I should eulogize Uncle Pat, who died Saturday after a protracted fight with cancer. Pat was the funny uncle, always doing impressions (Johnny Carson, Willie Nelson, Jimmy Carter, Grandpa Bartlett, etc.), always carried around in his wallet something that he would introduce as "my pride and joy", then reveal as a picture of a bottle of Pride detergent and a bottle of Joy dish soap. There's home movies of him walking around the living room with us kids probably circa 1970, with the music from 2001 playing on the stereo (which of course the home movies don't indicate), with his false teeth popping out of his mouth and his hair down over his forehead, his arms out in front of him like a zombie. The whole Pearce clan were a bunch of comedians, but no one held a candle to Pat.



For someone with such a sense of humor, you can't really say he had a happy or worthwhile life, although I'm sure there must have been times when things were going well for extended periods. He and Lois seemed to do fine for most of the time they were married, he certainly never had any trouble talking to people, ingratiating himself with people, doesn't seem to have had much difficulty getting a job. Keeping them was the big problem early on, I think because he wasn't that interested in them, but for as long as I can remember he was working for the state, in some department where, according to Dad, his primary function was to cut articles out of newspapers. But from around the time he started drinking seriously in the early '80's, things went into a gradual decline from which they never really recovered. Even with the several years he spent with Dorlis, they seemed to do well together, but it was always hard to know what was going on since they didn't have a phone and didn't always show up at family gatherings. The last couple of years he was making a lot more consistent appearances, probably because he knew his time was limited. Last summer when we were there with the kids, you saw a glimmer of the old self, but it wasn't the same. One would think there must've been a lot of soul-searching during his last year, but with Pat who knows. I'd almost prefer that he maintained his old attitude towards life right up to the end.

I finished watching City Limits (which I mistakenly referred to as "City Lights" in the previous post, which Blogger has graciously let me fix for posterity), and it truly was incomprehensible, or at least plotless. There's an MST3K short from one of the shorts tapes where apparently in the preceding host segment Servo has been turned into the robotic equivalent of The Incredible Hulk or something, and for the first few minutes of the short all he does is grunt and say "Movie BAD!" Some times that's about all there is >to< say.



So what else has been going on? I'm totally hooked on the Prisoner, the first DVD miraculously showed up in the mail from Netflix after having been listed as "long wait" for months, so I got to watch the first episode, twice, in fact. Now I've bumped the next one up to the top of the list. We all went out Saturday to find a new bike for Chloe. I figured we'd go to a real bike store, but so did everyone else in the world, so it took a while to get somebody to talk to us. I had figured on her moving up to the next size, which was a 20", and she even wasn't dead set on pink, surprisingly. But the bike shop guy thought it wasn't big enough to last her for very long, so she tried out the Trek MT220, which is really a real mountain bike but on a smaller scale (24" wheels), and with the seat all the way down (instead of all the way up on the Mystic 20) she could navigate the parking lot like a pro. They have to get the right color from the warehouse, so we couldn't actually pick it up until tomorrow, which is ok since it rained all day today anyway. So we went out looking at minivans briefly today, Beth test drove a 2004 Sienna, which is as rare and expensive as copies of "Lungbarrow", apparently. It was very nice by minivan standards, but I still think the Odyssey will win out on both price and availability, and the features are almost identical, or close enough as to not matter that much. I just want to hurry up and buy it so in five years when its paid for I can get my next car, something frivolous like a Jag.

It has to be said: "City Limits" has got to be the most incomprehensible MST3K movie ever made! But I may be getting ahead of myself since I haven't finished watching it yet. Maybe it all makes perfect sense in the last five minutes. Color me skeptical. Now that spring is in the air, you get that exhilirating feeling no matter what you're reading, watching, or listening to. Last week I got some music I had ordered, the Brahms first piano concerto and some more Poulenc. Early Brahms seems to have a very open-air, springy feel to it, but it may just be the weather. And I've been reading through my backlog of "High Adventure" magazine, reprinting pulps from the 30's and 40's, specifically the Black Bat and Suicide Squad. The Ace G-Men stories seem to have a breezy, springy feel to them, too. And then watching a couple episodes of the Prisoner on DVD last week, well that takes place mostly outdoors in what is obviously an airy, springy Portmeirion doubling as "The Village". I have the feeling The Tin Drum would seem springy right about now, but it probably has more to do with the obvious signs of this impossibly long, cold winter finally coming to an end. I can even put away the snow shovel this weekend, which is a ritual frought with meaning around these parts. I've got a hundred other things I want to do this weekend, too, so I'm hopeful that the weather holds out.

