hypocrisy

It's definitely gratifying for Saddam to have been executed by his own country in a place where he ordered many ruthless executions, but I'm still against the death penalty and I am still sad that my country is so hypocritical as to depose Saddam in the name of justice and then give him the same fate that he gave his enemies.

so what?

John keeps inviting me to join new online things, but my reaction isn't much more than to set up a skeleton profile and then ask, "So what?" I must be an old fogie for sure.

speed

My parents' desktop was insanely slow when I returned home, so I've spent inordinate amounts of time fixing it. I've also gone on a cleaning rampage, dumping out old publications that no longer enchant my inner child, donating books and clothes, and picking clothes to attempt to sell on the Haight with the hope that they'll pity a woman on crutches. And yes, as of right now I finally have this computer going at a normal speed.

I miss my days of stargazing (not that we can see anything from downtown Rochester). There are all sorts of things going on in the sky, history being made that only a few people witness... including "the kind of event that turns young children into Carl Sagans," according to one TV guy. Perhaps if Adrien were here...

I finally get my hands on Charles Burney's journal, "An Eighteenth-Century Musical Tour in Central Europe and the Netherlands," and what should the heading for the first section be about, but "Burney's poor opinion of French music confirmed." He has lots to say about carillons, including the competition between "a remarkable violinist and an equally remarkable carillonneur." I can't wait to find out who drowned out the other.

Another quote: "...and for the serpent, it is not only overblown, and detesably out of tune, but exactly resembling in tone, that of a great hungry, or rather angry, Essex calf." More gems to come in the journal of Tiffany's reading of Burney's journals.

Geckos are superheroes! Soon our cars will be able to scale walls too. I can't wait to hang from the ceilings of belfries.

And Bobby was ahead of his time.

Can one but snicker at the fact that a well-known historical organ resides in Uithuizen, the Netherlands (i.e. Outhouses)?

There is an interesting photography display concerning American outhouses in the Center at High Falls. Most of the doors are labeled with a crescent moon.

artastic ii

Mark had a brilliant reply to the article about art business today I blogged about as artastic.

I think Bourdieu would say, “My name is Bourdieu, and I think the increasing pandering of the art world to the international capitalist class both devalues what art is and clearly represents the need for sociology to function as a martial art to cut through the bulls-t of cultural capital accumulation.”

break the rain

It rained all day, and then suddenly the sun came out and threw golden light on brick façades, and I pulled on my shoes and hurried to the Little Bakery. I ended up stopping along the way into the sketchy corner store to discover it sold all sorts of interesting middle eastern foodstuffs and a few indian spices. Still no produce; can produce really be so unprofitable in downtown Rochester? I bought a Portuguese loaf at the bakery for the first time. The cheerful lady whose name I really need to find out greeted me and told me she was taking the next day off. As I was leaving, she gave me a cookie. It was still sunny, I came in and ate a delicious sweet slice of bread, the only fresh thing I have left, looked out the window, and discovered that it was so overcast it seemed almost as if night had fallen, or at least that nothing had ever happened. So I wrote this as evidence that it did.