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September 27, 2003The Mullet Contest Page!
Thanks to the miracle of internet technology, we're going to decide once and for all whether or not I was sporting a mullet during my senior year of high school.
Below is my senior photograph. I forgot to have it taken until the last possible day, so I didn't have a chance to get a haircut. Was my hair long and in need of a trim that day? Obviously. Was it a mullet? I don't think so. However, many people who have stumbled across this photo (students, mainly, who knew I attended Notre Dame and wanted to dig up embarrassing pictures from my high school days) contend that it is indeed a mullet.
I would argue that a mullet requires the sides and top of the head to be buzzed short, with long hair going down the back. Others have retorted that the hair in the back is what defines the mullet, and the length of the other areas was a non-issue.
Please, examine this photo and make your opinion known via comments and/or karma points. Don't let the empty-looking eye sockets frighten you. The darkness of the scanned image is to blame for that. Positive karma points will be counted as "not mullet," whereas negative karma points will be counted as "yup, that there's a mullet". Comments, hopefully, will speak for themselves as to which side of the mullet issue they represent.
The author of the most convincing comment on the prevailing side will win a huge, dented eight-pound can of sliced jalapenos. I'll put up the photo soon A) to entice you to participate in the contest, and B) to prove that I actually have such a random item.
Voting will end on Halloween. Enter now!
Posted by patrick at 02:21 PM | Comments (13)
September 17, 2003
What you say?
I love this administration. Now that Saddam is out of power and completely irrelevant, Dubya et al are going out of their way to say that there was no evidence linking Saddam to 9/11.
A reported 70% of Americans believe in such a link, and they're knocking it down? That hardly seems fair. Now who are we supposed to blame for 9/11--Osama bin Laden? As if!
If you're sighing, grinding your teeth together, shaking your head, or laughing cynically right now, click here to read an article that quite calmly compares the Bush administration to a troubled teenager. It won't hoist this country any further out of the rabbit hole, but at least it will lower your blood pressure a bit.
Posted by patrick at 04:45 PM | Comments (0)
September 15, 2003
Another opening, another show...
The Redlands Footlighters' "Love, Sex & the IRS" opened last Thursday to a large audience (one which set the tone for the entire weekend, numerically speaking). I'm still trying to scare up the link for the review in the Redlands Daily Facts, but you can peruse the Press-Enterprise's review here.
In other news, fellow cast member Lisa Fite e-mailed me the following a few days ago and told me I had her consent to disseminate it to the masses.
My greatest worry at present is whether or not I have been too zealous with the all too intimidating semi-colon. Semi-colons are the one form of punctuation that I believe would slap writers if they; the semi colon, became animated and could do so. I know what you are thinking.... You probably think that the exclamation point has just as much, if not more motivation to slap writers... I could not disagree more!! You see, exclaimation points can be used willy nilly and no one cares, least of all the exclaimation point!! See right there, I used one and another wanted a piece of the action and piggy backed along. If you let it, an exclaimation point would likely have no problem hanging out all by itself. After all, it will hang on to words as small as NO!!! See, I'm tellin' ya! Damn exhibitionist exclaimation point!
Now a prima donna semi-colon would never allow itself to be used half-assed like the exclaimation point. The semi-colon demands that you first ask; would you like a comma or a period with that? Even if you choose correctly, the semi-colon is not above shameless mocking. You see, the exclaimation point and question mark sit on a period, you can't blame them, they want attention. The comma is just lazy, let's face it. A comma is like someone who wants to raise their hand, but just can't find the strength. But a semi-colon, yes a semi-colon, is the only punctuation mark that makes the period sit on top and makes the comma balance it! This is why commas HATE semi-colons...lazy ass commas! I'm starting to see the semi-colons point here! I say we give the hardest work piece of punctuation a little break here!
Did I mention the fact that Lisa eats too much sugar?
Posted by patrick at 11:59 AM | Comments (1)
September 10, 2003
Governor Jerk strikes again...
Would you be at all shocked to hear that Gray Davis is in diss-his-opponents mode?
No, I didn't think so.
"You shouldn't be governor unless you can pronounce the name of the state," Davis said yesterday, referring to Arnold Schwarzenegger's penchant for calling it "Cal-ee-fornia". This, mind you, from the governor who only last Friday signed a bill allowing illegal aliens the right to receive driver's licenses.
Schwarzenegger's reply: "He doesn't like the way I say the word California because I say Cal-ee-fornia rather than Cal-a-fornia. But there's many other words that he doesn't like. Lost jobs, he doesn't like that word. He doesn't like blackout. He doesn't like energy crisis. And he definitely doesn't like recall."
Y'know, if you can get beyond the fact that "energy crisis" and "lost jobs" are actually two words apiece, it's a pretty decent retort.
