I got up this morning wanting to do some relaxed reading. Yesterday morning I sat down to read, but decided first to look up the address of the person who was hosting our AGO program subcommittee meeting, Judy Koeman. As I did so, I saw that I had received a phone message from Mom’s nursing home earlier in the morning. Then the games began. As I mentioned yesterday, everything turned out okay. I didn’t get over to see Mom yesterday afternoon due to a pretty hectic schedule. At any rate, I certain didn’t get too much reading time in even though I took along stuff to read to the Emergency Room. Mom was out pretty quickly.

I have been finding some pretty interesting citations in the footnotes of an article I am reading (“Medieval Byzantine Chant and the sound of orthodoxy” by Alexander Lingas) and started poking around to find out if I could get a gander at some of the sources. He briefly cites the discussion about the “ontology of music and its implications for musical historiography.”

This is academic gobbledy gook for something that really interests me, namely what are we doing we do music, whether it’s in the confines of the sterile academia or on the street or anywhere in between? Unsurprisingly there have been minds working on this idea. I am trying to get access without purchasing stuff until I know it’s worth the bucks.

So much for my early morning quiet reading and relaxing. But it was what I wanted to do. I noticed that two of the books I am looking for are sitting on the shelves of Hope College’s new music library. I have inadvertently interlibrary loaned books from Hope to Herrick (our local library). This seems like a waste of time and money for services I value. So I think I’ll take this opportunity to visit the college music library. I haven’t been over since they moved the library from the music building to the main library and hired a new music librarian. It’s kind of weird that I haven’t darkened the door yet, but I think it reflects the vast resources available to me via the Interwebs. I look forward to stopping and checking these books possibly today. For the record they are:

Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance by Richard Taruskin (Oxford U Press, 1995)

Music and the Historical Imagination by Leo Treitler (Harvard U Press, 1989)

I interlibrary loaned The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works by Lydia Goehr (Clarendon Press, 1992)

This books are dated but they are all published after my last year of Grad school (1987). I generally date scholarship that interests me in two ways: is it after my grad work? and/or is it published in the last five to ten years. This often means it will have some fresh info in it for me.

Well, Eileen just left for work. But before she, she and I put the box springs and mattress on the bed frame I sat up yesterday in the bedroom on our main floor.

One more step preparing for Thanksgiving done!

1. Doris Lessing, Author Who Swept Aside Convention, Is Dead at 94 – NYTimes.com

The death of an author I have read and will read more by. Speaking of the the danger of compartmentalizing one’s thinking, Lessing made the following comment quoted in the obit.

“any kind of single-mindedness, narrowness, obsession, was bound to lead to mental disorder, if not madness.”

A good description of remaining in a fragment echo chamber of awareness that so many people appear to be in.

2. The Banality of Robbing the Jews – NYTimes.com

So not just art was stolen, but personal effects. This is a horrible story told in this article of hatred and eradication of people. It is a warning to all humans. We are all capable of this kind of inhumanity and must vigilantly guard against it especially in ourselves.

Blogging a bit later in the day today since I had to get my Mom home from the ER this morning. She fell and cut her lip. Apparently that’s all. She was lucky to not have broken anything. Then I had to do a ballet class. After that, Rhonda E. and I drove down to Saugatuck for little AGO program committee meeting. My head is spinning a bit as I’m trying to get oriented after this kind of a morning.

I nailed my tricky little organ prelude yesterday (This means I played it well). It was  “Fantasy on “Mit Freuden zart” (Lord Christ, when first thou cam’st to earth” by Jan Bender, Op 47, no. 5a. Based on the closing hymn, it was a bit like Hugo Distler’s writing (Bender’s teacher’s). The choir sounded pretty good. I am instantly implementing choral techniques described and espoused by Brad Richmond in the workshop he gave our AGO chapter last week. Good stuff!

My brother emailed me this morning saying that he had noticed that he wasn’t getting my Facebook posts. He suggested that maybe I had limited a post’s dissemination and it had stayed default. This is exactly what happened. Sheesh.

1. I Was a Portrait by Francis Bacon – NYTimes.com

Someone who suffers from Bell’s palsey also loves Francis Bacon and sees themselves as a living portrait in his style.

2. The Insanity of Our Food Policy – NYTimes.com

This is a partisan read from the left. I totally agree with it.

“All of this exposes the Republicans’ argument in favor of these food policies — a concern for our future, particularly the impact of the national debt on our children — as a dishonest and deeply cynical pretense.”

3.  Outsider Art – Susan Tomes: Pianist & writer

I continue to enjoy Susan Tomes blog. From this one:

“…pop music has now become The Establishment, with pop artists feted by presidents and prime ministers on both sides of the Atlantic. Classical music, he suggested, has already become almost a kind of ‘Outsider Art’. Paradoxically, this may even give it a new lease of life, because outsider art pursued with skill and dedication often attracts followers. We agreed that it might even be better for classical music to situate itself consciously at the margins rather than struggling to maintain some kind of position at the centre of the music world…”

4. How Liberals and Conservatives See the Pope – NYTimes.com

Hey! Harvey Cox is still alive. And he wrote a letter to the NYT.

5. Disrespect, Race and Obama – NYTimes.com

I liked this sentence from this insightful article: “Racism is a virus that is growing clever at avoiding detection.” Aint that the truth!

Walking to the college this week,I noticed the trim on one of the houses I was passing.

It occurred to me that it might have been hand cut.  We’re a religious community so I thought perhaps the three center cuts were sort of crosses. Whatever kind of cross or object they are, they morph nicely into what looks to me like a leaf on each side. I thought it was cool enough to stop and photograph

Yesterday morning, I met my two local colleagues, Rhonda Edgington and Jane Bosco, at Hope College’s Dimnent Chapel. They had asked me to listen to their piano/organ recital for balance purposes. I admit I was a bit surprised and flattered to be asked. Largely due to my own doing, I live just under the musical radar here in Holland. Occasionally I raise my ancient head and do some music. But most of what I have done locally I have initiated. This has changed since I have returned to church music.

I believe if I have any increasing credibility with the local classical/academic musicians it is because Rhonda has carried me on her coattails back into the discussion. I have gone willingly.

