A Hawaiian Musical Selection

Today's musical selection celebrates the life and music of Hawaiian ukulele artist Israel Kamakawiwo'ole. The album containing the song below and his cover of Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World sold over a million CD's after its release in 1993 and made him a celebrity. Upon his death in 1997,  thousands of fans gathered as his ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean at Mākua Beach. A beautiful song from a big man with a gentle voice.    

      

The Lockout Continues

Starting to worry about what to do with the basketball season going down the tubes? From the friendly folks at the Grantland website - a translator that tells you which European soccer team to root for based on who your NBA team of choice is.Here's the verdict for those of us who cheer for the Chicago Bulls:   

What can replace the giant-size hole the lockout has left in your life? Your franchise has fielded one of the most dominant starting lineups in history. Your current talent-soaked roster, loaded with championship expectations, lures the NBA’s best attendance to the nation’s second city. Mazel tov. You have the good fortune to be a MANCHESTER UNITED fan, current and perennial champions, sponsored by Chicago-based reinsurer Aon. 

For those Boston Celtic fans:   

You live and die for a tradition-rich franchise with a rabid fan base in an Irish-tinged city. Your team’s legend was cemented by the glory of the 1980s, though the 21st century has been less kind, delivering just a single taste of meaningful silverware. Seventeen championship banners and 21 retired numbers waft over the floor. You are born to be a LIVERPOOL fan. Swap Lucky the Leprechaun, the mascot purveyor of high-flying dunks, for the toothy alacrity of Luis Suarez and the teams are basically interchangeable.  

Or maybe a Nets fan:   

Your team is relentlessly crap. Will a change in ownership and the promised land of new digs (obtained in slightly controversial fashion) make a difference? No chance. Congratulations. You are a WEST HAM fan. Born to be Claret and Blue. Ever hopeful, yet always cruelly denied.     

Portland Trailblazers anyone:   

You have a nasty case of Blazermania — a love so blind it compels you to bellow for your team, whatever the result. As one of the most rabid fan bases in pro sports, you are born to be a NEWCASTLE UNITED fan. Few teams mean more to their fans, despite giving them so little in return. In the same vein as Portland’s “Jail Blazers,” the law has often presented more of a challenge for Newcastle than opposing teams. But an injection of talent has transformed results, and Geordie fans, fueled by multiple pints of Newcastle Brown Ale, are living proof that few acts are more joyous than cheering for your local team.     

 Finally, maybe you are a Lakers fan:   

Simply put: We have had too many e-mails from Lakers fans begging “not to be Chelsea” to not make you CHELSEA. Lakers Nation, you doth protest too much: Your winning tradition has been soiled by an arrogance which, real or imagined, has caused you to be roundly despised across the league. You have a young coach attempting to gain the respect of a veteran squad, led by a soft Spanish big man and an aging Kobe, who could be any one of Chelsea’s graying superstars — John Terry, Frank Lampard, or Didier Drogba — attempting to substitute experience for pace.   

So enjoy your new team, NBA fans. And pray that at least some season is still left by the time the negotiating ends. Although every thing I read says that the Cavaliers owner (along with several others) thinks he will make more money if there is no season at all. Doesn't sound good. Now what do we do to take the place of eleven Bulls games this winter?     


   

13 Days When Music Changed Forever

WFMT, the Classical Music radio station and the San Francisco Symphony have developed a classical music series called the "Keeping Score Series - 13 Days When Music Changed Forever". Remember, these are classical music people, so the breakup of Creedence Clearwater Revival is not on the list. What is on the list are a number of musical pieces that I haven't heard (or heard of).   

It begins on February 24, 1607 with the premiere of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. The radio broadcast for this one runs 59 minutes and, according to the description,  

This is a program about the dawn of opera, but also about secular music becoming ...  high art (something that had been the exclusive purview of church music).  We’ll look at precursors to L’Orfeo in Ancient Greece and Rome, as well as Jacopo Perri’s Euridice, written a generation before Monteverdi.   

And it finishes on November 4, 1964 with the remiere of Terry Riley’s In C.   

This piece, which debuted at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, and the minimalist outpouring that it sparked, were a reaction to the rigid strictures of serialism and the stranglehold of the academic composers of the time.  

           

I may not know art, but I know an alarm going off in the morning when I hear it. I think it probably gets really cool later on. I don't know - I shut the alarm off after 3 minutes and got up. Maybe Mary can explain this to me sometime.   

