I am … unhindered by talent

I like carrying a bunch of pens in my pocket (never know when you’ll need to write something!), including one or more fountain pens for general day use. The current combination is a nice transparent Pelikan that WeatherGirl got me, along with a nice little leather case, and a Rotring Core, which WeatherGirl considers (with some reason) the ugliest fountain pen we own. The Pelikan is really nice, but has a fairly broad medium nib (which makes it tough for editing fine print) and the nice leather case (which is necessary for protecting the pen) slows down access if you just want to scribble something. The Rotring Core may not be beautiful, but it’s held up really well in my pocket without a case, and it has a nice fine nib which makes it very useful for editing.

The Rotring Core is, however, getting rather beat up after several years, and the cap doesn’t click on so well any more. And it embarrasses WeatherGirl. So maybe a replacement is in order. I liked the way the Rotring held up under difficult conditions, so I thought I’d see if they had a less frightening looking fountain pen that might work. A quick hunt suggests that the Rotring Newton might be the way to go. It’s a metal body, so it will hopefully hold up in my pocket (hopefully the cap stays snapped on well!), and WeatherGirl is much less likely to find it hideous. World Lux (whose site and attitude generally give me the heeby jeebies) seems to have them in a fine and extra-fine nib at a reasonable price. I’ll have to do some more looking later.

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Real Minnesota winter has finally arrived, with real temperatures of -9F and wind chills of -36F! SubEvilBoy and I bravely walked in regardless, but it’s supposed to be even worse tomorrow (real temp of -24F with wind chill of -45F at walking in time), so we may wimp out and use vehicles to move people around.

Ah, another Minnesota citrus crop gone to hell… :-)

Currently listening to “Alonso Cachiguano” by Nanda Manachi from the album Los Exitos del Milenio that Misty bought for me in Ecuador. Cool stuff. Really hard to get useful info on these folks, though. Tower Records in Ecuador doesn’t even list this album (although it does list two others). Andean folk music? Quechua? Still cool stuff.

Given the weather, maybe I should be listening to Baikal ice instead.

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SubEvilBoy got Love that dog by Sharon Creech from Otto for his birthday, and I read it while we were in Arkansas for the holidays. It took maybe 15-20 minutes (tops!) to read, and was a truly wonderful little piece. It’s in the form of a set of poems written by boy in late elementary(?) school, and in precious few words speaks volumes about the characters and the nature of poetry and expression. Full marks.

Currently listening to random loud noises coming from the loop at KUMM. Some good songs have wandered by, but I have no idea what any of them are…

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Sub-Evil Boy’s at it again, and wrote a really nice poem yesterday about his unfortunate experiences with a bat and way too many rabies shots. Very cool poem. He graciously doesn’t doesn’t mention how my lack of action put his life at serious risk. So I will. Public flagellation is a good thing. Really.

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We saw Ocean’s 12 last night and, well, it was a movie. Parts were pretty fun, but in the end the plot presentation was pretty unsatisfying and certainly not at the same level as Ocean’s 11. I had this sneaky feeling throughout that they had a ton of fun making it, and that the outtakes and commentaries may be better than the movie itself :).

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Back in the mid-80’s I had my hearing tested as part of a job, and got roundly chastized by the hearing lady about the damage that listening to music through headphones had done to my high-end hearing. I pretty much quit using headphones at that point, but had always assumed that this would be a on-going issue for me (since once you kill those little hairs, they don’t ever come back).

Yesterday I had my hearing tested for the first time (I think) since the test nearly 20 years ago, and I was all prepared to learn that the situation was deteriorating slowly as I drift through middle age, etc., etc. Certainly the evidence at home and in movies and the like was that I was having trouble hearing things (especially people speaking) that other people could hear just fine.

Or not.

I was significantly above average for someone my age in all frequencies except the two highest, where I was about average at (I think) 4KHz and a bit below average at 8KHz. So the high-end damage is there (and never going to get better), but I’m well above average in the ranges of human speech.

Weird.

