Teleidoscope

Sun, Dec 06, 2009

Alice

Posted at 8:37 pm MST to Media

The people who did the "Tinman" take-off on the Wizard of OZ have a new miniseries showing on Syfy based on the Lewis Carroll Alice books.

The first half is showing today and repeated tomorrow, followed by the second episode.

This is not a low budget show: the cast includes Tim Curry, Colm Meany, Harry Dean Stanton, Matt Frewer and Kathy Bates.

The story line is interesting and the visual effects are decent.

I'm definitely watching the second half, tomorrow.

And I want to dig out my DVDs of Tinman and rewatch it.

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Tue, Oct 06, 2009

Alternates

Posted at 10:41 am MDT to Media

Two great bits of online fiction out of LiveJournal:

A darker, haunted Little House and a Buffy/Secret Garden crossover.

I want to be able to find these again.

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Thu, Jul 09, 2009

Jeeves

Posted at 10:29 pm MDT to Media

I think I first read some of the works of P. G. Wodehouse when I was in high school, but it might have been college. I do know the first Wodehouse I read wasn't Jeeves and Wooster stories. It was an omnibus of the Psmith stories the local public library had in stock.

I soon worked my way through the rest of their Wodehouse collection, which was not extensive -- I think Wodehouse was mostly out of print for a while in the 70s, then his popularity picked up again later. I think they had more Lord Emsworth than Jeeves, actually.

I've read more Wodehuose, over the years, mostly from libraries and in no particular order. I'm not sure order really matters much with Wodehouse's works -- Wodehouse is pretty consistently silly. I own a two physical volumes of Jeeves and Wooster that I picked up on a whim a while back when I was in the mood for something light and episodic.

Last month when my brother Larry was here for a visit, he spent some time reading a Jeeves omnibus Life with Jeeves.

We talked about how good the BBC Jeeves and Wooster adaptations were, and I mentioned that I had seen some of the episodes on PBS but not all of them, and did not own the DVDs. (I think I saw one season of the three that were eventually shown.) That has changed now: I just received my birthday present: the complete Frye and Laurie Jeeves and Wooster DVDs. I think I know what I'll be watching this weekend.

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Sun, Apr 26, 2009

Unfinished Symphony

Posted at 8:32 pm MDT to Media

Last night was the final concert of the 2008-2009 season for the Boulder Philharmonic. They played three pieces, and the soloist also played an encore.

The first piece was "Lyric for Strings" by George Walker, a living African American composer. There was a family connection in this piece: the Concert Master of the Boulder Phil is his son.

Next was Schubert's 8th "Unfinished" Symphony, followed after the intermission by Brahms Second Piano Concerto, with Jon Nakamatsu as soloist.

Nakamatsu was an excellent pianist -- more showy in his encoure than during the Concerto-- but I have to confess that the Brahms did not really grab me.

I loved the Schubert, and the Lyrics for Strings, though, so I may just have been in the mood for melody. Being tired from travelling probably didn't help.

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Sat, Mar 28, 2009

Digger

Posted at 12:52 pm MDT to Media

I had been hearing about an online comic called Digger that was supposed to be very good. It recently moved to a new site that made it more accessible, and I finally looked into it.

It is very good. Very philosophical and with great charcaters who are vivid both individually and culturally. The art (black and white only) is beautiful.

The heroine, Digger, is a sentient wombat who inadvertently tunnels to somewhere strange.

Other characters (so far: I'm about 3 months into the archive) include: the statue of Ganesh, a "shadowchild" who doesn't know who or what he is, Ed the outcast hyena, Second Librarian Vo, the Oracular Slug and the temple rats (little furry librarians).

It seems to have started in February 2007, but generally updates Tuesdays and Thursdays so the back story is not huge. The beginning is here.

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Sun, Mar 22, 2009

Tabla Concert

Posted at 12:15 pm MDT to Media

Last night's concert by the Boulder Philharmonic was outstanding.

The opener was the Estancia suite by Ginastera: sort of an Argentinean equivalent to Copeland's Rodeo.

The symphony was Dvorak's 8th, which is inspired by Central European folk music.

