Tom Harpel at Tandoku gives a shout out to St. Peter’s, the British microbrewer, for their porter (which I haven’t yet tried). I first tried their Fruit Beer in 1998 or 1999 in a small pub in London, but most of the sources of their beers I’ve found in the States have been, unfortunately, skunked. I’ll have to try his sources.
Month: March 2004
Metafilter discovers bourbon
Ironic that Metafilter considers the story of bourbon nothing more than a battle between two producers. I think a lot of the story is the independents that have entered the market in the last ten to fifteen years, particularly Labrot and Graham (makers of the incomparable Woodford Reserve).
How did I miss this: PDF viewer browser plugin for Mac OS X
I can’t imagine how I missed the PDF Browser Plug-In for Mac OS X, but thanks to atmasphere for pointing it out. (Background for non-Mac users: while PDF is deeply integrated into Mac OS X, including being the actual print output format, no Mac browser currently displays PDF files in-context—they are all handed off to a second application. Not a big deal, except I can’t count the number of times I’ve clicked on a PDF file and forgotten I downloaded it, and found it days later on my desktop.)
It happens in Madrid
I don’t really have the words. BoingBoing is doing a good job of picking up pointers to blogosphere coverage (both local and otherwise) of the terrorist atttacks in Madrid that have so far claimed the lives of over 190 people. I’m reposting the illustration by Forges from El Pais below as a sign of my grief over the senseless loss of life.
Another Sloan blogger: welcome Shades of Gray
Thanks to Orkut, I learned tonight that Shades of Gray, fellow 2002 Sloan MBA, has a blog. Subscribed (note: may take some time for the crawler to pick up my updates). Now, if S. of G. would just post more than once a month…
AMS acquired and split up; my memory has just been sold
The Yahoo newswire says that Canadian IT consulting firm CGI is buying American Management Systems (AMS), the consulting firm at which I was a principal before I left for business school. The interesting parts?
- CGI is paying a 25% premium ($858 million) over the market cap ($657 million) of the stock (consistent with the feelings of many former and present AMSers that the stock was undervalued).
- As part of the deal, the defense and intelligence assets of AMS are being sold, for $415 million… to AMS rival CACI.
I wonder how my old teammates are being affected by this. We beat CACI to win the Standard Procurement System award, but a lot has changed since 1997 and I’m sure there’s a lot of value in combining the joint resources of the two businesses.
Also, what a difference a few years (and the war on terror) make. Four years ago, I don’t think I would have predicted that the defense and intelligence businesses would have a market cap of almost half the total value of AMS.
Open letter to a Glee Club student
I started thinking about my days in the Virginia Glee Club a few weeks back. Probably because of my imminent 10-year reunion. Then out of the blue I got an email from a current Club member and Clubhouse resident who had found my page about my time in the group.
I reprint my reply to him here, for the ten or fifteen other Glee Club members who might see it and remember too.
Sounds like you’re having a great time with Club. I remember my days in the group fondly.
I never lived in the Clubhouse (I was planning to my fourth year but I turned into a damned Lawnie instead), but I have many fond memories of flopping on, sleeping on, and drinking on the couch. And of cleaning the house after parties. Wait, those aren’t fond memories; they’re kind of nauseating. Does the basement still flood every winter?
My fonder memories are of rehearsing in Old Cabell, B-012; of making fun of the bass section; of long bus trips to, um, sing with young women at institutions of higher (or at least more Northern) learning; and of performing some of the best music ever written. There hasn’t been a year since I graduated that I haven’t been singing with one group or another, and none of them have come close to the camaraderie of Club (well, maybe one, but that was a special case; the guys sang at my wedding, and one of them was a fellow Club alum).
The mule, however, is new to me. What’s the story there?
Hope you’re enjoying what the Club web site says is your fifth year. (I see some things haven’t changed at Virginia. 🙂 ) Please give the group my best. If you ever travel as far west as Seattle, drop in; my door is always open.
