Garrison Keillor is allergic to hyphens – the idiot

I finally got around to reading Garrison Keillor’s snide little piece on gay marriage at Salon.com. Clearly he believes that it’s more important to hide the real complexity of life than to deal with it, embrace it. So what if “gay marriage will produce a whole new string of hyphenated relatives”. My family loved Tom (my father’s partner, friend, and lover for over 20 years), and we’d have been happy to call him by a family name rather than the euphemistic “partner”.
Schmuck!

Pie and wi-fi

Another free wireless hotspot… this time it’s pie minster in the Covered Market in Oxford. I popped in for a “minty lamb pie” for lunch, and stayed for cappucino and wi-fi.
Yesterday evening I made the mistake of turning on the TV. (Lorna does have a small one, mostly to play back videotapes of documentaries she’s been involved in.) It was a surreal experience. On two channels, there were back-to-back programs about food and health, including segments about food addicts who weigh 30 to 60 stone (US: multiply by 14 to get pounds). And then over on BBC2 there seemed to be non-stop cookery programs. (BBC1 seemed to be doing a UK version of American Idol – equally inane.)
However there is no doubt whatsoever about what’s the best of the new (to me) TV shows. It is, of course Shaun the Sheep. Sheer brilliance from Aardman.

Civilized blogging

I’m presently seated in The Fishes, a delightful pub/restaurant not far from my mother’s house in Oxford. The establishment offers three of the essentials of the good life: beer (I’m drinking a pint of Bateman’s), food (a pork steak is being prepared for me), and free wi-fi. What more could one want?
I visited my mother at the JR yesterday and today. (Her sister, Ru, was here today – it was lovely to see her again.) Lorna is doing pretty well, and is likely to to be transferred to an “IRB” (intermediate recovery bed – oh, the jargon you’ll learn) in a day or two.
The second leg of my flight was entirely uneventful, and we got in to Heathrow without having to hold. I think that’s a first for me. I encountered a new approach at the car rental (Alamo): after they’d processed my reservation, they told me to go out to the car park and choose any car in my group (“K”) that I fancied. I looked at a couple of sporty cars, then remembered that I might be ferrying elderly people and chose a Citroen G (I think) – very upright, good headroom. It was a very good selling point; if they do this in the US as well, I may well switch from my usual provider (Avis).
The food has now arrived. More later…..
UPDATE: Very tasty. Dessert too. And the coffee came with a little bowl of Smarties. (That’s “M&Ms” for those of you in the colonies…..) Now I must pay for it. Of course my Visa card isn’t equipped for chip’n’pin…….

Less uneventful than the average flight…..

I just landed at Chicago en route to London. There’s something about me and ORD. Last time I flew in here, the approach controller got the spacing wrong, and we had to go around. So when we started a go-around procedure about a mile out, I assumed that it was the same thing. But no…. eventually our captain told us that we hadn’t got a green light on the nose landing gear of our MD-80, so they had to use ‘an alternate procedure’. And then we stooged around for 10 minutes over the lake while they lined up all the emergency equipment next to the runway, just in case.
Many passengers didn’t understand what was going on. I got the impression that those of us that did were simultaneously calming anxious passengers while fully expecting the gear to collapse on landing. But it was all OK. When we finally landed, it was delightfully smooth.
And now the ORD-LHR flight is boarding. More anon.

Off to Oxford, courtesy Hotwire.com

I’m flying over to England today to visit my mother and help with various things. I’ll be there until Monday – and then I’ll fly back here, arrive in the middle of the night, repack my bags, and jump on an early flight to Reno, as I mentioned earlier.
It’s the first time in many years that I’ve had to book a last-minute flight for personal travel. Orbitz and all of the airlines’ own sites were quoting fares well over $1,000, including fees and taxes. The best American Airlines rate I could find was $1,753; the cheapest United offering was over $3,000!!!.
However Hotwire.com quoted me $752.00 (including everything) from an “unnamed major carrier”, which turned out to be American Airlines! So here I go: SEA-ORD-LHR. And then I’ll have to find a WiFi hotspot before I can blog any further….

The thinking person's imperative

Andrew Sullivan quotes a beautiful challenge to his book.

Leaving aside all quarrels about the meanings of words, the central fact is that any intellectual position is subject to the danger of authoritarianism. Clearly that happened to Enlightenment liberalism with communism. The right is at least equally susceptible,  however. For me, the right is more susceptible precisely because of this business of privileging tradition and longing for the past [….] Our only real hope is constant agitation against tradition, however much loss we risk by it. Don’t worry that it will be overwhelmed – plenty of powerful people will defend it, and love will defend it, too. In almost every age of the world it’s the other side that needs help, I believe. 

The author might have added that timid and fearful people will always defend tradition, too. In striving for a creative balance between liberalism and conservatism, the odds have always been stacked against the liberals.

Seattle Symphony

Earlier today, I was returning from a grocery shopping trip, and I had to change buses outside the Benaroya Hall, the home of the Seattle Symphony. A poster caught my eye, and on a whim I went inside to the box office. $52 dollars later, I had a ticket for this evening’s concert:

Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 22, K. 482
Schubert: Deutsche Tanze (piano solo)
Schubert, arr. Webern: Deutsche Tanze
Mozart: Symphony No. 36, K. 425, “Linz”

The Seattle Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Christian Zacharias, who also played the piano in the first two pieces.
I’d been to the hall once, for an Amazon.com company all-hands, but this was the first concert that I’d attended there. So how was it? Read on for my review… Continue reading “Seattle Symphony”

A less contentious list….

Here’s an interesting web thread. (I picked it up from PZ.) The idea is to copy this list of The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002, and then boldface those that you’ve read.
Now, why does this “definitive” list work where the music list I wrote about earlier didn’t? Obviously it addresses a relatively limited domain. It doesn’t try to lump together, and then rank, everything from novels to cookery books to religious tracts to poetry to manga to biography…. However that can’t be the only reason, because even in this list we have a wide range of styles, from the Silmarillion to Snow Crash to Harry Potter. I suspect that it’s something about the media involved. Words and music – the stuff you read and the stuff you listen to – are just very different, and we organize our thoughts about them differently. (Or is that simply a cop-out?)
Anyway, the list is below the fold….
Continue reading “A less contentious list….”