In between, they performed two world premieres -- pieces that have never been performed in public before. The other pieces that have premiered at the Phil over the years have been a mixed bag, but these were both amazingly good. Both pieces got standing ovations.

The Concerto for Tabla and Orchestra was written by a local composer, Bill Douglas, who is on the music faculty at the Naropa Institute, our local Buddhist University. It included rhythms and melodic themes from Africa, Celtic music, Medieval themes and others (all different uses of 12/8 time) and included a spectacular tabala solo. Also some interesting vocal percussion performed by some of the orchestra musicians.

The second short piece, Beirut Sensations, was written by the tabla soloist, Rony Barrak. The percussion was less spectacular, but the music was beautiful.

I appreciated the diversity of rhythms in last night's concert. Formal European music evolved with a lot of melodic and harmonic complexity but was fairly bland rhythmically. Adding influences from more rhythmically complex traditions (Including European folk dances) produces a wonderful result. (I'm sure they would not have been appreciated by 19th century concert-goers whose ears have not been trained by exposure to jazz, rock, and world music.)

Ironically, the Phil announced next year's concert, and because of the recession they have had to pull back to programs of mostly standards to try to put lots of bodies in seats. Interesting programming like last night's concert and the other programs of the past couple of years is not going to happen again for a while.

It's odd to look at a schedule that includes

Night on Bald Mountain 
The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique
Brandenberg Concerto #3
Beethoven's Fifth
Brahm's Piano Concerto 1
Ravel's Bolero
Carmina Burana
Chopin Piano Concerto 2

and think it looks bland. It reminds me of the Time-Life Treasury of Classical Music my parents owned, which is a little disappointing after all of the neat stuff I've been exposed to by the Phil over the years. I hope they can afford to be a little more adventurous for the 2010-2011 season.

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Sat, Mar 07, 2009

Raise the Camels

Posted at 12:50 pm MST to Media

"Raise the camels" is apparently what you say when it's time for a caravan to get moving, because when they stop to rest they lay down to chew their cuds (or whatever camels do instead of chewing cuds). There's a lot of raising of camels in the movie I just watched.

My back has been complaining a little, so I dug my yoga DVDs out of the travel crate this morning. (I think I am either losing a little weight or it is rearranging itself: I got in my own way less than the last time I did the last time I did yoga.)

Next to the yoga DVDs in the crate was Warriors of Heaven and Earth which I bought when I was living in Boston last and never watched or unpacked. I watched it this morning.

The movie is an excellent "Chinese Western" set along the Silk Road in 700AD, with swords instead of rifles and Turks instead of Indians. You can tell it's a Western (and aimed at an international market) because not quite all of the main characters are deadat the end. I've gotten used to the fact that Chinese movies tend to have body counts that would impress an Elizabethan tragedian, so it's refreshing to have someone survive.

The scenery and costumes were gorgeous. (Including some of the fanciest male hairstyles I've seen since the elves from Lord of the Rings). And there are lots of excellent sword fights, major battles, and horses (and camels). The battles were sort of John Wayne stylized, not over the top wu xia style.

According to the 'making of' special, the "helicopter" shots were done with an ultralight aircraft and a hot air balloon, since they were out in the middle of the Gobi.

And it's nice that the female lead got to take part in the climactic battle, not just serve as a love interest or baggage. (She was in charge of setting off ballistas and rockets, etc. while the men fought with swords and bows and arrows. Very reasonable.)

I will want to rewatch this on my big screen TV when I get home. I'm sure there are details I missed on the smaller screen.

I also find myself wanting to learn some Mandarin. One of the characters (Played by Kiichi Nakai) is a Japanese warrior whose letters home had Japanese voiceovers. Chinese movies are generally subtitled, sometimes in more than one dialect, even for home consumption, so the Japanese parts would not bother the audience. But it made me miss being able to follow along with the subtitles, which I can do, to some extent, in Japanese and many European languages.

The DVD comes with soundtracks in Mandarin, English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, and subtitles in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese... I watched in Chinese with English subtitles, but it might be interesting to mix and match. Watching a Chinese movie with a Spanish dub and Spanish subtitles might be an interesting way to refresh some of my very rusty Spanish. I seem to be able to read it better than I hear it, these days.

