Gallery

My Diary

I mentioned in yesterday's blog post that I am building a website for my brother's business. In a discussion yesterday I mentioned that he probably wanted to get a paid Google account for the site so that hs site would come up early in searches. I told him we can put the site up and it can look perfectly professional but it doesn't do him any good if no one visits.

You've perhaps also noticed my last two entries in the "Excerpt" category have come from the book I began yesterday, Elizabeth Bowen's Death of the Heart. The opening sequence involved a discussion between a woman (Anna) and a male friend in which she discloses coming across her husband's teenage half-sister's diary and found the girl had written horrible things about everyone in the family, especially Anna herself. The male friend, a writer, tries to make Anna feel better by talking about the act of writing in general, and of keeping a diary. Read the two "Excerpts" immediately below for more elaboration.

I put these two thoughts together while walking this morning. I keep my own sort of diary - you're reading it right now - and it's out in a public space but it may as well be under lock and key. No one reads it. But that's okay. Like the second Excerpt quote says, "a diary, after all, is written to please oneself – therefore it’s bound to be enormously written up. The obligation to write it is all in one’s own eye..." I keep this blog for my own pleasure, in order, as I've said before, to work out my own thoughts. And I do feel an obligation to keep it up, especially so being so far into the endeavor. I dropped blogging for four or fives months earlier this year but I am back now and enjoying it. Writing makes my mind work in ways that it doesn't when I'm not writing. I start seeing associations between things that I wouldn't otherwise. It expands my though processes. The world opens up.

So, while I would like to have regular readers, it's not necessary for my main purpose here. I have not yet reached the point of Joseph Epstein, whom I quoted in a blog post a few years back about his own habit of keeping a journal:

Keeping a journal or diary, once begun in earnest, becomes more an addiction than a habit. I cannot now imagine abandoning mine. I continue to scribble each morning, living my life at a second remove, with nothing in it quite real until it has been scrawled out in my increasingly poor handwriting. “When all is said and done,” Siegfried Sassoon wrote, “a good life is better than a good diary.” No doubt, but please note that Sassoon makes this observation in his diary. You may think this essay has at last come to its conclusion, but it will really only be done tomorrow morning, when, in my journal, I write, “Finished essay on journals and diaries. Am, as usual, uncertain of its quality.”

- but almost.

Excerpt

"Style is the thing that is always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style. Look how much goes to addressing an envelope - for, after all, it's a matter of set-out. And a diary, after all, is written to please oneself - therefore it's bound to be enormously written up. The obligation to write it is all in one's own eye, and look how one is when it's almost always written - upstairs, late, overwrought, alone..."

Elizabeth Bowen, Death of the Heart

Interlude

My favorite Emmylou Harris song. I've loved it since I was a teenager:

[audio:BoulderToBirmingham.mp3]

NOTE: Discerning readers will notice I changed the "Quote of the Day" category to "Excerpt". Here I am modifying the "Song of the Day" to "Interlude".

Excerpt

"You've got to allow for style, though. Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little - even if one did once know what one meant, which at her age seems unlikely. There are ways and ways of trumping a thing up: one gets more discriminating, not necessarily more honest."

Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

Life, Mad Men, and America

Life has been a bit of a whirlwind lately, and that's a good thing. I've been busy at work not only with normal duties but also studying up on data warehousing concepts, the reason for which will be forthcoming. In my sparetime I've moved the blog from Blogger over to Wordpress, hosted by Dreamhost, and have been happily learning all the new capabilities for audio, photos, posts, etc., to try to make it look more professional.  I've also started a photoblog, still in its infancy, and am building a web site for my brother's business, which is still a work in progress but should be ready soon.  I'm enjoying these endeavors immensely - it's fun.  One of my upcoming projects, I've decided, is to become expert at javascript and php so I can develop my own websites from scratch.   I'm fairly well-versed in HTML - I built a bunch of websites for our group back at my old job but the layout and formatting of them was pedestrian at best.  I want my stuff to look professional and the only way to ensure that really is to dig in.  Which is no problem.  That's when I have the most fun at work, when I'm learning something new, testing it, learning it, becoming expert at it.  It's something I look forward to.

