More Animal Stories

A favorite feature from my radio-show days, reborn in blogland:

• Animal rights activists decided that a good way to protest circus animal acts would be to steal a pet rabbit from a preschool and leave anti-circus flyers in its place.


• Burglars at a New Zealand house took CD's, cash and booze, but they left a goat on the owner's bed. (To make matters worse, the owner is afraid of goats.)


• At the Oklahoma State Fair, a horse got spooked, which nearly started a stampede among other horses. A minor-league hockey coach was able to stop the mayhem by biting the spooked horse on the ear.


• And finally, in the Lake Tahoe area, a bear walking across a road got spooked by a couple of cars, which caused it to get stuck under a bridge for nearly an entire day.

I'm sure this will become a regular feature of this blog, but we'll have to see how many stories come in during the next few weeks before I can designate a specific day for it or anything.

When I Say That I'm Crazy About Music, This Isn't What I Had in Mind

"One thin line draws the border between madness and the genius."
--Ambrosia, "Harvey" (written by Joe Puerta)
A recent study by some American and Canadian psychologists has found a link between creativity and mental illness:

The study in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology says the brains of creative people appear to be more open to incoming stimuli from the surrounding environment. Other people's brains might shut out this same information through a process called "latent inhibition" - defined as an animal's unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has shown are irrelevant to its needs. Through psychological testing, the researchers showed that creative individuals are much more likely to have low levels of latent inhibition.

"This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment," says co-author and U of T psychology professor Jordan Peterson. "The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities."

Previously, scientists have associated failure to screen out stimuli with psychosis. However, Peterson and his co-researchers - lead author and psychology lecturer Shelley Carson of Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard PhD candidate Daniel Higgins - hypothesized that it might also contribute to original thinking, especially when combined with high IQ.

[...]"Scientists have wondered for a long time why madness and creativity seem linked," says Carson. "It appears likely that low levels of latent inhibition and exceptional flexibility in thought might predispose to mental illness under some conditions and to creative accomplishment under others."

Read the whole thing. This new information certainly goes a long way towards explaining the occasional eccentricity (if not outright madness) found throughout history among the artistically-inclined. It's interesting to think that perhaps some of us creative types really could have gone one of two ways with what we've been given, and I for one am glad to be on the "good side" (and I hope my readers agree!).

A legend hangs up the mic: Hats off to Leigh Kamman, host of a longtime jazz show on Minnesota Public Radio, who's retiring after 65 years on the air. Check out some of his "brush with greatness" stories at the link. (Hat tip: Lileks, at buzz.mn--as is the case for most of my Minnesota-based stories.)

Heartwarming story of the day: A woman on a Phoenix-San Antonio flight gave her first-class seat to a soldier on board simply "because he deserves it."

The Amazon Takes a Small Bite Out of the Apple

I'm a Mac guy, and I've loved all things Apple since I got my first computer back in college. When it came time to buy an mp3 player, there was never any doubt that it would be an iPod, and my first online mp3 purchases naturally came from the iTunes Music Store.

But that doesn't mean that I'm not open to new things, so I read with great interest earlier in the week that Amazon is now offering downloads as well, at a new portal on their site. These DRM-free mp3's will play on any player, and most songs are priced at 89 cents (that's a dime below iTunes).

Blogger Megan McArdle tried it and liked it earlier in the week, and so, in the interest of research (yeah, that's it--it has nothing to do with beefing up my already ginormous CD collection), I decided to try it as well. My verdict? So far, so good.

The process is rather simple; it installs a widget into your web browser (in my case, Safari) that helps with the downloads, but, once it's loaded, the process is simple. The download process itself is pretty speedy, and I can't tell any difference between the sound quality of the mp3's vs. the iTunes files, and Amazon sends them straight to your iTunes folder once they're downloaded.

Since Apple makes much more money from selling iPods than it does selling music, the emergence of the Amazon service won't unduly hurt the iTunes store (except maybe with those who want their music all DRM-free, all the time), and there's certainly room for two such services out there. While comparison shopping, I found out that a specific CD might be available at one store but not both, and when it is available at both, it may be cheaper at one or the other. A little competition never hurt anybody, especially when it makes more music available out there.

The one thing that I still can't quite get past, though, is this whole thing of buying music strictly in digital form. Maybe it's the fact that I've lost my entire iTunes library in two previous crashes on the Ancient and Venerable iMac (though my current MacBook obviously allows me the backup option of burning all my purchased music onto CD's, which I do anyway in order to listen to them in the car). But I think the biggest thing is that I just like the idea of a CD as something tangible--something that you can hold in your hand. My digital purchases have come about because they were either immensely cheaper or unavailable in a traditional CD format.

I also like being able to read the liner notes on a CD. As a jazz listener, I like to be able to read the backstory of the recording and find out who's playing on all the tracks, since jazz recordings are notorious for having special guests and even multiple rhythm sections on the same album. I'm sure that, somewhere down the road, the same technology that allows a CD's cover art will eventually allow the liner notes to be accessed as well (and if Apple did this, they could call it iLiner--heh). I also will certainly buy actual CD's from guest artists at the college and other people whose shows I go to see, because it would be most unsatisfying--not to mention insulting to the artists--to have them sign my burned copy that I made for the car.