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Sat, Jan 17, 2009

Not Sinatra

Posted at 10:43 pm MST to Media

Actually, the title of tonight's pops concert by the Boulder Phil was "Simply Sinatra", but I like my version better. I was never a big Sinatra fan, but I grew up hearing his music and seeing him on TV, and this tribute concert wasn't quite as solid as the Beatles one the Phil did last January.

The vocalist, Steve Lippia, has a voice that strongly resembles Sinatra's and he mostly uses Sinatra's arrangements and phrasing (I think he uses phrasing from fairly late in Sinatra's career: a lot of longer notes were cut off rather than sustained).

But I kept having a nagging feeling that the tempo was very slightly too slow. It was oddly distracting. I kept feeling like someone needed to get out and push.

I think people forget how FAST the musical 'standards' of the mid-twentieth century were performed. Which is silly because it was all recorded. There was a rock cover of "Get out you're rocking the boat" a couple of years ago that drove me nuts because they slowed the song down so much compared to.the version performed in the movie of "Guys and Dolls". (There is something wrong when a rock cover is a lot slower than the original.)

Despite my minor quibbles with the performance, the concert made a nice change of pace: I've been struggling with reluctant downloads and software installs the past few days and needed the break in routine. Watched pots may not boil but at least they don't have progress indicators so that you can see they really are slowing down, for no apparent reason. Grr.

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Tue, Nov 04, 2008

Uncanny Valley and John McCain

Posted at 4:02 pm MST to Media

One odd thing I noticed about many of McCain's advertisements was that he seemed to be falling into the uncanny valley where things that are close to human but not quite really human look really creepy. In some of his ads, he looked like a stiff puppet with shoe-button eyes and very chalky, weird-textured skin. There were a couple of ads that showed stills that were especially bad for this. And these were Republican ads, not Democratic ones that might have been deliberately trying to make him look bad subliminally. Is it Chucky that is the evil doll in the horror movies?

It occurs to me that I do much of my TV watching in HD these days. It's possible that images intended for regular definition didn't get processed properly for HD. Or they got the makeup wrong.

Or his lighting crew sucked.

Or they were using very heavy makeup to cover ill-health and couldn't hide it from the HD. I really wonder if he will be alive in 2012.

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Sun, Nov 02, 2008

Mozart

Posted at 6:56 pm MST to Media

Yesterday was the last farmers' market for the season. The weather was beautiful -- like early September -- and unlike some past years when we froze at the last market. But it was hard getting up in the dark to get there in time to help set up.

In the evening I attended the second Boulder Philharmonic concert of the season, which had a pure Mozart program.

According to the program, Mozart wrote a letter describing one of his concerts in 1787. He started with the first movement of his 35th symphony, played some music from various operas, including arias with soloists, then a violin concerto, more opera music, some dance music, and finally the rest of Symphony 35.

The concert last night followed the pattern of Mozart's concert, which made a fun contrast to the structure of modern concerts. The vocalists (a soprano and a mezzo) were very good and the violinist seemed to be having fun, which I think always improves the energy of a performance. And, possibly because it was Mozart, the energy levels were high enough that I did not fade out, despite being tired from working at Market. The concert itself was excellent.

The theater, on the other hand, seemed to be having a meltdown: there were problems with the restrooms, they didn't start letting people into the theater until about 15 minutes before the performance was supposed to start so things started late, and there were odd delays at both ends of intermission. I wonder if someone who usually manages the theater was unavailable last night.

There were, as usual, people who left at intermission and did not return. I have to say I don't understand doing this: it seems very rude to the orchestra to leave right after the guest artist performs. Also wasteful: if you have spent the money for the seat (and my seat is in an expensive area so the seats in my row that get abandoned midway through most concerts aren't cheap ones) and taken the trouble to drive to the concert, why not stay for the whole thing? I say this even though is was convenient for me not to have people moving past me into the row -- my seat is near the aisle.

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Fri, Oct 17, 2008

Crusoe

Posted at 9:11 pm MDT to Media

Best. Treehouse. Ever.