We also visited Mom and Dad down in Florida this past weekend, a quick trip but very enjoyable.  I've always loved my mother's company.  We started talking about her childhood just before we had to leave for our flight back and I pretty much decided then that I need to get her talking about these things on tape.  I don't want to lose those stories before it's too late.  Not that there is any rush.  My mom is in about as good a shape as someone her age can be.  She still has lots of energy and is as sharp in in mind as always - and that's pretty sharp. Plus she has her interests - she's a world-class, award-winning quilter, and she teaches quilting classes down there.

I've had almost no time for reading or other sorts of entertainment.  The book I'm reading currently is wonderful and normally I would gobble up something so good in a couple of sittings over a couple of days.  Alas, a month later and it is still unfinished, though I am determined so sit and relax with it today and finish it up.

I did watch the fourth season opening episode ("Public Relations") of Mad Men.  And I loved it.  Things have certainly changed and the show had a different feel to it than the previous seasons, and I think that's a good thing.  The times are changing (it's almost 1965), the workplace is new, Don is divorced and Betty is now married to Henry - it's right that the show has a new feel because life has a new feel.  The opening question, "Who is Don Draper?" is something that may never be answered, though by the end of the episode it's clear Don has decided the future of the new agency, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, will be shaped by him.  He throws out potential clients who don't want to do things his way and he sets up an interview (a previous one having failed due to his reluctance to talk about himself) with a Wall Street Journal reporter in which he brags about himself and his new agency.  Not that anyone minds Don taking charge.  It's expected of him.  Roger, Bert, and Peggy all indicate their reliance on him at different points in the episode (Peggy: "We're all here because of you, you know.  All we want to do is please you.")

While Don takes charge at the new agency, his personal life is less settled, to say the least.  The publication of the initial failed interview characterizes him as a 'cipher' and this may be close to the truth.  He has reinvented himself, taking on a new name and leaving the past behind, but there's no there there once he steps outside the professional side of Don Draper.  He knows how to sell products and he knows how to sell the character he's created named Don Draper, but once he's alone and on his own, when there's nothing to sell, there's nothing left to the man.  So he indulges himself with prostitutes, whom he pays to play out his sexual impulses ("Hit me.  Harder.")  As Mad Men reinvents itself for season four, as Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce introduces itself as a new, hip, agency with Don Draper the master at the helm, perhaps we should also keep a watch out for what becomes of Don Draper the cipher.  Can he find value and fulfillment in his private life?  Or is it too late?  There are hints that he may be able to remake himself in his relationship with his children (will Sally and Bobby be his salvation?  He's clearly a better parent than Betty.)  But watching it play out, with no idea what's ahead, is a lot of the fun.

So what else is new?  It's still to be determined if we are seeing a sea-change in attitude towards the government or if this is a passing thing.  By "this" I mean the tea-party movement, the idea that America is being buried under a mountain of debt that we'll never dig out of if something doesn't change soon.  It does seem that it's part of the zeitgeist, the feeling that we're in trouble and something needs to be done.  I expect the mid-terms will be a disaster for the Democrats - don't rule out the Republicans will take over the Senate along with the House - but whether this will be the necessary spur to change is still a question.  Things will change, yes, but will they change enough?  We need drastic transformation, a remaking of government from the top down, large cuts in expenditures, a rollback of the Obamacare and other atrocities, a commitment to balanced budgets and pay down of the debt, and none of these things will be easy.  Obama can veto any proposed change he doesn't like for the next two years and by then will the passion we're seeing now among the rank-and-file have died down?  Add that to the near inevitability the newly elected will go native once they arrive in D.C. and count me skeptical that a change is gonna come.  Still, I hold out the hope that if ever there was a chance for transformation, the time has never been riper.

What You're Doing

I listened to The Beatles during my workout the past two mornings, something I hadn't done in quite some time, perhaps six months.  That may seem a short time to some but it may be a record for me - I grew up on The Beatles and for the first twenty years plus of my music-listening life I listened to them more than anyone else, rarely going a more than a few days or a week without putting them on the stereo.  Dylan took over in the-most-listened-to category for awhile and then (and still) Van Morrison but I have always gone back to them often and with pleasure.  I can report back the answer to the question "Can you still love the music you listened to as a child nearly fifty years later?" is yes, definitely, so long as it's The Beatles.   It's not just nostalgia.  They were great.  Great singers (John Lennon in his prime, circa 1963-1965, was the greatest rock and roll singer of them all) and great songwriters, they did nearly nothing that was worthless, little that was banal or ordinary.  They were consistently great, from 1962 until they disbanded (though their final single, "The Long and Winding Road" was perhaps evidence that their time was up - it may be their only really boring song.)

