March 30, 2007 at 8:43 pm (novelty)
My father just called. He’s been drinking a lot of wine. Anyway, he told me that he and my stepmother were looking at this giant tool catalog of some kind that occasionally appears in their mailbox. They have things like gas-powered blenders and weird things like that.
In any case, they have a remote-controlled fart machine. I do not know why my father felt I needed to know about this. He said they’ve turned into a couple of geezers because they are drunk enough to think this is hilarious. He asked me if I’d seen Eddie Murphy’s Nutty Professor, and I said I hadn’t but he loved it. Which I didn’t know until now.
sometimes I am mighty surprised by my dad.
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March 30, 2007 at 7:45 pm (church, music)
I completely forgot that I am an Enneagram four with a five-wing. Someone was searching with that specific term and found my blog. Lots and lots of people looking for Boston terriers, which is hilarious, because I have like, one picture of one from over a year ago. I certainly don’t own one. The only person I know with one is Silver Apples.
So apparently my mouse wasn’t ever supposed to do what it had been doing and there is nothing wrong with my computer at all. The guy was nice and didn’t charge me anything, so I bought an armband for my iPod. Since I’m trying to go to the gym at least three times a week, I figured it would be useful. And it is.
This coming week is Holy Week. We’re singing the Faure Requiem on Sunday (Palm Sunday). On Good Friday, we’re singing that God-awful Theodore Dubois’s Seven Last Words of Christ. And for some reason, the title of that work always makes me think of this dialogue with Groucho Marx in Duck Soup:
Trentino: Do you mean Worm?
Firefly: No, that wasn’t it.
Trentino: I know, Swine!
Firefly: …No, it was a seven letter word.
Trentino: Oh yes, Upstart?
Firefly: That’s it! Upstart.
[Firefly slaps Trentino across the face with his gloves.]
Then on Easter we’re singing the Hallelujah chorus of course and some other stuff. For our introit on Sunday, we’re doing a really cool Weelkes (1576-1623) piece, Hosanna to the Son of David. Here’s a horrible MIDI file of this piece.
And finally, here’s another church pic. This is my current church.
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March 26, 2007 at 4:54 pm (chicago, church)
Pursuant to my blog post of yesterday, here are some pics of that church featured in My Best Friend’s Wedding, which is where I had a paid gig, and also where my fourth cousin was a member for about 40 years until her death in 2001. I am also currently a member of the church. I’m in the immediate foreground, left, in this picture from September 2003:
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March 25, 2007 at 2:12 pm (bikes, books, chicago, church)
Yesterday I was supposed to go to my friend’s baby shower. I had two options: take the carshare car, which would cost $73. Not bad, considering it included the gas, but still wayyyy too expensive for me for one day. The other option was to take the train, and that would be four hours each way (when the drive would probably be two hours, tops). So I decided not to go.
Instead, I was good. I went to the gym. Then I walked all the way to Penn and “studied” with my friend Cat and her cool friend.
I found out since yesterday that I’m having computer problems. The menu that pops up when you hold down the “mouse” button on a mac doesn’t come up no matter what. For instance, when you’re trying to copy an image from another site, you would use the left button on a PC mouse, but you would just hold the one mac mouse button down until that menu popped up. I tried it with my tracking pad as well as my wireless mouse, and it no longer works. Anyone know how to fix this? I can’t find an answer on mac.com and so will probably take it in to have it looked at. In any case, I had wanted to paste a picture of the book I’m working on: Marooned: The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs.
(now I’m at work so I can do this. 
)
My Best Friend’s Wedding is on TV right now, which made me think of my friend N for some reason. So I called her and told her there was a movie made in Chicago on TV and she said she was watching it, too. They showed our church, of course, because it’s the one the two characters played by Cameron Diaz and Dermot Mulroney get married in. It’s also our old church choir (well, she still sometimes sings in it) singing the Praise the Lord by Rachmaninoff from the Vespers during the wedding sequence. Those of the choir who were around in 1996 to film that still get paid royalties every year for appearing in it.
I found a bike shop. I think it might be a bit overpriced but I don’t know of any others nearby. I need to get a tune up and then I think I might go to Critical Mass on Friday. My first time. I’ve always been too intimidated to go before!
Today in church we got to sing a great Byrd anthem, Civitas sancti tui, and Cwm Rhondda, which is one of my favorite hymns.
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March 21, 2007 at 8:18 am (politics)
I was here.
Here’s a pic from then. My friend K and I almost got arrested: and all because we were swept along with the tide to shut down LSD. We finally escaped off the side of the Drive before we got to a police block.
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March 20, 2007 at 8:32 pm (inadequately endowed, vehicles)
So I’m awfully glad I decided not to buy a car. I had one hour with the car share tonight and had to figure out how to drive a Prius during that time. I went to Trader Joe’s which was full of bitches, both women and men. Not the workers, of course: they’re always amazing. I couldn’t believe the shoppers though. There was not one, but five different bitchy Trixies talking on their cell phones and yelling into them and running into people with their carts and not caring. (By Trixie, I mean the Philadelphia equivalent of the Lincoln Park Trixie.)
I can’t understand for the life of me how people can stand driving around in these narrow streets all the time.
Which makes me wonder even more at the kinds of people who choose to identify with their cars here in the city and spend thousands of dollars modifying the tailpipes so they’re deafening and installing stereo equipment that can reach 140 dB. Really says a lot about their equipment, eh? (Yes, Philadelphia is coming abloom again with the inadequately endowed idiots of the world.)
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March 19, 2007 at 8:52 pm (cephalopods)
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March 18, 2007 at 6:39 pm (Smith)
P1020614
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.
The Werner Josten Library of the Performing Arts at Smith College. I decided I wanted to be a music librarian here. This is where I worked for two or three years. So, from about 1995 to the present…..
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March 18, 2007 at 6:36 pm (Smith)
P1020615
Originally uploaded by freyjawaru.
OK. So this is quite surreal to me. You see, when I graduated from Smith ten years ago, the student center was basically in Davis, where the ballroom was. They decided toward the end of my time there that they were going to tear down two of the student houses to build a new student center. There was a lot of protesting on the part of Hopkins Complex dwellers to save their houses.
I hadn’t seen the student center before. I think it might have opened a couple of years ago? Anyway, this picture is of Chapin House as seen through the center. Chapin is where Margaret Mitchell (author of Gone with the Wind) lived when she went to Smith, incidentally.
Click on the photo for more pics of the center (and DP .
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March 17, 2007 at 8:12 pm (early music)
I am very pleased. I just found Laetatus sum a 6 by Monteverdi. We were working on this my last semester of college (ten years ago right now!) in Collegium and I finally decided to quit in the middle of the semester (although I’d sung in the concert the previous semester) because I was way too stressed out. Anyway, it was the first time I’d heard what Monteverdi’s motets sounded like and I was enchanted. I was enchanted again by another motet that I sang in the summer of ‘05 in Champaign, Beatus Vir I. That was the situation where the woman who was conducting hired a theorbist from Indiana and a bunch of folks in the choir didn’t know what it was, even though some of them had sung in Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea the previous semester (needless to say, they didn’t bring theorboes in for that: they substituted harpsichords).
Anyway, for years I knew I had the music but would have to dig it out, which would be complicated, because I have enormous piles of photocopied early music. So I tried instead to remember the text. I thought it might be a Laetentur Coeli or a Laudate Dominum. Also, there of course are a few other settings of Laetatus Sum by Monteverdi, often as parts of larger works. So I went through a bunch of the recordings at U of I trying to find it and remember it. But I found it on iTunes and downloaded it. It must be the right one because I keep listening to it over and over.
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