I watched the new Crusoe TV show this evening on NBC. It's not bad, in a sort of McGyver/Pirates of the Carribean/Indiana Jones kind of way. Both the actor playing Crusoe (Philip Winchester) and the one playing Friday (Tongai Arnold Chirisa) are quite good (and decorative). Good guest stars, too: Sam Neill plays continuing character and Sean Bean played Crusoe's father in various flashbacks to England.

Lovely accents all around.

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Sun, Oct 05, 2008

Pulse

Posted at 4:54 pm MDT to Media

Last night was the first Boulder Philharmonic concert of the season. The theme was "Awakening the Pulse".

Maestro Butterman has a nice habit of talking to the audience for a few minutes before each piece describing aspects of the work or the performance that he thinks are cool. His enthusiasm is refreshing. And his themed concerts are fun.

Last night there were three pieces played and an encore.

The first piece, in honor of what would have been Leonard Bernstein's 90th birthday, was "Fancy Free", the ballet Bernstein wrote for Jerome Robbins that first made his reputation as a composer.

The second piece was "The Glory and the Grandeur" a conceto for orchestra and precussion trio by contempory composer Russell Peck. There were percussion instruments all across the front of the stage: marimbas and drums and xylophones and chimes and gongs and cymbals and rattles, and the players had to move from station to station as they played. (One of the precussionists was a woman who was a) tiny and b) 37 weeks pregnant. )

The third piece was Symphony #3 ("Organ Symphony") by Saint-Seans, another barn-burner. And I love organ music.

And after the symphony, the organist, Kenrick Mervine, played Bach's Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor. It's a cliche of organ music, but I don't think I have ever heard it performed live before, with the rumble of the big pipes (which can't be recorded) resonating in the room.

The people on each side of me left before the encore: too bad for them. They missed a treat, racing for their cars.

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Wed, Aug 06, 2008

Tor Freebies

Posted at 2:46 pm MDT to Media

Tor Books has started a new website with a lot of cool bloggers on various topics (John Scalzi has the science desk) and occasional short fiction. So far that includes short stories by Scalzi and Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow and a web comic by Wesley Allsbrook.

Note that the tor.com online magazine is not the same as the Tor corporate site, which uses a clunky aspx interface. They really need a competent web admin on that one to work on getting the menus and directory defaults to work reliably.

In the run-up to the site going live, they posted (at weekly intervals) electronic versions of a dozen Tor novels. I downloaded the pdf versions.

Some of them were books I had already read, or that already existed in hardcopy in my to-be-read pile, but some were initial books of series that were new to me. In my case at least, the free books are going to result in additional sales for Tor. The books I have read so far are very good, with engaging characters and very well constructed worlds>.

In the past few days I have read two and a half of these. (I have also discovered that the KDE pdf reader remembers where you were in a file, so that when I re-open a book I left in the middle, it puts me on the correct page. This is very handy.)

The first one I finished was A Shadow in Summer, the first book of "The Long Price Quartet" by Daniel Abraham. (It looks like the next two volumes, Betrayal in Winter and An Autumn War are out or scheduled). The magic system in the story is unique and well thought out, the culture where most of the action in the first volume occurs is nicely and consistently alien, with an intricate formalised use of body language as well as speech, and the events of the plot grow organically out of the chanracters and the environment. And there is something to be said for a fantasy book where a major viewpoint character is a middle-aged female accountant.

The second was Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell. He has another book out, Ragamuffin, set in the same universe, and another, Sly Mongoose that is due out in a couple of weeks, both of which I will be on the lookout for. I love the use of langauage in this book. The author is from the Caribbean and uses dialect beautifully in all of the dialogue. And his world-building is very solid. This feels like a Caribbean Poul Anderson to me: the combination of adventure and solid worldbuilding scratches that itch, and I think the non-whitebread speech rhythms are giving me echoes of Nicholas van Rijn, even though the actual accents involved are very different.

I need to find out what cultural ideas are attached to Ragamuffins and mongooses in the Caribbean. I have a definite impression that there are resonances that I am missing.