So I don't think I'll ever completely stop buying traditional CD's, but Amazon's entry provides another serious alternative when going the digital route.

And in other high-tech news: Is this the future of car audio? Blaupunkt has come up with a receiver that doesn't play CD's--only mp3 and WIndows Media files.

"Waxing" Nostalgic in Digital Form

When I worked in radio, the station had some great old vinyl recordings that never seemed to get released on CD (and believe me, I've been looking over the years, in every used CD store and a lot of online sites like Amazon). During the past few weeks, I've finally been able to find a few, either as imports or on the iTunes store. Here are some of the highlights:

• Phil Woods: I Remember (DCC Compact Classics). Phil and his quartet (Mike Melillo, Steve Gilmore, Bill Goodwin), along with an orchestra, play Woods originals dedicated to the memory of Julian (Adderley), Paul (Desmond), Charles Christopher (Parker) and a lot more. The Cannonball and Bird tributes are my personal favorites, but the whole album holds up well; some of Woods' orchestral excursions--which were common during the '70s--sound dated, but this music is timeless. (Available as an import or through iTunes)


• Phil Woods: The New Phil Woods Album (RCA). The full name of this is quite amusing: "The New Phil Woods Album: Improvisations on Songs Old and New, Some of His Compositions, Mostly His Arrangements with His Group, Strings and Brass." Two tracks alone are worth the price: "The Sun Suite" (an extended opener that goes through all kinds of meters and feels; some of the orchestra parts may sound dated, but then Woods' Birdlike licks come in over the top and all is right with the world) and "Chelsea Bridge/Johnny Hodges" (an original of Woods' sandwiched in between the Billy Strayhorn chestnut, featuring multitracked Woods solis on both tunes; the one on "Hodges" sounds--to my ears, anyway--like three sopranos and two altos). Also includes a cover of a '70s pop tune ("At Seventeen") and a nice original from Melillo ("Gee"). (Available as an import, with bonus points for packaging the CD to look like the original album, complete with little plastic sleeve inside.)


• Toshiko Akiyoshi/Lew Tabackin Big Band: Long Yellow Road (RCA). I had the fortune to play some of Toshiko's music while in lab bands at UNT, and it's a shame that her music isn't available more widely or performed more often (though, granted, a lot of it is pretty hard). Her compositions are presented by a hard-driving big band that features husband Lew Tabackin on tenor, Bobby Shew on trumpet and Britt Woodman and Dick Spencer on trombone. Highlights include the title track and the gospel waltz "Quadrille, Anyone?" Along with Kogun, which I hope to acquire soon, this is my favorite Toshiko album from college. (Available as an import CD, which once again was made to look like a record.)


• Tom Harrell: Stories (Contemporary). The trumpeter and flugelhornist--who spent quite a bit of time in Woods' quintet--is another jazz composer who deserves wider recognition. I would have bought this solely on the strength of one composition, "The Water's Edge," a gorgeous jazz waltz. Other highlights include the Mintzer-ish "The Mountain" and the extended title track. Featured players include Bob Berg on tenor and Niels Lan Doky on piano, along with special guest John Scofield on guitar on three tracks. The CD reissue includes a bonus selection. (Available used through Amazon Marketplace or as a download from Amazon and iTunes)


• Jack DeJohnette: Parallel Realities (MCA). Unlike the rest of the recordings documented above, this was one that I actually owned on CD until someone "borrowed" it quite some time ago, and it has proven difficult to find until now. Despite DeJohnette's name in the leader's spot, this is a true three-way collaboration between the drummer (who also plays an understated keyboard bass on this date), Pat Metheny and Herbie Hancock. Metheny's contribution alone should make it a double-billing as he wrote or co-wrote half the tunes here. I enjoy the whole CD immensely, but personal favorites include "Nine Over Reggae," the opening "Jack In" and the title track, which goes into extended exploratory mode. I need to pick up the live recording (which adds bassist Dave Holland to the mix) from the tour supporting this CD. It's great to have this one in my possession again. (Available used from Amazon Marketplace, as well as in download form at Amazon and iTunes)

Tomorrow: Digital downloads? We gots more options now...

Yet Another Friday Cornucopia

Once again, a list of the things I haven't had time to blog about this week:

• Best headline of the week so far: Cops complaining about cops writing cops tickets.


• Next-best headline of the week so far: Man Smuggled Iguanas In Fake Leg.


• Best headline of last week that I forgot to blog: Police Pull Over Batgirl, Find Marijuana. (By the way, "Batgirl" turned out to be a guy in a costume.)


• What was purported to be the World Burrito Eating Championship was held last weekend; the winner, "Eater X," downed 10 3/4 burritos in just under twelve minutes. (I wonder how he would have done on our 2BC (a two-Chipotle burrito challenge) back in the day


• A prison inmate, in an effort to protest his diet, attached a hard-boiled egg to some documents headed for court. The judge responded with some "Green Eggs and Ham"-style prose.


• Talk about some serious Cubs fans: A Indiana couple has named their newborn son Wrigley Fields.