Not too much going on today, trying to fight off a cold, haven't been to the gym yet this week, don't want to sneeze all over the equipment and all. Started last week on a four-week eating plan that's supposed to "drop two notches from your belt in just four weeks!", which seems hard to believe, but I figure it's a short-term thing that doesn't seem to difficult to stick with that might give me some insight as to how to improve the diet in general. For breakfast I've just been having milk and cereal for the last several years, now I'm mixing it up a little more with English muffins or these lean pocket breakfast things that are sort of a substitute for a egg-white omelet. That was last week, this week adds lunch, mostly variations on sandwiches and salad or soup. Lunch is a little more involved in that it needs to be something that can be assembled in the morning, but it doesn't seem too onerous. If I can keep the exercise thing going at the same time, that would be the best combination, but with this cold it's not helping the game plan very much. Let's see how much willpower I can actually muster for this sort of thing.

Last year I told Chloe as soon as she could ride a bike without training wheels I'd get her a new one, as the one she has is a Little Mermaid 16" bike that Beth got for free from somebody. She didn't seem to have much motivation or much success, and just at the very end of the fall she could pedal around Julie's backyard a little bit without training wheels, but then it got too cold and we had ten feet of snow. So now that the snow has gone, in the last week or so she's gotten the bike back out and had to learn all over again how to do it, this time without the benefit of Julie's backyard. It was amazing to see the transformation from Saturday morning, when she couldn't get the bike to go forward more than two feet without having to put her foot down and she was practicallly in tears and saying "I hate this bike!", to yesterday morning, when she was pedalling up and down the flatter section of the street at will and catching herself when she did lose control. Beth was gone for the day with Phil again, so I took the kids to Ghiloni and had them ride from the parking lot all the way to the end of the access road and back. Chloe was happy as a clam, and said, "I love this bike!" So now its off to the bike shop. Even Justin was doing well pedaling on the tricycle, and got the workout of his life going up and down that road, which took about an hour and is probably about half a mile total. Beth also had a 12" bike she acquired for free for him, but he looks too big for it already. He tried it out a few times, but seemed to prefer being rooted to the ground a little more securely with the tricycle. Last year he couldn't pedal anything, so that's a big improvement for him. My next acquisition is to get a bike rack for the car, since I don't think I could fit a 20" in the trunk of the Accord, and then Chloe and I could even ride together, since I'm not really that much better on the bike than she is. The older I get the more I try to be at least a little bit active, and would like to see the kids do the same, since I never did that much of it at their age. I used to ride my bike around Virginia in the summer time as a kid, but once I outgrew it I never got another one. Now real bike manufacturers like Trek and Specialized make kids bikes, even in pink, which of course is what Chloe wants. She'll get a few years use out of it, so it should be worth it.

So this is slipping into every other day mode, but hopefully it's just temporary. Yesterday was kind of wash as Phil is still visiting and Beth is driving him all over the greater Boston area. Today was more of the same, but she was able to ditch him for a few hours. But enough about them. Friday night I went to see Tosca, a rare (maybe first-time) event in that I saw two operas in the same week. I think Tosca is the only one of the four major Puccini operas I haven't seen live, having missed my chance back in college. One of the girls on my floor, Vera, and I decided to get tickets to as many operas as we could, and me being the advance planner that I am picked out which days looked promising for each opera before school had even started in the fall, and mailed the list to Vera to ask her what she thought. I never heard back from her, so I figured she'd decided to opt out, which was fine. Then on moving in day I ran into her and the first thing she asked was "Did you get your tickets yet?" to which I replied "What!" Apparently she had taken my recommendations and gone and bought herself a set of tickets for those dates. So I had to haul my opera-going ass down to the Lyric box office and try to scrounge whatever seats were still available for those same nights. I managed to get four of the five (including Tristan), but the only one that was sold out completely was Tosca, so I never saw it. As it turned out, her mother was able to score a ticket somehow and she went with her instead. For the next two seasons I just bought myself a subscription and that was that.



Anyway, this Tosca Friday night was very good, in spite of being in Northeastern's Blackman Auditorium, which has all the ambiance and acoustics of a lecture hall, because, well, it is one. But it makes for a relatively intimate setting, and even my Arts/Boston ticket was in the 16th row of the main floor, albeit way over to one side. There were enough empty seats that those of us in the peanut gallery could spread out a bit, which was good. The Cavaradossi was a little too much of a teddy bear for my taste, but he made a great sound. Scarpia and Tosca herself were both good. Hearing the music live you get a sense of the complexity of the score and how tenuous the connection is sometimes between the orchestra and the singers, with lots of offbeat phrasing and such, but it held together pretty well. My expectations for BAM aren't terribly high, so I tend to come away pleasantly surprised, but I was short on sleep that evening and still didn't have any trouble staying awake, which is saying something. I also ran into Phyllis Froeschle out in the lobby, who I hadn't seen in a couple of years. I keep intending to subscribe to BAM but still haven't done it yet, and this season was pretty promising and as a result of not subscribing I never did make it to their Percheurs des Perles in the fall. Next season BLO is doing Tosca, I think, so I get to hear it again.

