YouTube At Two Inches

I am now in Victoria, BC attending a conference this week on open source GIS. Pica has this amazing gizmo that is perfect for such trips. This is a Nokia N800 internet tablet. It’s a little bigger than a file card and does wireless: web browsing, email, and anything else you might want to do on the net. I’m blogging this lying on my back.in bed, holding it in my left hand. And I can catch up on movie trailers too:nothing like watching tte one for “Sleuth” on a two-inch wide window!

Musicological Podcasts Await

For some reason I was thinking about Beethoven’s ‘Waldstein’ piano sonata today (Opus 53 in C major), all of which led me to discover that the pianist Andras Schiff in the course of performing the complete Beethoven piano sonata cycle in London last year also gave a series of accompanying lectures. Podcasts of the eight-part lecture series are available from the Guardian Unlimited music site.

Dersu Uzala

I don’t know how I’ve managed to get to be the age I am without ever having seen this film, but we saw it tonight. Numenius found it at the public library.

I’m speechless, pretty much. (And chilled to the bone, but that’s what a windswept tundra will do to a girl.) Images — the tiger, the river, the ice — will stay with me for days.

It seems like Kurosawa’s homage to Eisenstein…

Messiah With B Mesons

We went on a day trip to Stanford today — we were invited down by our friends Ian and Katrin to hear her sing with the Stanford Symphonic Chorus in their holiday concert. They performed Dvorak’s Mass in D major followed by excerpts from Handel’s Messiah. The concert was in Stanford’s Memorial Church, an impressive venue right at the heart of campus. Afternoon choral performances are great concerts to go to, and we had a lot of fun at this one.

Beforehand, we met an old friend of mine who is working on his doctorate in experimental particle physics and is now doing his research at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. His graduate program is actually at the University of Wisconsin, but the experiment he’s working on is one of these massive high-energy physics collaborations that involves some 80 different academic institutions.

Fragments of Dreams

This evening I walked out the levee, taking my Sony 7600G radio to do a bit of AM band DX fishing, eventually tuning some station at 750 kHz broadcasting sports talk from the Sports Byline network. (They started out with an interview with Larry Dirker, who was talking a bit about the great hitters Rod Carew and Tony Gwynn. The radio station turned out to be in Price, Utah.) Along the way, I heard some musical fragment which put to mind a different musical fragment, kind of melancholic, that I knew was from some movie, but couldn’t place it. It’s always annoying when that happens.

Happily, a few minutes later, I figured it out. It was from Field of Dreams.

New Independent Film Venue to Open in Davis

The Varsity Theatre, an Art Deco building that has seen a good few years of mediocre community musicals, is getting a makeover and will re-open on Thursday (they were still laying carpet yesterday when I walked past, so they’re cutting it fine…). A project of two Davis enthusiasts, one of whom owns Mishka’s Cafe just up the street, the theatre will now offer independent films for Davisites who have otherwise had to go to Sacramento for the pleasure.

The opening film—sold out already for the first night—is Thank You For Smoking. I’m eager to see it based on the rave writeup of the titles on Typographica by Stephen Coles.

Not For Guys

My mother arrived at lunchtime today. We went to the local Nepalese restaurant for a very good thanksgiving lunch and then dropped Numenius back at home before returning to see Pride and Prejudice.

There were three men in the audience, one of whom walked out.

Singing For The Brain

Therapists have been finding that group singing sessions can unlock communication blocks in individuals with dementias such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Feline Drinking Songs

This sounds intriguing—a CD of Irish Drinking Songs for Cat Lovers. It just came out and is available now through CD Baby.

Be Obscure Clearly

Those who are fans of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style will be pleased to learn that this classic work has been turned into an operatic song cycle. It received its first performance last month in the reading room of the New York Public Library, the accompaniment performed by the Omit Needless Words Orchestra.