Yours in VMHLB,
Tim Jarrett
Club 1990-1994
Spem in alium, Part I
I got my score for Spem in Alium in the mail yesterday. Lisa called me at work and said, “You have a very large box.” She wasn’t kidding. I didn’t measure the cardboard flat the score came in, but the score itself is 14 inches by 20 inches. Open, it’s 38 inches by 20 inches.
And 40 staves tall. And 120 measures long.
And it hits me. Where the hell am I going to find the time to multitrack 40 vocal parts? At about 70 bpm, four beats to the measure for 120 measures is about 7 minutes per part. That’s 280 minutes, or more than four hours of recording. And how am I going to find that much quiet time in this house?
Man. This is going to be a harder project than I thought.
The score thing really bugs me, though. The only commercially available vocal part is the full score. There are part books available (one book has Choirs I – IV, the other Choirs V – VIII) but only for rent, not to buy.
Elvis Costello, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, March 8
As promised, a few more words about yesterday’s concert. But first a word about setlists. Elvis has such a deep back catalogue that anyone who claims to know every song he’s done is either lying or has very deep pockets. Or at least that’s my story. So I apologize when I will inevitably omit some songs from my retelling of the show.
Elvis opened the show with “45,” my favorite from his second to most recent album, When I Was Cruel. “Green Shirt” was next, then two other relatively uptempo songs. But most of the session was dominated by ballads, mostly drawn from North.
Mostly, but not all; Elvis’s performance of “This House is Empty Now” from his collaboration with Burt Bacharach brought the house down. Stripping away the layers of cheese-pop instrumentation that bloated the original recording, this version was just acoustic guitar, the magic touch of Steve Nieve on piano, and voice. And what a voice. Elvis stepped out from behind the mic after effortlessly nailing the high note in the bridge and sang the rest of the song unamplified. The performance brought the audience to their feet—remember, this was only about half a dozen songs into his set.
Incidentally, Elvis repeated the stepping away from the microphone trick a few more times during the set, which gave me a chance to notice that his unamplified voice was more in tune than his amplified voice. Maybe they screwed up something in the monitors. The acoustic in Benaroya was something to behold, by the way. Partway through the encore (which lasted 90 minutes!) he sang “You Left Me in the Dark,” and you could hear a pin drop. To be precise, you could hear the ventilation system of the hall, and the collective intake of breath as he sang the last phrase.
About 45 minutes into the first set, a latecomer took her front row seat, and Elvis, who had been vamping a bit on the guitar, leaned over and said, “The story so far…” After the laughter died down, he said, “…we’ve played a lot of sad songs.” But it wasn’t all cabaret. Elvis brought down the house with a broadly played version of “God’s Comic,” which he interrupted after the second verse with a moment of acidly political stand-up. (Sample: “God is everywhere, like CNN. And CNN was at our hotel in Florida because Dick Cheney was there. I saw him headed for the all-you-can-eat buffet, and thought, ‘Oh no. What if he eats too much, has a heart attack and dies? Then there’ll be nobody running the country!’ (a beat) And they’ll have to prise his cold, dead hand out of the arse of that Texan puppet of his.”) And his deconstructed version of “Watching the Detectives,” which veered from cabaret to reggae to feedback-drenched Hendrix, was brilliant, as was the rockabilly shuffle version of “Pump It Up.”
Again: for my money, one of the two or three best concerts I’ve ever attended. Get tickets and go. Now. You’ll thank me later.
The hardest working man in show business
Just got back from the Elvis Costello show. Two and a half hour concert—no intermission—that sounded at times like a mix tape; except all but a few covers were from Elvis’s own repertoire. One of the two or three best concerts I’ve ever seen.
No time to write down everything now, but hopefully I’ll be able to point to a set list and write some more tomorrow.
Which Elvis?
And by that I don’t mean Presley vs. Costello. What I’m specifically wondering is: which version of Elvis Costello will I see at Benaroya Hall tonight? Will it be the downbeat romantic balladeer of his most recent release, North; the angry young man of 1978’s “Radio, Radio”; or something in between? The review of the LA show suggests it will be a blend—EC performed there with a mic, an acoustic guitar, and Steve Nieve on piano, but heckled back unmercifully when an overzealous fan shouted a request from the balcony.
