My friend Chris Maloney has a new LiveJournal blog, klortho's Journal
The name "klortho" sounds like some sort of evil alien with spiky armor and vile breath. Or a guy named Vince.
I've let myself get involved in discussing the Terri Schiavo case on a conservative blog. It's been fun, but I'm spending way too much time on it; I respond to something, then I keep checking to see if they respond, then I respond back. Well, I just stepped away for a minute (went to the bathroom), and while away I realized I was going to have to pull the plug on this so I could get on with my life (which, now that I put it that way, has a nice parallel to my general feeling on the Schaivo case :-)
But I had already typed up something I rather liked, in response to comments on the post Terri Schiavo's Tube Pulled, and I hated to waste it. So I'll put my thoughts here, and Paulie probably won't respond either in his or my blog, so that should be that.
It *would* surprise me very much if Michael Schiavo were offered more than $1 million to stick with his position. Show me where the money is for this euthanasia crowd. I can see where the $1 million we do know about comes from; this issue is issue #1 right now among evangelicals. This is a very large group in the nation, and very passionate, and rather desperate at the moment. Easy to come up with a cool million to win this battle. But where is the euthanasia movement? Could you show me their Web page or something? Are leaders of Atheist churches all over the country urging their parisioners to open their wallets to help put the vegetable out of her non-misery, lest this crucial battle for the sake of non-life be lost?
It takes more than pure heartlessness to come up with $1 million, it takes passion and a sense of urgency. These euthanasia folks are heavily rational, remember. If they gave even a thought to trying to get him to stay the course, they would quickly realize that their money could be better spent.
But it would not surprise me if he were not paying for said doctor.
Two recent developments in Turkey are rather interesting:
Coincidence? I doubt it.So we had our UMRO concert last night. I've never been more depressed after a concert. I'm not often depressed after concerts. But... I'll tell you the story.
We did a slightly re-worked Peer Gynt Suite for the first half. It went more-or-less OK. The night scene went about as poorly as expected, but for different reasons, and I was probably the main culprit for it getting started off-pitch, but we got it through all right. I think my triplets in the Storm scene were pretty good.
Then we did Mendelssohn's Reformation Symphony. Overall, not bad, really, but the moment I had been waiting for was at the end. The second and third measures from the end are where the second trombone carries the grandiose final cadence. Notice, the second trombone. Or, the Tenor Trombone, if you like, but not "the trombones". For this orchestra, this season, this means One Idiot.
Well, something went horribly wrong. I decided to watch the conductor instead of looking at the music. I mean, I just had a bunch of whole notes, so I thought it would be better to watch for the cues. I didn't see the cues I was hoping for. Instead, the whole thing just kind of fell apart. And, while the conductor might have done a better job of keeping things together, the more I think about it, the more certain I become that I held onto my held-note-before-my-special-cadence note one measure too long, and the cadence was the thing everyone else was counting on to keep it moving.
I mean, holy crap, it's a well-known guideline that it's bad to end a piece badly (or start it off badly -- not so important what happens in the middle), but to have the ending be your personal moment of glory, only to not merely lose that moment, but be responsible for the total disintegration of the ending... it's enough to make me want to sell my trombone intead of buying a new one like I'd planned for the next concert where UMRO will be playing Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet.
So anyway, back when I was a Catholic, the idea of a Reformation Symphony never quite sat well with me. Even objectively, it seems to be a piece celebrating one religion over a particular other religion. It seems within the realm of possibility that something deep within me wanted to sabotage this symphony. Some inner demon, perhaps, told me, "wait, it's not your time yet". Yes, now that I think of it, there's no question that's what happened. I sort of haven't let go of my old grudges. You can take a boy out of the Church, but you can't take the priest... oops, that's way off-topic.
Lately WGMS has been running a blurb going something like "while other radio stations are constantly changing their formats, WGMS has been bringing you nothing but classical music for (50?) years." This is clearly a reference to public radio station WETA's recent format change.
In WETA's defense, I feel I must object to the implication that they are "constantly changing their format". In fact, WETA has eliminated their classical programming exactly once. That in no way can be considered "constant".
If WETA were to decide next month to bring classical music back, then WGMS might have a case with this claim.