I am still in the middle of Kate Elliott's Spirit Gate. After WorldCon I will pick it up in hardcopy, along with the sequel Shadow Gate. I may also look into her series for another publisher. I like the characters and the world (refreshingly not-Central-Asia as well as not-Europe), but it is quite long, and my energy for dealing with things going wrong even in narrative is limited these days. Ironically, if I liked the characters less, my patience for dealing with the on-going tightening of the screws might be better. The cultural and religious details hold together nicely.

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Wed, Jul 23, 2008

Christian the Lion

Posted at 12:19 pm MDT to Media

This video was linked by Lori Coulson in the Making Light comments (#88). It is wonderful. The availability of thing is one of the wonders of the internet.

If I'm being a little quiet this week, it is because I am on vacation, and as the pressure of work came off, I found myself able to write fiction again. Which means I am not getting as much done around the house as I had planned, but I am not complaining.

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Sat, Jul 19, 2008

A Crossover of DOOM

Posted at 7:06 pm MDT to Media

On fmanalysts's live journal I found a link to The Royal Society (a crossover of DOOM).

This is a crssover fanfic for: "deep breath Torchwood/Discworld/Nero Wolfe/Lord Peter/Harry Potter/SGA/Jeeves&Wooster/Sherlock Holmes.".

While on the subject of fanfic crossovers, there are a couple of stories online that crossover Bertie Wooster and Lord Peter Wimsey. The suggestion is that Bertie Wooster's odd world, where World War I never happened, is the world-view of a former officer with massive PTSD. It works very well. The first story is Green Ice. There is the beginning of a sequel Armistice which is just heartbreaking. (Now I have them linked I will be able to find them again without googling.)

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Dr. Horrible

Posted at 6:26 pm MDT to Media

Joss Whedon spent the writers' strike writing a superhero musical: Dr.Horrible's Sing Along Blog. It stars Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Filion as Captain Hammer, his nemesis and Felicia Day as Penny, thir mutual love interest, and it has been posted this week for free, one chapter at a time. Starting tomorrow it will be available on iTunes, and eventually there will be a DVD with extras.

I finally watched it today: I needed to plug phones into my laptop to hear it. The speakers on this laptop suck royally. I hope the new laptop has a better sound system... my previous laptop had speakers that I could actually hear.

The music is great.

I want to see the adventures of Bad Horse, maybe as an online comic. The head of the super-villain group that Dr. Horrible wants to join (the Evil League of Evil) is a horse. An evil horse with henchmen in western clothes.

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Wed, Jun 11, 2008

Spike

Posted at 10:22 pm MDT to Media

I emailed in sick yesterday. This cold is a really nasty one -- we're sure it is a cold: Nanette developed the same symptoms at the same time I did, so we probably caught it at the same time from someone at market.

I think I'm getting a little better: my eyes are still watery enough to make reading a nuisance, but the pressure in my sinuses has eased enough that I hope to make it through the night without using any more Advil. Yesterday and earlier today the sinus pressure was so bad it was making my teeth hurt.

I'm coughing a lot, but I think that is because I have been breathing so much sludge. With the drainage slacking off, I hope the coghing will ease off too.

In the evenings I've been watching reruns of CSI (the Las Vegas one). They are new to me, since I have never watched the show in the past. Cartoon Network seems to be in one of its occasional cycles of very lame programming, and watching Food Network, my other usual selection, just makes me sad at the moment. On Monday Altom Brown made popovers: milk, eggs, sugar, and a small amount of flour.

The CSI reruns are on a cable channel called Spike, and I am outside their target demographic (males under 35? redneck males in general?) to a degree that makes the ads they run quite surreal.

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Sun, Jun 01, 2008

Shadow Unit Season 1 Finale -- Aftermath

Posted at 5:55 am MDT to Media

Man, do I need a vacation!

I awoke very early this morning out of an anxiety dream that I am sure was triggered by the Shadow Unit finale, which was amazing and shattering. But the context of the dream was someone doing something stupid and annoying in ClearCase, the software tool I work with in my day job.

Eight more weeks on this contract.

Sigh.

I don't think I've had a real vacation since the Geek Cruise I took in October 2004 -- benchtime between contracts doesn't really count. Neither does recuperation time after surgery, which covers a trip to Santa Fe with Nanette and her husband in June 2005, and Which is still 3 years ago.

