GEVALT!
As reported on the BBC News Web site, the winning word at this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee was “knaidel.” Apparently, English is no longer sufficient to sort out the quality spellers. The...
View ArticlePutting “Gun Guys” in Perspective
One of the books that David Cole reviews in his article, “Facing the Real Gun Problem,” in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books is Gun Guys: A Road Trip by Dan Baum. The portion of his...
View Article“Official” Confirmation That Burma has Rejoined the “Global Community”
This morning BBC News reported that Coca-Cola has opening a bottling plant in Burma. This marks their return after a 60-year absence. There are now only two countries whose citizens cannot consume a...
View ArticleWasting Time in Old Age
In this increasingly digital age my wife and I share a physical library of books that many would find intimidating. It is the sort of collection that prompts a first-time visitor to ask the inevitable...
View ArticleDoes Combining Two Flawed Technologies Make for a Better One?
Regular readers know that I am no great fan of Safari. I once would have said that it was the weakest link in the chain of Apple software, but the emergence of the Lion operating system put an end to...
View ArticleRevisiting Old Friends
The second volume in the Mercury Living Presence: The Collector’s Edition just came out at the beginning of this week. When I saw the announcement of the first volume, I decided to give it a pass as a...
View ArticleHollywood And the Future of Work
Mick LaSalle makes some important observations about The Internship. He seems to be one of the few critics to have approach the film as something other than a self-serving advertisement for Google. I...
View ArticleLiving in BART Oblivion
According to a story by Thomas Peele and Daniel J. Willis that appeared on MercuryNews.com, former BART General Manager, Dorothy Dugger, managed to arrange an ongoing payout of her severance deal that...
View ArticlePolling Privacy And Security
Let’s begin with the hard data that Lance Whitney presented in his Security & Privacy article for CNET News this morning: Among 1,005 Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center and The...
View ArticleWith Power Comes Divorce?
BBC News has just released the Breaking Story that Rupert Murdoch has filed for divorce from his wife Wendi Deng. While I am not one to embrace Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity, it was less than a...
View ArticleSoftware Undevelopment
The transition to the new att.net Mail (which is apparently “powered by Yahoo!) did not go smoothly. There are an inordinate number of electronic mail messages saying the same things, which is that it...
View ArticleOn Being More Aware of Defects
When I used Yahoo! Mail through the Web, I was not always aware of when it was “suffering,” whether going through a minor hiccup or just plain crashing. The only thing I came to realize was that, when...
View ArticlePotential Victims of Deficit Hawks
This morning BBC News ran a story based on an independent study by Transportation for America. The bottom line is at over 66,000 of our bridges are “structurally deficient.” This comes to around one...
View ArticleRunning Afoul of a Failure to Understand Governance
The other day one of my skims of RSS headlines turned up the question of whether or not the Internet needs a “bill of rights.” At the time I decided that I had too many other things on my plate to open...
View ArticlePractical Music Therapy
The parade of really dismal news reports (both national and international) has been so incessant recently that I am beginning to feel trampled by what Barbara Tuchman called “the march of folly.”...
View ArticleJamming with La Monte Young
La Monte Young seemed to hold to the precept that the best way for a composer to get recognized was through provocation. In his early days the Fluxus movement provided him with abundant opportunities...
View ArticleVladimir Putin Ventures Into Robert Heinlein Territory
The Magazine Monitor section on the BBC News Web site seems to have taken great delight in yesterday’s colloquial remark by Vladimir Putin: It’s like shearing a piglet – too much squealing, too little...
View Article‘Great’ Composers
Back in my undergraduate days, one of my fellow students declared that, in the history of music, there were only three great composers: Johann Sebastian Bach, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Leroy...
View ArticleHegel’s Philosophical View of History And Edward Snowden
Following the adventures of Edward Snowden (apparently secure in the limbo of the transit lounge of Moscow Airport as I write this), my own thoughts turn to The Philosophy of History by Georg Wilhelm...
View ArticleRemembering the Concert Band
If the second volume of the Mercury Living Presence: The Collector’s Edition reminded me of that MIT student who numbered Leroy Anderson among the great composers, I have to say that there is a...
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