Scribbled notes while watching tonight’s episode of Lost. Spoilers, obviously, so only read further if you want to…
Lots of Pictures
I’ve spent much of the afternoon and evening continuing to work on scanning in old photos that I’ve had lying jumbled up in various boxes. Quite a few have been scanned in and uploaded to my Flickr account. They haven’t been done in any particular order — roughly chronological, but it’s been a bit hit-and-miss here and there as I come across mis-ordered sections — but to make things at least a little bit easier, I did end up creating a ‘Narcissism’ photoset that has all the pictures of me collected together and presented in chronological order.
Other bits that may be of interest to various people: Royce, who’s been in my life since fourth grade; City Lights, the first (though very short-lived) public DJ’ing gig I talked my way into; and The Lost Abbey (possibly NSFW, though not very), my first major (regular, longer than a couple months) DJ’ing gig.
More will come as I get time — I’ve only made it up to 1995, and I’ve got at least a few from ’96 and ’97, and that doesn’t even go into the three rolls from Gig’s that are sitting here too. For now, though, I need to do a little housework and get dinner in the oven before Prairie gets home and Hope and Peter show up to watch Lost.
Update: Prairie’s pointing out that when I said I needed to “get dinner in the oven”, I meant that literally — she’d actually made the dinner. I was just putting it in the oven so it would be ready in time for everyone to show up. It’s not like I’m actually cooking or anything here…. ;)
Who’s going to die tonight?
A few weeks ago, after the promo for tonight’s episode of Lost promised that, “one of these survivors will be lost forever,” I put a poll up (both here and on my LiveJournal) to see who people thought was going to be the unlucky party.
Here’s the results…
Wikipedia as Political Commentary
It’s not that this kind of thing doesn’t happen often, it’s just the first time that I’ve seen it before it got fixed. Currently, a Wikipedia search for Scott McClellan returns this…
Here’s the current page, and here’s the revision that I took a screenshot of.
Before I was around
Last time I went up to visit my folks in Anchorage, I snagged some old family photos. I’m (finally) starting to get some of them scanned in.
First up: four photos of my Aunt Kay. I never met Kay, as she died long before I was born. However, I’ve been told on a few occasions that she and I are very much alike. While I’m sure I’d seen pictures of her before, I didn’t remember any of them before I found these while digging through the stacks of pictures at mom and dad’s house.
From left to right: Kay sometime in 1960; Kay in a kilt sometime in 1961 (possibly at the University of Iowa, according to the handwritten note on the back of the photo); Kay and her date for Senior Prom sometime in 1961; Mom and Kay dressed up for Kay’s High School graduation in 1961.
Lastly, Mom pinning Dad’s wings on after his promotion to 2nd Lieutenant in 1968.
Voting: Nov. 8th General Election
My votes for today’s ballot (yes, I’m just now filling it out…but at least I’m voting, even if it’s on the deadline day). Thanks to Metroblogging Seattle’s endorsement rundown, too.
Where I’ve Been
USA, Canada, England, Germany (twice), Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia (which doesn’t exist anymore, so I had to choose Bosnia/Herzegovina), Italy, and Greece.
Alaska, Arkansas, California, Washington DC, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississipi, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia.
(Some of these are “visited” in the sense of “drove through or rode through in a train”, others were when I was very young and can’t really remember. Still…in once sense or another, I’ve physically been within the borders of the state.)
Create your own visited states map or visited countries map.
Kind of sad that this is all I’ve been to, and yet that’s enough for many people to consider me “well traveled”. There’s still so much of this planet that I need to get to…I’ve barely gotten started!
Jason Webley Fall 2005 Show
So last night was Jason Webley‘s fall concert for the year. This makes the fourth consecutive fall concert that Prairie and I have been able to attend together, and all in all, it was a good show — not the best that Prairie and I have been to, but overall still quite enjoyable.
We showed up downtown about quarter after seven, after a bit of confused driving around. While I’ve been to the Catwalk a few times before, this was the first time that I’d driven there, and the subsequent loss of direction was compounded by I-5 being insanely backed up when we left the apartment, so we’d taken Aurora in and ended up cruising through the World’s Scariest Tunnel™ and then finding ourselves on the Alaskan Way Viaduct before we finally found an exit and got into downtown Seattle. In any case, we did eventually find both downtown Seattle and the club (though I felt quite the idiot in the end) and grabbed a place in line.
Panexa (Acidachrome Promanganate)
Since Prairie got me watching a bit more TV than I have in the past few years, I’ve been regularly entertained by commercials for drugs where 20% of the commercial is soothing platitudes, and the other 80% is warnings about possible complications and disturbing side effects.
There’s a new winner in that particular game, though — Panexa.
No matter what you do or where you go, you’re always going to be yourself. And Panexa knows this. Your lifestyle is one of the biggest factors in choosing how to live. Why trust it to anything less? Panexa is proven to provide more medication to those who take it than any other comparable solution. Panexa is the right choice, the safe choice. The only choice.
Royce sent me a link to this site yesterday with a note saying “Man, I hurt myself laughing at some parts of this.” He’s not kidding.
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor…not Bach?
Here’s something interesting I hadn’t run across before — apparently there are strong arguments that Bach’s famous organ piece “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” not only wasn’t originally written for organ…but likely wasn’t even written by Bach at all.
The clues lie in the music. For one, Bach’s manuscript copy of the Toccata — the handwritten original — is lost, if it ever existed. That means attribution can’t be certain; it’s akin to trying a murder case without a dead body.
Like a good mystery, the sources are questionable, too. The earliest copy of the Toccata was done by a man with a reputation of passing off spurious works under Bach’s name.
However, the biggest questions arise when the Toccata is examined stylistically.
“It is a little worrying when literally the first and last notes of a piece of music raise doubts,” writes Peter Williams in a seminal article about the Toccata in the journal Early Music in 1981.
Neat stuff. Part of what caught my eye was this passage:
Scholars now think the Toccata was originally a violin piece Bach transcribed.
“If you know the piece you can just see it was written for the violin,” says Don Franklin, a Pitt musicologist specializing in the composer. “It has idiomatic figuration for the violin [and] the initial statement of the fugue subject can easily be played on the D string, crossing over to touch the G string.”
The opening of the Toccata, too, is violin-like, offering “the solo violin an opportunity to drop down through its four strings,” writes Williams. And there are other nuances that add up to an organ piece covering up its origins.
One of my favorite versions of the piece is by Vanessa-Mae off her fourth album, “The Violin Player“. While decidedly not a traditional interpretation (Bach’s original manuscripts are notably devoid of notations for samples and drum machines), it is incredibly well done, and one of the first times I’d heard the piece as a solo violin performance.