You can blame Lennon and McCartney for my insistence that a great song must have a great melody for that is what stands out about The Beatles' songs to me now: they were master melodists.  Of course Lennon and McCartney wrote the bulk, and the greatest, of the songs, but George Harrison had nothing to hang his head about.  All told, their list of great songs seems never-ending (I've got 77 Beatles songs on my iPod though I could easily have 177) and are too numerous to mention.  I don't really have to, do I?  Unless you grew up in a cave far from civilazation you must know some of them.  Add to their perfect melodic touch the great vocals, the soaring harmonies, George Martin's productions, and Ringo's perfect drums, and you dozens and dozens of little gems.  They were indeed the greatest rock and roll band of them all.  They were worth listening to in 1964 when I first heard them as a six year old boy, and they are worth listening to now as I approach old age.  I don't expect that will ever change.

I just mentioned Ringo's drums.  Please don't tell me Ringo Starr was not a great drummer, as many sophisticates like to do.  Sure, he wasn't as technically adept as Charlie Watts let alone Keith Moon but he was the perfect drummer for The Beatles.  The simple technique, the steady beat, the ability to stay out of the way of the vocals, his fill-in riffs (listen to the drums on "Ticket to Ride", perhaps his finest moment) - he was as much a part of the team as the others.  And that was the key.  For a few years these supremely talented men were put their egos aside for the good of the music.  As has often been said, they melded perfectly together to become more than the sum of their parts.  They were the perfect musical collaboration.   It couldn't last and it was perhaps inevitable that it would all come to a bad ending, full of accusations and recriminations.  But while it lasted, boy were they something.  The music still fills me with something akin to glee.

The bitter end is chronicled in this recent book, Peter Doggett's "You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup", which I've heard good things about.  Click on the book's cover to get to the Amazon page.

[abp:0061774464]

And finally, for your listening pleasure, one of my favorites, and the title of this post.  Ringo's drums are great here too.  I'm also using it as my song of the day.  Enjoy:

[audio:WhatYoureDoing.mp3]

Excerpt

..perhaps the entire concept of the evening news, with Chet or Uncle Walt or Waco Dan handing down the stone tablets is a relic of the days when news was something they worked on all day while the soaps were going on, and delivered to us while we digested the pot roast. Last time I watched evening news with any regularity was in the early 90s, while working in DC - it seemed like an in-house channel, and told you how the rest of the country was hearing what you and your clever friends were talking about at lunch. But even then the model was fraying, thanks to CNN and Headline News.

- excerpt from a James Lileks post, over at Ricochet

Interlude

Heading down to Florida soon to see Mom and Dad. So in honor of my mother, here is her favorite song, Artie Shaw's version of Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine":

[audio:BegintheBeguine.mp3]

Mad Men's Decent Drapery

The fourth season of Mad Men premiers this Sunday night and as regular readers know, we are big fans here at What's New. Part of the fun is reading everyone's take on the show - people love to discuss it. Some love the show and love Don Draper, others love it and hate Don Draper.  They see him as representative of a particular type, indeed of the entire pre-1960s era, so how you feel about the Draper character and perhaps about the show in general has much to do with how you feel about that type and that era.  Daniel Foster had an interesting take on it earlier this week at NRO in response to a fellow NROers column:

It seems to me that the brilliance of Draper, and of Mad Men as a whole, is its ability to make people born in 1974 or 1983 or 1990 nostalgic for a world they never knew, except through a second-hand public school narrative that paints it in the gray flannel and sharkskin tones we've been trained to find so stultifying. Note, I'm not just talking about the Romanticism of a generation of liberals and feminists waiting pins-and-needles for the deliverance of the 60s. It's a bona fide sense that something was lost that we can't ever get back.