Anyway, it does show my incredible lack of knowledge in the area of classical music. We sang a lot of Bach in high school choir and in church and when I was in the State Singers choral group at Michigan State University we did a Beethoven festival in 1970 with the MSU Orchestra and Albion University's choir to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Beethoven's birth. I still have the two vinyl records from the concert, though I haven't pulled them out in twenty years. The classical list on my IPod nowadays consists of Aaron Copland (I love Fanfare for the Common Man), Vivaldi, and Pachelbel's Canon in D. So, time to get to work. Let's see if we can teach an old dog to enjoy classical music. But we're going to avoid Terry Riley for a while. No need to go overboard here.   

May I Have the Envelope, Please?

I know you've been waiting for this. Grammar.net today announced the winners of the Best Grammar Blog of 2011. (Drumroll, please)   

3rd Place - Arrant Pedantry     

   Most recent post - "Rules, Regularity, and Relative Pronouns"   

          The age-old struggle to determine the correct usage of who, which, and that.   

2nd Place - Grammar Girl  

   Most Recent Post - "Why Does 'Gadaffi' Have So Many Different Spellings?"  

         The age-old struggle to translate Arabic words into English.   

1st Place - A CLIL To Climb

   Most Recent Post - "Compound Adjectives - To Hyphenate or Not"   

        The age-old struggle to decide whether to hyphenate "ten-mile run" and "loud-mouthed lime".   

  A fellow blogspot resident - so we are happy they won.  

The scariest part - online voting determined the winner - over 8000 votes were cast. And my high school English teacher, Ms. Geiger, would be 115 by now, so I don't think she's doing much voting anymore. I didn't know there were people who followed in her footsteps - but I can still diagram a sentence, so she is probably looking down on me (OK, she is probably looking up at me - she was a grammar teacher after all) with a smile.     

Conspiracy Theory, Anyone?

The movie Anonymous is due out soon. I have already started seeing trailers on TV. That's good, because I haven't had a bizarre conspiracy theory to think about for quite some time. I've worked my way through the Dan Brown Catholic Church conspiracies pretty well by now. I've quit seeing Opus Dei each time I go to the grocery store to buy grape juice. And the birthers have pretty much given up for a while, although with the Republican primaries starting up soon, I expect to hear at least one  candidate call Obama's citizenship into question.  I can hear it now - "No, 9 - 9 - 9 is not bad for the middle class and besides, how would Obama know - he's a Muslim."  I'm pretty sure we did go to the Moon in 1969 and not just to a NASA soundstage in New Mexico. And contrary to what Tommy Lee Jones tells me, I don't think Dennis Rodman is from another galaxy.   

Steven Marche, a former college English professor, writes an interesting article in the NY Times about the movie Anonymous and about conspiracy theories in general. He explains that he wasn't sure if the movie was any good. He spent most of the movie being upset by the absurdities given to justify the original premise: Shakespeare did not write his own plays. He describes a good final exam for a graduate class in Shakespeare would be to have the student find 10 ridiculous things that are stated as facts in the movie. The Oxfordian hypothesis, he writes, is a dead issue. But after this movie comes out, the loonies will come out and play. Despite having no background in English literature or English history, some people will take this seriously.    

I think that is the part that is so frustrating to me. Texas governor Rick Perry, in a recent debate, was talking about how climate change is a fraud perpetrated by scientists to get more funding, then goes on to compare his skepticism to that of Galileo. Come on, Mr. Perry. Really? It is frustrating to me that a denial of science comes so easily to those with no science background whatsoever. They can't explain what Galileo or Newton or Hawking did, but they are sure that their position on climate change and evolution and quantum physics is scientifically valid. And they take the fact that there are constant arguments about each of those to mean that they don't exist. The scientific community has a lot of arguments about how climate change will manifest itself, about the speed of the change, basically all about how it will unfold. But there is almost no argument in the scientific community that climate change is real and needs to be addressed soon.    

Marche sums it up very nicely:   

The Shakespeare controversy, which emerged in the 19th century, was one of the origins of the willful ignorance and insidious false balance that is now rotting away our capacity to have meaningful discussions. The wider public, which has no reason to be familiar with questions of either Renaissance chronology or climate science, assumes that if there are arguments, there must be reasons for those arguments. Along with a right-wing anti-elitism, an unthinking left-wing open-mindedness has also given lunatic ideas soil to grow in. Our politeness has actually led us to believe that everybody deserves a say.

The problem is that not everybody does deserve a say. Just because an opinion exists does not mean that the opinion is worthy of respect. Some opinions deserve to be marginalized and excluded. There are many questions in this world over which rational people can have sensible confrontations: whether lower taxes stimulate or stagnate growth; whether abortion is immoral; whether the ’60s were an achievement or a disaster; whether the universe is motivated by a force for benevolence; whether the Fonz jumping on water skis over a shark was cool or lame. Whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare is not one of these questions.     

And neither is climate change or evolution.  I'm just really happy that my brother Alan is retired from teaching Shakespeare courses at SOU; I feel sorry for the instructors next fall who will have a student say, "Well, everybody knows that Shakespeare didn't write his own plays. I mean, that's why they did the movie, right?"  
 

