Last Sunday we were at Tanglewood, in Lenox, MA, where the Boston Symphony Orchestra plays every summer. It was an all Mozart program, and well attended, although the age of the audience skewed decidedly 40 and up.
While waiting in the “wine line” during intermission, I happened to stand next to political consultant and former presidential adviser David Gergen. I overheard him discussing — what else? — politics.
I took some time off from blogging. Let’s pick up where we left off, with Peanuts and politics. The Charles M. Schulz Museum has an exhibit called Political Peanuts, running through December 1. And Peanuts Rocks The Vote this year with a nicely designed Flash animation page.
Happy birthday to Amy Schulz Johnson, back on August 5. And speaking of the Schulz family, in this photo there’s an extra swimmer in the pool with the Schulz kids. Who is that?
In yet another prescient political drawing by Charles M. Schulz, John Edwards waits by the phone for Barack Obama to call about a possible Cabinet post.
(That’s a $400 haircut?)
Here is the ultimate 8-Track cartridge listening experience. Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” is ideally suited to this particular electronic audio medium. 8-Track tapes were notorious for leakage between channels, but in this case, if that were happening who could tell?
I suspect the tracks are identical, but again, who can tell? Nevertheless, here are all four of them, with the “click” between tracks left intact to simulate the 8-Track listening experience. (Four tracks in stereo, for a total of eight.)
Track A-1
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/AUG/MetalMachineMusic1.mp3]
Track A-2
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/AUG/MetalMachineMusic2.mp3]
Track A-3
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/AUG/MetalMachineMusic3.mp3]
Track A-4
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/AUG/MetalMachineMusic4.mp3]
I watched some, not too much, of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, and they sure were impressive in HD. All of the coverage is in HD, and it’s scaled down for regular TV. This made me think about the looming end of analog broadcast TV on February 17, 2009. When that happens, my little LCD TV that Carol bought for me Christmas 1999, will no longer work.[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2008/AUG/China.flv 440 330]This TV is very important to me, because it’s what got me out of a very deep and dark place emotionally, while I was face down for weeks on end, stuck in something called a vitrectomy chair, following a second surgery for a detached retina.
Before getting that TV I listened to the radio all day, but as much as I love radio, doing that didn’t lift my spirits. Reading was impractical, but I could put that portable TV on the tray of the chair and watch it out of my “good” eye, which later had problems of its own.
There was a UHF station in Boston that showed a lot of old Bonanza episodes, and those became the highlight of my day. I was amazed by how adult the show was, and by how much innuendo there was in the writing.
Besides the TV, something else Carol did that was helpful was she read out loud from Thomas Hardy’s tragic book “The Mayor of Casterbridge.” It’s not a very cheerful story, but I really got into it, and enjoyed discussing its characters and themes with Carol. Since then we’ve watched several different adaptations of “The Mayor of Casterbridge.” The recent A&E production is very good, but Dennis Potter’s version with Alan Bates is probably our favorite.
And I must also say thank you to D.F. Rogers, who played Dragnet radio shows from the 50’s for me, that we listened to on Eric’s toy R2-D2 cassette player. When I was down and out, doing that was a lot of fun. Hard to believe that was almost nine years ago.
My twinster Jean is, as I write this, on the phone with Microsoft, trying to recover her computer from a bad case of malware. Whatever it is, it deleted the point-in-time copies of the Registry, preventing her from running a system restore.
From this sort of incident, I guess I’d have to say that Vista is the right version of Windows for most people, because it intercepts every attempt to install anything. It’s just too dangerous to be collecting mail and browsing the Web when logged on as an administrator.
My recommendation is that if you’re a typical Windows XP Home user, create a restricted user account and use that for mail and browsing. The only time you should be in as an administrator is if something won’t install in the restricted account and you are sure you want to install it.
