Well I have actually had two days off in the last few days, so that’s good. Still tired enough for some vacation time, but shouldn’t really complain.
Today I have a rehearsal with a wedding soloist and then Phantom of the Opera auditions from 3 – 5:30, break, 6 – 8:30. Same audition schedule for tomorrow.
I bought my first Kindle book to put on my new netbook. This entailed installing “Kindle for PC” software. Cory Doctorow recommended the new novel “Sensation” by Nick Mamatas on Boing Boing recently. The description of a young married woman in Brooklyn being invaded and taken over by mutant wasps sounded pretty interesting to me so I checked out the first chapter. Was intrigued enough to purchase and start reading last night.
I also tangled with the New York Times Reader (also a PC app). I had troubles with this on my old netbook. When I emailed the help people, they suggested I uninstall and re-install. Never got around to that, but thought it might be a good idea to have it working so that I can read the New York Times on my netbook even if I can’t get access to a wifi connection.
It wouldn’t let me log-on. Dang. Double checked the user and password. Then I finally noticed the error message. Something about “check the time and date on your computer.” I did that and discovered that my netbook thought it was tomorrow. Corrected this and it worked. Sheesh.
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O’Bama and Netanyahoo’s Duelling Speeches : The New Yorker
I agree with Hendrick Hertzberg’s take on Netanyahoo as acting like a Fox commentator when he ignored the total content of Obama’s 1967 border comment.
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Technology Provides an Alternative to Love. – NYTimes.com
Jonathan Franzen has some interesting critiques of Facebook and other tech forms of love.
Example:
“There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.”
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The Weak Foundations of Arab Democracy – NYTimes.com
Some interesting historical perspective from Timur Kuran.
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Passive in the Senate – NYTimes.com
Yes. Yes. This editorial takes theDemocratic Senate to task for its lack of courage and reactive governing.
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‘Run,’ a Verb for Our Frantic Times – NYTimes.com
I put this one up on Facebook. I do love words.
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Amazing footage of a very brave teacher.
Linked from Global Voices Online web site which provides this description:
“The video recorded by the teacher on a cellphone shows a classroom full of very young children lying on the floor. The teacher is heard gently asking her students to keep their heads on the floor while shots are heard in the background. She reassures the children that everything is ok, and that they’ll be safe in the classroom, reminding them to keep their heads down. To distract them, she starts singing with them. She selects the Raindrop Song from the Barney show: in Spanish, it wonders about what would happen if raindrops were made out of chocolate and how you’d open the mouth wide to catch them all. By getting the children to sing the song she managed not only to keep them calm but also to have them stay with their heads on the floor, as she prompted them to turn over and look up to the sky with their mouths opened wide.”