I think Foster gets to the heart of the matter - for me at least - in this excerpt. I remember reading a column about Mad Men last year that insisted that if you weren't watching the show as a critique of the era and its attitudes then you were watching it wrong. I felt that was wrong at the time and clearly others, including Foster, agree with me. Certainly one can read the show as a comprehensive critique if one is intent on it. Take for instance Don and Betty's treatment of their children, who are often ignored or told to go somewhere and play. If one is a practitioner of today's smothering, full-court press type of parenting then Don and Betty would indeed seem to be terrible parents. But when I think of my own childhood, contemporary with that of Sally and Bobby, I must admit that my upbringing was similar. We were often told to go outside and play and we didn't expect our parents undivided attention. And while I don't actually recall my mother being overly loving, I certainly never felt unloved - and I adored my mother. As I've argued before, I think Mad Men plays it pretty straight, trying to show the era as it was. It lets us make up our own minds about what's being presented.

So one of the appeals of Mad Men, for me, and as Foster argues, is the sense that we've lost something that those people had. I'm not even sure I can define what's been lost but I'll try. What's lost is a sense of decorum, a sense of style, an agreement on how people behaved in public, the way men treated women in public, a sense of dignity, a confidence, an optimism. What Burke called "the decent drapery of life." Yes, these things were operative primarily in the public sphere but there can be no doubt that they carried over into the private. And while I understand that Don Draper's private behavior is often monstrous, it's his public behavior that we find so attractive about him, the decent drapery. To give you a better understanding of what I'm getting at requires a more extensive excerpt of Burke:

All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland the simulation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of her naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

Mad Men shows us the decent drapery and the "naked shivering nature" side by side. It's part of what makes the show so fascinating. Season four will be set in 1964: the president is dead, the war in Vietnam is beginning to escalate, they are marching for civil rights in the south, The Beatles have just arrived in America - here come "the sixties." From our viewpoint we know what that means for America - all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off - but what it means for Don Draper is still to be seen.

Excerpt

The second new feature will be a quote of the day, stolen from Terry Teachout's daily "Almanac" entry over at About Last Night.  It will be a quote or an excerpt from a book or a blog or an article that makes me think, or laugh, or cry.  Actually I don't cry, but you know what I mean.  Like Terry, I'll often try to take it from something I'm currently reading or have read recently.  I'm almost done with a marvelous book, Jane Gardam's Old Filth, so that's a good place to start:

"They live together, Eddie dear.  They 'co-habit.'  They have 'co-habited' in Wandsworth for six years."
"In Wandsworth! They're not doing well then?"
"Wandsworth, dear Eddie, is now the creme-de-la of the Euro-chics."
"Rubbish. It's where all the taxi-drivers live."
"Not now. It's full of rich thirty-year olds who owe thousands on their credit cards and go to Tuscany for their holidays but have never heard of Raphael."
"They sound particularly unattractive."
"Yes, they are. But they seem to have a very good time."

Interlude

I'm starting a couple of new threads here. One will be a song of the day. t will usually be a song I love though I'll try to make them songs that aren't very well known to the general public, something that seems fresh.  To start the series here is one of my favorite songs off Tom Waits' magnificent 1985 record Rain Dogs (a record a rarely go a week without listening to), "Jockey Full of Bourbon":

[audio:JockeyFullOfBourbon.mp3]

NOTE: I've modified the name of this new feature from "Song of the Day" to "Interlude."

Collapse It!

Okay, now I've figured out how to use collapsible posts. I hate when a long post has a "read more..." and when you click it it opens up in another page. Then you have to go back to your original page if there is other content you want to read. I've see a few places, like Ace, and Ricochet, where clicking on the "read more..." simply opens up the rest of the post in the same page, leaving everything else in place. So tonight I've implemented my version and I'm using a long post from yesterday as my test case. So here it is. Click the "read more..." to expand and collapse. read more...

Yesterday I learned how to have a separate home page using Wordpress. The idea is you have a main page that shows up through your www.xxxx.com link, and have your blog page as a menu selection. I quickly implemented it. While walking this morning I realized that I didn't want to have a main page. My main intention here is to blog so that's going to be my home page. So I'm switching back this morning. Below is how I set up my home page. As you can see if you look around the site, a lot of it has changed already. Anyhow, this is what I wrote yesterday for the now defunct home page:

Hello.  This is my web page.  Everyone has to have one nowadays, right?  I've had a blog for years, over on blogspot, but I decided to take more control of my content so I've moved it all over the Wordpress software and it's hosted over at Dreamhost.  I'm using the virtually brand new Twenty-Ten theme, which I love the look of, so clean and elegant.  (I never liked any of the themes I tried over at blogspot.)  I've also learned all about plugins and already have installed a few and put them to use.  In short, I now have total control over the page to make it look and feel the way I want and I've had a lot of fun lately building this site.