• Advice for the criminally insane: If you're going to burst into an apartment with the intention of attacking your former friend with a Samurai sword, it's best not to go into the wrong apartment.


• And finally, check out this cool corn maze in Minnesota.

Tomorrow, we'll talk about music again.

The Nostalgia (Ol)Factory

When walking out of my last school of the day, it had just rained, and the air was thick with Houston-like humidity. There was a bit of mud near the sidewalk where I was walking, and the combination of mud and humidity took me back--way back. All the way back to football practice, as a matter of fact.

It's pretty weird how, as someone firmly established in a career, I could suddenly be transported back decades in time to the fields behind Nottingham Elementary in Houston, where my team, the Jets, practiced. Though I would never, ever be good at it, my scrawny, 65-pound self gave it my all for two seasons in football because it was the cool thing to do in Houston. (This was quite a contrast to my previous neighborhood in suburban St. Louis, where the popular pursuits included playing Yahtzee in the driveway.) Though it would give way to other, more sensible pursuits when I hit sixth grade, I've never stopped being a fan of football.

Have you ever taken a trip way back in time, just because of a specific scent?

The "No Fun League" Strikes Again

Just a week after the NFL fined Terrell Owens for using the ball as a prop in a touchdown celebration, they've come up with something even weirder: The league has now banned cheerleaders from warming up or stretching in front of the visiting team's bench (or, for that matter, doing anything else that might be "distracting" to the visitors).

Isn't this (once again) going a little overboard here? Don't most professional athletes find themselves bombarded by female fans wherever they go anyway? Aren't they highly-paid professionals who are supposed to have a high enough level of concentration to ignore any and all distractions?

Silly, silly, silly. Don't you agree?

Speaking of no fun: A ten-year-old MInnesota girl wanted to have a miniature horse as a pet, but city codes wouldn't allow it, classifying the animals as livestock. So she went before the City Council to challenge the ordinance, although she came up, umm, short.

This won't be good for tourism: A musician from Cincinnati wanted to propose to his girlfriend, an artist from Japan, in a romantic setting, so he chose Central Park. After she said yes, the couple was promptly mugged and robbed.

College: The Best Four Five Six Years of Your LIfe

Even as legislators in some states are trying to herd students through college at a faster rate, some people are taking even longer to graduate than before, according to an article by David Eisen on MSN Encarta last week:

If a student's formative years are spent in grammar school, then college is a time to exercise independence and--parents hope--choose a career path. But these days, a sizable amount of college students are taking as long to attain a college degree as it takes to jump from grammar school to junior high.

The four-year degree is largely a thing of the past. According to a 2006 study by the National Center for Education Statistics, less than 35 percent of students at "four-year colleges" are able to complete their bachelor's degree in four years or fewer. But most do graduate--more than 56 percent eventually get their B.A. within six years. The data was culled from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, which captured graduation rates of full-time undergraduate students beginning in 1998 from more than 6,500 institutions.

And it's not that everyone's sitting around being a slacker, either; as I've noted before, it has to do with rising tuition costs and more students having to work their way through school than before:

Mary Ann Swain, provost at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton, has seen a growing shift in the length of time it takes for a student to graduate[...]

"As the cost of an education has shifted from state-tax support to family contributions, it now takes more hours of work to provide the same proportion of the costs of one's education," she affirms. "Students who are working to support their college degrees seem to be carrying fewer credits per semester than before, and are working more hours. Thus, their college careers are lengthened."

According to Eisen, several factors may figure into the lengthened stay: Not enough room in classes that may only be offered once a year, an increase in double majors, co-op programs that split time between classes and work, and people taking a semester (or more) off to work.

But the universities are working to try and speed up the process:

While reasons for the longer stints at college vary, colleges and universities are working hard to make improvements so that lagging students aren't using up the space that can be given to new enrollments. At the University of Connecticut's (UConn) Storrs campus, only about 50 percent of students graduate in four years or fewer. To improve those numbers, UConn launched the Finish in Four initiative in 2004 to ensure that courses were available to students who needed to take them, as well as to improve and increase communication between students and advisers to keep them on track.

As the article points out, it can also be expensive for students to remain in school longer than the usual time, but, as more students are financing school on their own, there will have to be more cooperation between students, colleges and financial aid officers to get people out in a shorter time.

Yet sometimes, a shorter time is not beneficial. The music degree that I received in college was four years only on paper; the number of single-credit classes that met for two or three hours a week and the amount of practicing required makes extended stays almost the norm. As I said in the earlier post,

I think I'm particularly sensitive in this area because of the way musicians learn their craft. While most traditional academic degrees consist of four to six three-credit courses every semester, the bulk of music courses only earn one credit (despite sometimes meeting as often as four hours a week, in the case of many ensembles). The solution would certainly not lie in increasing the credit hours of those classes to match the "contact hours," because that would push most semesters into credit overload: an average schedule would balloon to 21+ hours, which would be cost-prohibitive for most students. But even under the current system, an 18-credit semester would probably consist of ten or eleven classes, as compared to the six taken by "regular" students whose classes are all worth three credits. Sometimes, that's just too much.

