You bet!!!

The sound of old T-rex...




Have a wonderful weekend!!!!

Hero!!!

I'm sure that I'm jumping on about a thousand bandwagons, but this guy is a freakin' hero!!!!

Story here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_colo_school_shooting

Swing and Turn!!!

Wow - I'm so glad that I finally found this!!!! "This" being a song sung by Carolyn Hester called "Swing and Turn Jubilee". It was one of the first songs that I really liked when I started getting seriously into folk music up in Oregon, and it's taken quite a while to track it down again!!




It's a great song on its own - a lovely old square dance from who-knows-when - but this version has a neat little story to it:



Carolyn Hester was signed to a record contract with Columbia by John Hammond in 1960. He expected her to be the next big thing in the folk music revival that was happening at the time. Unfortunately, her first two albums didn't do so hot, so Hammond tried to get her a really good band for her third try.




If you listen to the playing on this song, it's just amazing!!! When I first heard it, I was particularly struck by the great harmonica breaks in between the verses. looking into it a little, I finally found out who played on it: A little known folk singer named Bob Dylan, recently arrived in New York and playing on his first album!!!



It may just be my imagination, but whenever I listen to it, I can just feel his excitement at being in the studio for the first time!! And by the way, on bass is Bill Lee, father of Spike Lee!!! It's just such a great performance!!





Here's the band during the recording:













The album still didn't do so great, and Carolyn Hester never made it as big as her friend and rival Joan Baez, but I'll always have a soft spot for this song!!





Here it is from Last.fm:




http://www.last.fm/music/Carolyn+Hester/_/Swing+And+Turn+Jubilee




Live and learn!!

Auden!!!

Happy 103rd birthday to W.H. Auden!!! He was a cynic's cynic:

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.


And when all is said and done, he probably wasn't quite up to Eliot, who was his main rival, and for whom we acquired Auden from Great Britain. But he did write some great stuff, like the amazing "Stop all the clocks" (used in Four Weddings and a Funeral) and this, about Yeats:

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Also, read here for an outstanding interview that was just re-pubished:

http://www.parisreview.com/media/3970_AUDEN.pdf

Happy birthday!!!

Math!!!

Patrick O'Brian wrote that many men discover, later in life, an appreciation for math that they did not possess when they were being pressured to learn about it in school. This may or may not be the case for the majority of men (and he didn't mention whether it applies to women), but I've definitely found myself to be more interested in math ever since I started doing cabinetry in my late 20's.

I'll probably never really see the elegance and beauty that real mathematicians can find in complex proofs, but at least I feel like I finally got a grasp on geometry that eluded me in junior high! Not to cast aspersions, but I do feel like some of my math teachers could have done a better job of clarifying the underlying logic and purpose of some of those formulae, if not actually revealing their abstract charms. I finally passed geometry on the 2nd try, but it wasn't until much later than 7th grade that I was interested in what it was all about.

But now that I can at least appreciate a decent theorem, I am really enjoying a great series in the New York Times by Steven Strogatz. He is a really smart guy (his CV is terrifying) who has decided to try to explain all math - even the really hard stuff - to us simpletons!! He has done three articles so far and they've all been really interesting and readable. Plus he started off with a video from Sesame Street ("Spark plugs???")!!!

If you feel like you missed something back in school, you may want to check it out! Here is the first one:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/from-fish-to-infinity/

And this is the most recent:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/steven-strogatz/

Enjoy!!

Snow 2!!!

We finally got the whole family up to the snow today!! You never know how many good snow days there are, so we took our chances & headed back to Mount Baldy, where we had been thwarted by the traffic two weekends ago. This time either we got there early enough - or not as many people were thinking “snow” this weekend - but we finally made it!!!

It was another great snow day: good sledding & warm sun!!! It was also Jack’s first real snow day!! I think that he was a little overwhelmed by the whole thing, but he did do some great sledding & I’m sure that he’ll be a pro pretty soon!!

But here's the really twisted part – we came back & it was so warm that the kids went swimming!!! So Southern California : )

Hope everyone had a great President's day!!!

Snow!!!!