I’m guessing Benaroya tonight will be more of the same, which is mostly fine. Some of Elvis’s ballad performances are among his best songs on record, even some of his covers like the stunning version of Burt Bacharach’s “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” that he recorded on his last big outing with Steve Nieve. Which, I am amazed to note, is available for purchase from selected Amazon marketplace sellers starting at $150. I did’t realize this box set was so rare. I’ll have to be more careful with it.
More early Schulziana on the way
I got a postcard late last week from the good folks at Fantagraphics. Apparently the first volume of The Complete Peanuts has slipped its publication date by a month, to April 1 (no jokes please). But it’s not all bad news. They offered a bundle with a new, first-time-ever collection of all Charles Schulz’s pre-Peanuts work, including both the trailblazing “Li’l Folks” strip and his single panel work. Was I interested? Oh yeah. This is the good stuff, the ur-Peanuts, so to speak, before the characters evolved into their familiar (copiously merchandized) selves.
Side note: I have been consistently impressed with Fantagraphics, both as a publisher (the Krazy and Ignatz collections have been consistently excellent) and as a business with consistently excellent customer support and communication.
Happy birthday, spam. Don’t expect a card
The Register points out it’s been 10 years since what is generally considered the first-ever unsolicited commercial electronic communication, also known as spam. It was ten years ago on Friday that arch-fiends (and US law firm) Canter and Siegel cross-posted to over a hundred newsgroups offering a chance to participate in the Green Card lottery.
Yes, the first spam was on Usenet, not email. I remember it well. It raised such a stink across almost all the groups I was reading that one could read nothing else for days. I sometimes think that this spam, coming less than a year after the AOL floodgates opened dumping thousands of new users onto Usenet who showed neither inclination nor capability to learn the culture, was the penultimate hammer blow that sealed the end of the golden age of Usenet. (The final blow, of course, was the emergence of the Web, which technically started in 1993 with the release of Mosaic.
Keiretsu update
Around the block:
- Esta writes about the Baptist Church protesting the Laramie Project and seeks constructive ways of providing opposing images of what Christianity is all about.
- Craig emailed me about a study of RSS statistics in progress over at All Things Distributed. So far they are reviewing data from their own logs, which is a little suspect as far as their market share study (with only 141 unique agents represented) goes. More interesting is the study of polling frequencies; looks like a lot of people leave the frequencies at their defaults.
- Dave points out that Scott Young, UserLand’s new CEO, is now keeping a weblog to discuss the company’s direction.
- Looks like Tara and Matt might be moving out of the neighborhood. Can’t really blame them; I don’t know when “bang for the buck” has applied to any part of Kirkland, except perhaps when talking about Very Large Bucks Indeed.
- Dave Hyatt reports on updates to WebCore, the heart of Safari and other web apps from Apple.
- Oliver Willis points out the hypocrisy of those who argue that 9/11 justifies all the president’s misdeeds, then turn around and slam the victims’ families when they protest the president’s policies. Quoth a Lt. Smash (there’s a moniker crying out “I am the voice of reason!”): “Do these ladies get a free pass because they’re widows? How long does that free pass last?” (scroll down into the comments)
- ALA: Zebra Tables: CSS liberated tables from the burden of being design frameworks; now it helps them display tabular information better.
About vinyl
What is it about vinyl? Really? (Yes, I’m talking about records, not clothing…) I found a good used music store in the U-District tonight and walked out with a handful of records—all stuff I had on CD, all early and mid 80s records: the Police’s Synchronicity and Ghost in the Machine, Sting’s first solo album, U2’s The Unforgettable Fire.
Common thread? The CDs, made early in the technology, sound … a bit thin to my ears now. I want to hear what the vinyl, made at the most mature stage of that technology, sounds like.
And Simon and Garfunkel’s The Graduate soundtrack? That’s just for kicks.