Besides, music (and this goes for most of the other arts, I'm sure) is something that isn't necessarily learned on a schedule. Getting the degree doesn't necessarily ensure that one's playing (or singing/acting/painting) is exactly where it needs to be; that extra semester could be the time when everything finally solidifies.

So I'm fully in favor of things that can keep people from having to work so much to get through college, and I have little sympathy for the slackers, but I hope that legislators and college leaders don't paint everyone with the same broad brush; sometimes people are taking their time for a very good reason.

Don't know much about history: Meanwhile, a recent study finds that college students aren't doing too well in the area of history and civic literacy. Among the problem areas: Less than half of college seniors knew that Yorktown was the battle that ended the American Revolution or that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansion. The repoirt doesn't just fault the students; it also blames colleges (and high schools, for that matter) for not doing enough to add to their civic literacy.

Take five: Has anyone out there seen the new $5 bill yet? I'm sure the changes will help combat counterfeiting for a while, but the purple printing makes it look even more like Monopoly money.

Blog Holiday

OK, seeing as how it's after 11 p.m. on a Sunday night, and I just realized that I completely forgot to watch the Cowboys game, I think it's time for bed. Posting will resume tomorrow.

Heading Way Out West to Hear "Back East"

Joshua Redman's last scheduled appearance in this area was rained out in Denton back in the spring of '06. A trip to Houston last March to see the SFJAZZ Collective (from which Redman has since stepped down as musical director) sated the appetite for a while, but it was high time for a full-blown Redman experience, and last night's performance at Jazz by the Boulevard in Ft. Worth delivered as promised.

Redman is touring with a trio these days, in support of his newest release Back East, which has been promoted as an homage to the classic 1957 Sonny Rollins release, Way Out West. The older recording was also done in tenor/bass/drums format, and they have two songs in common, "I'm An Old Cowhand" and "Wagon Wheels." It takes a master saxophonist to pull of the chordless trio format and maintain interest for an entire set, and it takes a brave saxophonist to pay such obvious tribute to the still-alive-and-kicking (and playing) Rollins fifty years after the original recording. Redman succeeds on both counts, and last night's performance added to the enjoyment of the new music.

Back East actually features several bass/drum tandems (Larry Grenadier/Ali Jackson, Christian McBride/Brian Blade, and Reuben Rogers/Eric Harland), as well as a few guest saxophonists (Joe Lovano, Chris Cheek and Redman's late father Dewey, who is much appreciated here in his native Ft. Worth). For this show, bassist Rogers was joined by longtime Redman associate Gregory Hutchinson on drums, and the group formed a cohesive unit that made a seamless transition from recording to live performance. Although the first three tunes of the set ("The Surrey With the Fringe On Top," "East of the Sun (and West of the Moon)" and "Zarafah") did match the first three tracks of the recording, it was like listening to everything for the first time again, as the three players expanded and reinvented the music, sending it to even greater heights (we realized at about the one-hour mark that they were only on their fifth tune, but time passed quickly; we could have listened to this for hours on end).

Redman's tenor dazzled as usual, going from a solid low register to otherworldly altissimo (often within mere seconds of each other) while sharing a wellspring of creativity. His soprano playing (what a big, thick sound from the small horn!) evoked otherwordly sounds on the Middle Eastern-influenced "Zarafah" (yes, the "East" of Back East doesn't just refer to New York, where it was recorded). Rogers was given a lot of solo space as well, and he mixed exciting technique and creative lines with the ever-present open fifths (one of my younger cohorts in attendance called them "emo chords") that often framed the accompaniment. Hutchinson held it all together with taste and precision, and he got his chance to shine on Back East's title track. Another highlight was the inclusion of a tune that was originally recorded with a larger group: "Hide and Seek" (from 1996's Freedom in the Groove), which thrived in its trio reworking.

It had been way too long (1999, not counting the SFJAZZ performance) between Redman shows for me. Sure, I would still love to hear his electric Elastic Band someday, but this trio stood tall on its own merits and showed evidence of tremendous musical growth on the leader's part. Were it not for the 11 p.m. outdoor stage curfew, this group could have played for a lot longer, as they undoubtedly had a lot of music left in them. I'm already looking forward to the next time.

Another Friday Cornucopia

All the news that I haven't had time to talk about in detail, but still deserved to be posted:

• A St. Paul man was charged with assaulting some fellow passengers on a city bus. He was on his way to an anger management class at the time.


• In the Department of the Obvious, a police force in the U.K. is catching a lot of grief for its slogan: "Don't commit crime."


• The "I couldn't possibly have made this up" headline of the week: Vet Extracts Toy Lizard from Real Lizard.


• It was bad enough that a drunk man tried to enter his ex's house through the chimney (no Santa-like notions had he), but then he became stuck there, and rescuers had to break down a wall to free him.


• Here's the latest real-llife sequel to Snakes on a Plane: Bats in a Dorm.


• Did you hear about the Nebraska state legislator who sued God earlier in the week? Well, God has an attorney now, and a response has been issued.

I'm off to the Joshua Redman concert in just a little bit--review tomorrow.