No wonder I'm so burned out.

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Wed, May 28, 2008

Shadow Unit Season 1 Finale

Posted at 9:24 pm MDT to Media

The Shadow Unit creators are uploading their final "episode" for this season in "real time": the chapters that were uploaded yesterday describe events that took place May 25 through May 27, 2008. The chapters that were uploaded today describe events that happen today. This is going to continue for the next three days, with the finale of the finale scheduled for uploading on Saturday.

This makes quite a contrast of five-part Memorial Day stories. There have been seven previous episodes uploaded at two-week intervals. Five of the off weeks have had uploads of sections of a story about a potluck picnic held Memorial Day 2007 (the WTF BBQ).

The upload time is 7 pm Central time, 6 pm Mountain time. I was late reading today's chapters because I had a massage therapy appointment.

The Shadow Unit folks are also now selling mugs and teeshirts and such through Cafe Press, and one of the fans is setting up an order for FBI-style windbreakers with WTF on the back.

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Fri, May 02, 2008

SCFD

Posted at 4:49 pm MDT to Media

SCFD (Scientific and Cultural Facilities District) is a fund in the Denver area, supported by earmarked local sales taxes, that provides funding to museums and orchestras and such.

Last weekend at the concert, they announced that the Boulder Philharmonic was within $30,000 of donations of qualifying for tier II SCFD support ($100,000) instead of tier III ($20,000).

I usually make two donations a year: half when I buy my season tickets and half in December, and I bought my season tickets for next season several weeks ago. Because of the possibility of matching funds, it made sense to make the second donation now, when it would have leverage, instead of waiting until December.

I just received a phone call thanking me for the donation. They reached the goal and will get the additional funding. This is very good: funding for cultural organizations dropped dramatically after 9/11 and the Phil has been cutting back and cutting back to try to stay solvent. Maybe now they can start growing again. Or at least stop shrinking.

The orchestra has also been named Best Classical Music in Boulder by one of the local papers.

I may make another donation to the Philharmonic in December anyway. Last year my charitable donations were roughly 10% of my takehome pay. This year I would like to aim for midway between 10% of gross and 10% of net. I'm adding charities -- the Match-it for Pratchett movement got me to donate to the Alzheimer's Association -- but I may also increase donations to some of my usual targets.

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Fri, Apr 25, 2008

Noir LOTR

Posted at 6:32 pm MDT to Media

It is truly said that you can find anything on the internet.

Someone on the Shadow Unit forums made a sarcastic comment about a noir detective version of the lord of the Rings.

And someone else provided a link to the 1944 Warner Brothers version. Oh. My. God. Humphrey Bogart as Frodo. Peter Lorre as Gollum.

Nine minutes of wonderful editing.

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Fri, Apr 04, 2008

Da Vinci's Face

Posted at 9:33 pm MDT to Media

Neil Gaiman has posted a link on his blog to a wonderful discussion of what Leonardo Da Vinci looked like, by an artist who has drawn 1100 portraits and caricatures for newspapers.

I love the internet. It's full of such wonderful things.

I have only been outside of North America twice, both times on Geek Cruises (now InSight Cruises). The second cruise (October 2004) started and ended in Venice, and I spent a couple of days in the city before and after the actual cruise.

While walking around the city, I came across a church that was hosting a display of mechanisms that had been built based on designs from Da Vinci's notebooks, with pictures of the notebook pages they were based on. It was a working church (I was raised Catholic: I can recognize an active altar when I see one) but most of the floor space inside the church was taken up by the displays. Some of the more complicated mechanisms were marked "Please don't touch", but many of them were set up so you could move the various parts and really see how they worked.

The architecture of the church itself was lovely, too. And there were some nice pintings (probably frescoes) on the walls.

I will put a couple of pictures below the cut. I took more than 20 of the different gadgets. (I am such a geek.) I love digital cameras, too: if I had been carrying film I certainly would not have taken so many near the end of my trip. And I wouldn't have been able to take pictures indoors without a flash: the camera is smart enough to figure out the time it needs to make the image.

See more ...