Oops, missed a day again. Good thing no one is reading this. Beth's old high school friend Phil called up out of the blue last week, saying he needed to come to Boston because both his parents were in the hospital. She spoke to him for a little while, then didn't hear anything for several days, then he called again Tuesday nght to say he was arriving Wednesday morning. His dad was in the VA hospital in West Roxbury, so once he arrived he went straight there and found out everything that was wrong with him, which was quite a bit. He got to Natick somehow and Beth picked him up there Wednesday evening, ostensibly to take him to his parents' house, but when they got there the place was in such a state of disarray that she had him come back to our house for the night. Yesterday morning the hospital called to tell him his dad had died. Beth drove him out there again, then back to the hospital in Framingham where his mother is, and didn't get back home till late last night, and he spent the night at our house again. Bear in mind this guy is Beth's age, doesn't drive, and before yesterday hadn't seen his parents in 13 years (and that was only because he came here for our wedding). He has no job, has never married, still rents an apartment, and seems to have done a superhuman job of avoiding responsibility for his adult life. Now that he's here, he's got the opportunity to sort out the various entanglements left by his parents, which I suppose it's in his best interest to do, so I'm mildly curious to see what comes of it. What is this disaffected generation from moderately well-off families, smart people with lots of promise who started college, couldn't quite stick with it, end up in a variety of uninteresting and/or menial jobs, shun commitment, and now, firmly entrenched in middle age, have built up very little to show for their lives so far? There's a screenplay in that somewhere.



While I was sitting at home alone again last night I watched an episode of the Prisoner on DVD. I've been trying to get the one with the first episode from Netflix for months, but it's perpetually flagged as "long wait", so I gave up and went on to the next disk, having a vague recollection of the premise. As it turns out there's about a three-minute montage recapping the first episode at the beginning of the next, so that filled in some gaps too. I've only seen a few of them over the years, and not any that I can remember since I was staying at Tufts in the summer of '86, but what I saw jibed with my hazy memory. This show has got to be the most audacious thing ever produced for television, it's so New Wave, so contemptuous of its audience, it's fascinating to watch. It's the same feeling I get reading Grant Morrison's "The Invisibles" comic, except I think there's probably less continuity in The Prisoner from one episode to the next. Can't wait to see the next one.

Last night I went to Jordan Hall to see the Teatro Lyrico d'Europa for the first time, performing a semi-staged Boris Godunov in the Rimsky-Korsakov version. Since Richard Dyer has been effusive in his praise for this group over the last few years, I decided to give it a go, and being a Russian opera with a primarily Russian castI (with principals from the Bolshoi Opera) didn't hurt. It was a very good performance, and the singer who did Boris, whose name I won't even attempt to remember, was extremely compelling, with lots of that full, booming Russian bass sound, but without sounding too nasal or just shouting, as you hear sometimes from his countrymen at the Met. The rest of the cast was mostly excellent, also, and did remarkably well just to be heard over the full orchestra. The volume generated by chorus, which was only around 30 people, was also impressive, speaking as a former chorus member. The venue of Jordan Hall for an opera means a more intimate experience, and it would've been particularly thrilling to hear this from the first few rows of the main floor, but there are really no bad seats there, so the amount of sound being generated versus the size of the hall meant for a very involving musical experience. I wish the surtitles were better timed (and not run from a noisy slide projector). I wish there had been more people there (couldn't have been more than 400 in the audience). But otherwise it was a great concert. Due to the vagaries of scheduling my nights out around Beth's nights out, I'm actually going to two operas in one week, with the next being Tosca on Friday.

Oops, missed a day, somehow didn't get to it at work, and then came home, ate dinner, put the kids to bed and passed out. Justin waking up at 6 am all weekend put me at a sleep disadvantage, and I wanted to get somewhat caught up tonight since I'm going to the opera (never a good idea on low sleep). This meant I missed part 2 of Children of Dune, but I figure I can catch one of the next hundred times its on. The first part was pretty good, actually.



