Ah, English.

Pastime is spelled "pastime", but dumbbell is spelled "dumbbell". Go figure.

Notes on Notes, volume 2.

Occasionally I try to get a handle on the entropy of my life. This mostly involves moving masses of paper from desktops to boxes/recycling. (Recently I became the owner of a filing cabinet, which will be the future prison for many currently floating items in my room.) Many of the papers are scraps on which I have scribbled random notes for later use. Often I will go through these notes and have no idea to what they refer. This also happens in my digital life (as documented in a blog post from last year, "Spring Cleaning"). However, I do know the meaning of the following computer note, unearthed a few minutes ago:

empty picture frames (a dozen or so), and four full ones on the mantle
out-of-tune piano
gold and silver chess set
game room

gopher shooting

It refers to a woman I met once in Montana while on tour with The Scott Fisher Band. This young woman was recently divorced from a venture capitalist, one of whose investments was in a fledgling startup called "Google"; consequently she, though barely thirty and unemployed, was wealthy beyond yours or my dreams. One evening she decided to head into town from her vacation home and catch some live music, proceeding to ensnare the lead singer and bring the entire band back with her that night. We appreciated her largesse, had a right fun time in the game room and the private movie theatre, and each slept in his own private bedroom that night. The next afternoon we were treated to jetskiing and other water sports at her other lakeside residence. I enjoyed myself as much as the next fellow (the jetskiing was especially thrilling), but boy was part of me sickened by the display. (The "gopher shooting" refers to a favorite childhood pastime of hers, described in gruesome detail.)

"Oh gosh!" you say, "How noble you are to denounce a rich, vapid woman!" Thank you, I say, but this post isn't really about that. I just got sidetracked. No, this post, as evidenced by the title, is about notes. As I implied earlier, my computer desktop gets as cluttered as my actual desktop. I do my best to stay organized by placing things in appropriately titled folders, e.g. "pictures" or "pics" or "recent pictures". But eventually there are too many categories, and my desktop overfloweth. When this happens, I have no recourse but to toss everything in a folder called "old desktop" and start anew. I'm sure you are all familiar with this sad story.

I have resolved to do one mega-cleaning/organizing. One part of that will be finding all the folders of pictures (there are 33 of them, according to a quick computer search) and combining them, deleting doubles, and organizing the remaining mass in an intelligent way. Yet as I comb through "desktop", "old desktop", "old desktop #2", and "desktop" (there are three of them, in fact), I find myself reminiscing and hesitating to destroy even the old organizational systems that contain my nostalgia. I have such an attachment to things from my past, and notes about those things, and folders that contained those notes. When I come across them, I get a brief flash of memory, a wistful or rueful smile, and they're soon forgotten again. What is the point?

* I am often convinced that one of the greater tragedies of my life was the accidental and permanent deletion of all of my emails pre-2005. What were they but** documents of my past?

** "But"?!

Notes on Notes.

Oh I've neglected you, blog and readers, and I apologize for that. But I shan't waste our time moaning about my hectic schedule, but rather will return to you as if I had never left.

Back in May, my housemate Will and I twice performed a very cool piece of music - "Piano Phase", by Steve Reich. "Piano Phase" is a landmark of minimalist music (composed in 1967), involving one piano part phasing against another, an effect Reich adapted from his experiments with phasing tape loops.

Well, you might as well just listen to the explanation we gave the first night we performed it. This recording is 21 minutes long in all, including the 1m30s of introduction. It was quite the thrill to perform, and quite the test of concentration. (Below is my transcription of the piece, which I did mainly to get around paying $15 for it online. Follow along, if you like – you can click on the scores to see larger versions.)

download (option-click for Mac users, right-click and save for PC users)

Recorded on May 1st, 2009, at The Little Church, in Portland, OR.

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My kind of humor.

My wife! My Family!

(via Tofutti Break)

Scraps.

It's time for another episode of "Things I jotted down and lost on my desktop". This time desktop means computer desktop. In a text file that's been sitting open on my computer for months, these words appear:

Canadian bowling
death midwife
albino body parts racket

dreams:
death threats - stolen computer - karoake threat - detective

I happen to remember typing this, actually, and I can tell you that the first three lines are real things that I had recently read about. When did real life become more interesting than my dreams?

Sound on fire!

Mythbusters is an awesome television show. For all the scripted spontaneity and hackneyed editing, the two hosts Adam and Jamie are at their cores wonderfully curious and delighted by the natural world. Here's a clip from online (that didn't make it to air) that I just found today. It introduced me to a Ruben's Tube, which is a super cool visual representation of a sound wave, using FIRE!! I hope you get a kick out of this:

A tourniquet.

I've listened to this about five times in a row now, and while it hasn't made me feel any better, I sure don't feel any worse.

"Sweet and Lovely", performed by George Shearing


Bless you, iTunes, for finding me the right song to brood to.

This is insanely awesome.

(via http://cuteoverload.com/2009/06/05/look-up-in-the-sky/)

Quiet genius.

I have the HUGEST crush on the girl in this video.