Music: I finished “M” today with some Muzikas, but now I’m on “N,” and after some Natalie Merchant and Nazareth (won’t be listening to that again any time soon!) I’m on Neil Diamond. What I thought was lots and lots of Neil Diamond, but is, actually, only about two and a half hours. Then I realized that part of that is due to the fact that the soundtrack for The Jazz Singer is not in the Neil Diamond directory but the separate Soundtracks hierarchy.
I first heard Neil Diamond as a kid, to a great extent because my mom had the Jazz Singer soundtrack on LP, along with “I’m Glad You’re Here with Me,” which as the piece “Lament in D minor / Dance of the Sabres,” which for some reason I’ve always loved. It’s still about an hour until I get to that piece.
Art of the Day: Sarah Bishop’s Frilly Bits. I ended up posting this because a friend of a friend ended up describing her rabbit’s testicles as “frilly.” Hey, I didn’t do it …
Upcoming: Monday I teach and have to hand back a lot of homework so will stay up tonight grading and organizing. Then I’ll go to sleep early Monday … I hope. For Monday evening I have a German-Play group rehearsal meeting; Manfred should be there. And then later in the evening Andrea the Italian guy here for the Grad Student Conference is getting into town, and Helena will bring him over. He’s staying three nights. So I need to clean just a little, but I can’t be bothered to do a thorough job of it.
TV: Today I finished season/series 1 of Torchwood; the next one isn’t due until 2008, I read. As for the first season, it was mostly really quite good, but the last episode was a bit weak in some regards. Partially because it didn’t do a very good job of tying itself to earlier episodes. Sure, it was sort of a continuation of the one before, number 12, but the whole “rift machine” had little series-wide setup. The conclusion required too much knowledge of Doctor Who to make it make sense internally, and the bad-guy, Bilis Manger, only showed up directly in the last two episodes, but he “felt” as if he were more important. This is just to say that the monster-of-the-week formula was given up too late and ongoing questions were addressed too little early on, though the matter of Jack’s “immortality” was dealt with from the first episode.
Links:
- Über das Schreiben von Fachaufsätzen und -Büchern – a resource for writing academic papers (in German … but could be of use to my students)
- You’ve Read the Novels (Now Read the Footnotes) – a NY Times article on “classics” and the type of detailed commentary that shows up in some of them, and we’re talking about things read by “normal people,” not just students and scholars. Jane Austen provides the main example.
- Men sentenced for running castration ‘dungeon’ – You know, I can understand the “practicing medicine without a license” bit, but the whole thing just sounds like an excuse to convict them for being “perverts.” To quote the prudish judge: “I think this is a type of perversion that cannot be tolerated by society.” I’m much more culturally/socially liberal and libertarian in this matter — I do not see any important state interest in interfering in the bedroom activity of consenting adults.