So we're going to go to war with Saddam. Personally, I couldn't be more thrilled. The fact that there's a good chance it'll be an ass-whupping doesn't hurt, but even if it looked to be a long, difficult slog, I still think in the long run its worth it to get the nutcase out of there. I don't normally feel particularly hawkish, but I have to think that the basic idea makes sense, and there would seem to be a number of historical examples (Hitler being the most obvious) where in hindsight somebody should have done the same thing. Saddam is no Hitler, and Iraq is no Germany, but in the new version of the real-life game of Risk, you don't need huge armies and tons of fanatical followers to stir things up. And without Russia to pose as a deterrent, there's not much stopping the US from doing whatever it wants, which I'm sure bothers a lot of other countries, but may not necessarily be a bad thing. It probably smacks of the manifest destiny stance the US always used to have before WWII. I don't blame the european countries or Turkey for wanting to avoid all this, as its a lot closer to home for them than it is for us, and Saddam is nuts enough to fire off a few missiles in any random direction just because he can. But if we can truly go in there and get rid of the guy, and if somebody better can actually then take over, and if enough pressure is brought to bear either by the US or the UN to keep it that way, then I think in the long run we come out ahead. We'll never know what it was like in the parallel universe where Saddam is left alone to cook up his schemes and provide assistance to other terrorists, but personally I don't think we need another 9/11 to galvanize us into action. We know the guy is bad news, he could be responsible at any moment for some major terrorist attack, let's just get rid of him now and be done with it before anything worse happens. MacArthur supposedly said, "It's better to be boldly decisive and risk being wrong than to agonize at length and be right too late." The agonizing has been going on for twelve years already, I think the risk of being wrong is fairly remote at this point.

After one of the longest, coldest, snowiest winters in recent memory, finally a really nice weekend day to make us all remember what the rest of the year is like. It's only mid-March, so we could still get a few more feet of snow before it's all over, but it's a nice sign that maybe spring is finally on its way. I personally couldn't be more thrilled.



Spent the last two evenings watching Vengeance on Varos on DVD, which I haven't seen in a long time. As with the Aztecs, I watched with the commentary track on, this time featuring Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant and and guy who played Sil, Nabil Shaban or something like that, who said he thought Sil looked like a cross between a tadpole and a turd. "I wish you hadn't said that", said Baker. It was a very entertaining running dialogue, they had plenty of observations to make and memories to share, particularly Shaban, who turns out to be a big Doctor Who fan in his own right. And the story is definitely prophetic, having to do with people watching violent acts on tv and actually getting to vote on the outcome, with all the Survivor and Big Brother and various other shows now having taken over the airwaves, both here and in the UK. It was never one of my favorites, but it was fun to watch it again, plus there were a number of extra scenes included, and a few outtakes, plus the BBC trailers, which are always amusing. Now if I can just get Power of Kroll and Armageddon Factor done, I'll be all caught up with Doctor Who DVD's, hopefully in time for the next wave in June.

Justin and I spent the day together, not doing much of anything out of the ordinary. I wanted to go to Framingham this afternoon to check out a home theater system at Cambridge Soundworks, so I looked around there while he watched Monsters Inc, which was actually playing on the very system I wanted to check out, then Toys R Us was right next door, so we went over there to look around, and they had the one Rescue Heroes robot guy that he hadn't been able to find at Walmart, so we got that, and that was about it. Otherwise he played some computer games while I watched the recap of the sixth stage of Paris-Nice on OLN, we went out to lunch at McDonalds, got the drycleaning, went to the post office, etc. etc., nothing too strenuous.



This Elizabeth Smart thing seems to bear a mention. While it's nice to hear about something other than Iraq, and actually a story with good news for once, I would tend to think it would get just as much airplay even if there was no impending war. What I find interesting about the whole thing is that here again is a case of someone doing something in the name of religion. The presumption has always been that without religion society would break down as the threat of eternal damnation or whatever would be taken away as a deterrent from commiting some heinous act. This may be true for petty things, but I tend to think that most people faced with proof of the non-existence of god would probably just sink into oblivion rather than go out and trash their surroundings. It's sort of the Detroit syndrome, it seems people are more likely to riot over proof of the existence of god rather than non-existence, for some reason. But anyway, although this by no means the norm or even that common, every so often there's a high profile instance like this Elizabeth Smart thing where the perpetrator is doing something for religious reasons which is deemed illegal and immoral by society as a whole. Much like terrorists think its ok to kill thousands of people because their religion is correct and the other people's is not. The only comment to be drawn from this is that it tends to support the theory that religion is not necessarily a panacea, or opiate or whatever, that we may think, at least not for everyone who is drawn to it. And the fact that Ms. Smart herself seems to have been deeply religious, from a sheltered background, and probably something of a goody-twoshoes, probably worked against her in that she didn't have the acuity at her disposal to see her situation for what it was and try to do get out of it, but instead chose to play along, which inevitably led to brainwashing, which incidentally would seem to be easier to do on somebody of that personality and belief. Although I didn't know them then, I would be inclined to think that if at age 14 Beth or Nancy or Dawn or some other intelligent, strong-willed, but not necessarily non-religious girl was subjected to a similar situation, they would have found a way out of it. This doesn't intend to speak ill of Elizabeth Smart herself, just of the religious fervor that got her into that mess, and religious myopia that kept her in it.