Posted by patrick at 01:37 PM | Comments (1)
The Walrus of Love lives on!
From a Yahoo! News article entitled Black Hole Strikes Deepest Musical Note Ever Heard:
"One particularly monstrous black hole has probably been humming B flat for billions of years, but at a pitch no human could hear, let alone sing, astronomers said on Tuesday.
"'The intensity of the sound is comparable to human speech,' said Andrew Fabian of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge. But the pitch of the sound is about 57 octaves below middle C, roughly the middle of a standard piano keyboard.
"This is far, far deeper than humans can hear, the researchers said, and they believe it is the deepest note ever detected in the universe."
Call me crazy, but I think it's Barry White. Think about it. If ancient heroic Greeks could be set in the sky as constellations after their death, why not posthumously install Barry White as an uber-bass black hole? It's the perfect vocation for a soul of his talents and expertise!
[Okay, okay...so I don't really think the black hole is Barry White. There is, if nothing else, that particularly sticky issue of it having existed for billions of years prior to Mr. White's existence. Still, it's apropos that we'd discover this crooning black hole so soon after his death.]
Posted by patrick at 01:25 PM | Comments (0)
September 05, 2003
They really put the "moan" in Ceremonial Bugels...
The following innovation would be funny, if it weren’t so disrespectful and thoughtless.
About 1,800 military funeral-eligible service veterans die each day in the United States. As the relevant article on Yahoo! News relates, “Families of honorably discharged veterans are entitled to a two-person uniformed funeral honor guard, the folding and presentation of the U.S. flag and a rendition of taps [sic].” The trouble is, there are only about 500 military buglers are on active duty on any given day. If one assumes that only half of those eligible opt for the military funeral, it still leaves the bereaved over 600 buglers short.
The solution, as suggested by the folks at S & D Consulting, and as approved by the Pentagon, is the Ceremonial Bugle, a digital recording device that plays “Taps” from its inconspicuous vantage point inside the accompanying bugle’s bell. The Ceremonial Bugle even gives the user a five-second grace period between when they activate it and when the music begins, thus giving them time to raise the false instrument to their lips and perpetrate what is at best a deception, and at worst, a farce. The online instructions don’t say anything about puffing out one’s cheeks to complete the illusion, so I’m assuming it’s at each “musician’s” discretion.
The Ceremonial Bugle is the brainchild of Simon Britton, who emigrated here 13 years ago from—wait for it—Britain. Even more interesting than the name/origin homophone is how he’s referred to his new home as the “Untied States” in his brief biographical sidebar. Whether Freudian slip or simple transposition of keystrokes, it’s damned amusing. He also doesn’t see fit to end all sentences with some form of punctuation or to end all sentences with some form of punctuation spell “recording” with two Rs. Then again, the British are our (ah…two Rs there) lingual forbearers, so I suppose I’ve no right to grouse.
Those of the pro-Ceremonial Bugle camp consider it a much better alternative than the playing of Taps on a boombox. Its introduction will “enhance the dignity of military funeral honors,” according to the Pentagon, which lauds the Ceremonial Bugle’s “performance” as “an exceptionally high-quality rendition of taps [sic] that is virtually indistinguishable from a live bugler.”
Virtually indistinguishable, perhaps, to Helen Keller.
When my dad was buried at Riverside National Cemetery in December of 1992, they cranked out Taps on a boom box. And yes, it was a horribly ghetto moment, shouldering its way through the crowd into a larger, far more horrible moment: “Okay…okay…those are my dad’s ashes in that little box that they’re putting in the ground, and—hey! Canned Taps! Dear God, do I laugh? Do I cry? Thanks for being there for me in my time of need, Sony. Oh, how an MC Hammer B-side would ease Death’s barbed handiwork!”
However, as lame of a gesture as it was to play Taps on a boom box, I would have been nothing short of aghast if the cemetery representative had hoisted the boom box up to his lips and pretended that we’d all fallen into some Kafkaesque world in which any random object was just waiting to unleash its latent buglitude. Hundreds of times a day, some random guy is going to tromp out to a military funeral and fake his way through Taps.
I don’t know whether this is SNAFU or FUBAR, but I’m pretty sure it’s at least one of the two…
The military might well be short of buglers, but one does not need to be an accomplished musician to play Taps. Observe:
As shown above, Taps is all of eight bars long. There are only 24 notes—nine Gs, eight Cs, six Es, and one G sitting atop the staff just to give it some sort of arc—and the second, fifth, and seventh measures are use an identical dotted half/dotted quarter/eighth rhythm.
When I was in fifth grade, I took clarinet lessons for a month or two. My interest waned, and I stopped, but before I did, I had taught myself how to play "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" and "When the Saints Go Marching In". One can, after all, only honk out the prescribed “Hot Cross Buns” so many times before looking for jazzier alternatives.
