ITS TIME

OH, Hi Guys...


So its about time to officially rechristen this mammoth boat. 
I was surprised that we managed to update this thing as many times as we have. But now that some of us are out of school, this shouldn't be a problem anymore! Wait...what are we doing here? Some people, like Timmy Wilgrims, believe that a successful blog has to have a precise thematic underpinning in order to be interesting to read. I was thinking about this on my bike ride home, and I wondered what could that theme be? Now that I'm not in school, I could really focus into a very specialized topic and be blog-famous, publish a cheap paperback, and go on tour! Suck it guys...writing is easy--especially in blogform. 


But the question remains, what could it be?

Modern music often strives to contain a narrative, the most popular story being one of love or love lost. However, cannot music explore each and every facet of the human experience, even those that cannot be explained through the telling of a tale? When considered beyond lyrics, music is perhaps the most intuitive medium; if film and visual art are an exploration of the external aspects of the self (with an inherent focus that is centered on the physical features, actions and dialogue of the characters), and the novel an internal medium (with an inherent focus that is centered on the thoughts or feelings of the characters), then music must be striving to reach something even more abstract: the ineffable subjectivity of the listener. While one can usually explain or be convinced of the merits of a certain genre of film or style of novel over another, one's taste in music is much more intimate and often inexplicable. While no piece of art evokes just one emotion, they usually fall into a certain range, whereas two people can listen to the same piece of music and have radically different reactions to it. The emotions evoked from a piece of music depend almost entirely on the subjective experience of the listener; if I love Johnny Cash and someone else doesn't, there is little I can say to make them see why and if I find a song uplifting and someone else finds it depressing, there is little either of us can do to close that gulf. But really, I think that is one of music's inherent strengths. Music is, perhaps, all emotion (to the point that trying to use words to describe it is as absurd as trying to use tap-dance to describe architecture), and it is also something that can affect us deeply and with enduring strength, which should be a key component to any definition of art.

Thus, here is a Top-Ten list of songs about prison. To be considered here, the song must actually deal with prison as an idea or an experience and not just have it in the title. I also strove for diverse range of musical styles and ways of interpreting the idea of prison. Also, the song needs to be good.

Israel

So I have a 12 page paper due Monday morning. Now I know what you're all thinking, you're thinking "Holy cow you'd better get started on that bad boy soon, or else you won't have time to do any studying for your psych exam which is on Monday, that being the same day as your paper's deadline." But the situation is not so dire. You see, we had to write a 6 page early version about a month ago that we would then flesh out for this final paper. At the time, I thought this was irritating, but now I am reaping the benefits of having half of the paper done already.

What does this have to do with the blog? Nothing. But here's the dilemma. Every time I need to write a paper, at least lately, it ends up working like this: I keep on trying to start, but I know that I can write much better. And yet I keep on cranking out these poorly written, awkwardly connected paragraphs. But then, after a while, it starts to flow better, and I go back and redo whatever I wrote during those first twenty or so minutes. So I thought to myself, maybe I just need to warm up. You won't attempt to deadlift three hundred pounds for the first time without warming up, would you? Of course not! You'd stretch your hip flexors a bit, maybe do a couple pull throughs to groove proper hip mechanics, and start with lighter weights first. And for my last post on the blog, the same sort of thing happened (this should have been placed higher up): the first paragraph or two was pretty slow going, but then once the ball got rolling the writing went a lot faster, and I started having some fun with it.

But now that I've written two paragraphs, I'm starting to have some serious doubt. I want you all to understand my concerns, so I'll go back to a sports metaphor. If you wanted to race someone in a 400m dash, it's true, you would warm up first. But you wouldn't do just anything to warm up; you'd have to pursue a sport-specific warm up in addition to your general warm up, as detailed by Thomas Kurz in Stretching Scientifically. That is, I wouldn't prepare for a race by doing a bunch of dips or pushups; I would do some leg swings, or butt kicks, or a quick little warm up jog. Could it be, that by wasting the time of whoever is bored enough to read this, I am committing such an error? Will I go back to my essay and find that I've only warmed up for random rambling with sports metaphors thrown in? Will I be unprepared for discussing United States foreign policy toward Israel? Should I have just made a quick outline, or at least taken some time to decide what it is I'm going to write? This is a serious dilemma. I need to write a two to three page contextual introduction, and yet I have no idea what I'm going to say. Why does this matter? What reasons am I going to give? Are there any sources I should read? Is it a mistake to be sitting here without a single one of my sources handy? This seems likely.

Then again, the first paper was supposed to have said introduction, yet my introduction was one short paragraph before I cut to the chase, and yet a got a good grade. But that is foolish reasoning; it should be much easier to write 2-3 pages of filler than 2-3 pages of meat, and I really should take advantage of this great opportunity for easy writing.

Anyway, it is time to turn again to this paper. Perhaps in the future I will share the results of this experiment with you, dear readers, at least those who are left after Tim ravaged the blog mercilessly with a series of inane, pointless posts.