The "No Fun League" Keeps Living Up To Its Name

Last week, I had a few questions about recent penalties handed down by the NFL; were they too harsh with Cowboys coach Wade Wilson for using a banned substance, but too lenient with Patriots coach Bill Belichick in the stealing-signals case?

The debate continues, but I'll bet this one will just inspire a collective "Huh?" and slap to the forehead: Cowboys wide receiver Terrell Owens has been fined $7500 for a post-touchdown celebration on Sunday--because the ball was used as a prop:

The NFL fined Owens on Wednesday for violating Rule 12, Section 3, Article 1 of the official league rules that state, "possession or use of foreign or extraneous object(s) that are not part of the uniform during the game on the field or the sideline, or using the ball as a prop."

Owens used the football to simulate a camera Sunday in Miami, as he mocked New England's illegal video taping of the New York Jets' defensive coaches in Week 1.

"I'm like [Bill] Belichick," Owens said. "I misinterpreted the rules."

I'm sorry, but this is really silly. "Using the ball as a prop" costs a player almost eight grand? This is not about "upholding the decorum of the game" or something like that; it's a league office wielding its power, simply because it can. The Belichick spying incident? Sure. But even people who don't care for T.O. could almost certainly agree that this penalty is too much. Throwing a flag for "excessive celebration" is bad enough, but having something like this cost a player money is going over the top. It's the equivalent of a city fining people for wardrobe violations...oh, wait; that's already happening, isn't it?

Am I all wet here, or is the No Fun League going overboard this time? The comments section is always open...

Catchin' up: My belated posts from Monday and Tuesday are now up. One is about arts advocacy, while the other is yet another revisitation of the saggy pants issue. (There's an odd pair of subjects for you...)

Man with a horn: I didn't have time to post it yesterday, but there was a nice profile of Wynton Marsalis in the Dallas Morning News. I wish I'd gotten to catch the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra at the Meyerson last night (review here).

Buy your textbook, and then set up a perimeter: Georgetown University's law school is offering a cool class--"The Law of 24." (Course description here.)

Since I'm Still Behind on This Week's Posts, I Only Have One Word to Say....

Arrrrrrr.

(And I'll be catchin' up on them ancient posts by and by, ye scurvy dogs.)

UPDATE: James Lileks has done an entire buzz.mn post in pirate-speak, and some of the snarkier commenters are debating the "authenticity" of the dialect. Arrrr, give it a rest, mateys.

More Saggy Logic in Dallas

I've posted before about what a waste of time and resources I think it is for local governments to spend time on things like banning baggy pants, especially when there are so many unsolved problems that fall much more closely under their jurisdictions. Just a little over a year ago, a Dallas school board member tried to get the City Council to enact a ban (that's right, not just in the schools, but in the city at large); last month, we discovered that Atlanta was working on a similar measure.

I thought that the idea was dead in Dallas, but this morning, there was Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway on the radio, trying to drum up support for an ordinance again. He wants to do this because "it is a total disgegard and disrespect for all females to have to entertain looking at someone's dingy underwear...it does not set the tone of something that should be accepted in society." He also mentioned the term "respect" several more times during the interview.

But here's the thing: You can't legislate respect. Certainly, it's the goal of any society to raise the level of such respect, but, on the other hand, it's not wise to go around making a whole bunch of laws just because people might be offended. As I said in the earlier post, if something like this were to pass, what would be next--outlawing fat guys in Speedos? (OK, there's still part of me that thinks such a thing would be a good idea, but you get my point.)

The other problem with this is that it shouldn't consume an ounce of city resources until all the other much more pressing problems are at least on their way to being solved. As I said earlier,

Is this style of dress annoying? Sure. But do we really need to get the police involved in enforcing it? Surely not. The time when the council should be devoting the city's resources to something like this would be when crime levels are nonexistent, when all the potholes are fixed, there's not a homeless problem downtown, the police and firefighters are paid the same as their suburban counterparts....in other words, not anytime soon.

More coverage of the story can be found here, and be sure and listen to the entire radio interview at the link above.

To his credit, Caraway doesn't expect the police to "ride past a burglar just to go and make somebody pull up his pants," but he would have them issue civil citations for the defense. As always, if you have strong feelings on either side of this, please chime in using the comments.

Stupid criminal #1: A woman who went to court to pay a traffic ticket probably shouldn't have driven there in a stolen car.

Stupid criminal #2: LIkewise, a man in New York state shouldn't have stolen a car to turn himself in on another charge.

Stupid criminal #3: And finally, if you're going to rob a restaurant, you shouldn't 1) rob one where you're a frequent diner, and 2) order food on a credit card before attempting the robbery.

Just A Reminder That the Fine Arts Are Part of a Basic Edcuation

While browsing the op-ed page in yesterday's paper, one column stood out: Teacher Sue Blanchette offered some ideas to improve public education. Most of them were fine by me: Lengthen either the school year or the school day, don't rely so much on test scores, and so on. But one thing she said really jumped out at me, and not in a good way:

If the purpose of school is education let's consider the amount of time students spend on non-academic pursuits like athletics, journalism, band or choir, cheerleading and drill team, or theater. Of course there is value in each of these activities, but if the time students spend preparing for them were directed into academics, there would undoubtedly be improvement in academic results. Heresy? Perhaps, but this is where the community and society have to change. As long as Friday Night Lights or the high school musical have priority, not much will improve.

