Ummagumma

I enjoy classical music throughout the year but winter is a particularly good season to listen. Fewer daylight hours and colder weather limit my time outside.  I usually have something classical playing in the background as I read. Beginning with the holidays in December and so far into 2016, I have listened to and reacquainted myself with a number of symphonies.  Of course, as I posted before, Shostakovich's Great Tenth is always on my playlist this time of year. Russian sensibilities seem well-suited for cold cloudy or rainy days.  Listening to Tchaikovsky's Great Sixth around Christmas brought back to mind my 12-part series (written between early 2010 and early 2013) on my favorite full-orchestra masterpieces. It occurred to me as I listened to other symphonic works that several of these compositions deserved to be mentioned in the series.  Just for fun, I decided to create an "honorable mention" category so that a few additional "great" symphonies co

This is the winter storm as it appeared about 8AM Friday morning.  Heavy rains in Georgia and Florida as snow fell from western Tennessee into Virginia.  Eastern Kentucky got the worst of it at this stage as indicated in the darker blue regions were the snowfall was most intense.  The following pics are how the storm played out in roughly 8-hour intervals.  The blue is snow, the pink is ice, yellow is heavy rain, and green is lite rain. Jonas only arrived at DC after I left work late-Friday afternoon.  Eastern North Carolina was getting a lot of sleet. Heavy thunderstorms along the North Carolina coast caused local flooding as it fueled the storm's snowfall.  Our small amount of snow began to fall as the storm swirled into Maryland and Pennsylvania. Jonas roared onward into New York City and glanced Boston before finally going out to sea late Saturday afternoon, dumping up to 40 inches of snow in several places about 100 miles west of DC.  We got a few flurries at thi

In late December, I came across a superb op-ed piece in The New York Times by Roy Scranton , author of an excellent book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene .  The NYT article was simply titled, We're Doomed. Now What? It was one of the most powerful pieces of writing that I had the privilege to read in 2015.  It resonated with me on so many levels and I found very little to fault in its perspective - it is so close to my own, articulated better than I can do.   I have written about the beginning of the Anthropocene before.  It is a subject that I continue to find intriguing.  For the first time in the expanse of history human beings find themselves significant participants in various environmental systems on Earth.  Our species affects the nitrogen cycle and the carbon cycle (to cite two examples) in ways that were previously impossible - so inconsequential was our presence on the planet.   Such is the under-heralded power of modern humanity .  We have grown to become as