4.28.2005
wheee!
The first essay of Trinity Term has been handed in! And a whole 1.5 hours in advance, too...
I picked up the Bate Collection's contrabassoon yesterday in a very short window of nice weather. It was strange: when the weather report two postings back said "Wednesday, 80% chance of precipitation", it wasn't kidding. It was rainy and gross for 80% of the day, and gorgeous and sunny and stunning for the other 20%. And I mean stunning - warm, sunny, blue skies, the works. Then all of a sudden the clouds would swoop in and unleash drop after pounding drop of rain.
Happy Birthday to my friends Daniel and Sundeep! They are the MCR co-social secretaries, whose job it is to make sure we go out and have fun. So when it was discovered that they indeed do have the same birthday (though, to be fair, Daniel is a fair bit older than Sundeep), they took that as a sign. So out they went, to a pub, to a club, then to another club. Unfortunately, I did not go with them. Why? Because I had a paper to finish.
But all is well, though oddly, I've yet to see either of them today. Coincidence? Hmmm...
Anyway, so back to the contrabassoon. I last played the contrabassoon in November, in a concert with the Oxford University Sinfonietta. It's a heavy beast of a contraption, with none of the benefits of the modern age of contrabassooning. A while back, and I'm being vague because I have no idea how long a way back, the contrabasoon went from huge and unweildy to just heavy but relatively compact. Somehow, the Bate Collection contra is not like that. I've played the one that Princeton rents - it's held together in places by duct tape, but at least it's small. The tubing is still 16-feet long, but it's coiled around and around to make it easy to carry. The whole thing is less than four feet tall. This one, the old one, is more than five and a half feet tall, and is so unwieldy. It also comes in a really heavy case without any sort of strappage, so you just have to carry it in your hand and hope that your hand will uncurl afterward.
Awful. Just awful.
So now Dim Sum is bad for me. If you think I'm going to stop eating shu mai you're out of your mind. In fact, when I was in Paris a month ago (wow... was it really a month ago? How depressing!), I couldn't escape those little Asian Tratteurs who stocked little trays of dim sum and all sorts of excellent goodies for snacking purchases. I caught my fair share of it too. Diana made fun of me constantly for it.
Paris photos will be up following this weekend. My friend Derek borrowed our guidebook, and without the guidebook to tell me, a lot of the photos I took are un-captioned. And that's just wrong, putting photos up online that don't have captions on them.
Speaking of things that don't have captions on them, the New Yorker magazine's back page has undergone yet another change. First it was the removal of the Shouts and Murmurs page to the interior of the magazine in favor of a full-page cartoon. Now it's the "every week is a caption-that-cartoon contest". It's awful. Give me my old cartoons back. For the past three years or so, there's been a caption-that-cartoon contest on the back page of the cartoons issue, which was once a year. That, I could do, because it was a pleasure to see what my fellow erudite Americans had come up with. But now, it's cheapened. The whole effect is ruined, and furthermore, it makes me work too hard for what should be an instantly gratifying and witty little bit of pencil and pen humor. Hmph.
I picked up the Bate Collection's contrabassoon yesterday in a very short window of nice weather. It was strange: when the weather report two postings back said "Wednesday, 80% chance of precipitation", it wasn't kidding. It was rainy and gross for 80% of the day, and gorgeous and sunny and stunning for the other 20%. And I mean stunning - warm, sunny, blue skies, the works. Then all of a sudden the clouds would swoop in and unleash drop after pounding drop of rain.
Happy Birthday to my friends Daniel and Sundeep! They are the MCR co-social secretaries, whose job it is to make sure we go out and have fun. So when it was discovered that they indeed do have the same birthday (though, to be fair, Daniel is a fair bit older than Sundeep), they took that as a sign. So out they went, to a pub, to a club, then to another club. Unfortunately, I did not go with them. Why? Because I had a paper to finish.
But all is well, though oddly, I've yet to see either of them today. Coincidence? Hmmm...
Anyway, so back to the contrabassoon. I last played the contrabassoon in November, in a concert with the Oxford University Sinfonietta. It's a heavy beast of a contraption, with none of the benefits of the modern age of contrabassooning. A while back, and I'm being vague because I have no idea how long a way back, the contrabasoon went from huge and unweildy to just heavy but relatively compact. Somehow, the Bate Collection contra is not like that. I've played the one that Princeton rents - it's held together in places by duct tape, but at least it's small. The tubing is still 16-feet long, but it's coiled around and around to make it easy to carry. The whole thing is less than four feet tall. This one, the old one, is more than five and a half feet tall, and is so unwieldy. It also comes in a really heavy case without any sort of strappage, so you just have to carry it in your hand and hope that your hand will uncurl afterward.
Awful. Just awful.
So now Dim Sum is bad for me. If you think I'm going to stop eating shu mai you're out of your mind. In fact, when I was in Paris a month ago (wow... was it really a month ago? How depressing!), I couldn't escape those little Asian Tratteurs who stocked little trays of dim sum and all sorts of excellent goodies for snacking purchases. I caught my fair share of it too. Diana made fun of me constantly for it.
Paris photos will be up following this weekend. My friend Derek borrowed our guidebook, and without the guidebook to tell me, a lot of the photos I took are un-captioned. And that's just wrong, putting photos up online that don't have captions on them.
Speaking of things that don't have captions on them, the New Yorker magazine's back page has undergone yet another change. First it was the removal of the Shouts and Murmurs page to the interior of the magazine in favor of a full-page cartoon. Now it's the "every week is a caption-that-cartoon contest". It's awful. Give me my old cartoons back. For the past three years or so, there's been a caption-that-cartoon contest on the back page of the cartoons issue, which was once a year. That, I could do, because it was a pleasure to see what my fellow erudite Americans had come up with. But now, it's cheapened. The whole effect is ruined, and furthermore, it makes me work too hard for what should be an instantly gratifying and witty little bit of pencil and pen humor. Hmph.
