Courtesy of the Random Complaint Generator: At times, we all have an axe to grind. Currently, I’m grinding my axe in regards to Mr. Steve Creighton’s insults. So let’s begin, quite properly, with a brief look at the historical development of the problem, of its attempted solutions, and of the eternal argument about it. With […]

I was feeling like skipping a rehearsal two weeks ago, then Allen called at like 5 o’clock that day and asked if I could fill in as accompanist, so of course I said sure. So then last week I was still feeling like skipping a rehearsal (no one’s fault, it’s Brahms Requiem), the family was […]

Don’t drop your teeth, I had nothing to do with it. Scott and Shelley have conspired to produce the second Bartlett boy of his generation. Fletcher Mark Bartlett was born on April 12. You can see more info here, at least for a few months yet. Mom says he looks nothing like that, though, but […]

So I haven’t posted in four weeks, but look on the plus side, I’ve saved you the trouble of wading through a bunch of rants about the weather. We’ve made it to the nether end of the fourth snowiest winter on record, and in retrospect it wasn’t that awful, but I’m sure that’s what the […]

So a couple of days ago I hit the big four-two, and like most recent birthdays it was met with a mixture of dread and self-loathing, but there was cake involved, so it wasn’t so bad. Having long since passed the milestone birthdays that actually mean something (the last one being at 35, after which […]

A recent e-mail from an uncontrollable nihilist breaks two-plus years of silence in order to provide a linguistics lesson on the name of this website: mata = eye(s)gelap = dark The spelling in Indonesia would normally be “mata gelap”, two words, but it is possible that they render it “mataglap” in slang (or in Malaysia). […]

Happy President’s Day! Spent the weekend at what by my count is my twelfth Boskone, the local sf convention that was very handy when it was in Framingham and now marginally less so now that it has relocated to downtown Boston. What I discovered during the Worldcon last fall was that I don’t really need […]

All this talk of dynasty takes away from the week-in, week-out effort that this team has demonstrated during the course of the season to get to this point, such that the outcome of the big game this year was a foregone conclusion, and otherwise ambivalent Superbowl watchers were rooting for the Eagles just to cheer […]

So as I alluded to yesterday, last week I went to the BSO, ostensibly to hear Garrick Ohlsson play the Viktor Ullman piano concerto, not because it was Viktor Ullman but because it was Garrick Ohlsson. Ullman was a German Jew who died in a concentration camp and saw virtually none of his music performed […]

One good way to get through a snowy New England winter is to go to a lot of concerts, which is what I’ve been doing this month, so pardon me if I drone a while to catch up. The trick is to not buy tickets in advance, since you never know what the weather will […]