January 19, 2006
last gulps of free time
It’s a quiet night at home, the last non-schoolnight weeknight for quite some time, as classes kick into gear Monday. As if to make up for lost time over break, I’m in mental cramming mode, trying to squeeze in all the little bits of everyday life that are sure to pass me by once the grind starts again. Here’s a selection of what tonight found me doing…
- starting (and rather enjoying) William Gaddis’ A Frolic of His Own (586 pages)
- wondering why water makes that sound when it boils
- letting the American Journal of Public Health fire me up about how to characterize the Third Revolution in Health
- discovering that the award-winning, Best of Baltimore computer repair shop, The Little Shop Of Hardware, is not a block from our house
- finding out why the branches of snowflakes are symmmetrical (or are they?) (here for the original query, here for my resource)
- finishing a server changeover for the 6thandcollege.com website. Gallery 2 is pretty sweet so far.
- practicing some basic scales and chords on our new guitar (and trying in vain to learn, or even just play once, some tricky dan bern tabs)
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June 13, 2005
The Singing Life
The father of a close friend was featured on NPR this morning (listen to the 8 minute clip here) to promote his book about birdsong, The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birds. It was an interesting piece to hear, complete with a plug for my favored mode of transportation (“there is no better way to hear birdsong than by bicycle”—he’s biked across the country with his microphone over his handlebars) and a more philosophical riff about birdsong “dialects” and how they are similar to human dialects. He interviews drawling birdwatchers in Kentucky and Colorado and compares the differences in their voices to the regional differences in particular birds’ songs. There’s also some commentary from these country lifers whom the author meets along his way about how birdsong is one of those reasons that they live in the country. It makes me feel a little like the city pigeon, cooing artlessly and digitally about the reasons I move from one city to another.
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March 20, 2005
BP
Last week I biked over to the local batting cage to take some BP for the first time in nine years. After half an hour of swinging a wooden bat at the pock-marked plastic yellow balls thrown at me by a pitching machine (that used to be Mo Vaughn’s, I’m told by the owner), my hands were in tatters. Do blisters really build character? If not, then at least the evidence of hard work was enough to get me on a legit hardball team this spring. Cheapest seat for good ball in town isn’t at Fenway, folks.
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