From Jon Carroll’s column today:
I think there are about seven lessons that life has to teach us, and we just learn them over and over again. Wisdom consists of remembering at least three of them at any given time.
Quote of the Day
July 8, 2009 by dsmarleyWhat Paul Meant
July 8, 2009 by dsmarleyDespite already being in the middle of both Little, Big and Thoughts without a Thinker, I came across a copy of Garry Wills’s What Paul Meant at a used book store on Monday and started it on the BART trip home. I’ve read and enjoyed his two companion books, What Jesus Meant and What the Gospels Meant, so I was eager to complete the set. Good book, too.
So now I’m in the middle of three books. It’s a bad habit of mine and I can’t even guess how many books over the years that I’ve laid down somewhere and forgotten I was in the middle till I came across them again months later.
But What Paul Meant is a fairly short book, a little under 200 pages, and I’m not far from the end, so I’ll be back to the others soon.
Sunday at the Academy
July 5, 2009 by dsmarleyDave and I spent part of Sunday at the California Academy of Sciences. On our previous visits we’d never gotten there early enough to get planetarium passes, but the Academy is open an hour early on Sundays for members, so this time we made an effort to get there early and got passes for the first show. I thought the show was fun but rambling, like it couldn’t quite settle on what it was going to be about.
Afterward we spent time on the Living Roof, in the Africa hall (great fun to watch kids and penguins interacting with each other through the glass wall of their tank), and other stuff, but the rain forest and the aquarium were very busy and we skipped those this time.
Backhanded Compliment of the Day
July 4, 2009 by dsmarleyFrom an AP news analysis by Philip Elliott:
Despite the misstep, Palin enjoys an ability to connect with voters that cannot be taught.
Misspelling of the Day
July 3, 2009 by dsmarleyFrom the New York Times breaking news alert in my email inbox a few minutes ago:
Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, announced she would step down before the end of the month, citing a desire to affect change outside of government.
Yeah, I guess it’ll be easier for her to pretend she’s changed if she’s not in government.
Grammar Schrammar
July 1, 2009 by dsmarleyReceived email at work the other day warning us that there’ve been a number of plural-singular mismatch errors slipping through lately, along the lines of (and I’m making this example up)
The inclusion of updated widget tables and expanded reticulation equations make this new edition especially valuable.
I found myself grinding my teeth a bit, partly because my ego doesn’t like people thinking I’m capable of such an elementary editing error (even though I know perfectly well that we all are when we’re working at a fast clip), but mostly because the mismatch of the singular subject “inclusion” and the verb “make” seems to me to be least of this sentence’s problems. Good grammar doesn’t redeem weak writing.
Two rules of thumb:
If you have to actually stop reading a sentence in order to work out whether the verb should be “make” or “makes”, then your sentence structure is just too damn complicated.
If your subject is an abstract noun like “inclusion”, then there’s a pretty good chance you’ve got the wrong word as your subject.
The real fix:
This new edition is especially valuable because it includes updated widget tables and expanded reticulation equations.
Hike at Point Reyes
June 28, 2009 by dsmarley
Dave and I and our friend Doug spent the day hiking at Point Reyes. We had originally planned to hike somewhere else more inland, but when we saw this morning how hot it was going to be, how hot it already was by 8:30 a.m. or so, we changed our plans and decided to go someplace along the coast instead. So we took Sir Francis Drake Boulevard out to Point Reyes — a quick stop in Inverness for some provisions — and when we got to the information center in Point Reyes and looked over the maps, we decided on the eight-mile hike to Sunset Beach and back.
It was still hot, but nowhere near as hot as it got inland (it was over 100°F where we had been planning to go) and we had a breeze nearly the whole time. Most of the trail has a view of the estuary, and on our walk out it was low tide. We saw a lot of egrets and white pelicans flying low over the shallow areas looking for food. We didn’t see a whole lot of other wildlife, but there’s a remarkable variety of plant life along the way. The whole hike took us a little under four hours. I think I got a little sunburn on the back of my neck and the little toe on my right foot got sore, but otherwise I came back in better shape and better spirits than I set out.
Stopped for dinner on the way back at Sol Food in San Rafael, a terrific if noisy Puerto Rican restaurant. My ensalada con bistec (a salad with thinly sliced steak and grilled onions) was good sized even though I ordered the small, and tasty.
For the last sixteen or seventeen years (and even much longer in Dave’s case) Dave and I have spent all of Pride Weekend, both Saturday and Sunday, working our butts off as volunteers. This year we didn’t, and we didn’t go anywhere near the parade. Nice change of pace.
Now it’s time for a hot soak in the bathtub with a glass of wine, and to bed.
Another Step Ahead
June 9, 2009 by dsmarleyFinished another lyric for the work in prog. Good to feel like I’m moving forward again.
It was a tricky lyric to work out, partly because I have so much more I need to say here than the original librettist did. He just needed to say, “Here we are at this point in a story you all already know,” short and sweet. But I’m taking the well-known story and I’m telling it in terms of a very different time and place, a very different culture, so I have a couple of additional points I need to make, and I didn’t have quite enough notes for all the words I needed to use, not unless I made the lyric so dense with information that the points would rush by too quickly for the audience to assimilate them.
After trying out and rejecting a whole lot of other possibilities, I ended up adding repeats to two sections to give me sixteen more bars to set words on. Not my first choice; I would have preferred to use the number exactly in its original form. But my ear tells me the repeats will make decent musical sense. And anyway, this is such a free-wheeling adaptation that any Opera Purists who would be offended by such liberties with the composer’s intentions will already have stormed out of the theater in a huff well before we reach this point anyway. So what the heck.
Logic Problem
June 9, 2009 by dsmarleyIt ought to be one of those SAT questions that tests whether a high school senior can make simple deductions without being distracted by irrelevant information.
1. Which weighs more?
(A) a pound of feathers
(B) half a pound of lead
2. Which is worth more?
(A) a dollar’s worth of tin
(B) a nickel’s worth of gold
3. Which is wiser?
(A) a wise Hispanic woman
(B) an unwise white man
And then several months later a red-faced parent stands up at the school board meeting, waves his son’s lousy SAT scores in the air, and insists that the right answer to question 3 is B and anyone here who thinks the answer is A is clearly a racist.
(Here’s Sotomayor’s remark in its context.)
Sick Day
June 8, 2009 by dsmarleyAn odd sort of flu came over me this weekend. I started to feel a bit achy, not badly, just a little, on Saturday evening, and still felt that way Sunday morning. No fever, though, so I didn’t worry too much about it. On Sunday Dave and I did shopping in the morning and visited the Oakland Museum in the afternoon, and the mild achiness persisted. Then in the evening the fever came, and the achiness became more than just mild.
Fever gone again as of this morning, but still very achy. Called in sick today and haven’t moved from bed for very long all day. I’ve been taking a lot of vitamin C since yesterday; that usually chases off a flu pretty quickly for me, but it’s early evening now and I’m not really feeling any better than this morning.