So I finally made the commitment to get my own domain, and in the next few days I'll probably migrate all these pages over to the new location. I've been thinking about doing this for a long time, but never really had the justification for needing it. But since I'm looking at adding more pictures to this site, and my verizon account only gives me about 5MB, which is only enough for about 80 or so pictures plus all the text and everything, it seemed like I finally had an excuse to do it. With the new site I'll have 500MB, which is enough for 10,000 pictures, which should be plenty. bartlett.com is taken by some landscaping company who obviously had somebody who was savvy to the web at an early stage. bartlett.net is taken by some company who houses tons of domains made of common last names, and then sells you the rights to use them for e-mail, and maybe did some webhosting stuff too. markbartlett.com is claimed by somebody in England. ".com" used to be the defacto for anybody, but now it seems like its original intent, that it's really for companies, is a little more the standard, so it doesn't really bother me to use .net instead. It sort of identifes it as my official "net presence", and definitely bumps up the chances of anyone looking for me finding it on a web search. There are quite a number of other Mark Bartletts out there, if yahoo is any indication, so I might as well stake my claim now before one of the other ones takes it. mataglap.com is also taken, but that's okay, that name won't necessarily stick for this page. I'm already seventh on the list of hits for the word "mataglap", I'm surprised there are that many others out there.

Here's Laura's e-mail regarding last night's reading group:

What a lively discussion we had about tonight's book (Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen)! (Okay, I'll admit that almost all of our discussions are pretty lively, but this one showed little sign of flagging as we neared 9:00 and I finally guided us into wrapping up.) Part of what contributed to the length and energy of the discussion was that about half the people liked the book and the other half didn't, so the half that liked it felt compelled to try to convince the other half that they really did, or at least should have, liked it. The biggest complaint of those who didn't like it was that it was dull. The biggest strength of the book for most of those who liked it was its humor. (In the course of this debate, one member suggested that it most closely resembled "Seinfeld" - possibly humorous but basically about nothing with somewhat two-dimensional characters.)



Of course we touched on the theme of "pride and prejudice," but spent even more time inspecting the marriage theme and debating whether these folks really could be living in a time of war and not ever talk about it! We also discussed whether Elizabeth really had the opportunity to actually fall in love with Darcy (as opposed to just coming to appreciate him more and see him in a truer light) and made the inevitable comparisons between the book and various filmed versions of the book. One thing I think we all agreed on was that the folks in this book led really dull lives!

If I may add my two cents, I've always found Jane Austen to be extremely dull, but Pride and Prejudice is actually the least awful novel of hers I've read as it does have some pretensions of a plot and isn't written so circumspectly that you can't keep track of what's going on. There's something to be said about the general level of discussion last night in that when we read Persuasion a few years ago it was only Roger and I who didn't like the book, while last night probably half the group didn't like it, and it was ostensibly the better book! Although the discussion may have gone on till almost nine, I for one was done talking about it by 8:30. But I was surprised that so many people were so unforgiving about historical context in terms of plot, theme, etc. I think the surface familiarity of this novel tends to make you forget it was written 200 years ago, and as a result it comes up short as you impose greater literary requirements upon it than were probably achievable at that time. Don't get me wrong, I still don't think much of it, but it was an unusual instance of the group in general taking the critical low road last night.

I'm shocked this morning to read on velonews.com about the death of Andre Kivilev. I remember Kivilev most from the 2001 Tour de France, where he was the only GC threat in a large breakaway on an early stage in the rain that managed to foil the peloton and finished about 35 minutes ahead of the pack. I took Lance and the rest of the contenders several days to catch up to them in the GC, and the whole time Kivilev was identified as the one person who could take advantage of such a large lead. As it was he ended up fourth. But now in stage two of Paris-Nice yesterday he was involved in a crash and landed head-first on the pavement. Of course, like most of the European peloton, he wasn't wearing a helmet. I've been following professional cycling since Lance's first win at the TdF in 99, so this is the first death during a major race since I've been around. They still talk about Fabio Casartelli all the time, who succumbed to a similar accident in the Tour in '95, so its a big deal in the cycling world. Doesn't seem to motivate them to wear helmets though. Bob Roll says it's strictly a macho thing, there's no other reason not to wear them. Considering how fast they go and how close together they are and how varying the course conditions are, its a wonder it doesn't happen more often. Sprinters will typically wear them for potentially close finishes, but in mountain stages they sail down these steep declines without them because they don't want to wear them on the way up.



