Web Log Archives, November 27th through December 10th, 2005

 

Saturday, December 10th, 2005

"I went home and I showed my wife and I said, 'Look, Jesus gave us a $25,000 ticket!"

Friday, December 9th, 2005

Ordinarily, when I read something that I find to be educational or amusing, I select a quotation within it and post a link to it. But this morning, my genius son sent me an article from today's Wall Street Journal that, in this festive time of year, should be required reading for all. And, besides, the WSJ has become a pay-to-read online source. Here we go: 

 

Please, No More Presents
by Daniel Akst


Christmas shopping, like waiting in line at the motor vehicles office,
is surely one of civilization's most widely shared discontents -- and
very possibly among its most enduring.

No less than Harriet Beecher Stowe began a short story in 1850 with a
woman who has just a fortnight for Christmas shopping and finds it
"impossible to decide what presents to get for people that have more
than they know what to do with now," for the simple reason that
"everybody has got everything that can be thought of."

Inevitably, some things were thought of, but apparently that only made
matters worse, because in 1894, the New York Tribune complained that
the "modern expansion of the custom of giving Christmas presents has
done more than anything else to rob Christmas of its traditional
joyousness. . . ."

Christmas joy was presumably still in short supply in 1921 when
Margaret Perry felt compelled to write in the Atlantic: "Christmas has
been even more thoroughly commercialized and desecrated [than Easter],
the better to fill moneybags that are already bursting open."

But if the process of gift-giving is familiarly fraught, hardly anyone
talks about the complex -- and, until now, silent -- agonies of being
on the receiving end, which in my view are incomparably worse. It's
time to come out with it; the biblical injunction about the
superiority of giving over receiving contains more truth than anyone
so far has been willing to admit.

Why do I so dislike getting gifts? It's not just discovering the
inadequacy of my inner Stanislavski when the time comes to open the
box, although my inability to muster just the right expression of
wonder and delight immediately poses a similar thespian challenge to
the observant giver (who must now pretend not to be disappointed by my
disappointment).

No, the real problem is that presents, no matter how thoughtful or
well intended, are inherently burdensome. I can't shake the sense that
they come tightly wrapped in a foil of guilt, with ribbons of
obligation, imposing more discomfort and inconvenience than delight on
both sides of the transaction. It was to spare myself as much as my
friends that I talked my then-fiancée into putting "no gifts" right on
our wedding invitations (we already had two of everything by then
anyway).

Besides, what is a good present for a middle-aged, middle-class
dullard like me? Books are a claim on my scarce reading time, clothing
an imposition on my taste. The truth is that nobody is as good as me
at getting me what I want, and I don't want much. Oh, it would be
grand to possess the New York Yankees or the talent of Tolstoy, but
I'm old enough to know that such gifts aren't likely to turn up under
the tree some snowy Christmas morning.

The challenge of receiving any gift is only amplified by the
foreknowledge that it's coming, which means endless searching for what
to give in return. Unexpected gifts are still worse, since they offer
no opportunity for reciprocation -- or, more appropriately,
retaliation.

Let's face it, gift-giving has its dark side. Anthropologists, who
have written a lot about gifting, have observed that in parts of India
certain unreciprocated gifts are thought to transfer misfortune and
sin from the giver to the recipient. Even in this country it's
impossible to look at the vast gift-giving economy and not sense
something ulterior.

Givers, after all, can be as emotionally extortionate as receivers.
The sociologist Theodore Caplow, putting it more politely, has
suggested that "ritualized gift-giving in this society, as in others,
is a way of reinforcing relationships that are highly valued but
insecure." This will not come as news to my wife, a dentist who is
showered with gift baskets annually by various well-remunerated
specialists seeking to curry favor (and cultivate referrals).

The great wrong turn, it seems to me, occurred early in the 19th
century, thanks to the convergence of industrialization, mass media
and retail marketing. Until then, Christmas presents flowed largely in
one direction: toward those who were dependent. There were the
servants and children at first, and of course women, but soon enough
everyone was brought under the umbrella.

The jammed parking lots at your local mall will make Christmas
shopping look like a big gain for the economy, but most gift-giving
probably involves some economic loss. If you buy me a $100 necktie,
for instance, but I wouldn't have given more than $20 for it, that's
$80 down the drain -- unless of course your pleasure at choosing and
giving it, or the obligation you thereby impose, are worth that much.
Perhaps sensing the large deadweight losses involved in most gifts, my
eight-year-old twins have already said that they prefer to receive
money.