Castaway, A Poem for Wilson

This is a tribute to my friend Sara, grounded in boring, provincial Paris by the terror of Iceland, while her friends gallivant in Turkey. They left her only a dated pop culture reference, and I thought immediately of this blog that I totally killed.

In the heady dot-com boom I heard
a rumor:
Tom Hanks was giving up the grin;
sending his mother
the FedEx uniform,
kept pressed in the closet
but never far from the chest.

"He's running for president,
or maybe playing one," they told me,
and all I could think of was an island,
scrap in a Hollywood dump.
A coconut tree, a wind machine,
and a painted volleyball,
mute and waiting.

I may have have stolen this blog entry from my other self because I couldn't decide which blog would be less interested in this

As usual in these situations, everyone loses.

K, so there was some music fest or something. There was music, blogging, beer-sweat T-shirts, but mostly blogging.
It was beautiful, probably.

But that was last week! This week, what we care about is stodgy guys discovering Youtube. I just won't let my developing classical music-blogging obsession die.

Here's a composer who pieced together Youtube auditions for his piece into a Powerpoint-ish purple-gradient-tastic 250-person choir. What poor grad student edited this into semi-coherence? We will never know, but his windows on our walls of many lanlord-friendly colors, windows into our souls, we will never forget.




Eric Whitacre has friends! Friends, named Steven Bryant, who tell us the Composing Secrets "They" Don't Want You To Know! But seriously, this guy deserves some Internet fame, because it's clear from his blog that composition is the dismal science.

And by science, I mean, art. And by dismal, I mean, no money.

Interweb comment of the day

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

How I Started Developing a Head Tic...And Then Destroyed It

I just got back from getting my eyes examined. You see, last week I had pain in my right eye, and the nice people at UHS told me that everything looked fine, and that I shouldn't worry about it unless it gets worse. And then I started seeing a spot at night, so I figured that probably counted as getting worse and decided to have it looked at. And after a thorough examination, the doctor concluded that everything looked fine. And thus I conclude another chapter of my body randomly malfunctioning for no apparent reason (though to be fair, he did say it was probably just eigengrau, the stuff you see in darkness when your brain decides it doesn't want to just see blackness and starts making random neurons fire).

Which reminded of this one time my body malfunctioned, and I was actually able to solve the problem. So now it's time for me to share this glorious success story with you all.

Back in maybe January, I noticed that for the past month, about once a week, I would be minding my own business when suddenly my head would just twitch for no reason. I thought to myself, "How odd. I hope this doesn't get worse." But of course it did, and soon enough it progressed to once a day, then repeatedly throughout the day, and I thought to myself, "Great, another mild bodily woe not quite serious enough to actually complain about." However, the many hours I had spent researching anatomy and various physical dysfunctions came in handy. I immediately thought of a picture that was taken of me while I was preparing to race my illustrious roommates down the street to see who wouldn't have to pay for the two pitchers of beer we got at the Great Dane. What struck me about that picture was that my posture was just terrible; I was engaging in forward head carrying to the extreme. A good example of this can be seen below, where rather than resting comfortably on top of the spine, the head hangs forward, stuck in a looking at a computer screen style pose.

Here, have another picture.

Supposedly, for every inch your head is held forward of center, it adds an extra ten pounds of strain on your neck. This seems like a wild exaggeration, and I'm not sure why I added it in.

So I hypothesized that my forward head carrying was the culprit, and put several stretches into action. The first involves lightly retracting your chin/pulling it back. This should be gentle. The woman in the picture used her fingers to assist her, but I wasn't that hardcore. (if any of you are inspired to do any of those, remember to be gentle, and if you do use your hands, use them to pull or push on your head just the slightest amount - this isn't a quadriceps stretch, so don't treat it like one)

The next is basically the same, but you sort of tilt your head forward and look down toward the ground to give those posterior fibers a good but gentle stretch.

Now it's time to start stretching those levator scapulae. Keep your chin retracted, and pull your head or just let it fall forward at about a 45 degree angle.

Lastly, keeping your chin retracted as usual, let it fall to the side.

When I did this last one I felt a great stretch akin to the first time I successfully stretched my hamstrings in the muscle itself, rather than just the tendons. But it wasn't quite that hardcore.

And after I did those stretches, I found that the twitch had went away. It came back the next day, so I stretched again, and it went away again. But, being the aggressive guy that I am, I kept on stretching, and it has not come back.

Now maybe if you're lucky, someday I'll tell you about the time it hurt to raise my left arm to the side once it reached around 90 degrees, but I did this one stretch and the pain went away instantly.

THE END

best anti-virus hardware?

ps-wii?

linkified...

extreme disappointment

after seeing some of the new posts...i've come to the conclusion that we have some posters on this blog that haven't fulfilled their duties for this blog...u know who u r...

until then...