We were innocent bystanders to a similar event in Arlington in the summer of 2000 for the first running of the "Tour of Arlington", which turned out to be the first of only two, since the sponsor, BMC, couldn't keep its end of the deal past that. The family and I showed up for the men's race, since I wasn't buying Velo News yet I wasn't quite up to date on the domestic women's field and at the time Saturn was so hugely dominant most of the races were a formality. But that was where Nicole Reinhart met her untimely end, colliding head-on into a tree on the last lap. The men's race was cancelled and everybody just stood there stunned. Unlike something like auto racing where cars run around at 200 miles an hour, you don't typically think of bike racing as a dangerous sport, but there's definitely a certain amount of risk involved. Just getting out and riding around town I feel much more exposed and much more tentative on a bike than when I'm running on the same roads. The older I get the less I want to put myself in harm's way, but at the same time you want to be able to ride somewhere. Either way, I plan on having the helmet. The UCI should think about doing the same.

I'm so far behind in my comic reading these days its not even funny, but I've been treading water for the last several weeks and at least reading as many as I'm buying, even if the ones I'm reading are ones I bought three or four months ago. It actually makes for an interesting change, since most comics are generally episodic and if you read three or four at once from different titles you get three or four unconnected episodes, each of which won't be continued for another several weeks in most cases. By having a backlog of 50 or so comics, I can actually read "vertically", that is, read several issues in a row of the same title. So tonight, for instance, I read the three most recent issues of Daredevil, plus a couple of single issues of other things. It makes for better continuity and I'm more likely to remember the story by reading larger chunks of it at once. Of course, the whole point of graphic novels is to consolidate all the related issues of a particular story together so you can read it in a few sittings rather than waiting from one month to the next. I think in the old days it was easier to keep the continuity straight on a month to month basis, because a) I was younger and better at remembering what I read, but also because b) the stories were more verbose, with lots of captions, so it actually took longer to read a single issue, and because it took longer you got into it a little more and were better positioned to remember it four weeks later when you got the next issue. A lot of comics these days don't have much at all in the way of captions, and its a rare comic that requires more than 10 minutes to read. At a minimum $2.25, for only 10 minutes entertainment, it's an expensive thrill, and with some of them pushing three or four dollars each, you're getting into phone sex prices. I stoppped buying manga because with not only no captions but not much dialog, many of them could be read in under five minutes, and it just didn't seem worth it. It's hard not to see comic books, or at least mainstream superhero comics, as a dying medium, slowly being superceded by graphic novels. Although they tend to point fingers at video games and the internet and whatever, the industry really has only itself to blame, with the consolidation of distributors and lack of advertising and creator ownership all driving up prices and driving down sales. But I keep buying them anyway.

Considering how many pianists there are in the english-speaking world and how many magazines there are in the same english-speaking world, it's somewhat surprising how hard it is to find a magazine about the piano. And I don't mean Keyboard Magazine, which is about keyboards, after all, but one about the actual piano. I subscribed briefly to Piano & Keyboard several years ago, but at the time wasn't playing as much and consequently not reading it that closely, so I dropped it. Now it apparently no longer exists, and I feel guilty. While we were in New York a couple of weeks ago Beth and I stopped in at Patelsons, which was about two blocks away from our hotel, and she sat and read the guide book while I browsed. They had relatively recent copies of both Clavier magazine and Piano Today, both of which I'd seen once in a while but never bought before, so I picked up one of each (the Clavier was only $2, hard to pass up). These magazines actually contain music, so it almost makes sense to keep them near the piano rather than on the bedside table. It's usually my m.o. if I take an interest in something one of the first steps is to find a magazine about it. When I stop reading the magazine, then my interest has officially waned, so I can stop subscribing and move on to something else. I still get Opera News and BBC Music Magazine and read them semi-regularly, but I thought I'd give these a try, too, plus there's another one from the UK called International Piano (which used to be Piano Quarterly), that's kind of pricey, but I ordered one issue to check it out. Of course I'd rather be playing the piano than reading about playing the piano, but since my playing time is limited, this helps to keep my interest up, I suppose.

Somehow I missed the last couple of days. I spent the evening on the computer Friday night, but it wasn't until five seconds after I turned it off that I remembered I'd forgotten to update this. And Saturday evening was mostly spent fighting to stay awake, which I succeeded in doing, but again, without updating this log. So now it's Sunday and the computer's been running all evening doing a disk defrag, and when the Batman Reunion movie is finally over and I come in here to do a quick update and go to bed, I find Beth has shut it off and turned off the light (which is completely out of character for her).