Yesterday, I received an email from Stephen Thomas, an Episcopal musician in Kalamazoo who ran the installation service of our bishop. He was asking colleagues their opinions of the needs of the diocese for musical direction and education. Glory be! This is exactly the kind of work I did years ago in Western Michigan and found so rewarding, not to say formative. I emailed him back. This is pretty unusual stuff for me at this point. When I first came to Holland (1987) I was a Roman Catholic church music bat-out-of-hell (even though not an RC myself). I did have many colleagues and many collegiate discussions. This all dissipated when I withdrew from working at Our Lady of the Lake.

As Eileen pointed out, I was interested in other things. So it was no big deal. I missed the companionship but had no interest in keeping up with the field.

This has changed a bit since working at Grace Episcopal Church.

Yesterday I found myself online trying to figure out the cost of Robert Taft’s new edition of his book Beyond East and West.

This man and this book are very important to what understandings I have about Christian liturgy. The dang book is expensive (60 bucks or so and no ebook apparently available) so I’ll probably do the old interlibrary loan trick.

Rhonda and Jane’s recital is today at 2 PM. I’m going of course. I also emailed some parishioners who might be interested. I think it will be an excellent recital if yesterday is any judge.

After that, Eileen and I worked on clearing the main floor bedroom.

With the help of my Dad’s old hand truck, we moved the remaining files to the porch.

First this one.

Then this one.

Not bad for a couple of old people.

Room empty of files.

We then moved the bed downstairs. This involved taking the box springs out on the roof, tying a cord to gently lower it, and then having the box springs frame give way and dropping it. It seems none the worse for the wear. I was too busy being ridiculous to take pics at this point.

After all this work, I managed to take a fall at work. In the dark, I miscalculated how high I was when I jumped from the choir area to the church floor. Ended up on the floor terrified I had finally harmed myself. But not so. Only I am sore from both moving stuff and falling. Ah old age.

Since I had the book Byzantine Orthdoxies checked out, I thought I would dip into a few other essays besides “Hymns of Hate” (mentioned in yesterday’s blog). I only bring this up because in the first essay I looked at there were two footnotes of a book by a teacher of mine in grad school.

His name is Robert Taft.

He is a well known liturgy dude with an emphasis on research on Greek Orthodox. The essay is  “Medieval Byzantine Chant and the sound of orthodoxy” by Alexander Lingas. He cites Taft’s idea that I remember hearing from his own lips, namely there is a new ecumenism. This new point of view insists we should no longer compare our idealized tradition to others’ realized traditions or vice versa. It’s a helpful notion because it not only slows down bigotry about others, it also helps us see ourselves more clearly when we wrongly idealize other traditions and find our own lacking.

Anyway, Lingas cites this notion twice when talking about how the Greek Orthodox routinely deride western practices such as using instruments in church.

In the next paragraph Lingas cites John Tavener who died this week.

Admittedly he does so with a certain rueful smile in his prose at Tavener’s committing Taft’s error as a convert to Greek Orthodoxy. Tavener “regularly juxtaposes the music of a Western ‘culture in ruins’ with what he perceives, not always with the greatest discernment, to be the ancient repertories of Orthodox chant.”

Not no more he don’t.

On Thursday I listened and watched to ‘I got It from the toilet seat’: Frank Zappa live on German TV 1978.

It runs about an hour. I have a great admiration for Zappa. I didn’t know most of the tunes he did on this tape. The tunes themselves are weird mixtures of Zappa’s adolescent not-so-PC obscene humorous lyrics with music that tends to grab me. Hearing a bunch of tunes that were new to me all at once by a composer whose work I have admired and even sought to emulate occasionally (see “Dead Man’s Pants”… o that’s right you can’t. It’s not recorded and I don’t believe I have put up a score of it. Anyway, Zappa is one conscious influence on it as well as Miles Davis and John Hartford).

The musicians none of whom I recognize are top notch. They cavort their ways with high musical skill and appropriate zaniness.

The music stuck in my head a bit. Especially Zappa’s improvised guitar solos. I always wonder how Zappa’s music could be categorized. He himself exhibits a wide array of influences including Edgar Varèse, doo-wop music, music concrète, all pop and rock styles, ecstatic jazz, Prokofiev, and on and on.

As I improvised Friday in class, my mind wandered over into Zappa territory. Interesting feeling.

1. U.S. Dancer Quits the Bolshoi, Complaining of Bribery – NYTimes.com

Young and talented in Russia.

2. Sudden Shifts on the Health Front – NYTimes.com

Letters to the editor. Some quite good:

“if we want to be a “nation,” a community of people seeking to, in the words of the Constitution, “promote the general welfare,” we have a responsibility for one another.”

A footnote in Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulluch, led me to interlibrary-loan Byzantine Orthodoxies edited by Andrew Louth. MacCulloch had cited an article in it, “Byzantine Hymns of Hate” by Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash). He also suggested that it was a witty treatment of its  subject. This intrigued me enough to see if could I get hold of a copy.

The book in which I found it is a collection of papers given 36th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies at the University of Durham in 2002. The title of this symposium was “Was Byzantium Orthodox?” The collection of papers bears a less confusing title.

The author of the article is indeed witty. He first asks the non-Eastern Orthodox reader to imagine hymns which named off other Christians by name whose beliefs contradicted one’s own. He even writes a stanza.

Let Luther, Calvin, Zwingli too
Be cast out from the Church with shame
With Cranmer and his godless crew,
Who marred Christ’s glorious, holy name.

I wonder what the august rulers of Calvin College (from whom I interlibrary-loaned the book) would think of Archimandrite Ephrem (Lash)’s hymn which he suggests is “to be sung to Talli’s’s Canon.”

There are four feasts in the Byzantine Church year that celebrate Councils of the Church (as the gatherings which hammered out what constituted heresy and orthodoxy at the time are called). This blows me away. We are talking a historical period of 325 to 797 CE. East and West in the Christian church hadn’t split yet so these are events are shared by present day Western Christianity’s history. One of the feasts is  the Feast of the Fathers of the Fourth Council. It commemorate the Council of Chalcedon (451).

Here is a text that is routinely sung on this day:

The fourth Council in Chalcedon overthrew the dread Dioskoros, Eftyches and Severos, finally thrusting outof the Church of Christ the Master their thorny error that confounds the natures of the Savior. Holding to right belief with it, let us then hate them.

It is this last sung prayer that Arichimedes Ephrem (Lash) says “justifies what may appear as the somewhat extravagant title of this paper.”

I am interested in this history of struggle because a lot of it was about images. There were other controversies, but maybe none so far reaching in impact.