So who am I?  As I said in the old blogs About page, I'm a middle-aged man living in the Washington D.C. area. I love old music and old movies, politics and sports, reading and traveling. I'll post on all these subjects as the mood strikes me.

Below is a picture of me and my wife at the carousel near the Eiffel Tower in Paris in May, 2009.



Rather than have the blog as my front page as before I how have this introductory page.  The blog can be found on the menu above, and that is still where most of the action will be.  I also have menus of books I've read since starting the blog. (I'm always reading a book.  It may take me a day to read it or it may take a few weeks or a month, but I always have a book in progress, pretty much since I was a teenager.)   I have ideas for other sections of the site too, which will be revealed in time.  There is also a slideshow built with the Featured Content Gallery plugin that you can find above under the "Some of my favorite things" menu.  FGC is normally used by businesses to highlight their most important features on their home page but I decided to use it to build a nice slideshow.  If you hover over above you'll see a whole lot of submenus, which can be ignored.  No matter which one you click on you'll end up at the same place, watching the slideshow from the beginning.

The sidebar to the right has links to my most recent blog posts, the most recent comments I've received.  (Though they are ages old.  Sigh.  No too many people know about my previous blog but I'm hoping to get more traffic on this site.  We'll see.)  There are also archives of blog posts by month and by category, though I've yet to categorize my posts.  That's coming.  So is a blogroll of my favorite blogs.

So why blog and run a website?  The answer to that can be found in one of the earliest posts I wrote on the old blog.  Here's an excerpt:

The general idea right now is to blog about whatever interests me at that moment. While I do have a lot of interests – music, old movies, politics, history, sports, finance and investing, reading – they tend to rotate in importance day by day. One day I may want to discuss who’ll get the nominations for next year’s general election, the next day I might want to discuss whether more great movies came out of the 1970s than the 1980s. Another day I might not want to discuss anything, just lie down with a great book and read all day, away from the world. Anyhow, I’m thinking writing about my interests may deepen my understanding of them. Pauline Kael once wrote, in her introduction to Deeper Into Movies, that “I write because I love trying to figure out what I feel and what I think about what I feel, and why.” I guess I’m thinking something similar for the blog, though I’d be more comfortable saying “I write because I want to figure out what I think, and why.”

So that's why I blog.  I want to run the website because I enjoy it.  I don't play as much golf or watch as many sports as I once did so I need something to keep me busy.  So while I hope you read this I'm really doing it for myself.  I find it fun.

Finally, on the old blog I had Helen Merrill's version of "What's New" on the sidebar where it could be played at any time.  Now I'll just keep it here on the home page, where you can get to it whenever you'd like.  It's kind of our theme song around here:

[audio:03 What's New.mp3]

Stairway to Nowhere

I blogged a few days back about how much I enjoyed Powell and Pressburger's I Know Where I'm Going and that I was eager to see more of their films from Netflix.  Alas, the one we watched last night, Stairway to Heaven, (aka A Matter of Life and Death) was not quite so fine.  Far from it.  Neither my wife nor I found it enjoyable - she was so bored she gave up twenty minutes before the end.  I stuck around for the finish but I can't really recommend it.  Besides being boring but it was also rather strange.  It turned on a dime from being a romantic fantasy to a piece of wartime propaganda (it was set in May, 1945). I actually started laughing out loud at one point about the ridiculousness of it all.  I noticed on Netflix that a lot of people love this movie so perhaps you will too.  But to my taste, while "I Know Where I'm Going" has whethered the years beautifully, this one is more than a little dated.  I hope the other P&P movies I have waiting for me are better than this.

One thing bugged me while watching that I cleared up during my early morning walk.  The female lead in the movie was Kim Hunter and while I recognized her face immediately I couldn't remember where I'd seen her before. I had my "aha!" moment this morning during my walk and I'm really not sure why it took me so long to figure it out.  How can anyone forget Stella?

[youtube]S1A0p0F_iH8[/youtube]

Tweet

I've had a twitter account for ages but it goes unused. Until now. I just downloaded and configured the Twitter for Wordpress plugin which will tweet over to my twitter account each time I post here. So, let's see.