I’m not quite sure what this means, because that still doesn’t change the fact that I have to cup my ears to make out dialogue in films, or that I can’t hear/understand WeatherGirl when it seems that I should be. It’s easy enough to believe, though, that a simple test (and it was a simple) of whether or not you hear different frequencies in near silence test doesn’t necessarily tell us a ton about ability to parse complex speech in a noisy environment. I know that I was happily passing eye tests at elementary school when I was blind as a bat, which delayed me getting glasses by several years from when they probably should have been prescribed.

Or maybe it’s just a case of “I just can’t hear my parents call”.

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I am, once again, pretty clueless living out here in the middle of nowhere (but, hey, W is pretty clueless, and he lives in D.C. :->), but apparently there are quite a lot of protest activities planned for the time of W’s upcoming inauguration. Not suprisingly, Michael Moore has a page devoted to the subject.

One that struck me as interesting were Turn Your Back on Bush, which encourages people to attend inauguration events in “plain clothes”, and then all turn their back on Bush at some pre-arranged signal. (Lord knows he’s done it to us often enough.) It almost makes me want to watch some of the events on television just to see if it works, but I’m not sure it’s enough to make me suffer through the awful commentaries.

Another which I liked was Not One Damn Dime. The idea here is simply to not spend any money on the 20th. I like it because it’s simple and inclusive and feasible. I’ll have to talk to WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy and see if I can talk them into making this a family thing.

I’m almost looking forward to the 20th now :-).

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As reported on MichaelMorre.com, Moore’s excellent “Fahrenheit 9/11″ won the favorite movie award Sunday night.

Ain’t life amazing? I certainly find it remarkable that this film could do so well in the same country that elected W. two months ago. Says much about the complex nature of our ~300 million souls.

I’d love to know more about the way in which the ballots were collected and the possibilities of fraud here. I know that I voted for 9/11 on-line and it wasn’t clear that it would be all that difficult to electronically stuff the ballot box. Not that I have any reason to believe that anything like this happened, it just didn’t seem the most secure system to me.

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Sub-Evil Boy had his first band concert tonight, and it was really quite fun. I’d been a bit nervous going in, since the 5th graders only started with these instruments in September, but it was actually quite impressive. I’m not going to rush out and buy the CD quite yet, but I’ve heard older folks sound a whole lot worse on more than one occassion! Their first piece (”Ancient hunter” by Sean O’Loughlin) was particularly good, suiting the huge group of students (all but a handful of the 5th graders are in the band) with wonderful depth and color.

Sub-Evil Boy was a little disappointed by how hard it was to hear the french horns (there are only two of them) in that ocean of players, but this is, after all, part of being one player among many.

One of the stand-outs had to be Mitchell’s stint as M.C. since he couldn’t play his sax due to surgery a few days ago. He was confident and quite funny in front of a big audience, and handled a couple of mix-ups really well. The band teacher (Dot Vick) gets huge props for pulling these kids together and making a real band out of them in such short notice, and the sax section in the 6th Grade Jazz Band was really impressive.

The one (unsurprising) bummer is how stiff a lot of the kids were. A few of them (including Sub-Evil Boy) tapped their feed and showed some life, but way too many never moved anything that wasn’t strictly required to make the music. Part of this is just their struggle with their instruments and music, but part of it is that stiff, “well-behaved” manner so many people up here have when “enjoying” music. It (sort of) works for the more classical pieces, but they’re going to have to loosen up some if they’re ever going to get past the music on the page.

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Neither this log or WeatherGirl’s can receive PingBacks, but SubEvilBoy’s weblog can! Same code, same host, blah, blah, blah. How weird is that! I posted a long question about it on the WordPress support forums, but haven’t heard back yet. The fact that I probably posted in the wrong forum and at the end of a long thread that developer’s may be frustrated with suggest a certain lack of tactical skill (or at least sleep) on my part when I posted it.

My sense is that this is all fixed in the 1.5 beta of WordPress, but I’d really like someone to post a clear solution for people (like us) with 1.2.2 installs, both because not everyone wants to (or can) update to a beta, and because having a key feature broken in what is advertised as the stable release hurts what is a demonstrably wonderful project.

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