You had basically two lines of thought: images were forbidden by the commandment about forbidding making “graven images” or that images specifically icons were holy in and them selves as a conduit between the worshiper and God.

Guess which one won.

Today I believe we are in a similar struggle: image is growing in influence, words have less impact. While I strongly love the idea of image, especially in art and nature, I find myself wondering whether written words will continue to have the impact they have had on my life and thinking after I’m no longer on the scene.

Of course, one could easily over estimate how much impact words have had in the past. Literacy is a relative concept I guess. It might be literacy that interests me whether connected to words or images.

Have been mulling the so called “perils technology” around in my mind. Many older (and some not so older) people feel that the instant tech of the Interweb, cell phones and personal listening devices such as ipods are having primarily a deleterious effect on people who use them and society at large.

They have read their Marshall McCluhan and Neil Postman (both of who are dead and to my way of thinking inadequate to sufficiently help me think about being alive right now). But many of their complaints are mine also.  An example of this shared concern is the insensitivity that is bred into listeners who access music as though it were a commodity. In other words who listen to recordings only and often through ear buds which intensifies the privacy and individualism of the act.

But what is missing from this anxious luddite critique is  an awareness of the basic meanings of music and being human.

Meanings like transcendence, connection to a larger idea of other, and the fact that all humans exist in some sort of community be it physical, spiritual or intellectual or a combination of all three.

The question to ask in this regard is can a whole human actually be alone?

She or he is the context of others (dead and living) even when doing private acts like listening to music, reading poetry or prose, or even cooking a meal.  There is no sane vacuum available when doing the stuff of living a full human existence since no one of us originated our meaningful acts like those mentioned.

Christopher Small is also dead but brilliantly in touch with what it means to musick or make music and helping me think about this stuff. He  writes about the emergence of the genius of African American music (Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African American Music by Christopher Small, 1987).

He has some salient comments in regard to the idea of survival. He is of course talking about surviving slavery and oppression that African Americans have historically experienced.

I don’t mean to trivialize the depths of that origin when I observe that it teaches me something about my own survival and connection to beauty and spirituality.

There is a holistic aspect of the impact of Africa on all our lives as Americans.

The African genius has in the past turned to music for an art of survival as well as celebration. This context exploded in the United States tragically (in slavery and subsequent persistent racism) but also in contributing if not creating the genius of American music, art, poetry and prose.

If you grew up like I did in an environment of church music and popular music, and let’s say, fell in love with both, there is a real sense where music is part of your survival mentally and spiritually, dare I say constitutively.

However faintly and feebly, I do claim my share of the African inheritance in my day to day American life.

It has shaped my thinking and existence through my love of music, poetry and prose that has been created in American from a point of view that is larger than our institutions such as church, university or state. Myu conviction in this regard is probably why I am inexplicable to so many people I meet.

I’ll close today (even though I continue to think about this stuff) with this quote from Small.

“It would seem as if a completely secular existence is not an option when Africa is a cultural inheritance. This shows itself in explicit form in the debt acknowledged by what seems like a majority of present-day black American writers, artists, musicians and thinkers to the church, as a formative influence if not as a present resource; it shows itself also implicitly in the real unity of black American music, which at a deep level is all religious in content if not in form. It is, to put it crudely, a tool for survival; whether we call it ‘sacred’ or ‘secular’ its function is fundamentally the same: to preserve the community and to enable the individual to affirm, to explore and to celebrate his or her place in that community. Between sacred and secular there is in fact not opposition at all.”

I tried to give myself an entire day off yesterday. I shirked my self imposed weekly task of submitting the bulletin information to the church secretary for a week from Sunday. I have done my best to get my church organization to think further ahead in planning worship. When I worked for the Roman Catholics, I urged them to use what protestants call “bulletins” (RCs prefer the more trendy “worship aid.”). They were kind enough to give me money and permission to print up a weekly page for three masses. I worked further ahead than my present gig so that the Friday before a given Sunday, I had a finished copy of the upcoming bulletin for the following Sunday ready to print.

We are almost that far ahead at my Episcopal church now.

But yesterday I put it on the back burner.

Instead I tried to do nothing (this means read and practice I guess). Around 11 I had the notion to move furniture. I have three file cabinets presently in the new room (main floor bedroom off the newly renovated bathroom). I have made another little task for myself to get them out of the room this week. So yesterday I made a start.

This meant first moving my treadmill off the porch to make room for files there as well bring it in to the house for the cold winter months (the porch is unheated).

This I did.

This actually was kind of a pain. The treadmill barely fit through the doors. Then I moved one file to the porch. I removed the two drawers which still had stuff in them to make this a bit easier. Also I had to clear a path in my cluttered living room to do this.

That was enough for one day. I plan to move the other two this week with Eileen’s help. I will empty the drawers in them and we will  balance them on wheels (the handle on the dolly pictured above comes off and forms a little cart). I think the two of us can roll them to the porch and then I can fill them back up with stuff for the winter.

This is what the room looks like now. If you look closely you can see the two lateral files I want to move. The idea is to get this room ready for visitors at Thanksgiving. At this rate,  I might make it.

Since I will no longer need my remote speakers for treadmilling (it is now sitting right  next to the computer speakers which are the best speaker system in the house), I used them to set up the shower and the kitchen for sound. I tested one speaker in each room with the laptop pumping out the sound through the little wireless thingo. Worked great. I am now in pig heaven. I can take a shower and listen to music (which I did twice yesterday). And cook and listen to music. Wow. Very cool.

1. Randi Zuckerberg’s Honest Confusion — Daily Intelligencer

Another review of Mark Z’s  sister’s book.

He is the Facebooger guy who has already been immortalized by what looks like a tedious movie. I have posted a link to another review of this book by Judith Martin (Miss Manners). This review by Kevin Roose is wise in the way it looks at online life (Unlike Randi Z). Roose has insights into the not yet finished settling-in of understanding what we are doing online. He names our ambivalence.

I heard someone talking this week about the perils of our technology. It reminded me of a prof I had in undergrad school who was tyrannical in his insistence that when he played recordings of music no one was to do anything but listen. I think he had it wrong. I obviously shower and cook to music. But I see the perils of tech, but I also see and experience an amazing explosion of access to information (professional research journals, reference tools like the OED, a dizzying array of music available for listening, instant purchase and downloading of ebooks).