Should I have a home page? Nah, this is a blog

Yesterday I learned how to have a separate home page using Wordpress. The idea is you have a main page that shows up through your www.xxxx.com link, and have your blog page as a menu selection. I quickly implemented it. While walking this morning I realized that I didn't want to have a main page. My main intention here is to blog so that's going to be my home page. So I'm switching back this morning. Below is how I set up my home page. As you can see if you look around the site, a lot of it has changed already. Anyhow, this is what I wrote yesterday for the now defunct home page:

Hello.  This is my web page.  Everyone has to have one nowadays, right?  I've had a blog for years, over on blogspot, but I decided to take more control of my content so I've moved it all over the Wordpress software and it's hosted over at Dreamhost.  I'm using the virtually brand new Twenty-Ten theme, which I love the look of, so clean and elegant.  (I never liked any of the themes I tried over at blogspot.)  I've also learned all about plugins and already have installed a few and put them to use.  In short, I now have total control over the page to make it look and feel the way I want and I've had a lot of fun lately building this site.

So who am I?  As I said in the old blogs About page, I'm a middle-aged man living in the Washington D.C. area. I love old music and old movies, politics and sports, reading and traveling. I'll post on all these subjects as the mood strikes me.

Below is a picture of me and my wife at the carousel near the Eiffel Tower in Paris in May, 2009.



Rather than have the blog as my front page as before I how have this introductory page.  The blog can be found on the menu above, and that is still where most of the action will be.  I also have menus of books I've read since starting the blog. (I'm always reading a book.  It may take me a day to read it or it may take a few weeks or a month, but I always have a book in progress, pretty much since I was a teenager.)   I have ideas for other sections of the site too, which will be revealed in time.  There is also a slideshow built with the Featured Content Gallery plugin that you can find above under the "Some of my favorite things" menu.  FGC is normally used by businesses to highlight their most important features on their home page but I decided to use it to build a nice slideshow.  If you hover over above you'll see a whole lot of submenus, which can be ignored.  No matter which one you click on you'll end up at the same place, watching the slideshow from the beginning.

The sidebar to the right has links to my most recent blog posts, the most recent comments I've received.  (Though they are ages old.  Sigh.  No too many people know about my previous blog but I'm hoping to get more traffic on this site.  We'll see.)  There are also archives of blog posts by month and by category, though I've yet to categorize my posts.  That's coming.  So is a blogroll of my favorite blogs.

So why blog and run a website?  The answer to that can be found in one of the earliest posts I wrote on the old blog.  Here's an excerpt:

The general idea right now is to blog about whatever interests me at that moment. While I do have a lot of interests – music, old movies, politics, history, sports, finance and investing, reading – they tend to rotate in importance day by day. One day I may want to discuss who’ll get the nominations for next year’s general election, the next day I might want to discuss whether more great movies came out of the 1970s than the 1980s. Another day I might not want to discuss anything, just lie down with a great book and read all day, away from the world. Anyhow, I’m thinking writing about my interests may deepen my understanding of them. Pauline Kael once wrote, in her introduction to Deeper Into Movies, that “I write because I love trying to figure out what I feel and what I think about what I feel, and why.” I guess I’m thinking something similar for the blog, though I’d be more comfortable saying “I write because I want to figure out what I think, and why.”

So that's why I blog.  I want to run the website because I enjoy it.  I don't play as much golf or watch as many sports as I once did so I need something to keep me busy.  So while I hope you read this I'm really doing it for myself.  I find it fun.

Finally, on the old blog I had Helen Merrill's version of "What's New" on the sidebar where it could be played at any time.  Now I'll just keep it here on the home page, where you can get to it whenever you'd like.  It's kind of our theme song around here:

[audio:03 What's New.mp3]

lightbox2

I've implemented lightbox2 so you can now click on a photo and it will pop up in a separate window on top of your original page. I intent to produce some photo galleries using this neat feature so stay tuned. In the meantime, click on one of the photos below to see how it works:

Rumble

I had just come down stairs and walked into the kitchen yesterday morning , accompanied by the Biscuit Boy, as per usual, when the world started shaking. I said, "what in the world?" as Biscuit scampered into the living room to hide under the table. The windows rattled, the cabinets shook, and I realized immediately what was happening. Five or six seconds later it was all over.  I looked over at Biscuit (who was looking at me with wide eyes like I had something to do with it) and said, "Baby, I think we just had an earthquake."  I went outside on the deck, then out front, and looked around and all was quiet.  No plane going over head (we're not far from the airport), no explosions.  Turns out my initial thought was correct.  Biggest earthquake ever in the DC area, and my first, at least the first that I've ever felt.

