Sherlock Holmes

When I was a child, I got The Complete Sherlock Holmes Treasury as a Christmas present (probably from Aunt Judy). Of course I read it right away—what nine-year-old can resist Sherlock Holmes?—and would re-read it every two or three years as I forgot how the cases ended (though I could never forget “The Red-Headed League”).

I have this book on hold, which has prompted me to dig that old treasury out of a box in the closet so that I can re-read “The Hound of the Baskervilles” before the hold gets filled. However, “The Hound of the Baskervilles” is the very last story in the book, so, clearly, it is my duty—and nothing less!—to read all of the stories which precede it. And to do such reading on a cold and snowy weekend next to a fire…O, the sacrifices I make to duty!

Sherlock Holmes would be proud. (And he would probably also get as much of a laugh as I did from this album.)

The Barber of Seville

My knowledge of classical music is slight, but I will still venture the opinion that whatever you would call the effect Rossini creates at the end of the overture of The Barber of Seville, no one could surpass his version of that effect. It is at the same time both worthy of awe and a musical dead-end.

Comcast >>> AT&T

Having given one side, I’ll now give the other.

Comcast has made a strong effort to fix the connectivity problems we have been having, and we are hoping at this point that they have been resolved. We also signed up for cable television service again, which I dropped a year ago (immediately after the Ohio State – Michigan game). I am very happy that Comcast has finally added the Big Ten Network to its channel lineup.

As for AT&T…still fine overall, but when I wanted to call a friend in Greece a few weeks ago, I just went ahead and called, figuring it wouldn’t cost that much. I just got the bill: $2.30 per minute. How in the world does long-distance to a European Union country in 2008 cost $2.30 per minute?

Commitments

I’ve come to think of commitments as the structure of life.

Make the right commitments, and I have a platform to stand on.

Make the wrong commitments, and I have a prison to live in.

Upgrades

During the four weeks that I was just away from this blog, wordpress.com updated the editing interface. I like every change they made, especially the one that makes categories easier to select while writing a post.

Also, I upgraded my iPhone 3G system software to version 2.2, which, as advertised, has stabilized the Safari web browser so that it does not crash daily.

Ray Taliaferro

When I was in junior high school in the early ’80s, I had terrible insomnia. I used to lay awake at night and listen to the Giants game on KNBR, then listen to the Giants post-game show and the news. If I was still awake (it would be midnight by this point), I would turn the dial to KGO and listen to Ray Taliaferro until I finally dozed off.

I grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb of San Francisco and considered myself to be a Reagan Republican, but I loved to listen to a guy from the City who eloquently and forcefully disagreed with what I had been brought up to believe. He didn’t change my mind, but he helped me understand what other people were thinking and what other ways there were to look at the world.

Taliaferro used to say that the KGO signal reached well into Oregon, Washington, and Nevada, and he would sometimes get calls from small towns hundreds of miles away. I wonder now how many other people in little towns across the West would lay awake at night, in those days before the Internet, listening to Ray Taliaferro spin their mental kaleidoscopes.

All this comes to mind because I have been getting over a cold, which has made it hard to get to sleep at night; so I’ve moved my transistor radio next to my bed and listened to KBOO as I laid awake sniffling. Two nights ago, it was the poetry of Richard Brautigan. Last night, it was reggae Christmas carols. If I can’t sleep tonight, it will be punk music, selected by the awesome Erin Yanke. I love KBOO.

Shazam!

An iPhone ad touts an app called “Shazam” that allows the iPhone to identify a song that is playing loud enough for the iPhone to detect.

Does it work?

Yes it does, and I now have a copy of “Silly Boy” by The Blue Van.

How libraries reinvented knowledge

Ian F. McNeely and Lisa Wolverton note how the development by the Greeks of libraries, as storehouses of the written word, changed the possibilities of knowledge from what they had been in a purely oral society:

Every library comfortably contains writings and juxtaposes ideas that, if they were represented by their proponents in the flesh, might contrast violently with one another. Yet there they sit, on shelves, awaiting such scholars as may chance upon them to confront their latent contradictions. Libraries […] [construct] a well-made intellectual edifice where every doctrine has its proper place. Where schools [of philosophy] fade or fragment, libraries persist; where schools [of philosophy] sustain fixed arguments and preserve intellectual lineages, libraries absorb new knowledge and accommodate newcomers to learning. This made Greek learning, incubated by oral competition, newly portable to non-Greek landscapes. Abroad, for the first time, writing enabled the accumulation not just of philosophical perspectives but of knowledge of the world more generally.

– Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), page 13.

My new favorite Christmas carol

A Christmas carol from Stephen Colbert and Elvis Costello that sounds…exactly the way you would expect a Christmas carol from Stephen Colbert and Elvis Costello to sound.

The suffering of Italy

Rome is known as the Eternal City. James J. O’Donnell notes that Italy could be called the Eternal Victim:

After [the period of 476-535], Italy as a whole would know no comparable unity, prosperity, and freedom from warfare until the 1950s.

– The Ruin of the Roman Empire (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), page 106.

Out of action

Home sick again today. My fifth illness in the last two months. I’m glad I have a couple of weeks off over Christmas and New Year’s—I clearly need it.

One other effect from the ‘08 election…

During the new Obama administration and 111th Congress, the old South will be shut out of power, for only the third time since 1930. The other two times were brief (1953-54 and 1965-66).

If Obama does well, then the coming dry spell for the old South could match the post-Reconstruction record of 14 years (1897-1910).

Darn Coogs…

So I was all set to head to a bar tonight with a fellow Houston refugee to watch the University of Houston men’s basketball team play against mighty Duke on national television. All the Coogs needed to do was to beat Georgia Southern yesterday afternoon, and they would be in the game tonight. Easy, right?

Apparently not. Yesterday’s final score: Georgia Southern 65, Houston 63. Not nearly as bad as the Coogs’ loss to Prairie View A&M that Thomas Gray and I saw live and in person lo these many years ago, but still…

AT&T >>> Comcast

I’m using my iPhone to blog from home because my home network has gone down. Again.

Armistice Day

The 11th minute. Of the 11th hour. Of the 11th day. Of the 11th month.

Ninety years ago today, Europe ended its first attempt at collective suicide. At war’s end, France had suffered 1.7 million dead and 4.3 million wounded from a population of 39 million; it had been “bled white”. Ninety years later, as the war is close to slipping from living memory, France has perhaps finally recovered.

A generation later, the United Kingdom and Germany would be bled white in turn.

I wonder how aware Americans are about the fact that we ourselves are not immune to such a fate.