I am interested in how we develop etiquette with our evolving tech as well as how it is changing us.

I prefer a clear-eyed insider and user like Roose.

2. Clear-eyed Margaret Atwood | TLS

Speaking of “clear-eyed,” This review of Atwood’s new book makes me want to go back and re-read the first two volumes of her current trilogy. I like that Amanda Wilson (the intelligence behind the blog Dead White Guys) says of her blog that “we’re on Twitter because Margaret Atwood is on Twitter.” This makes me smile.

3. David Hykes – True To The Times (How To Be?) (CD, Album) at Discogs

David Hykes is blowing me away. Professor Brad Richmond introduced me to him in a talk he gave this week on choral conducting. Hykes has taught himself to sing in a quasi-Tibetan way in which he can produce high overtones with his low long sung notes. He then uses this idea in very cool compositions. I totally recommend this guy.

As usual I got quite a bit out of Richmond’s talk. I have been madly checking out other stuff like the Swedish conductor Eric Ericson who died this year, but exerted a powerful influence on choral sound world wide.

Today’s date is one of those little fun ones: 11,12,13…. Heh.

For some reason, I had a spike in visits a week ago Monday. I happen to glance at Google Analytics and was surprised to see 45 visits for Monday, November 4. I admit I was checking because I suspected my readership might be dwindling to zero. Always good to know when I’m posting here every day. If no one read this for a while, I would certainly feel a bit less compelled to write daily even though I do so primarily out of a discipline and a need to write something every day.

For the record, Google Analytics shows the following unique visitors for the last week:

Monday, Nov 4: 45

Tuesday, Nov 5: 23

Wednesday, Nov 6: 26

Thursday, Nov 7: 25

Friday, Nov 8: 30

Saturday, Nov 9: 16

Sunday, Nov 10: 25

Monday, Nov 11: 25

So you can see that 40 is a bit of spike. I cannot think of a reason for this spike. Sometimes I cross post to Facebooger and that can cause a bit of a spike. Or I link in to something which brings visitors.  Last Monday’s blog contained no links. It was just a typical Jupe rant about his hate/love relationship with religion.

I became interested in this after I posted a video of my composition, “Julie’s Waltz.” YouTube also keeps track of hits.  I wondered if anyone had clicked through to the video I posted of my playing it. YouTube reports seven hits on the video as of four days ago. I know that a couple family members subscribe to my YouTube videos. I began to wonder if people were looking at the blog much. Hence  checking Google Analytics.

I made an interesting discovery this morning reading in Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch. He cited Peter Jeffery and said that the origin of the church modes arrived in the West via the  Byzantine empire who got them from the Palestinians.

This organization of modes is basic to all of Western Civ music. I used to get amused at rock and rollers who were so sincere and hard core about their ability to play chords on the guitar.

My reading had taught me that they couldn’t never have played “Louie, Louie” without the literal invention of tonality and harmony which grew out of experimenting with the church modes. From such esoteric endeavors comes “96 Tears” and “Stairway to Heaven” and “Kick out the Jams, Motherfucker.” This makes me smile.

And now it looks like we all got it from the dang Palestinian Christians who sought refuge in the Byzantine Empire after the Muslims had a stronghold in the Middle East (c. the beginning of the 8th century).

Cool. I interlibrary-loaned the festschrift containing Jeffery’s article.

I recently ran across some pretty cool blogs on the Smithsonian website. I’m not sure how often they are updated. But here are the ones I bookmarked and intend to check occasionally.

Food and Think – Smithsonian.com

Past Imperfect – History – Smithsonian.com

 Paleo Future (sort of a steam punk blog gone wild)

Design Decoded Smithsonian.com

Collage of Arts and Sciences Smithsonian.com

Innovations Smithsonian.com

Surprising Science – Smithsonian.com

As I brushed my hair yesterday, I mused as I sometimes do that having the hair style of my youth (long) is like men I saw as a young person who preserved old fashioned hair styles (parting them down the middle).

It’s like I’m stuck in the past with old fashioned notions. I often feel like I am living in the future.

So today is Veteran’s day. Coincidentally yesterday I began reading in Andrew Bacevich’s Breach of Trust; How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country.

It is a history and indictment of changing attitudes toward war and military in the USA.  The prologue is a bitter description of a Red Sox game in Boston on July 4, 2011. It sees the pregame manufactured media event of acknowledging our armed forces with a clear eye to setting the stage for Bacevich’s basic point. He maintains that US citizens want other people to do their fighting for them.

He quotes George W. Bush who said in 2003, “Freedom is worth fighting for, dying for, and standing for….” Bacevich asks “Who fights? Who dies? Who stands?” then answers his own question “The American people have devised (or accepted) a single crisp answer to all three questions: not us.”

I have had life long questions about the ethics of war and military. But I do see that we are in a mess in the USA. For me the military has always been about war and killing. That has to be their job. When loved ones (including my son the Marine) join the  military, I want them not to have to do that job any more than they do. I am relieved when they no longer serve and are no longer  in harm’s way that’s for sure.

I have been asked to play a Veteran’s day service/party at my Mom’s nursing home this afternoon. I think this is the third year in a row I have done so.

1. How I Helped Teachers Cheat – NYTimes.com

This is about how some future teachers cheated in college.

2. Doug Rauch Wants to Sell Outdated Food at Junk-Food Prices – NYTimes.com

Getting practical about outdated food. Is it all really bad?

3. BBC News – How did ancient Greek music sound?

I have always wondered what the music I studied sounded like. There’s a little mp3 of the results of this man’s research and conjectures.

4. Left Behind by Joy Katz

A poet looks at her own grief. Her mother’s death changes her relationship to her poetry. Some amazing observations.

5.  On Reading Proust by Stephen Breyer | The New York Review of Books

As a young man, Justice Breyer read Proust. In French. Twice. I love this comment he makes: “Proust is the Shakespeare of the innner life.” O and this interview originally was conducted in French.

6. HealthSherpa

A web site where you can put in your zip and find out about the Affordable Care Act in your state for most states. Works for Michigan.

I’m feeling a bit more rested. For some reason this past week left me exhausted. I think it was because I chose to do a lot of stuff on Tuesday and never quire recuperated from last Sunday.

So yesterday I dragged myself to the Farmers Market.  It was the last CSA pickup. I have enjoyed receiving a weekly dose of veggies this summer. I think it’s a great idea and we will probably do it again next year if we can afford it.

