Posts

Showing posts from 2013

Loose Ends 2013

The Dow and S&P are near all-time highs .  Stock markets all over the world have enjoyed significant gains this year .  Gold was hammered in its worst year since 1981 .  The economy remains sluggish , perhaps unusually sluggish .  Where is the employment? 1.3 million Americans just lost their unemployment benefits . Where is the strong middle class ?  Is everybody debt-free and fully liquid ?  LOL.   Are you kidding me?   Despite persistent optimism , this nation's economy is precarious at best .  History will record that Obamacare started on the day the government shut down .  That is remarkably metaphorical, I think.  Although the major health insurance carriers all seem to be betting on Obamacare , the biggest expansion of the welfare state in America since Medicare itself is off to a woeful start .  In fact, Obama is off to a stumbling final term as president.  He looks even more ridiculous and unskilled than George W. Bush at the start of his horrible second term .  

"Guaranteed to Last"

Image

My Year with Wolfgang Rihm

Most of my many classical music purchases in 2013 featured the work of Wolfgang Rihm . I went OCD on Rihm in 2013. Before this year I only owned three CDs by him, one of which features his excellent but difficult turn-of-the-century avant-garde composition Jagden und Formen (Hunts and Forms). Another CD offers his interesting composition from 1983 entitled Silence to be beaten , where he uses the piano in its pristine form as a percussion instrument (a single key is hammered vigorously for extended periods). My third Rihm CD contains his beautiful and accessible Music for Oboe and Orchestra (2002) among other pieces. I have had an interest in exploring Rihm further but did not get serious about it until this year, when I purchased another ten Rihm CDs. This only puts a dent in the possible purchases out there by Rihm, who is one of the most prolific living composers in the world . He has apparently written three times the amount of music Beethoven composed in his lifetime. In

Reading At the Mountains of Madness

I have previously blogged about my fetish for weird fiction author H.P. Lovecraft (see here , here , and here ).  I recently finished re-reading his longest novel published in his lifetime (a novella, really, coming in at a bit over 100 pages) At the Mountains of Madness .  It is one of his finest achievements and an excellent example of how Lovecraft was able to inject mood and effect upon the reader without much actually happening or even being fully described. When I last posted on Lovecraft this story was under consideration by Guillermo Del Toro  and James Cameron as a possible film.  Unfortunately, that project is now suspended .  Lovecraft remains trendy and fashionable , however.  He is an acceptable fringe author with a cult following.  There is discussion as to whether his writings might actually belong to the elevated status of "literature" instead of "pulp fiction".  I obviously side with the former as I have read, been entertained, and found fasc

Selfie: A New Word and Experience

Image
My only selfie so far.  Me and Jennifer in Alaska in June 2008.   I don't own a smart phone. I have a 12-year old flip phone that does nothing except make phone calls. Imagine a cell phone that is just a phone. Absurd, right? So, I have not taken many selfies, which are largely a phenomenon of phones that take photos. I remember taking a selfie of Jennifer and myself in Alaska just before we had our grizzly bear encounter (see pic above). I shot it from a low angle with the camera out at arm's length and waist level. Above us in the background there was a rock cropping and a cloud passing in an otherwise mostly sunny summer sky. Now selfie has become an official word . It is new karma generated by iPhones and similar devices . It has become so commonplace that a word reflecting the behavior has entered the evolution of the English language, so the behavior, in turn, is now officially a force in the world. Selfie beat out another new action word considera

Cassini Amazes

Image
The Day The Earth Smiled photography as fully assembled.  This is not a photo-shopped image.  All the colors are natural and reveal the beauty of our neighbor in the Solar System.  Taken July 19, 2013 and released to the public earlier this week.  The original image is much larger than this reduction.   My  continuing interest in the Cassini spacecraft mission got a shot in the arm earlier this week.  Back in the summer Cassini performed a maneuver to photograph the far side of Saturn looking back toward Earth.  Initially, the resulting photos were only fragments released to the public.  Now, after months additional work, the wide natural-color vista of Saturn was released for the first time.  The results are stunning. Cassini took a series of 141 images from a distance of about 750,000 miles from Saturn (three times the distance of the Earth from the Moon).  The span of view is some 404,000 miles across looking back into infinite space.  The Earth was about 900,000,000 m

Lady Chatterley's Lover: An Intensely Sexy Read

Warning: The following post contains adult content .  You can not really discuss this novel without talking dirty. There are some smutty adult words here, all quoted from the novel reviewed. Read them responsibly. Long-time readers know that I try to maintain a certain health regime and lifestyle. Part of that is regular sex. There are numerous studies that indicate the health benefits of sex , the benefits to relationships, and to piece of mind. No need to revisit all that here other than to say that after practicing this for many years, I have discovered that in my mid-50's I am a more erotic person than I was as a college student or when I first married. The erotic is an accentuated part of my life. It inspires, motivates, entertains, and brings fulfillment. It can be a strong thread tying otherwise loose ends of life together in a holistic fashion. For years I have read erotic novels and watched erotic films (both pornographic and artsy). As you know I also enjoy read