Hold on a second, Ma'am. It appears that your main "targets" are the fine arts, and they are definitely more than "non-academic pursuits." On the contrary, they help develop a well-rounded individual.

Here is what a few notable leaders in Texas have said about fine arts education:

Governor Rick Perry
We have encouraged the study of music and the arts in addition to the fundamentals of math, science, reading, and writing, which all have led collectively to tremendous gains in education in Texas over the last decade.

Representative Rob Eissler, House Public Education Committee Chair
For our society to move forward, for our culture to survive, fine arts education must remain strong. We already know that kids who study music do better in physics and math. Teaching the fine arts is a rounding of the whole development of the student.

Senator Florence Shapiro, Senate Education Committee Chair
My vision is that fine arts education would continue to thrive in our Texas public schools. No longer can we look at the fine arts in a box separate from other content areas in the curriculum. Fine arts should be integrated across content areas and vice versa. Just as math teachers can easily bring elements of music into their lessons, so should music teachers take the opportunity to teach students how the elements they are learning relate to mathematics.

Shirley Neeley, Ed.D., Commissioner of Education
The arts are an integral component of our educational system in developing the attitudes, characteristics, and intellectual capacities required for students to participate successfully in today’s society and economy. The arts teach self-discipline, reinforce self-esteem, foster thinking skills and creativity, and promote teamwork and cooperation. Most notably, though, the arts are important in and of themselves in that they are a vital and vibrant part of our personal, social and cultural environment.

[Source: Texas Music Educators Association]

Certainly, there are ways to tweak the system to have more instructional time in core subjects if people so desire, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater by attempting to do this at the expense of other equally vital subjects such as the arts. If all the extra time advocated by Blanchette went only into core classes, students might make higher grades, but there's no saying that their enthusiasm for school would be any higher (for many people, it might decrease), and they certainly would be a lot less human without access to the arts. I would challenge those who consider the arts to be "non-academic pursuits" to, in the words of another arts advocate, "find as many positive traits of attitude, teamwork, camaraderie and cultural enrichment being developed in a science, math or English class. Some things cannot be learned sitting at a desk with a textbook!" (The advocate being quoted, incidentally, is myself, in a paper written in college that ended up being published in a professional journal.)

At the end of the day, we educators need to stick together; we're under opposition from so many external fronts that we don't need to be fighting back and forth amongst ourselves. But those such as Ms. Blanchette should understand that we'll never achieve a unity of thought if core-subject teachers continue to attack the arts as unnecessary. Let's work together to improve education in a way that doesn't involve such things.

Is Southlake "The Place People Love to Hate?"Not To Me...

I was somewhat surprised to see a sound-off forum in the editorial section of yesterday's Morning News entitled "Is the animosity toward Southlake deserved, or is it a sign of envy?" Huh? Animosity toward Southlake? Where did that come from? Then I noticed that the editorial pointed to an article in this month's issue of D Magazine called "Southlake: Welcome to Perfect City, U.S.A." Here's a sample:

They’re good at everything in Southlake. If you’ve never been, there’s something a little Pleasantville about it. The streets are cleaner than your streets, the downtown more vibrant, the students more courteous, their parents more prosperous. Everyone is beautiful in Southlake. Everyone smiles in Southlake. Everyone is a Dragon in Southlake. This last fact, especially, is central to understanding the city. The kids and their mothers coming out of Central Market. The retired men who eat barbecue at the Feed Store. The white collar professionals strolling through the shops of Southlake’s Town Square. They are all Dragons.

That may sound a little snarky, but the rest of the well-written article has a nicer tone, and it also contains a rather good narrative of the founding of Southlake and how Carroll Dragon football helped put the town on the map.

The DMN forum has some interesting contributions, but most of the respondents aren't hatin' on Southlake; if anything, they're saving most of their ire for the usual suspect, Highland Park. But most are talking about how envy isn't a good thing to be carrying around in the first place, and some even note that the success of any North Texas community makes the whole Metroplex better. I wholeheartedly concur.

And as for me? I love Southlake; in fact, I've been there the past three Saturday nights and one other time besides that. The main object of my fancy is Southlake Town Square, the older cousin to Firewheel that serves as the de facto downtown, containing both City Hall and the post office. I can't remember how I happened upon it soon after it opened (I'm guessing it was an article in the paper), but, since I have an alumni meeting every month in nearby Bedford, it's only a short detour from my normal route. Once I saw the place festooned in holiday lights, I've been back there at night every December, and it's turned into my little hangout before the alumni meeting ever since I started attending an earlier church service a while back. (You have to admit that "festooned" is a great word, right? I try to work it into a post whenever possible.)

The D article also speaks kindly of Town Square:

All that money, inevitably, drew one of those fashionable “new urbanism” developments to Southlake. In 1999, something called Town Square sprung up out of the prairie: a 131-acre mixed-used development designed by David Schwarz, the same architect who built the American Airlines Center and the Rangers Ballpark in Arlington. The Hilton Hotel on the far west side of Town Square sits across the street from Truluck’s and Taco Diner, which are down the street from Barnes & Noble, which is near the Cheesecake Factory and Snuffer’s. There’s 1.2 million square feet of this—a Lane Bryant here, a Starbucks there. Just like Plano, just like Addison, just like everywhere else.