Turns out it was big news yesterday around here but I heard none of it.  I've spent the weekend at the kitchen table getting this web site together.  Yesterday was a struggle but today I've made a lot of progress.  Which is how it usually goes for me dealing with new technology.  The struggle actually helps sometimes.  Makes you look into the tool deeper and understand it better once you've finally had success.  I go through days like yesterday all the time at work and, I think, I end up the better for it.  That's my story anyhow, and I'm sticking with it.

Waking up in NYC

Last video for the time being. Can you tell I love these children?

[youtube]Zt6YpNyGFqw[/youtube]

New video...

...in which my baby reaffirms her love for me, in French, with three adorable children accompanying her.

[youtube]rr_bVKoaNUA[/youtube]

Testing Wordpress Video Embedder

I'm testing out different video embedders.  This one is very simple.  It points to a video I uploaded to youtube taken during a dinner last year in Paris

[youtube]_0XzV2sTqBM[/youtube]

Enchanting

That's the word I used to describe I Know Where I'm Going, a 1944 British film I watched a few nights ago by the directing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, starring Wendy Hiller and Roger Livesay.  Utterly charming, and as I said above, enchanting.  It's a rather simple story: a headstrong young woman from London who knows what she wants and where she's going, is to be married in Scotland on the Hebridean Island of Kiloran to one of the richest men in England.  Unable to make the crossing over to the island due to the weather, she finds herself falling in love with one of the locals, on leave from the Navy.  She realized she must get to the island and be married or all the things she's always wanted - money, luxury, the high-life - will be threatened by these feelings.  But enough spoilers.  If you really want to know more about it the link above has a terrific analysis of the movie.   My wife wasn't up for a movie when I watched so that gives me an opportunity to see it again soon - it's not one she'll want to miss.  I also filled up my Netflix queue with three more Powell and Pressburger movies from their 1940s heyday, which arrived in the mail today.  And a happy feller am I.

The movie reminded me of another movie set in Scotland that I love, Local Hero, which was one of the first movies my wife (then girl-friend) and I ever saw together.  Another piece of enchantment: the big-city oil executive arrives in a small Scottish seaside village to buy the entire town in order to build a new refinery.  Slowly, he starts to decompress, he catches the rhythms and the charms of the town and the townfolk, and finally, he is in love.  Not with a woman, but a way of life.  He's found the contentment he'd always been searching for.  The last thing in the world he wants to do is disturb this little slice of paradise.  The humor in it is that the people of the village, aware of his initial intentions, would like nothing better; they're holding not-so-secret meetings to figure out the best strategy to net them the most money from the deal.  I've always considered Local Hero to be a small masterpiece.

So there are two movies set in Scotland for your enjoyment.  And my preceding post was about the ongoing British Open at St. Andrews, Scotland.  I guess I must end with some music set in Scotland.  Here is Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, a magnificent piece of music, completed in the year 1830 when he was just 21 years old:

[audio:TheHebridesOverture.mp3]

Rory

I was walking downtown today, on my normal lunchtime walk, when I heard someone passing by me say into his cellphone "Nine under!" and I realized I'd forgotten it was the first round of the British Open at St. Andrews. I also knew that someone had shot a 63 and I was anxious to find out who it was. No surprise that is was Rory McIlroy, who one day (I predict) will be the greatest golfer on the planet. He's already close.

That's not such a bold statement?  Many who follow golf think it's a foregone conclusion.  He verily drips with talent.  So long as he is a great putter - and so far he seems to be - he will be a great player.  (No golfer can be truly be great if they are not great with the putter.  Yes, that means you Sergio Garcia, and you, Adam Scott).  But the specific moment when I realized he was the next great star of the game was earlier this at Quail Hollow, one of the finest courses they play on tour, when McIlroy shot 66-62 on the weekend to win going away.  You don't do something like that at the age of 20 unless you're something special.  It simply isn't done by ordinary run-of-the-mill players.   Nicklaus and Woods could do it at 20.  Who else?  Who else has done something similar at such a young age and did not go on to be one of the greats?  I don't have my golf history books out but I would venture that no one else at 20 could match such a feet.

