November 15, 2022

During an electrolysis appointment yesterday afternoon, I was chatting with the gal I was seeing about relationships -- mostly hers, since I had very little to say about the last decade or so. One thing she talked about was an engagement she broke off a couple of years back. I asked her about her ex, and among other things she mentioned that he was an accountant. She then told me that something I said to her while they were still together contributed in a small way to the break up: "It's hard to imagine you with an accountant," or something like that. I laughed, and sheepishly confessed that my attitude towards accountants derived primarily from Monty Python.

November 14, 2022

Two contrasting programs this weekend: Mozart's Marriage of Figaro Friday night at the Benedum, and Tchaikovsky's Pathétique symphony at Heinz Hall yesterday afternoon. I'd seen Figaro before, and will see it again if the opportunity presents itself, cuz LOLing multiple times at an opera is pretty bloody rare. I'd never heard the Tchaikovsky symphony; and while I'm normally not a yuge fan of big gushy Romanticism, I found this work really moving, perhaps because it was impossible not to hear it in the context of the composer's looming death. The passage from the melancholy of the first movement to the the levity of the second, the jubilation of the third, and the bleakness of the fourth, with the dying pulse of the double basses at the very end, suggested a dying man raising himself for one last celebration, then succumbing in the end. Just wow. (NB: The first of the two pix is actually from Figaro. It's dark because I thought to take it just as the lights were dimming at the end of the intermission. Whoops.)

 

 

 

November 12, 2022

In the one course I taught at the College of New Jersey (TCNJ), "Africa and the West," I took advantage of a terrific exhibit the college's library was curating that semester on critical cartography to schedule a class visit and have my students do an assignment on maps. (I've forgotten the details of the assignment, but I'm sure it was bloody brilliant.) The contrast between the two maps below is a great example of why thinking critically about cartography is important: they present the same information, but the way each does so skews our interpretation of that information. The first map suggests that the country is overwhelmingly Republican with little oases of Dems. But since people, not land, vote, the second map is a more accurate representation of the national electorate. The first map does, however, underscore why Republicans have structural advantages in the U.S. Senate (since they are the majority party in many low-population states).

 

 

 

November 10, 2022

So listening to old recordings of the British actor David McCallum reading three stories by H.P. Lovecraft during my recent drives to and from Maine c/w a bad joke I made in a chat a short while ago using the Greek alphabet may or may not have led me to the following insight: the name of Lovecraft's vaguely octopoid god Cthulhu likely has its root in the Greek word "chthonic," which means basically of or relating to the underworld. I'm guessing Lovecraft kept the first part of the word as much for its gaggy sound as for the allusion, and added the two subsequent syllables to suggest gobs of phlegm. Et voilà!