Costume Ideas if You Grew Up in the 80's

We know you have every intention of making your own costume this year for Halloween. You do every year. But you know things will get busy and you will run out of time and you will end up putting in a pocket protector and going as Steve Jobs. Well, BuyCostumes.com, the world's largest costume store, has just the thing for you twenty-somethings - a blast from the past.    

Yes, it's an adult size Skeletor Masters of the Universe costume and it includes "A chiseled muscle chest jumpsuit featuring attached brilliant purple armor, matching hood and a vacuform character mask." What it doesn't include are the socks so you are on your own there - and somehow tennis shoes or black dress shoes just won't look right, so you're going to have to spring for the purple boots.    


And we don't want to forget the ladies, so you can "Embody the powerful princess of Eternia in the Masters Of The Universe - She-Ra Adult Costume which includes: A white dress featuring a gold emblem with aqua jewel detail, tiara headpiece with a faux ruby accent, red cape and a pair of gold wrist cuffs." It's a good thing they told us it's a faux ruby accent. I expected real rubies for $54.99, didn't you?     

 And Thundercats are on the loose with your official Lion - O costume.    

Or you have lots of other choices:    

Super Grover - Numero Dos!

Optimus Prime

  Waldo  

 PacMan 

  Stay Puft Marshmallow man 

  Waluigi  

So let's get going out there. I want to see pictures of all the costumes. Unless you're going with the Naughty Nun again. I'm still recovering from seeing that one last year.     

Is Florida Becoming the Scariest Place on Earth?

So a lot of the state - level political bickering these days seems to center around the idea of testing people on welfare for drug use. As a follow-up to the post a couple of days ago about conditional probability and drug testing, this just seems like an incredibly expensive program with few benefits, but let's see what the experts say. As of July 1, residents of Florida have been required to be drug-tested to receive their welfare benefits. According to Governor Rick Scott, the program will pay for itself and is needed because people on welfare are notorious drug users. But the Tampa Tribune reports that according to the Department for Families and Children which runs the program in Florida, the state is seeing a fail rate of 2% through the first two months of the program. According to the 2009 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, performed by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services, 8.7 percent of the population nationally over age 12 uses illicit drugs. The rate was 6.3 percent for those ages 26 and up. That seems a tad higher than the 2% use rate among welfare recipients in Florida. Welfare recipients must pay for their own drug testing, but are reimbursed by the state if the test proves negative. So a welfare recipient must shell out $30 ($60 if he/she ends up being a false positive - and remember that more than two-thirds of the positive tests are false positives) to be eligible to receive welfare. Estimates in Florida so far show little savings for the state in what they spend on welfare. Adam Cohen of the Yale School of Law (not exactly a hotbed of liberal thought) , in a Time Magazine op ed piece entitled "Bad Policy, Even Worse Law", writes, "If Florida and other states are really concerned about drug use, they should adopt stricter laws and better enforcement policies aimed at the whole population, not just the most vulnerable. But these laws are not really about drug use. They are about, in these difficult economic times, making things a little harder for the poor."   

As Cohen states, the problem with Florida's law is that it isn't about drug use. It's about bullying.  And it's about bullying a group of people who don't have the resources to fight back.All the research I have read about student achievement has stated that the single most defining statistic in whether students pass the standardized tests is the poverty level of the families involved. It would seem that if we care about kids, attacking poverty should be our approach, not attacking food - stamp recipients. I guess that's why the Occupy Wall Street movement has struck such a basic chord for me. There is plenty of money out there to help people out, to create the jobs that would lift people out of poverty and give them a sense of hope. But the private job creators have other uses for that money - bonuses for the banking execs who received bail-out money, stock-options, and a record dividend paid out to the shareholders of BP.   

In Ohio, there is a big push to pass this odious piece of legislation about drug-testing welfare recipients. In a marvelous counter-strike, Ohio Democratic legislator Robert Hagan has taken it to the next step.  Rep. Hagan’s bill would require statewide officeholders, legislators, members of Gov. John Kasich’s jobs board and recipients of federal bailout money to pay for their testing for un-prescribed pharmaceuticals, illegal drugs and alcohol. Officials testing positive would have to undergo treatment or be booted from office.    

Now that seems a little more fair - everybody who gets state or federal money gets tested - farmers who get crop subsidies, executives whose companies get state contracts, legislators and legislative boards. I like that idea much better.   

  

  

  

Let's All Go to the Lobby, Let's All Go to the Lobby!

Trailer 2 for the Muppet Movie is out for your enjoyment. I see a reclining seat with pillow and blanket in South Barrington on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Popcorn for everyone. Woooo!