Stopped by to see my Mom and drop off some stuff she requested (kleenex, combs). Tangled with her dang hearing aid recharger. It won. I was unable to figure out why it doesn’t seem to work. I suspect Mom of putting regular batteries in her hearing aid and then putting them in her charger. She denies this. I put regular batteries in her hearing aids so she at least will have working ones. I will have to figure this out next week when the stupid Miracle Ear shop is open. I  put her charger on the floor behind her dresser so she won’t be tempted to put her hearing aids into it.

Went to church for the usual Saturday prep and daily organ practice. Eileen and I sat with a couple from our church on Friday evening at the library dinner at a local restaurant (Beechwood). It’s always interesting to answer questions and chat with people at my church. I admit to be very lukewarm to the whole church experience lately. It is all seeming a bit Hallmark Cardish to me.

But toujours gai, Archy, toujours gai!

Came home, treadmilled, then I cooked. I made Chicken Cordon Bleu for Eileen (which wasn’t quite done when she got home). Earlier in the day, I had roasted pumpkin seeds (I like them, I don’t think Eileen does). I also boiled up potatoes from the CSA and made Sloppy Joe stuff using Eileen’s Mom’s recipe as a guide.

That’s what Eileen had when she got home from work.

I do enjoy cooking.

1. Bloomberg News Is Said to Curb Articles That Might Anger China – NYTimes.com

Do people even understand why this is bad? A free press is one that doesn’t censor itself.

2.Medium

This is a new blogging platform by Evan Williams, one of Twitter’s co-founders. So far I have mixed feelings about it. It seems to be running some kind of a web page that will not allow me to use my bookmark service. This is enough to discourage me. It asked me to log in with my Twitter account. I began messing with it and then just decided not to. Maybe later.

3. Pan-Fried Risotto Cakes – Recipes – The New York Times

These look good. They use squash.

4. Reporter for Reuters Won’t Receive China Visa – NYTimes.com

See link 1 above. A free press matters.

5. They Loved Your G.P.A. Then They Saw Your Tweets. – NYTimes.com

I put this one up on Facebooger. It interests me because of the impact of the new ways we connect. I have often wondered about my blogging. I once pissed off a reader with  my profane approach to religion. He threatened to tell my priest about my blog in order to shame me. I found that amusing. The interweb is public. Get it? I told my priest and my profanity amused her. I have like six readers tops not counting family. Whippy skippy.

6. Why Do Brits Accept Surveillance? – NYTimes.com

I have wondered about this. I have concluded that Americans (me) are different from Brits. Also from Canadians.

7. The Syllable Everyone Recognizes – NYTimes.co

Funny research. The syllable is “huh.” “Everyone” is everyone on the planet.

8. New Chinese Video Explains Why Americans Shouldn’t Kill All the People in China – The China Chronicle

I find about a Jimmy Kimmel stunt through the China Chronicle. Cool.

Similarly, I learned about some sensational stories via Stories for a Price – On The Media in this weeks On the Media (one of my favorite NPR shows).

9. How 17th Century Fraud Gave Rise To Bright Orange Cheese : The Salt : NPR

My niece, Emily Bastian, drew my attention to this article. Interesting.

I have been thinking about my own musicianship and how disconnected my ideas of music are from most current ideas. The most popular idea seems to be that a musician is someone who makes recordings and plays popular music in hopes of making a living at it.

I figured out in the late 20th century, that I am not a recordist. I did this by purchasing and using a digital recorder which I recently gave to the rock and roll band that lives next door. Also I had help from reading up on it (of course) and befriending a young recordist (Jonathon Fegel) who did have a clue about the art and eventually became pretty accomplished at it.

So it’s not surprising to me that I don’t fit this category.

I’m still very interested in popular music (whatever that is) and try to find music that is new to me to listen to, enjoy and learn from.

I was disturbed lately by the rants of David Byrne and Thom Yorke against Spotify (both of them) and the internet (Yorke).

Both of these men have been involved with (written and performed) music I like.

I have even read in Byrne’s book on music which I found pretty quirky.

But I think they are both way off base with these rants. I was gratified recently to see some refutation of their weird renunciation of the wonderful interweb and Spotify.

I think this is the best one: Google Executive: "You Cannot Devalue Music| Digital Music NewsDigital Music News3

Basically Tim Quirk, the author, says music is priceless (disclaims being a hippie… ahem…. not sure I can pull that off).He comments that “What’s new is that the casual fans no longer have to buy if they don’t want to.”

Quirk provides this helpful graphic.

Quirk is saying that most people will ignore the music you that you might like, but the more you are connected to something the more willing you are to pay for it.

This reminded me of Ethan Zuckerman’s graphic.

In a wonderful critique of the New York Times approach to multiplatform pay scales Zuckerman says that the NYT practically “criminalizes” people who are trying to access news stories they have paid for once in one of the platforms. (quick side note:  I have a history of trying to get New York Times to give me a digital subscription (without subscribing to the paper paper) when everything was still free online. They make me crazy.)

Zuckerman endorses the public radio approach. He quickly says he doesn’t think the NYT needs to adapt the approach completely, just “that they would benefit from thinking about the relationship public radio stations and shows have built with their members.”

Between Zuckerman and Quirk I see a lot of hope about how popular as well as eccentric and even historical musics can be sustained in the new digital online world.

But I still realize that I am myself an eccentric in all of this. I insist that music is something I mostly want to DO (though I do love listening to it of course). And at the same time, Bach is as important to me as Zappa as music that I’m likely to discover and fall in love with that has been made up last week.

This doesn’t exactly seem to fit in with academics (who love Bach), the organ world (with whom I share many tastes but also am very critical of the narrowness of the field), or any other group I can think of.

I do it to myself.

And worse yet, I am happy this way.

This morning I was looking for the famous Hatch Sloppy Joe recipe, so that I could cook up the rest of the ground beef for Eileen to eat sometime.

I searched everywhere. It wasn’t in my file under Sloppy Joe. I began looking through Eileen’s recipe cards which she hoards but rarely uses. I found many recipes including the handwritten above and below.

Eileen confirms this is the handwriting of her mother, Dorothy Hatch. (Here’s a link to the recipe in PDF format)

Eileen and I had lunch with Dorothy yesterday along with her sister Nancy and her cousins, Diane and Janet, and Aunt Mickey.