The growing popularity of gift cards (less useful than money but
somehow more thoughtful) is another reflection of the heavy losses
associated with gift-giving and receiving. Americans are expected to
spend $18.48 billion on gift cards this holiday season, up 6.6% over
2004, according to the National Retail Federation, whose polling finds
that more than two-thirds of consumers plan to purchase one. For all
their problems, gift cards at least let recipients pick something they
value.

Of course, if the recipient really likes you, what he'll pick is a
shared experience. In a 2003 paper titled "To Do or to Have? That Is
the Question," psychologists Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich
conclude from surveys that "experiential purchases make people
happier." The more affluent you are, the more pronounced is the
preference.

We're not rich, but in our family these are easily the most enduring
gifts, and the good news is that they come all year. Last September,
for instance, with no holidays in sight, I took my sons to their first
game at Yankee Stadium. Their first glimpse of that venerable green
field was eye-popping, and once the game began every inning was
rapture.

We sat in $5 seats up above left field and ate meaty tacos from a
friendly Mexican joint in the South Bronx, which fed all of us
magnificently for less than 20 bucks. Jorge Posada hit two home runs,
but Baltimore almost came back, keeping everyone on edge until the
end. Even when Tom Gordon nailed down the Yanks' nerve-wracking
victory at last, and the game was over, my boys were reluctant to
leave.

The great thing, of course, is that they'll never have to, because
that night was a present we'll always have. Better yet, they believed
me, on the way home, when I told them that Father's Day had been
abolished.
---
Mr. Akst is a writer in Tivoli, N.Y.

Thursday, December 8th, 2005  Happy Birthday, Carol!

Today is the Catholic Feast of the Immaculate Conception.

"I am not going to let oppressive, totalitarian, anti-Christian forces in this country diminish and denigrate the holiday and the celebration. There is no reason on this earth that all of us can not celebrate a public holiday devoted to generosity, peace, and love together...anyone who tries to stop us from doing it is gonna face me." Merry Christmas from  Bill O'Reilly

Wednesday, December 7th, 2005 Sixty-Fourth anniversary of a Day That Lives "In Infamy"

OK! That does it! I ain't votin' fer Hilary Clinton even if she winds up running against Pat Robertson! She can kiss my skinny white ass! Disgusting! Of all the pressing issues bearing down on our society, tell me who has the leisure to give a rat's rear end about flag burning? Geez!

Quick, clumsy mix of what I was working on last night. I'll do a new mix of it sometime after I wake up.

Tuesday, December 6th, 2005   Happy Birthday Charlie! Happy Birthday, Chucky!

For more than a year, I have been (with varying degrees of intensity) learning to run Pro Tools. But last night there occurred a 'watershed event'.
I (finally---hey! I'm slow! Do ya mind!?!)) learned to configure a virtual synthesizer (as a so-called 'plug-in') within the program! Some Swedish geniuses at a site called "Propellerhead" have developed a software product which they call 'Reason'. To me, it is a staggering achievement but then, if you live in Sweden (where, today, in a heat wave, there'll be a high of 38 and a low of 33 with showers or snow flurries), I suppose you get to spend lots of time indoors! These guys have effectively replaced rooms-full of racks of expensive recording hardware (compressors, reverb units, limiters, filters and, yes, synthesizers) with software! They've even had some fun with their creations, offering a feature whereby the user can view a graphic (specific to his current configuration and (almost) looking like a photograph) of all that replaced hardware...front and back, including all cables and routing. This shows the user precisely what the software has replaced and is emulating! In the 'old days' (not all that many years ago), the use of any ancillary recording hardware required the use of a 'patch bay' to organize the comings-and-goings of myriad cables connecting the components. This invariably became a maintenance issue as in, if there's a 'buzz' (or static) somewhere in the lines or if something simply doesn't work, the recording engineer must take his mind off the music project to walk around or crawl under and behind his racks of equipment to look for the malfunctioning unit(s) and/or broken or misrouted cable(s). Most people have only so much patience for tasks such as these. 

With this new understanding (although I am now only inside the kindergarten door), my life will not be the same. My first use has been to add some (conservative by synthesizer standards, but beautiful) strings to an ongoing project (which, for now, I will neither reference nor post).

"Renaming fighters in Iraq has become a veritable hobby for Don. He's been re-branding the Iraqi fighters since the day we arrived there. Before the war...started he didn't even have a term for them because, he assured us, there would be no opposition to a U.S. attack on their country. But after Saddam was gone and U.S. troops started dying, Don told the same TV cameras to pay them no attention because, he said then, they were just a handful of "Dead-Enders" (D.E.'s)." 