Except in Southlake it’s different. It works. It works because it’s beautiful. The main entrance of Town Square is a two-square-block public space, with a lawn in the foreground and mature trees shading parts of a fountain. Behind that there’s a gazebo and behind that another lawn with intersecting sidewalks, like a college quad. City Hall is here, too. And the post office. The development, perfectly huge and perfectly planned, does something most unusual in these parts: it gets people walking. Elderly couples, kids with their skateboards, mothers with their strollers. They’re everywhere. Go ahead. Try not killing someone while driving through the place.

The day Town Square opened, developer Brian Stebbins walked around it. It was much smaller then, not yet built out, and Stebbins was thinking of staging a photograph to capture what he envisioned for the future. “That very first morning,” Stebbins says, “there were kids playing by the fountain and people playing Frisbee. And none of them were hired.”

As I've said before, I like New Urbanism. The old-school architecture and the mixture of commercial and residential is appealing to me, as is the walkability; weather permitting, I walk as much of the place as i can on every visit. If money (and my commute to the college) were no object, I'd buy a Brownstone (complete with a Wenger module for practicing, of course) and be happy as a clam living in Southlake. As someone noted in the D article, the people I've run across out there don't seem to act like they have lots of money.
And I'm already a fan-from-afar of Carroll football (as I noted last year after their then-football coach, Todd Dodge, got hired at my alma mater, UNT), and I was none too happy when their 49-game winning streak (dating back to a 2003 loss--by one point--in the state finals) came to an end last night at the hands of Florida powerhouse Miami Northwestern.

But in the meantime, I'm happy with the (at least) monthly visits. Needless to say, the presence of Copeland's in the new HIlton makes trips on non-alumni days even more likely. (That explains one of the trips during this three-Saturdays-in-a-row stint, in case you're wondering. The other two visits were precipitated by a rather substantial gift card that I had been given for one of the other restaurants in Town Square; the food was worth the drive.)

So there's not a shred of Southlake envy on my part. I'm glad the place is there. What about you, fellow Metroplexites? Is there a place in the area that you "love to hate," and if so, is it Highland Park? Plano? Frisco? (Those seemed to be the top vote-getters in the DMN forum.) Or do you agree with the people who say that any area's success makes the whole Metroplex better? And if you're not from this area, feel free to chime in about someplace similar in your locale.

Friday Night Darks: Speaking of high school football, a game in Arizona had to be called off this week after thieves stole the copper wire that helped power the stadium lights.

It's Saturday; Go Ahead, Relax.

On a weekend with a busy start (judging Region Jazz auditions this morning), I was happy to read in the paper today that author Eric Weiner has given us permission to slack off:

I bet you're reading this at work – and feeling guilty about it.

Rest easy. You are not alone. A recent survey found that the typical American worker wastes slightly more than two hours a day, not including lunch and scheduled breaks. The insurance industry is particularly rife with time wasters (can you blame them?), and Missouri, for reasons not entirely clear, is the state with the highest percentage of slackers.

The No. 1 time-wasting activity is surfing the Internet and sending personal e-mails (a finding perhaps skewed by the fact that the survey, conducted by AOL and Salary.com, was Web-based), followed by socializing with co-workers, conducting personal business and just plain "spacing out." All of this loafing is supposedly costing employers $759 billion a year in lost productivity.

The findings were greeted, predictably, with much hand-wringing about the declining American work ethic. I find the survey disturbing, too, but for a different reason. American workers, it turns out, are wasting less time than they did just a couple of years ago – 19 percent less. We must stop this dangerous trend.

I can relate to this. I tend to teach 12 to 14 hours a day during the school year, and when I get home, the first thing I often do is get on the computer. But even if I have 20 emails in my inbox, I might not answer them right away; a lot of them are related to work, and the last thing that I want to do when I get home is more work. And as a musician, it's easy to feel guilty about not practicing enough, so that's hanging over my head as well.

But there's no doubt that we all need some downtime. Perhaps we should all back off on the guilt a little bit and learn to embrace our inner slacker. Weiner says this is a good idea:

Despite all of this fretting, we are no slacker nation. The U.N.'s International Labor Organization recently issued a report that found that the U.S. leads the world in worker productivity – and by a wide margin.

So why do we feel like such slackers? For one thing, we are a nation ambivalent about work. We cherish it and resent it. I suspect that some of this loafing is a subtle form of revenge. With work now sloshing over into personal time (think Blackberry), it seems only natural that personal time should slosh back into work. Technology is fast rendering distinctions between "work" and "leisure" meaningless. This is a problem. If the U.S. is to stay strong, we need to goof off more at work, not less.

Thus the recent Web survey gets to the heart of the paradox. We are a nation of doers, hard workers, yet we are also a nation of ideas, big ideas. These two aspects of the American personality constantly rub against each other; great ideas require idleness, but idleness makes us uncomfortable.