Which is the same thing I thought last month when watching Stephen Strasburg strike out 14 batters without a walk in his thrilling major league debut.  No one does that unless they are special.  Clemens did it during his rookie season, and couple other guys had similar type games as rookies, and they all turned out to be great.  Strasburg has had six more starts, all of which I've watched, and while none were quite so thrilling as his debut each contribute in some way to my conviction that he is the next great major league pitching star.

Back to McIlroy.  Not only does he have talent, but he has flair, the kind of thing that draws people to the game, that makes the game exciting.  I'm hoping for a Tiger/Rory shootout in the final round this week.  It would be riveting for all sorts of reasons - the new kid on the block trying to knock off the old, the damaged hero trying to regain his game and a piece of his dignity, etc.  And you know what?  For the first time in ages I think I'll be rooting for someone other than Tiger or Phil coming down the stretch.  Go Rory.

MP3 Test

[audio:TheThingsWeDidLastSummer.mp3]

Blog moved to dreamhost and wordpress

While fixing the mp3 links below I realized that if I'm going to continue blogging I was going to have to find a spot to host my mp3 files.   The mp3s below are hosted on free sites but they are all limited to 100 meg or less - not sufficient if I'm going to continue blogging and posting music.  I then decided if I'm going to get a host I may as well have it host the blog completely, not just mp3s, and to go to a different blogging software.  So, I've moved to dreamhost.com as my host and wordpress as my blogging software.  I've done the move in just a couple of hours so, so far, I'm quite happy with it.  Wordpress also, so I've read, gives you a lot more flexibility on themes and the like.  So, anyhow, this is the new site.  Enjoy!

Done With The MP3 Changes

Okay, that's it - I'm done fixing all the broken MP3 embeds in the blog. They've all been migrated to the lovely little flash player that I discovered yesterday. It's supposed to be sunny today after raining buckets overnight last night and yesterday. No problem, we needed it. So here's to Buckets of Rain, one of my favorite Dylan songs:

[audio:Buckets-Of-Rain.mp3|titles=Buckets Of Rain]

Theme Song Side-Bar Fixed

I've just now fixed the side-bar which plays Helen Merrill's version of "What's New" - this blog's theme song. It had been broken along with all my other music embeds when Imeem was bought out by MySpace. Now that I'm completely running the show on my new mp3 hosting site I don't have to worry about such things any longer. At any rate, it's fixed over on the top right-hand side. My next task is to go through and fix the rest of the embeds in all my postings over the years. That's for tomorrow though. Good night sweetheart, goodnight.

Really Jumpin’ Now

I didn't like the look of the mp3 player I embedded below - very clunky looking. It also had no volume controls and it did not show the song or artist while it streamed. So I decided to go a little further and upload a flash player and javascript code to my web hosting site, one that I could reuse each time. Now, every time I embed a new song, I just use the same code and replace the mp3 url. And it's a beautiful little player, very elegant. What do you think?

[audio:04-One-OClock-Jump.mp3|titles=One O'Clock Jump]

One O'Clock Jump

I've spent all afternoon trying to:

1. Find a free m4a to mp3 file converter
2. Find a free MP3 hosting site
3. Figure out how to embed the mp3 file on my blog

And finally, success. This is how I feel right now:


UPDATE: removed because it interfered with my new audio player.

Once More about Ricochet

The best part about the ricochet.com site that I mentioned below is the weekly podcast. I hope Lileks becomes a regular contributor on them. Click on the link below for a list of all they've done so far. #23, "Read All About It" explains the demise of newspapers, magazines, and evening newscasts in an extremely engaging manner. I listened to it twice on my IPod this week too and from work. Check it out:

Ricochet Podcasts

Check out ricochet.com

I've been hanging around at ricochet.com lately, a new site run by Rob Long, Peter Robinson, and Mark Steyn. James Lileks recently joined too, an additional bonus because he is the funniest man on the web and one of the most thoughtful (read The Bleat daily and you'll discover why I make this claim). Another nice surprise is that Pat Sajak (yes, that Pat Sajak) has joined and he is by all evidence delightful; a smart and funny guy. Here are two of his posts, for your enjoyment:

Vacation's Over - Ricochet.com

Obama Oratory Overrated? - Ricochet.com