Monday, December 5th, 2005

Today, I propose a moratorium on the use of the word 'disingenuous',
for it has long lost its gloss as the antonym for 'ingenuous',
which derives from 'ingénue'.
These days I usually read and hear 'disingenuous' used in place of a less pretentious and more emotive word: 'shitty'. 

And speaking of shitty: "We see you slithering out of the can of worms you've opened, Ms. Morgan – and we're ready. We need to consider the opening salvo received and be prepared to jump right up in [your] overly made-up face."

Sunday, December 4th, 2005

"Ah, distinctly I remember. It was in the bleak December."

Saturday, December 3rd, 2005

The Mission of “The World” (Joseph Pulitzer's) newspaper: “An institution which should always fight for progress and reform; never tolerate injustice or corruption; always fight demagogues of all parties; never belong to any party; always oppose privileged classes and public plunder; never lack sympathy with the poor; always remain devoted to the public welfare; never be satisfied with merely printing the news; always be drastically independent; never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”
From Pulitzer's retirement speech, April 10, 1907

Friday, December 2nd, 2005

"For...launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C. sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached..."
Martin Van Creveld, Professor of Military History at Hebrew University



Thursday, December 1st, 2005

The incipient invidious insipidous insouciance of December does not fail to augment my gloom. To wit, but only e.g., does anyone need to hear "Frosty, The Snowman" or "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" while pushing a creaky shopping cart...in a world bereft of pity? But hark ye! Courtesy of KB, we have, here below, a Victorian classic to buoy the soul of Everyman: [note: this reads, in places, like a rhyming exercise. I especially like "warm blood mixing...eyeballs fixing".]

All Things will Die

All Things will Die
Clearly the blue river chimes in its flowing
Under my eye;
Warmly and broadly the south winds are blowing
Over the sky.
One after another the white clouds are fleeting;
Every heart this May morning in joyance is beating
Full merrily;
Yet all things must die.
The stream will cease to flow;
The wind will cease to blow;
The clouds will cease to fleet;
The heart will cease to beat;
For all things must die.
All things must die.
Spring will come never more.
O, vanity!
Death waits at the door.
See! our friends are all forsaking
The wine and the merrymaking.
We are call’d–we must go.
Laid low, very low,
In the dark we must lie.
The merry glees are still;
The voice of the bird
Shall no more be heard,
Nor the wind on the hill.
O, misery!
Hark! death is calling
While I speak to ye,
The jaw is falling,
The red cheek paling,
The strong limbs failing;
Ice with the warm blood mixing;
The eyeballs fixing.
Nine times goes the passing bell:
Ye merry souls, farewell.
The old earth
Had a birth,
As all men know,
Long ago.
And the old earth must die.
So let the warm winds range,
And the blue wave beat the shore;
For even and morn
Ye will never see
Thro’ eternity.
All things were born.
Ye will come never more,
For all things must die.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

 

Wednesday, November 30th, 2005

So imagine that you settle on a way to sing a song and you keep trying to record it that same way on one track after another. You'll expect that, as you do more and more tracks, each successive track will be less distinguishable from the track that was recorded before it. For example, if you record eight tracks, you'll expect that the eighth and the seventh tracks will be more nearly identical to each other than the second track is to the first. No?

As part of the TMC, I've rented one Gigabyte of online storage space (for only $10 per year!). It's ideal for sharing works in progress and for making sub mixes available for other musicians to overdub. A typical MP3 is only about four Megabytes in size, whereas the corresponding file in *.wav format is likely to be larger than 25 Megabytes. A 'whole' Pro Tools session consisting of, say, twelve tracks, might be on the order of half a Gigabyte.

I DO recommend that you read today's column by Norman Solomon, entitled "Colin Powell: Still Craven After All These Years".

Tuesday, November 29th, 2005

"When we must change our mind about someone, we charge the inconvenience he causes us heavily to his account."  Fred

Monday, November 28th, 2005

This just in from the Ya Can't Be Too Careful Department: "A...girl...died after kissing her boyfriend."

"...there are theories that his everyday diction charms the below-average mind, hence insuring him Republican votes."  
"Poverty is a draft...the U.S. would be out of Iraq already -- or might never have gone in -- if children of the middle and privileged classes were forced to serve." 
Charles Rangel
I must be more out-of-it than I knew. While "Cyber Monday" is a newly-minted linguistic nickel, people write and talk about "Black Friday" (to mean the first shopping day after Thanksgiving) as if everyone is supposed to know what that is. When I hear "Black Friday", I think: October 29th, 1929...or was that a Tuesday?

Sunday, November 27th, 2005

Potato peels are still the No. 1 drain stopper, plumbers say.

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