But I digress. “Hot Cross Buns,” which was too simple to hold the attention of this fifth-grade musical newbie, repeats three different notes. Taps only repeats four. I don’t have “Hot Cross Buns” in front of me, but I’d assume by virtue of the notes that it’s five measures long. Taps is only three measures longer than that.
The military has hundreds of thousands of men and women at its disposal. If it can order them to die during post-invasion nation-building, I’m sure it has the authority to order some of them to learn Taps.
No, I take that back. They all need to learn Taps. That’s the new military standard, when I’m in charge: If you can’t play Taps, you don’t get a gun. Or you do get a gun, but it’s fitted with a Ceremonial Bullet—a tiny digital recording device that fits inside the muzzle of a gun and plays “an exceptionally high-quality rendition” of gunfire.
[Note to S & D Consulting: A) I’m joking, unless the Pentagon wants to use it—in which case, B) I thought of it first.]
In the midst of my indignation, I almost forgot to mention the financial angle. Each Ceremonial Bugle runs $525. That’s right. The military will be paying over half a grand a pop for these musical one-trick ponies. The website does assert that the Ceremonial Bugles are real bugles, and can be played as such when the insert is removed. However, they don’t give any of the sorts of specifics (or even generalities) that I would expect a musician to want to know about an instrument before forking out $525. Considering that they’re not meant to be played, I don’t hold out any high hopes regarding the Ceremonial Bugle’s workmanship. On eBay right now, the most expensive bugle—intended for actual musical use, one presumes—was going for $300, and the prices plummet from there. You do the math.
Of course, it would be petty of me to bash the Ceremonial Bugle if I didn’t offer a better solution to the legitimate bugler shortage. Military funeral bugler Jari Villanueva (no known relation to my girlfriend, but from whom I appropriated the Taps sheet music above) suggests the following on his website:
“If you are interested providing the service of sounding Taps at a funeral, there are several ways you can get involved. One is an organization called Bugles Across America. Headquartered in Chicago and founded by Marine veteran Tom Day, this group is trying to provide a much needed service to deceased veterans by creating a network of buglers.
”You may also alert your local VFW and American Legion Posts and local funeral homes that you are willing to perform at funerals, or contact your state National Guard office and find out if they have a need for civilian contract buglers for ceremonies. Many buglers and professional trumpeters are willing to sound Taps and can be hired to do this duty.”
Remember, kids: Just say no to fake foreign funerary flugelhorns!
Posted by patrick at 06:34 AM | Comments (1)
September 02, 2003
Give the gift of theater, dammit!
I've moved in, but the settling in is taking its sweet time. I don't yet have my couch (the acquisition of which depends entirely upon the kindness and schedule of my friend Kristen), which I think will lock my living room/dining room area into some degree of finality by virtue of its size and presence. Of course, said presence requires it to be...well...present.
Along a similar vein, the unpacking of boxes has been abandoned for hanging up posters and buying frames for pictures and old book pages that I'd always wanted to display, but for which I'd never had enough room.
No, I don't pretend to understand my priorities, either.
The real purpose of this particular journal entry is to spread the word about The Company Rep's upcoming production of "The Fantasticks". My friend Jon Bastian is a member of the company, not to mention their webmaster.
The show opens Thursday, September 11th and runs through Sunday, October 19th. Tickets are $20 to $25, but there are discounts available for groups, seniors, and students.
In addition to talking up the show, I wanted to let my visitors know about The Company Rep's Angel Subscribers Program. The idea here is that, for as little as $60, you can have tickets for The Company Rep's four-show season donated to a student or senior organization of your choice (or theirs, if you're not picky). Thus, somebody who couldn't otherwise afford it has the chance to go to the theater.
I can't recommend this program enough, folks. I'm horribly biased, of course, but I think that theater can be an acutely moving experience. I forced my senior English students to go and watch a play or musical during the third quarter of my course, and the results were really gratifying. I wanted them to review whatever show they saw on a variety of criteria, applying some of the themes and ideas we'd been discussing in class. For quite a few of them, it was the first time they'd gone to see any sort of live theater, and many of the newbies enjoyed it a lot more than they'd expected. Nobody leapt through the door, fell to their knees and threw up jazz hands the next day, but I'd at least had a hand in enlarging their world a tiny bit. My girlfriend had a similar experience when she was teaching fourth grade and took a few of her students to see a local production of "West Side Story" as a reward for a class project well done. These were kids from families for whom getting by was enough of a struggle, never mind having the time, money or energy to enrich their children with theater.
Anyhow, I'm off my soapbox now. If you can support the Angel Subscribers Program, please do so. I don't yet know if the next two years will grant me the financial latitude to donate to causes like this, but I figured I could at least talk it up for free. I'd invite other po' folks and student-types to do the same.
Posted by patrick at 01:33 AM | Comments (4)