We are staying with our friends Marcy and Randy Boyd in their home on the east side of Madison, and as usual I’m struck by the differences between the Midwest and California. Most prominent is the fact that there is so much land here; it doesn’t feel like everything is so crowded and pinched together. An example: While Randy and Marcy were at work Friday morning, we took their dog […]
We saw the Giants-Cubs game yesterday at Wrigley Field, a wild game that featured radical weather changes, the Giants giving away runs like a Little League team (at least 4 Cubs runs scored that shouldn’t have, the difference in the ball game), two Barry Bonds homers (one crushed out of the park, the second to almost-dead center against a ferocious wind), but with the same old result, a 9-8 Giants […]
What, you thought I was gone forever? Here is a fascinating article about why it is that most music — in a wide variety of cultures and places, including Western music — is based upon the familiar 12-tone system. According the article, "when the sounds of speech are looked at with a spectrum analyzer, the relationships between the various frequencies that a speaker uses to make vowel sounds correspond neatly […]
My wife and I watched most of the French Presidential debate between Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal last week, and although I can’t say we understood all (or even most) of it, we were struck by how different the Sarkozy/Royal debate was to the Presidential debates here in the U.S. Seated across from each other at a table, with a running clock to ensure both had the opportunity to speak […]
Yet another old picture, this one of me and my college roommate, Scott Honsey, and his wife Julie, in Des Moines in 1981 at my friend Boyd’s second wedding: This took place in the winter of 81-82, and I drove to Des Moines from Ithaca with my girlfriend Nancy in my very deficient 1976 VW Dasher (remember those?), leaving in the early evening and driving all night. Nancy was driving […]
I was looking through an old book the other day, and stuck inside was this, a picture of me and Dennis Fitzgibbon, taken in 1974, at the Rettenmaier trailer north of Burlington, Iowa, when I was seventeen: It is hard for me to comprehend that I was only 3 years older in this picture than my oldest son is now. He’s just a kid, and I was so mature and […]
I just can’t get too fired up over the latest ‘scandal’ involving the forceable ouster of several U.S. Attorneys. Although I think it was a bad idea for a number of reasons, the bottom line is that the replacement of political appointees for political reasons just doesn’t fire me up. Nor does another example of the incompetence of the Bush administration. I do believe that point has been more than […]
France has a unique 2-stage Presidential electoral process. All candidates from all political parties participate in the first stage, with the top two vote-getters advancing to the second stage. In 2002, this system resulted in a second-stage meeting between the popular, centrist candidate (Jacque Chirac) and the far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen, with the the large Socialist Party unrepresented. This year a similar possibility exists. Although the two main candidates […]
One of my favorite bands, Son Volt, is playing a show at the Mystic Theatre in Petaluma on March 31. The main creative force behind Son Volt is Jay Farrar, formerly a member of the influential “alt-country” band Uncle Tupelo, whose other main creative force, Jeff Tweedy, later formed the band Wilco. Jay Farrar’s solo albums are more acoustic (they are categorized as “Americana”, although I’m not exactly sure what […]
This has been a tough, tough year for Hawkeye fans. The football team, after starting out gangbusters, went 2-6 their last 8 games, then lost to Texas in the Alamo Bowl. The basketball team never really got on track, losing non-conference games at home to Northern Iowa and getting blown out on the road at Drake (bonus points for any native Californian who can tell me where Drake is located). […]