George Bush was rather muddy.) I was happy to find out that the engine did pretty well on the "block test" and showed no real damage; the only thing that happened was that the steam coming out of there last night did a beautiful job of cleaning all the little sedimentary deposits off the engine. So even though it killed part of a holiday (just like back in October, but with a much cheaper bill), the car is in good shape again. Now, if it can make it to December (the date of my last payment) relatively unscathed, I can start saving up for Kevmobile 2.0, maybe sometime in late 2007.

Cream of viper? Feeling cold and in the doldrums this winter? How about some snake soup? They swear by it in Hong Kong... (via Dave Barry's Blog)

Belly up to the counter: On the subject of food that actually tastes good, the new Potbelly opens today in Firewheel Market. They do have soup, but snake is not among the choices...

A Tribute to the Masters

The National Endowment for the Arts bestowed its latest round of Jazz Masters awards in New York at the International Association for Jazz Education (IAJE) convention yesterday (some of you already know that I almost had a chance to attend that convention as a substitute chaperone for one of our college students who made an all-star ensemble, but that didn't work out). Among those honored at a Friday concert during the convention were Chick Corea, Tony Bennett, Ray Barretto, Bob Brookmeyer, Freddie Hubbard, and John Levy (a bassist who was also the first African-American promotional manager).

Each Jazz Master gets a one-time fellowship of $25,000 and has the opportunity to participate in a tour program covering 75 cities and all 50 states. Dallas is not one of the participating communities, but the tour does go through UT-Austin. A list of previous winners is here.

Oh, and aspiring jazz trumpeters should evidently watch out for this kid...

What's in a name, rap version: It's interesting how rappers who use pseudonyms sometimes end up in legal trouble pertaining to their stage names. A few years ago, C-Murder was charged with murder, and now Juvenile has been arrested for issues with child support.

At least she doesn't look like Triumph the Insult Comic Dog: Finnish president Tarja Halonen is getting a lot of publicity for her re-election campaign from the Conan O'Brien show, of all things. Why? Because they look almost exactly alike. (UPDATE: She'll be in a runoff, so Conan can keep up the gag for a while.)

Are We As Mean As They Say We Are?

There was a report in the news the other day that listed Dallas as the sixth-"meanest" city in the nation in regard to how it treats homeless people--this according to a survey by several national homeless advocacy groups. Cities were ranked based on the number of "anti-homeless" laws, enforcement of such laws, the general political climate towards homelessness and how the city deals with the issue. The ranking comes despite recent passage of a $23.8 million bond issue to build a homeless center in the downtown area.

So let's pore through the report for a moment and see what kinds of restrictions are being put in place that these guys consider to be "mean":

• No panhandling within (15-25 feet) of an ATM. I don't see a problem with this; I don't want anyone near me when I'm using an ATM in an urban area, except one of my friends who's "got my back" in this situation. In fact, I try to use the drive-through machines whenever possible.


• No panhandling within (15-25 feet) of a sidewalk cafe. Nobody wants to be bothered during dinner (except by their server, of course, but even some of them overdo it); this one makes sense to me.


• No panhandling within 15 feet of a public toilet. Umm, yeah. That just falls under the category of "personal space."


• Church/charitable groups getting fined for feeding the homeless outside specially designated areas. On the surface, it seems like this is a little unnecessary, but, as downtown residents and merchants have pointed out, those paper plates and plastic cups can stray quite far away from their original areas, and suddenly there's trash everywhere. (I'm also a fence-sitter on the subject of requiring anyone who feeds the homeless to take a food-handlers class similar to the one taken by restaurant workers. On the one hand, that makes sense--just because they're homeless, they don't deserve to get sick from tainted or poorly-prepared food--but it also just seems like a big load of bureaucrap.)


• Removing a shopping cart from its owner's property. Hmm, the last time I checked, this was called "stealing." And they have a problem with this being outlawed?


• Urination/defecation in public. You've. Got. To. Be. Kidding.

Call me cold-hearted, but those laws don't sound all that bad to me. I've certainly been among the many people who have had a trip to downtown Dallas made unpleasant by constantly being accosted by homeless people begging for money, and those who have businesses there certainly have a right to conduct business without their patrons going through this on a daily basis.

There have been plenty of stories over the years about the public library in downtown Dallas scaring off "regular" patrons because of the large concentration of homeless people, and no doubt the advocacy groups would consider the library's recent odor ban to be an act of meanness as well. But the code also prohibits sleeping, eating, drinking and bathing at the library--by anyone, regardless of residential status. While library officials concede that it's doubtful anyone will be asked to leave because of an overwhelming odor of, say, Chanel No. 5, they also will not invoke the odor rule without first having heard specific complaints from other patrons.