So let's all pledge that, assuming we actually get things done this week, we'll slack a little more and not feel guilty about it. I'm In.

Fido meets file cabinet: In this country, "Take Your Daughter to Work Day" has been popular in some circles. But in the U.K., it was dogs who were visiting the office on Friday, as part of a fundraiser for an animal charity.

Schoolyard brawl, bizarro-world edition: It's bad enough when a student and teacher get into an argument and the student hits the teacher; it's even worse when the teacher hits back.

Don't fear the reaper, but fear the low clearance: Massachusetts authorities, growing tired of having trucks smash into low-clearance bridges in their state, are considering reviving a novel solution: More cowbell.

Does the Punishment Fit the Crime Here?

The NFL has sometimes been called the No Fun League for handing down penalties against things like "excessive celebration" during games, but in the past few weeks, they've also handed down some penalties for much more serious violations. The question, though, is whether or not these penalties were meted out evenly. Here are the scenarios:

Wade Wilson. The Cowboys' quarterbacks coach was suspended for the first five games of the season and fined $100,000 a few weeks ago for violation of the league's substance abuse policy. Wilson, who's fought diabetes for years, was taking a substance to "improve the quality of his life," but was unaware that the substance was on the league's banned list. (It was even more of an embarrassment to Wilson when a subsequent story surfaced that he had tried the banned substance to treat impotence. And to add insult to injury, he barely used the substance because it messed with his blood sugar.)

It seems odd to me that a coach would be penalized for a "performance-enhancing substance," since it's not like he's on the field of play or anything, but the league maintains that coaches need to be held to an even higher standard because they set an example for the players.

Bill Belichick. This week, allegations surfaced that New England Patriots coaches had videotaped New York Jets coaches sending signals on the sideline to their players during a game last Sunday. The commissioner eventually announced that Patriots coach Bill Belichick was fined $500,000 in connection with the incident, and the team was also fined $250,000 and will have to forfeit some draft picks in 2008.

But nobody got suspended. Is that fair? Wade Wilson is wondering the same thing:

When Wade Wilson learned New England coach Bill Belichick would not miss any games for his role in "Spygate," the suspended Cowboys quarterbacks coach was puzzled.

"Being told coaches are held to higher authority, my intent was not to create an imbalance in competition," Wilson said. "Presumably, what the Patriots did was try to, so I'm wondering about the consistency."

[...]Wilson said the fines seem disproportionate when comparing his salary to Belichick's. The Patriots coach is believed to make $4.2 million a year, while Wilson makes a little over $300,000.

"I'm not trying to jump down the commissioner's back or bring Coach Belichick down," Wilson said. "I'd just like consistency from what I was told to what the next situation was."

Wilson is now deciding whether or not to appeal his suspension, but he'll defer to the wishes of the Cowboys organization in that matter. Meanwhile, Wilson is not not alone in wondering if a suspension for Belichick was in order.

So was justice administered equally here? Chime in using the comments.

My appetite was just de-feeted here: A worker at a Chinese buffet in New York state was discovered to be preparing garlic for the restaurant by stomping on it with his boots in the alley behind the restaurant. Someone took a picture of him doing so and notified the health department. (Key quote: "The health department does not consider a person's shoe or boot a proper instrument to use in food preparation, senior public health sanitarian John Stoughton said Tuesday.")

The agony of de feet: I love flip-flops, but there's now more than one reason that I don't buy them from Wal-Mart.

Stupid criminal of the week: Once again, a bank robber was caught after he wrote the holdup note on the back of one of his personal checks.

Say It Ain't So (About) Joe

The world of jazz lost one of its greats this week when Joe Zawinul died on Tuesday in Vienna. The Austrian-born keyboardist was privileged to work with several of the all-time jazz greats in Miles Davis and Cannonball Adderley, not to mention his stellar co-founder of Weather Report, Wayne Shorter. After Weather Report disbanded in 1986, Zawinul continued to tour with his own group, Zawinul Syndicate.

He also made his mark as a composer, penning "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" for Cannonball and "Birdland" for Weaher Report. As I told my evening combo tonight, it really says something if a jazz composer whom 90% of the world wouldn't know by name has nonetheless written two tunes that would both at least be familiar melodies to those same people. Zawinul also contributed a great deal to the music by advancing the role of electronic keyboards in jazz; this may well have been overdone by some in the '80s, but the overall sonic palette has benefited from this expansion.

I remember hearing that Zawinul had been hospitalized about a month ago, but I was hoping he was OK. I salute his contribution to our art, and I'm thankful I had the chance to see him perform a few times.

Blowing Out Almost An Entire Hand's Worth of Candles

Happy birthday to my middle nephew, Caleb, who's four today. Like his older brother Noah did at that age, he's become quite the little conversationalist, so he's very entertaining to talk to on the phone. (He's also at the "cute" stage of conversation, where he refers to his favorite burger place as "Wed Wobin," adopting that pronunciation at about the exact same time Noah grew out of it.)

I won't be able to attend his birthday party this weekend, because I'll be judging Region Jazz on Saturday, but I was glad to see him at his little brother Micah's first birthday party last month, and I look forward to my next trip down there.