Spent yesterday evening at the Montlake Ale House, where I met up with Jon and Laura. We were there to hear Mudcat, the band in which my friend Eve Maler plays. 
I had a very good time, kicking back to… well, I guess the current term for the style is “roots rock”, but to me it drew upon the rock, R&B, jazz, bluegrass, and blues that I associate with folks like the Jerry Garcia Band, Bill Withers, and Neil Young. For me, the three stand-out performances of the evening were “Deal”, “Use me”, and “Down by the river” (by the three aforementioned artists respectively). Good times, good beer, and good company.
Of course, all of this came about because I’d emailed Eve to see if we could get together to discuss work matters. Obviously last night wasn’t the right time to discuss the finer points of XML and JSON, so we still need to schedule that meeting….
P.S. Oddly enough, I don’t own a recording of “Down by the river”. In fact I only have one Neil Young album in my collection: the powerful, though flawed “Live Rust”, and that doesn’t include “Down by the river” or “Cowgirl in the sand”, or “Ohio”…. I think I’m going to wander across to Starbucks to get my usual quad espresso macchiato, and while I’m there I’ll pick up the new “Live at Massey Hall 1971” CD. It’s all your fault, Mudcat!
P.P.S. I’m back home, listening to “Live at Massey Hall 1971”. What a wonderful recording. With the simplicity of these stripped-down arrangements – solo piano on “A Man Needs A Maid/Heart Of Gold Suite”, acoustic guitar on “Cowgirl In The Sand” – it’s like hearing the songs for the first time. (And it’s been 36 years…..)
Life
Evolution in photographs. Breathtaking.
[From a Long Now seminar by Frans Lanting – thanks, Adrian.]
Shaken up
The medium is the message
Just when I think I’ve got my blog looking the way I want it, along comes a compelling alternative: a WordPress theme that looks like “a command-line driven Commodore 64 interface”. I wonder if someone could build a Q*Bert widget to sit in the sidebar….
A Very Linky Day
What Jon said. But first, after watching Chelsea v Bolton (what a nail-biting match, with the scores coming in from Everton v ManU every few minutes), I need to catch up on a few chores… and maybe watch a little of the Middlesbrough v Tottenham match. And I want to finish the latest New Yorker, which has an outstanding commentary on Shootings.
The Gender Genie
Do I blog like a man.. or a woman? Check out The Gender Genie. I tried it with some of the longer passages from my blog, and while most score strongly male there are one or two which are unambiguously identified as female. Hmmmm.
[Via Andy.]
Airline geeks
Patrick is writing about us! Me and the thousands of airliner geeks that hang out at airliners.net, and subscribe to Airliner World (and even Airports of the World). We listen to channel 9, and some of us even prefer to fly on United for that reason. We know about Passur’s Airport Monitor (and wish it was available at our local airport). We have been known to kibitz at PPruNe. We probably have one or two (or two hundred!) models from Dragon Wings, Gemini Jets, or Herpa on our bookshelves. We loved Pushing Tin, and when we watched United 93 we were humbled and impressed by the way that it captured the gestalt of commercial flying and the heroism of the moment – but we were also distracted by the anachronistic details. We all have our favourite photographs of airliners, as well as our personal stories.
Thanks, Patrick.
Baghdad's most often quoted blogger is leaving Iraq
Riverbend and her family have decided to leave:
It’s difficult to decide which is more frightening- car bombs and militias, or having to leave everything you know and love, to some unspecified place for a future where nothing is certain.
As Juan Cole points out, even leaving is not without risk:
Worse, Iraqis who want to come to the US as refugees seeking asylum often face a catch-22 of being defined as terrorists because they have been victimized. For instance, if a family had a member kidnapped, and payed ransom, and then fled to Jordan and applied to come to the US, their having paid the ransom would be considered a form of material support to terrorism and they would be excluded!
What's happened to "The Happy Heretic"?
Anyone know what happened to The Happy Heretic, the blog by Judith Hayes. She’s the author of the book by the same name, and of the great quotation: “If we are going to teach creation science as an alternative to evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to biological reproduction.” The domain name is (still) reserved, but the site is down, or perhaps just unreachable.