Finn & I played hookie from school on Monday and headed up to the snow!!! Well, actually I only had a half day of work, and I picked up Finn from school when he only had an hour left, but it sounds more rebellious to say we played hookie : )

Anyway, I’m soooooooo glad we went because it was an awesome snow day!!! Unfortunately, the Angeles Crest Highway has been closed lately because of all of the mud slides, so we had to take the longer journey to Mount Baldy, but the drive wasn’t too bad, and the snow was amazing!!! Here are some pictures from a fun afternoon:

I’ve said it before, but one of the things that I love about Los Angeles is that, in the winter, you can be in the snow in an hour - even less without mud slides! No offence to those who choose to live in places like, say, Maine, but I really like being able to go to the snow & then leave : )

Speaking of Los Angeles, did anyone else notice that the city looked amazing this afternoon??!!! There was a light rain falling, and these incredible clouds in the west, and it was really ridiculously beautiful! Unfortunately all I had was my phone camera, but there was an incredible DOUBLE rainbow right over our apartment for a little while:















this picture completely fails to do it justice, but it was amazing. Actually the whole sky looked more like this:

I love L.A.!!!

Treehouses!!!

Apparently I've been given the job of co-treehouse designer for the guys' treehouse up in Oregon! I've been looking for inspiration & found these:

It begins this Summer!!!!

Good Dharma!!!

I got to spend the Sunday with Jack this weekend since everybody else had business of their own to attend to. Thankfully the rains let up! Jack is a great little guy, but he is not at his best being cooped up all day, so it seemed like the perfect day to go to Griffith Park!

Of course there is so much to do at the park, but we hadn’t done the old standbys of train-->ponies in a while, so we bought our tickets and boarded the Griffith Express – when suddenly who should get in the seats behind us, but Francois Chau! If you’re not a Lost fan, then this probably isn’t too exciting, but if you have been following this outstanding show, which just started its final season, it’s freakin’ Dr. Chang!!!!!!!!!



Of course I told him that I was a fan of the show, and he was really nice! I resisted asking anything about the final season, but we talked about Griffith Park, and we even had a nice Lost moment: the train conductor (who always makes up a destination) announced that we were heading for “Delta”. Mr. Chau asked the question that I was wondering as well; “Where the heck is Delta?”…and the conductor just walked away. So I said that between sitting in front of him and our mysterious destination, it was shaping up as a pretty eerie train ride!

Anyway, it was a nice celebrity sighting, and I love this picture of Jack and him with his super-cute daughter – maybe someday Jack will watch the show and we’ll get a laugh out of this : )

Afterwards we went to the ponies and Jack wanted to go on the big fast ones!! I was a little nervous since I can still remember being pretty scared and uncomfortable when the horses start trotting! But (unlike a lot of the other kids) he looked thrilled when the horses started bouncing along – he told me afterwards that he liked it when they went fast! Jack can be a handful sometimes, but he’s a fun little guy to hang out with : )

Three!!!

Three Rabbits West - for T-Rex (the rabbit).

Nighty night!!!

Birthdays!!!

It’s a funny birthday day – two of my favorite writers have their birthdays today, and they’re soooo different! It’s Ayn Rand’s 105th and James Joyce’s 128th!!!! Since I'm not feeling particularly controversial today I’ll leave Ayn alone, but Joyce deserves a few words.

I think that some writers are macro-writers: those who write a story that sweeps you along, although you might be hard pressed to remember a particular word or sentence. Dickens seems like this to me – he has his sentences ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," etc.) but overall it’s the story that counts.

On the other hand, there are the micro-writers: those who have obviously carefully considered every word and sentence. This category includes nearly all poets, and most bad modern writers. Joyce also falls into this category, but on a scale unsurpassed except by the giants, such as Shakespeare and, of course, Homer, who were his only competition.

Of course, writing like this often takes focus and patience to read, and it goes without saying that Ulysses - which is Joyce’s masterpiece and may be the greatest novel ever written – is incredibly draining. Anyone who says they burned breathlessly through it from cover to cover is either putting you on, or inhabits a mysterious world entirely their own. It is simply not a page turner. But sentence for sentence, James Joyce was probably the best there has been in the last 500 years.

From Ulysses:

“The void awaits surely all of them that weave the wind.”

– My vote for the most beautiful sentence in English.

Also, “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”

– Many other people’s vote.

And

“In motion being each and both carried westward, forward and rereward respectively, by the proper perpetual motion of the earth through everchanging tracks of neverchanging space.”

– If you’ve made it to chapter 17, you know what I mean!!

Plus, of course, the last sentence : )

Finally, from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

– Which is great on the page or from Chris in the Morning:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppShcRlJeZI&feature=related

Happy Birthday guys!!!