I did rest yesterday. But I’m still tired today. Must be old age. I don’t have much time to blog this morning having laid in bed later than usual. A full day ahead. 8:30 class. Lunch with Eileen and several other Hatch ladies in Muskegon. Then a library dinner this evening. Whew.

I’m convinced that many people seek out news and information online (also radio and tv) that reinforces their point of view rather than challenging and informing them beyond it. It’s an easy danger to fall into. Just yesterday a colleague of mine (Hi Ronda) said that it was easy to look at one composition by a composer (a living one she meant I think) and miss other stuff that might be better.

I consciously try to work away from this tendency. Probably unsuccessfully but at least I make an attempt.

Yesterday I found this web site: EastSouthWestNorth Blog

It was mentioned by Ethan Zuckerman in his book Rewire which I am reading. It is an English language China focused blog and compiler of links. This morning I checked it and found this link:

I haven’t had a day off for several days and this morning I am feeling it. It’s a beautiful bright fall day in Western Michigan. I have been trying to convince myself that I am indeed getting some time off for the next three days. It is true. I’m just having difficulty relaxing into it.

On Monday, I was playing Pointe class.

We were doing an unstructured stretch time for the dancers. The instructor will sometimes walk them through stretches. Sometimes the instructors just tells them to take some time and stretch. If the instructor asks me, I then play. The music is not only mood music for the moment. I provide regular phrases which allows alert dancers to time their stretches evenly.

As I played Monday, the instructor, Julie Powell, began dancing and smiling at me. After a while, she indicated I should stop and told us she had an idea. For the next class project, we should all collaborate on a little piece together. I would make up the music. The dancers with the instructor’s help would make  up the moves.

She asked me if I was game. I was.

The dancers sat in a circle and brainstormed what the dance should be like.

The instructor asked each student to come up with at least one word to describe the kind of dance they would envision.

I wrote them down.

First they decided this would not be a “character piece,” rather a “mood piece.” We had just spent a lot of time with a “character piece” called Esmeralda which involved tambourines and a famous piece of ballet music (of which I had never head, but found online).

So instead of dancing like a character in a ballet story, the dance would be mood bsed.

Here are the words the dancers came up with.

Elegance

Romance

Calm

Happy romance

Promiscuous

Waltzy

Flirty

Sassy

I thought this was fun. A tall order, really.

So yesterday I was madly trying to pull together my compositional thoughts I had been having.

I came with a piece finishing just before class yesterday.

I just took an hour or so and made a video and uploaded it so you could hear it if you want.

I put a lot on my to do list yesterday even though Tuesdays are days I usually try to rest. Consequently this morning I am facing a day of tasks and am pretty exhausted at the outset.

Eileen and I went and voted in the morning.

I haven’t heard the returns yet, but I’m pessimistic that my guy won. Republicans have a stranglehold on local politics. I believe a lot of this is voter turn out. People who might not vote for the local Republicans tend to not vote at all.

I was amused to see one of the pollster people was reading a Bill O’Reilley book about Lincoln.

This must be how this works. Allowing pundits and others to shape your thinking instead of reaching past them to better sources of information.

But maybe that’s too big a conclusion to jump to just because some poor schmuck was reading a book by O’Reilley.

I had two main things to get done yesterday. One, I wanted to pick Christmas anthems. Two, I had to get my Mom to a doctor appointment. I asked Eileen to take care of the second one after she had volunteered to help. She was taking a day off work so that worked out pretty good.

As is sometimes my wont I filled up the rest of the day with lots of little tasks.

One of which was carving up my other dollar pumpkin.

Also while Eileen was taking Mom to the doctor, I did other Mom things. I went to the bank and arranged to transfer money from her IRA account to her checking account. This is very cumbersome with her bank. Can’t be done online. Every time I do this I end up with a new person helping me. I can tell they are doing this kind of transaction for the first time. They have verify my Power of Attorney of which I have given them at least two copies. They end up making calls because they don’t understand their own filing system at their little branch.

I also did the book thing for Mom. I keep her supplied with Christian romances from the library to read. This involves comparing a list I keep of all the ones I have given her in the past to avoid duplication.

I did get anthems chosen but it took much longer than I had anticipated.

By the end of the day I was almost as tired as I am right now.

It’s cold and rainy. A walk in the rain to my first class should wake me up.

I quit reading Orson Scott Card years back. Most of this was I was tired of his characters and stories. It hasn’t helped me that he has emerged as a sort of Mormon spokesman for the GOP views on homosexuality and other stupid stuff.

I did enjoy reading a lot of the Ender series.

But watching trailers of the new movie based on the first book, I felt like something was weird about it.

I suspected they had messed with the plot. But after Eileen and I saw it last night, I felt differently. I recognized the plot by the time we got to the end of the movie. I had only remembered climatic ideas, not the way Card got there.

It wasn’t until I read a review this morning, that I realized that they had changed the character of Ender.

I think that Simon Abrams is on to something when he comments that they have softened Ender and made his character a bit incoherent. Like any stupid movie nowadays, characters are more about people you see in commercials than people you see in your real life. This softening is almost imperceptible to this old guy because it’s so prevalent in our consumer images. The incoherence stems from Ender’s supposed isolation and brutal nature being constantly contradicted by how quickly he forms bonds with other kids and how he dithers over cosmic decisions to save the world (this last observation is my own).

So they haven’t got Ender quite right. I wondered at the ending. The character seemed to be more like the character I remember from the books as he speeds into the sunset (okay the universe) for obvious future adventures in sequels.

I probably shouldn’t indulge in too much movie reviewing since I find most new movies insipid, boring and silly.

Like TV.

1. Which professions have the most psychopaths? – The Week

Dumb. But I clicked on the link and read the dang thing.

2. How to make roasted pumpkin seeds – in easy illustrated steps

Planning to do this. I have rinsed and dried the seeds from one pumpkin. I have another waiting for me to get to it. Then I will do them all at once. Wondering about those four tablespoons of butter in each recipe. Wonder if olive oil would be too weird?

3.Randi Zuckerberg’s ‘Dot Complicated’ and ‘Dot.’ – NYTimes.com

Miss Manners reviews a book. I do admire this woman and her ideas.

4. China Aims to Fully Mute Dalai Lama – NYTimes.com

China persists in repression and lies.