Anyway, while fighting to stay awake both last night and today I did watch The Aztecs on DVD, which just arrived in the mail last week. As with Tomb of the Cybermen before it, it's just plain weird to watch these grainy, indistinct, muffled stories from the '60's all cleaned up and good as new, if not better than they were when they were first shown. My first viewing of a Hartnell episode was "The Keys of Marinus" in 1985, on a nth-generation copy of a Betamax tape with a rented VCR on a 13-inch tv. The story seemed fuzzy and hard to follow. It turned out, when I moved out here and Channel 11 in New Hampshire first started showing Hartnells, that even those copies were fuzzy and hard to follow. Plus these six, eight and ten part epics weren't meant to be watched in one sitting on a Saturday afternoon, either. The Aztecs is much easier to take (at only four parts), but in the mid-80's it was more Upstairs Downstairs than Doctor Who for somebody who had only seen Doctors 3, 4 and 5 up to that point. Now, with a complete set of videos and 10 years of Doctor Who magazine under my belt, you can appreciate the context much better, but the pacing by itself won't keep you awake and riveted late at night. The commentary track was a bit thin (a little too much "ooh, that looks quite good"), but did give some good insights as to what a shoestring operation it was, and the interview with some of the guest stars in one bonus track and designer Barry Newbery in another were very enlightening. Next up should be Vengeance of Varos, plus I still have the last two Key to Time installments to watch.

So Beth is off tomorrow for a wild weekend of scrapbooking on the Cape, leaving me with the kiddies for a couple of days. While this is the sort of thing that used to inspire dread and fear, now it doesn't seem that awful. The kids are older, more self-sufficient, fairly easy to entertain, so it's no big deal. Of course it'll be 40 degrees and sunny and I won't be able to go for a run, but that's okay. And since Beth is back around lunchtime on Sunday so she can turn around and take Chloe to a Girl Scout thing, there won't be enough time to go to the science museum like we did last year, but that's okay. I'm sure we'll find something to do. I asked Chloe where she'd like to go while Mommy was gone, and she said "McDonalds". Not exactly what I was looking for. She'd watch tv for the whole 40-hour stretch if I let her. Next weekend she and Beth are going camping on another Girl Scout outing, so it'll be just me and Justin for a weekend for the first time. I told him we can do guy things like sit around in our underwear and watch football, which he thinks is hilarious. I'd like to come up with something different to do, given this opportunity, but haven't got any concrete ideas yet. Have to get past this weekend first.

Seems like Blogger's been having problems today, but maybe it's just the network here at work doesn't want to let me in. Last night I stopped at CompUSA on the way home to check out the PDA's, but also picked up a copy of Adobe Photoshop Album for $10 off, since it was top-rated in PC Magazine and I was looking for something more official than the freeware JAlbum to organize pictures for the web page. After the kids were in bed I set myself down to install it, and ended up spending about two hours monkeying with stuff before it finally worked. By then it was 10 o'clock and it was too late to do anything with it. First it wouldn't install DirectX completely (which I already had installed, but like most games, it didn't seem to care). That required turning off all the Norton stuff before that would work (a little trick I learned a while back). Then it would start but tell me it couldn't open the catalog because of ODBC problems. That required installing an upgrade of ODBC from Microsoft's website. But the newest versions don't include the JET dll's for Access and other pc-based databases, so that was a separate download and install from Microsoft, all interspersed with frequent reboots. I pity the fool that encounters these kind of problems and doesn't have the years of experience to know how to troubleshoot. To Adobe's credit, it gave me enough information in the error messages to know where to look, but it was still a whole evening I could've been doing something else. It wasn't until after I shut down the computer and fired up an MST3K tape that I realized I never did update my blog. I'm so looking forward to technology making my life easier.

Just finished (like 15 minutes ago) David Brin's "The Uplift War", a big, sprawling mess of a novel that was the Hugo winner back in the 80's and finished the loosely connected first Uplift trilogy. This is Brin's "War and Peace" following a large number of races and a few representatives from each through an extremely convoluted plot involving, at its core, mankind's right to exist as an uplifted species when they apparently had no patron to guide them through the process to intellligence. There are many things to admire about this book, Brin's attention to detail is consistently sharp, he only introduces enough characters as the reader can keep track of, the larger aspects of the war are largely played out offstage, allowing more time to focus on the individual efforts. He particular enjoys putting otherwise average people/chimps/aliens into extraordinary situations and then seeing what comes of it. The alien races are mostly anthropomorphic, but distinctive in their own alien qualities. There are still some humans around to keep things grounded (which if I remember correctly was conspicuously missing in the next book, Brightness Reef) and give the reader (or at least me) something to latch on to. I suppose it's the kind of book that benefits from repeated readings, in that knowing up front who's important and who's not, and generally what happens, would allow one to wallow a little more in the world-building that Brin indulges in. But as a first time through, it's not an easy book by any stretch, the multiple viewpoint characters, each involved in their own little situations, makes the overall picture of what's going on hard to follow. The book isn't necessarily too long, but could stand to be a little more focussed, or else a little more philosophical to make up for the lack of a strong narrative drive. This was also a problem in the previous book, "Startide Rising", which followed basically the same premise, take a bunch of ordinary people/dolphins/chimps, plunk them down in an hostile alien environment, separate them, have some vague battles going on around them, and don't answer any big questions. The Uplift War ends less ambiguously than Startide Rising, but because the action is so diluted amongst the different protagonists, the payoff isn't really that exciting for the amount of pages that it requires to reach it.

