Life in the freezer

We're experiencing an unusually cold, snowy winter here in the Boston area, the worst (or best, depending on your point of view) since 1995-96.  The last few nights have been down in the low digits, or even below 0F (yes, we still use Fahrenheit here).  The snow is piling up everywhere and there is nowhere to put it.  Every few days we seem to get more.  Tomorrow, we may have to miss orchestra rehearsal on account of yet more snow.  We'll see.

Speaking of which, I am enjoying preparing this concert very much.  Two outstanding pieces: Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto (with George Li as soloist) and Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. I have written the program notes and I will be giving talks before the two concerts.  Our two soloists are outstanding and with all the extra players, the orchestra is sounding really good.  We didn't have to miss the rehearsal although the weather was not good and then overnight we got another 8 to 9" of snow.  The snow is piled high outside and we have no more room.  Let's hope we don't get too much more.

The temperature outdoors has actually warmed up quite a bit and that's helped a lot.  The house just couldn't keep warm the last few days (something's up - I suspect a need to bleed the pipes).

I've never been a huge fan of fiction and what fiction I read tends to be adventure, mystery, and that sort of thing.  I'm behind in reading many of the "classics", although in recent years I've read some non-English classics like Moby Dick, Les Miserables, and the Count of Monte Cristo.  And, while the Aubrey/Maturin canon isn't exactly one of the classics, Patrick O'Brian's prose style is exceptionally good, especially for an adventure writer.

But nothing had really prepared me for Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.  Well, I'd seen the mini-series and the recent movie and liked them a lot.  So I knew that the story and the characters were interesting.  But as I got started listening to the CDs (read by none other than Jeremy Irons), it dawned on me that this was writing of a type I'd never known.  It's not that he uses long words or short words or any other particular type of words.  It's just that the way they're put together is simply brilliant.  I imagined that he probably wrote the book very slowly, spending long periods of time finding just the right word.  Au contraire!  He wrote the book, by any standards a lengthy novel, in less than six months.

I didn't know much about him, although it wouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's read the book or seen it on the screen that he went to Oxford, Hertford College in fact.  He was also gay, in the modern sense, at least during his time at Oxford.  Nevertheless, he ended up marrying (for a year anyway) another Evelyn (a woman) and again later to Laura, this time more permanently and with two children.  All this didn't stop him creating perhaps his most colorful character in the book, Anthony (or Antoine) Blanche, as an over-the-top pansy (his word). 

Yet the book, which I had initially thought was a literary condemnation of Catholicism turns out to be just the opposite.  He himself converted when he was in his late twenties (about fifteen years before writing the book) and was not in the least critical of the church.  And whereas I had assumed that it was largely autobiographical, and indeed I'm still sure that it is, he and Charles clearly have very different opinions about the Catholic church.

Now, it's back to Mahler and Beethoven for me: a pleasure but requiring inspiration which doesn't always come easily.

Freedom of speech

The NFL playoffs are back on and New England (at home) is scheduled to play the New York Jets on Sunday at 4:30pm after earning a bye for the first week and home-field advantage throughout.  In fact, the Patriots are favorites to win the Superbowl this year, having won 14 of 16 games, including the last eight.  One of those was a 45-3 drubbing of the Jets just over a month ago.  So you'd expect that the Jets would be quietly and respectfully planning their revenge.  But no, this is the land of free speech, where everyone has the right to put their foot in their mouth.  From the head coach on down, they are trash-talking the Patriots, targeting especially Tom Brady, the greatest quarterback ever to have played the game (and I've seen some good ones before!).

But all this is protected by the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution, perhaps the most sweeping and liberating piece of legislation ever.  You don't find too many people opposed to that!  Not so, its successor, the second amendment.  It is surely one of the most controversial pieces of legislation.  What did the framers actually mean?  Did they really want to allow everyone to go about their business "packing"?  We have no way way of asking them – the Supreme Court must study the words, perhaps making allowance for the different manner of construction of legal language from then to now and make their decisions based on that.  Unfortunately, when you combine the first and second amendments of the constitution, and extrapolate quite a bit, it gives anyone the right to disagree with political figures (including bystanders) by firing an automatic weapon at them, as happened last week in Arizona.

At the time the constitution was drafted, the state of the art was the musket, a large (the barrel alone was three to four feet long) and inherently non-concealable piece of weaponry which took about 20 seconds for a well-trained musketeer to load and fire.  Today's Glock 19, the gun used by the assailant, can empty the standard 15-round clip in less than 15 seconds!  In Arizona, anyone who is 21 years or older can walk into a gun store and, after a quick check that he or she isn't a convicted felon or known lunatic, can walk out with a gun that can legally be concealed and taken into most buildings (not schools and certain other places).  No permit is required.  Amazing!  The surprising thing really is that this kind of thing doesn't happen more often!  Much has been made of the intensity of the political rhetoric coming from the most recently unsuccessful Vice-Presidential candidate.  Just take a look at the map she created (since removed from her own web site) with Giffords' name and district, among others, clearly marked with a bulls eye.

Meanwhile, closer to home, a long-term violent criminal who had been released on parole in 2008, while serving three (!) concurrent life sentences, shot and killed a Woburn police officer (who was shortly due to retire) while in the execution of an armed robbery of a jewelery store on December 26th, 2010. The fact that this felon was also killed during the exchange was not a lot of comfort to the family of the police officer, nor to the people and government of Massachusetts.  Questions of how come this scumbag was released on parole have been answered by a commission set up by the governor.  Guess what!  It turns out to have been a software error!  Middlesex county was not informed of the hearing at all (they had opposed parole three years earlier) and Suffolk county (ditto) was given an incorrect description of the crimes committed so were also absent from the hearing.  Didn't anyone on the parole board stop to wonder why the D.A.'s office in these two counties seemed to have lost interest in the intervening three years?  In any case, nine people have been fired so maybe cock-ups (as we Brits would put it) like this may be less likely to occur in the future.

We are currently without a working TV, our 10-year-old plasma TV having gone (literally) puff! last week.  In its day, the Sony TV was pretty much unique and very expensive.  In the intervening years, Sony has stopped making plasma TVs but there are many plasma and LCD units to choose from at a fraction of the old price.  And the quality, power-consumption, longevity, etc. have all improved dramatically.  And additionally, these new units all have new features like 3D, internet connectivity, etc.  It's amazing.  So it didn't seem worth fixing the old one.  Hopefully, we'll have the replacement before the Patriots play on Sunday!