5.GOP Governors Reject Obamacare’s Medicaid Expansion, Millions To Stay Uninsure

How is it conservative to starve the poor and blame them? The calvinistic notion of the good get rich because they deserve it (God gives it to the good) is inverted in the Reaganistic notion that the poor are poor because THEY deserve it. Sick shit.

6. CNBC’s Santelli Rants About Housing Bailout – ABC News

Very early weird tea part rant. Hate lives in our public rhetoric. Shameful.

7. The real story of the shutdown: 50 years of GOP race-baiting – Salon.com

A parsing of the racism on the right. Haters goaded on by people who know better and don’t necessarily share the hate but seek to benefit from it.

8. Understanding Society: Why a war on poor people?

“If you are poor in a market system, this ideology implies you’ve done something wrong; you aren’t productive; you don’t deserve a better quality of life. You are probably a drug addict, a welfare queen, a slacker. (Remember “slackers” from the 2012 Presidential campaign?)”

9.A War on the Poor – NYTimes.com

Krugman’s article is the source for several of the other links I have read and posted.

10. Bob Greene, Jazz Pianist, Dies at 91 – NYTimes.com

Greene makes a coherent argument for the replication of jazz styles of an earlier era (specifically Jelly Roll Morton, a composer I revere).

“If it was once done so perfectly, why do it again?” Mr. Greene once asked aloud, voicing perhaps the most obvious question about his devotion to Jelly Roll Morton. “I can only say: Because there’s beauty there, there’s excitement, there’s love. If that can be transmitted to a live audience, some of the aroma of the original happens again.”

Eileen’s home safe and sound. She was pretty tired after her whirlwind trip to California. Fortunately, she was wise enough to take today and tomorrow off work.

I find myself musing about religion a lot these days.

I have long since reconciled myself to my religious upbringing and the fact that my livelihood (church musician) is embedded  in religion.

Nevertheless I am a critic.

Yesterday as I did my work, I found myself pretty disconnected from what was happening.

It’s like something gives way in me and I can no longer buy the communal vision I find myself working in. For years this was this case when I worked for the Roman Catholics.

It was clear to me that there was much about that denomination that I could never espouse: closed communion, antiabortion, antiwomen, antigay, and probably most important of all the weird notion that their faith was the only true religion.

I am amused that despite my own misgivings, I find myself drawn into thinking about and reading about Christianity.

I have been slugging away at Charles Taylor’s The Secular Age. He and other thinkers wonder how Western Civilization went from an overwhelmingly Christian society to one that is decidedly pluralistic.

Reading him and Diarmaid MacCulloch (Christianity: the first three thousand years) makes the notion that there is one true Christian faith pretty hilarious to me.

But more than the Christian thing, I am also confronted daily with people who seem to be living in a different world from me. By that I mean, they seem to gloss over or not know about stuff that is important to me.

Some of this seems to be an orientation to a Christianity that is largely built around the notions of comfort and even compassion. There seems to be almost no challenge in their religion. This lends itself easily to the religion of consumerism which is endemic in the USA and beyond.

And its not only  religion. I find a weird naivete in people I quite like and admire. I fear that this gentle lack of awareness can easily slip into insidiousness, so that what starts out as a sort of willful focus on surface issues ends up omitting truths and even contributing to the very kinds of injustice they (the naive) strongly oppose.

In terms of  Christianity, I continue to remember the line from a hymn: “The peace of God, it is no peace,. but strife closed in the sod,. Yet let us pray for but one thing –. the marvelous peace of God.”

I realize that part of my personality is that I am always involved in struggling with something. And this is probably a case of my own personal blindness, but I keep asking (of politics, of religion) where is the strife? the struggle that is not the silly partisan stuff that colors our daily lives, but the struggle that comes from attempting clarity and continue to seek to learn about and get a handle on what is true?

Heavy stuff for a monday blog I guess.

This morning I was reading in Arthur Kirsch’s edition of Auden’s poem, The Sea and the Mirror.

Kirsch points out that “Shakespeare may well have been thinking of the liturgy of All Souls’ Day when he wrote The Tempest, and the play is in significant respects a meditation on death, which may be one reason why so many modern critics have found it essentially different from Shakespeare’s other last plays and more perturbing, and why Auden, writing in a time of war, with its ‘unmentionable odour of death,’ should have found it so apposite.”

“Apposite” as in “apt” that is.

So All Souls in my reading and All Saints at church this morning. I like it when these serendipitous connections occur in my life.

I have also been rereading The Tempest in order to understand Auden’s poem in which he imagines  a series of monologues of all the characters immediately after the play.

This morning I smiled as I read the words of Prospero (the deposed Duke of Milan and a magician of sorts). “My library was dukedom enough.” He is saying how he turned from the affairs of the state to the “liberal arts,” these being his “study” and preference.

I feel that way often. That my library of words and sounds is certainly dukedom or even kingdom enough for me.

Yesterday, my friend Rhonda was kind enough to invite me over to have a meal with her and her family.

I got a little carried away with cooking for the meal.

I started out by peeling, bubing and boiling one of two pie pumpkins that have been sitting on my table. I purchased them with the idea I would make jack-o-lanterns out of them. I didn’t get to it. This is the first year in a long time I didn’t make jack-o-lanterns for Halloween. No harm done. We’ll just eat them.

I purreed the results and made a pumpkin pie out of some of it.

I used the rest to improvise a pumpkin soup which I thought was quite good.

In addition, I made “Yellow Indian Woman Bean Dip” using a recipe provided by the woman who sold me the dried beans that came from her farm.

I had stopped at her stand at the Farmers Market to see if she had any dried garbanzo beans since I seem to be currently addicted to hummus and have resolved to quit buying commercial hummus and make my own.

She said Yellow Indian Woman Beans were much better. I thought I would make up her recipe and if I didn’t like it add stuff like tahini and make it more hummus like. It tasted pretty good and so I took along for the meal. This is what’s left.

Unfortunately, I dropped the pie while loading the car. It smeared on the pie holder but didn’t spill.

But it tasted pretty good and Rhonda and Mark were good-natured enough to try some.

I also separated and dried the seeds for roasting.

I have one pumpkin left.

I paid a dollar each for these guys. What a bargain.

I’ve been goofing off this morning trying to use this time to rest and read. Now I need to get moving, get over to the Farmers Market and pick up our CSA package.

This morning I am going to limit myself to links since I have been omitting them recently.