Had my first real experience with the Boston Piano Amateurs Association today as a member. We met at someone's house in Northboro, which had a good-sized music room with a grand and two uprights, plus an organ. Nobody took advantage of the multiple pianos, though. About a dozen people played, including my first contribution, the Debussy Prelude from Book 2 "Les terrases des audiences du clair de lune" or however it's spelled. The piano was a Steinway, and a little stiff, with a couple of sticky keys, and the room dimensions were such that it took a fair amount of control to keep things from sounding too loud, but it went off pretty well. Other members played some Chopin, some Liszt, even the Copland Variations, which really >was< too loud for the room, plus not exactly a crowd-pleaser. Most of the people who played seemed to have a pretty good facility with the piano, only a couple I would classify as "beginners". Afterwards I got to talk at length with a few of them, then it was off into the pouring rain for the short drive home. This is a more or less monthly event, primarily at members' homes, presumably just members with grands, which lets me out. I'd like to check into using the Marlborough library, though, as I think that would be a good-sized venue, although its a bit dimly lit, that maybe would serve in lieu of my living room.

So Wednesday night, after spending the day in the freezing cold, shopping, standing in line for tickets, then seeing "Thoroughly Modern Millie", we were on our way to Lincoln Center to see the NY Philharmonic for the first time, and the first time in Avery Fisher Hall. The main attraction on the program initially was Peter Serkin doing the Brahms first concerto. I've heard Serkin a couple of times before, he's not my favorite, and typically plays more modern stuff (last time with the BSO I think it was the Stravinsky Concerto, which suits him perfectly), so it was some mixture of anticipation and trepidation that I approached his attempt at Brahms. But the real star of the show was Danish composer Poul Ruders, who was in town for the American premiere in the same concert of his "Listening Earth". We even went to the Barnes & Noble across the street for a pre-concert talk with Ruders. It turns out he came across the text that inspired him from a poem by Addison that was quoted in a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. Since his operas have been about somewhat sfnal subjects in the mainstream (The Handmaid's Tale, plus his next one based on Kafka's "The Trial"), it's kind of neat that there's a composer who's also a science fiction fan. The piece is in four sections that lead one into the next, the first three with a very dense orchestration that required four percussionists plus timpani playing a large variety of instruments, predominantly vibraphone and three glockenspiels. The last section takes a sudden turn into different territory as it was written after September 11, and is a much sparer, yet darker texture, with repetitive percussive outbursts from timpani and bass drum, which Ruders said should have been called "Angry Earth". For this section, he diverged from Addison's poem, which had a much more upbeat ending, and chose as inspiration W.H. Auden's poem written the day the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. In his pre-concert talk he said he wasn't trying to "cash in", and didn't even set out to compose a response to 9/11, but it since he was in the middle of composing something he couldn't help but be affected by what had happened. The audience, which was about half full, was polite but not overly enthusiastic, but it seemed the sort of work that would benefit from multiple hearings. I'd heard of the "Handmaid's Tale" opera, but the composer's name was unfamiliar to me before, so this was a good introduction to his work.

The original attraction for the concert, the Brahms concerto with Peter Serkin, turned out to be something of a revelation too. Serkin was definitely giving it all he had, and as Tommasini wrote he seemed to feed off of conductor David Robertson's enthusiasm, making the fast parts, particularly the last movement, very exciting. The large part of the first movement particular he allowed tons of time for the expanisveness of the music to naturally take over, such that the total elapsed time for the concerto was well over 50 minutes. I also liked how he played around with dynamics, taking some of the obviously fortissimo octave passages and playing them more mezzo forte once in a while. The last piece on the program, the Janacek Sinfonietta, is a very nice piece and was very capably performed, and Robertson acquitted himself and the orchestra admirably. And we got our money's worth since it was nearly 10 (after a 7:30 start) by the time the show came to an end.