The root of the homeless problem, as far as I see it, has nothing to do with the temporarily down-and-out--the people who are actually trying to find work and a place to live. These individuals tend to stay in shelters, take assistance when they can, and follow the rules, and they often return to the working (and sheltered) world after a time. The problem lies with what could be called the "chronically homeless"--the ones who are either suffering from mental illness or simply don't want to live anywhere besides the streets. (I recall the story years ago by the Dallas Morning News's Steve Blow, who interviewed a man with a "will work for food" sign set up right across the street from a McDonald's with a "help wanted" sign. Steve put two and two together and asked the guy why he didn't just go across to Mickey D's and apply for a job, and the guy said something to the effect of "too many rules, don't like to get up early, don't want to stop drinking" and so on.) Perhaps the solution ultimately lies in the construction of more mental hospitals to get the "worst of the worst" off the streets, but in the other cases, it's hard to help people who don't actually want to be helped. The advocacy groups say that Dallas is being "mean" by passing these laws, but I say that we're just regulating behavior that shouldn't happen to begin with...and these groups, instead of actually helping the homeless, are instead being "enablers" and perpetuating the problem.

Does that make me a "meanie?" So be it, I guess...

I'd like the Bandit Platter, please: Running for office in Arkansas? You'd better be prepared to eat some raccoon.

Hot for teacher's assignment: An Ohio high school's research project on Internet porn has been cancelled after complaints from parents.

Bureaucrap

I think I've invented a new word today:

bu-reau-crap (byûru`krap): [n] The unfortunate treatment by, or a bad situation in dealing with, a public or institutional official who gives rules a higher priority over people.

I had to deal with a bit of bureaucrap today. Due to the fact that the incident in question took place at one of the myriad educational institutions at which I am gainfully employed, I'm not going to reveal the actual nature of the bureaucrap, but let's just say that it's the equivalent of an entire report or proposal being rejected by virtue of an undotted "I" or an uncrossed "T." So even though I've already posted about local government bureaucracy, federal government bureaucracy and bloated school-district administrations, today's event was enough to launch at least one more general rant on my part:

• If a rule doesn't actually help people (at least the people it's intended to serve--not just the people making/enforcing the rule), the rule should be abolished as soon as possible.


• Until said rule is abolished, it should be bent as much as possible by all reasonable, thinking people in positions of power.


• Those individuals in power who give rules a higher priority than people (i.e. acting without thinking because "the rules [or "the boss"] told me to do so") should be removed from a position that interacts with the public as soon as possible. Whenever feasible, the bureaucratic position should be eliminated and the bureaucrats replaced by computers.

OK, I've ventured off into an imaginary world here, but, to quote a tune on the Jazz Camp CD, I can dream, can't I? The notion of one-size-fits-all simply has no place in a sane society. As I said in an earlier post,

The problem is, one-size-fits-all thinking just doesn't...fit all. Never has, never will. It's just easier (lazier?) to hide behind a set of rules and not take the time to consider each case on its own merits. It's also a quick and easy way to avoid having to make difficult decisions, or (heaven forbid!) stirring up controversy. Why do any work when you can sit back and let the rules do the work for you?

Or maybe what we really need is a "B" Ark. In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, Douglas Adams spins the tale of the planet Golgafrincham, where the leaders announced that the planet was doomed and it had to be vacated; they promptly divided the populace onto three giant spaceships to go and resettle on another planet. The "A" ark had the thinkers: the leaders, the scientists and the great artists and so on; the "C" ark had the doers: the people who made things and did things. Aboard the "B" ark were all the middlemen: consultants, account executives, etc. The "B" ark did find it puzzling to note that they had lost contact with the other two arks shortly after takeoff; what really happened, of course, was that the Golgafrinchans had found a way to rid themselves of the entire useless third of their population by blasting them out into space. Sounds like a good solution for dealing with bureaucrats, although I'm sure that a few would also respond to rehab or reprogramming sessions and eventually lead useful, productive lives.

Anyway, I'm just venting; thanks for listening. I hope I never have to post about this again, but I bet I will...

Triskaidekaphobia? Not here: Did any of you do anything in the least bit differently today because it was Friday the 13th? I heard on the radio that nearly $2 billion in commerce is lost on any given day like today because of superstition. There were no black cats in my path today (Tasha is a tabby), no ladders under which to avoid walking, and I only talked to one person named Jason.

Yay, we win: This is a headline we thought we'd never see: Garland leads region in retail growth for 2005. Take that, Frisco! (Don't worry, Gary, you guys will probably reclaim the top spot this year, but Garland was tremendously under-retailed before this year, so we had to catch up in a big way.) I said before that Firewheel was going to transform this city, and it's doing so...and there's plenty more room to grow.