1.G.O.P. Filibuster of 2 Obama Picks Sets Up Fight – NYTimes.com

Politics as usual. GOP shoots down appointments. Democrats test the water with reasonable candidates. First time a sitting member of the House has been denied a confirmation since the Civil War. Progress.

2. In Alabama Race, a Test of Business Efforts to Derail Tea Party – NYTimes.com

This article also mentions a Michigan race: Ellis and Amash. Both Republicans. One coming from the Chamber of Commerce, one from the Tea Party. Will be interesting to see what happens. In Western Michigan the Republican usually wins so the only way to influence a race is in the primary. I have voted in Republican primaries. But those days are over. I can barely vote Democrat. Republicans seem incoherent to me. Even more than Democrats.

3.Jonathan Rauch Reminds Us That Truth Can Only Be Achieved Through Free Expression – Forbes

Relativism as the kiss of death when applied to ideas.

4. Barneys accused teen of using fake debit card for $349 belt because he’s a ‘young black American male’: lawsuit – NY Daily News

Young man falsely accused returns belt and swears never to shop there again.

5. Homecoming at Howard – NYTimes.com

Moving father/son story.

6. The Iraqi Prime Minister’s Plea to Americans – NYTimes.com

Wow. I’m always interested when the actors in international affairs put their ideas in writing. Always good to factor in large amounts of bullshit. But still.

7.As It Denounces U.S. Spying, Europe Delays Privacy Protection at Home – NYTimes.com

This story about NSA basically spying on everyone confuses me. Surely this is common knowledge among educated people.

8.Rash of Lazy, Sensational Reporting is Freaking People Out About Obamacare | News & Notes, What Matters Today | BillMoyers.com

PolitiFact | David Axelrod says ‘vast majority’ of Americans will keep their health insurance

It seems that once again the fourth estate  has totally failed the public by not bringing this contradiction to light, say three years ago when the law passed. Even now it’s hard to get a straight answer.

Mr. President, I like my health insurance. I’d like to keep it. Can you please help me out? | The Health Care Blog

This guy was on the News Hour (the TV news show I can watch the longest before giving up). His claims are obviously couched in propaganda language. He neglects to tell us WHY he lost his health “Gold Standard” health insurance. On  TV he cited statistics about people losing their insurance despite its quality. I haven’t found any accurate reporting on that. Only that insurance companies are dropping people because they do not want to provide the full coverage that is now required under the law or the timing is bad (grandfathering in coverage doesn’t work if one has recently switched coverage).

Finished reading Peter Berger’s A Rumor of Angels yesterday. It’s kind a wandering commentary of his take on being Christian.

Began reading Arthur Kirsch’s annotated version of Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror. Auden’s poem is a lengthy poem that uses the characters from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The poem takes place immediately after the end of the play. It is useful to read a commentary on works like this, since I miss so many of the references and implications.

I found a copy of the Oxford Anthology of English Poetry in a thrift shop yesterday. The photo above is my actual copy since I didn’t like any of the pictures of it I could conjure up with Google Image search (which is how I usually find my images).  I read the introduction last night, sipping a martini and listening for trick or treaters. I’m tempted to simply read it straight through the way I have been reading poetry in the last few years  (choosing a poet’s work and reading it from cover to cover).

I also found a copy of Gustave Reese’s classic Music in the Renaissance. Both were ninety cents each at Community Action House’s Thrift shop on River Avenue. It was my first visit there. I also found a little arithmetic book for Eileen.

I picked up some books at the library recently to look over.

One was a huge tome of graphically treated classics. The Graphic Canon Volume Three covers 20th century writers like Kafka and Frank L. Baum. Each artist was asked to treat a work in the way choose.

I flipped through the book, looking at some stories, reading others.

I ran across The Cartoon Introduction to Statistics by Klein and Dabney on the new shelf at the library. I end up thinking a lot about statistics. I do have a working knowledge the of the subject probably gleaned from another cartoon treatment I own.

But I thought I would refresh my thinking with a more current treatment.

I dug up Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers which Ethan Zuckerman footnotes. It was sitting on the shelves at the library. I read in it enough to think about putting it on my list to read right after I finish Zuckerman’s Rewire.

I have a class in an hour. Time to stop.

I’m sitting around in my robe exhausted this morning and getting to blogging late. Eileen gets on a plane this afternoon to fly away to California. I wish I was going with her. But I didn’t want to miss a weekend at work. Stupid me. I’ll drive her to the airport.

Sometime today I’m figuring my Mom will need a ride home from the hospital. The nurses assured me the hospital could work with my schedule to arrange the time. I will go over this morning and say hi to Mom and find out if any decision has been made for her release.

This morning I continued reading Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection. 

The lack of connected footnotes drives me to check stuff out on the web. In order to flip back and forth between where I’m at in the text and the footnotes I have disciplined myself to do no other highlighting or put notes in the ebook. The reason for this is that they quickly mount up and the Kindle interface insists that I page from the beginning of notes each time I access it. If that doesn’t make sense, just know that it’s I needlessly cumbersome.

It occurs to me that ebooks are not designed by people who love to read. Or at least people like me. I miss knowing conceptually where I’m at in the book especially. I usually read footnotes. But I find that since I read at an enlarged font setting the Kindle reader sometimes has difficulty returning me to where I’m at in the book from a footnote.

But I do like the convenience of the ereader. I love being able to discover a book I’m interested in and within minutes have it on my ereader. Also the compactness of carrying around a library is invaluable to me.

Anyway in Rewire I discovered that the author, Ethan Zuckermann, is involved with the organization Global Voices (“The world is talking. Are you listening?”). I think a lot about how to connect to the world and get as much perspective on stuff as I can stand. I think this is one benefit from living in a small town where my paths do not often cross with people interested in the stuff I am interested in.

I recognized Global Voices because I follow them on Facebooger (link to their page). “Emerging citizen media” as they call it there interests me a lot. Despite the sound of American minds snapping shut, I am encouraged that journalism and information is thriving. One does have to seek it out.

Zuckermann points out that it was an aha moment for him and Global Voices when they realized that they not only had the task of bring global stories into the limelight of world wide availability, they also had to create demand. Ultimately it becomes a question of visibility and attracting attention to interesting stories.

Here are the last two on their Facebook stream:

AND

I’ve rigged the images above so that if you click on them you should go to the story if it happens to interest you.

As I say once or twice a day (usually under my breath), I love the Interwebs.