Monthly Archives: February 2014

All Things

13-07-09-aThe strange attractor that centers my universe for now is the growing certainty my parents won’t see another winter. Even the fullness of summer may outdistance them. The spectre came as slowly as time and a well life permits, but a thousand similes paint its implacable gait. Ages turn into years become months, then weeks, days, finally hours and minutes. All clocks stop eventually.

That they shall likely walk off into the Great Unknown almost simultaneously describes in the final act the entire arc of their life. In a word: together. Happily — no, joyfully — married for nearly seven decades. Never cursed with wealth, but ever blessed with love, they were rich beyond measure. They are why, even still, I believe in love.

To the extent I am a good person, look no further than my mother and my father.

Continue reading


Smooth or Bumpy

vu metersLast time I wrote about analog recording and how it represents a physical chain of proportionate forces directly connecting the listener to the source of the sounds. In contrast, a digital recording is just numbers that encode the sounds in an abstract form. While it’s true that digital recordings can be more accurate, the numeric abstraction effectively disconnects listeners from the original sounds.

In the first month of this blog I wrote about analog and digital and mentioned they were mutually exclusive Yin and Yang pairs (a topic I wrote about even earlier — it was my seventh post).

Today I want to dig a little deeper into the idea of analog vs. digital!

Continue reading


Interstellar Record Album

golden recordOne of the cool things that happened in 2013 is that Voyager 1 has left our solar system. This time it was really, for sure, no kidding! There have been some previous occasions where it left, but this time we really mean it.  (Truth is, it’s still way inside the Oort cloud, so in some sense it’s merely left the city for the ‘burbs.)

Say rather that Voyager 1 no longer flies in skies affected by the sun. The heliosphere, the giant fart bubble around our solar system, is filled with our sun’s gassy emissions. Outside that bubble is the galactic ass gas of a billion other suns. Voyager 1, for the first time in human history, samples farts not our own.

It got me thinking about our interstellar golden record: Earth’s Greatest Hits!

Continue reading


Movies: Man of Steel

Supes-0I thought Zack Snyder blew the doors off Watchmen. The movie does total justice to a classic graphic novel that I would have thought impossible to put on film. It turned out to be a work that doesn’t just honor the source material, it elevates it. I liked his version of 300 okay, and I thought Sucker Punch interesting (although it’s a rather strange movie).

Plus, I have a high regard for Christopher Nolan. I very much enjoyed Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige, Inception and the first two Batman movies (as I’ve written before, I thought much less of the third one).

Snyder at the helm, Nolan as a producer and writer,… I was really looking forward to Man of Steel.

Continue reading


Seahawks in Seattle

sb48-0

Best start of a football game ever!

Those who know me know I became a hard-core baseball fan four years ago  this June. Those who’ve known me a long time found that mildly surprising; for most of my life I had little or no interest in sports of any kind. But as I’ve explained before, baseball got under my skin at a time when I deeply needed something totally new in my life. And in getting to know it, I came to really love it.

The year or so prior, I’d gotten a bit into football. To some extent that was echos from the marriage; both my ex- and step-son were into football. Of course, like any kid who grew up here, I played sandlot football and baseball. Both sports were familiar, but I was never really a fan until my “baseball awakening” in 2010.

But while football didn’t “take” with me, I often do watch the Super Bowl.

Continue reading