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Thu, Apr 03, 2008

Stupid Banks

Posted at 10:38 pm MDT to Media

I can tell I'm a little better this week. Last week during working hours I couldn't stand to listen to the radio, only to one of the Dish Network Classical channels that has only pure wall to wall instrumental music with no DJs. This week I am listening to the radio.

But listening to the radio is a little annoying . There seem to be a lot of advertisements for bank loans against people's houses, which is surprising given the state of the local economy. Also for car deals with what sound to me like really iffy terms.

On the other hand, there seem to be a lot fewer ads for companies that claim they can fix your credit than I remember from a couple of months ago. Possibly they are being overwhelmed.

I happened to watch the late local news yesterday evening, and the opening segment was about foreclosures. On the average one family in 45 in Colorado has had their house foreclosed, and there are areas around Denver where it's running 1 in 30, including a couple of developments where almost every block has at least one foreclosed home (I suspect a collusion by scummy bankers and scammy developers).

One of the houses in my little neighborhood had a sign in front of it from the 'Get It Gone' real estate agency for a few weeks a while back. I suspect that means that we're running one in ten, here. (I can't tell if there is anyone currently living in the house: it is too far from the road and on the other side of the mesa from me.)

I had an ARM for the first couple of years after I bought this house. (It was a complicated deal -- I was making payments directly to the previous owners for a while to cover the down payment, on top of the main loan.) There was one year when interest rates went up from high to obscene (this was in the late 80s), and my payments went up and I spent a year paying basically nothing but interest. I got really good at budgeting, and ate really cheap for a while. And some major repairs (replacing the roof, which was leaking badly... jacking the foundation...) got put off until interest rates came down.

Since I paid off the previous owners (ahead of schedule) and got into a fixed mortgage, I have generally had 15 year fixed mortgages. I have refinanced a couple of times to do major home repairs and improvements and put money into the company, so the end date of my current mortgage is out a ways, but still before the end of my probable working span, and a reasonable chunk of my payment goes to principal, not interest.

I pay a little extra principal every month, too, rounding my payment up to the next hundred. Since June of last year more than half of my actual payment has gone for principal, a few dollars more every month thanks to the winders of compounding. Since January of this year, the interest in each payment has been less than half of my scheduled payment, so even if I cut back to my scheduled payment, more than half of it would be going to principal. It's nice to be on the down-hill slope, so to speak.

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Tue, Apr 01, 2008

Norse Three Bears

Posted at 10:52 pm MDT to Media

I have known of Jo Walton for years: she was a regular poster on rec.arts.sf.written before she became a published writer.

She has created a retelling of Goldilocks and the Three Bears in the style of Norse poetry that is wonderful, and seems like a suitable topic for April 1. I found the link on Making Light, where abi (one of the local poets) has been giving tourist directions to Amsterdam in the Norse mode...

I love the internet. It's full of amazing stuff.

And at the moment I'm feeling very pleased because James Nicoll, one of my favorite writers from rec.arts.sf.written, and more recently on LiveJournal, has friended me on Live Journal. I'm not entirely sure how that works in this case, since I do my active blogging here rwith a link into LJ. I do hope the LJ feed of Teleidoscope is working.

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Sun, Mar 23, 2008

Dance Concert

Posted at 11:24 am MDT to Media

Last night was another Philharmonic Concert. This one explored classical music inspired by dance (Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances) and dance inspired by classical music.

The dancing -- by a modern/ballet duo called LemonSponge Cake -- was very good. Especially considering that they were dancing to some very abstract late-20th century stuff by Arvo Pärt. That part of the music would have been too depressing without the dancers. I don't think my brain chemistry is in a state where I should be inflicting abstract music on it.

That goes double for the first piece of music that was played yesterday: "Company" by Philip Glass. Too much math, not enough chemistry. I won't quite go as far as talking about the emperor's clothes when it comes to Philip Glass, but I very much prefer my music to have some melodic or rhythmic complexity, preferably both. I have a suspicion that Glass's reputation comes more from musicians than from pure listeners. I can see where the pieces might be much more tricky and interesting to play than they are to listen to.

Note to self: the guy who gives the pre-concert lectures is a pompous bozo. Stop getting to the concerthall so early.

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